Bullshit: Required by Default

Why being a bullshitter goes hand in hand with being an artist...

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I have taken six days away from social media. I know, I’m a hero. I do it every so often - usually to reboot my sense of the world. It’s amazing just how affected we become when our routine is to literally wake up and check our feeds. It’s done me some good, I’ve not woken up with a sense of dread for a few days in a row, which has been really quite pleasant.

I have a healthy-ish relationship with social media these days. I’d say that I have a more realistic approach to it than most. Over the past few years I’ve come to use it as a source of news, mostly about people I used to know, just in case I run into them and I can say ‘Oh yeah, I saw that you were doing that…’ Outside of that I am prone to posting my gym progress on Instagram and occasionally cross promoting my Substack/Insta on Facebook. I did join TikTok a few weeks ago - turns out I have a sense of humour, I just don’t know if I have the attention span to make something every day even if it is only a minute long.

I was at a workshop regarding how we present ourselves as artists this week. That is to say, what do we call ourselves in a professional sense? For me, we settled on ‘Storyteller’ - which, honestly, I’ve been calling myself for years. The simple fact is that being in the arts requires one to tell stories all of the time, also known as ‘bullshitting’. Petar (the husb) always frowns at me when I say that. In his eyes the arts is a place for honesty and earnest presentation. When I make my art, this is certainly true, but when I talk to others about it? Well then it becomes about ‘the reframe’.
The simple fact is that any arts degree requires you to have some ability to reframe AKA: bullshit. Everything you do must be justified artistically whilst also being presented as accessible to those who are examining you. This means a constant reframing of your work to fit a syllabus or mode of work decided by someone else.
Social media is not unlike an arts degree in that respect - we are required to create a narrative that suits our curated audience (friends/followers/subscribers). If that perspective shifts, it can actually result in alieantion… even if just socially.
For example, I was a part of a group on Facebook that was supposed to be about playwrights connecting and promoting their work. I haven’t written a finished playscript in a few years (I’ll get around to it, okay?)… In recent months the group became a culture of shitting on people for using AI - not to write plays, mind you, but for creating an image for their posts promoting their written work. Every entitled member of that group was literally frothing at the bit to point out how much better they were than the awful AI users. I left the group. I am no longer a [part of the audience it is helping to promote. It was reframed and I wasn’t buying the bullshit.

Tangentally, this isn’t something I would personally do, AI art is a bit of fun on the odd instagram story, but I wouldn’t use it in a way that presents it as solely my work. That’s cheating.

‘But, Ollie,’ I hear you cry, ‘…haven’t you used it to create header images for your Subtack posts?’

Yes, yes I have. The images are clearly AI though and I don’t claim them as my own creations. They are just there as a titling tool. But every single Substack post has been handwritten and thought out by me - a singular image does not take away from that, and the framing of my work remains the same - accessible personal writing that dips its toes into creative writing every so often.

AI:
Tool to enhance? Yes.
Abuse of technology that changes the content of my actual work? No.

I don’t think that AI is the answer to the world’s problems, but I do think it has a place for answering questions and organising one’s life. I’m also realising that the more it is used, the more it adds value to the artists that work without it. The fact I write without AI is a skill that will become rarer and rarer. Copy jobs are more often than not posted with ‘must understand AI prompts as part of workflow’ - that is insane. What makes good writing is the human ingenuity that AI simply can’t replicate.
AI is a tool that should be used to enhance or clean what is already there, perhaps to facilitate skills one doesn’t have, or to make an image in your mind clearer, or as a sounding board for ideation. It does no harm when used, as all things should be, in moderation.

I want to add that ‘bullshitting’ doesn’t mean you don’t believe what you say, or that you’re trying to make something appear that doesn’t exist, on the contrary, bullshitting is about taking what is there and recontextualising it in a way that people will understand within their own means. I do believe what I wrote above is true - I’m also aware that it disregards AI’s role in harvesting the work of artists, and its impact on the environment when used in ways outside of simple language based prompts… how it is affecting the job market and why it’s easily abused in ways that can be illegal… but that’s a larger debate, and people are usually the problem, rather than the tool itself. I’ll probably write more about it in the future…

I spend my life trying to make things for others. I thrive on an audience. I am grateful for the audience. Whether that be one reader or one hundred, I value the time you give to my work - as such, I am happy to reframe and contextualise for you - it’s what every artist does, whether you realise it or not. Value it, it’s what makes us good at what we do.

Peace, love, and everything that goes with it x

Ollie