Ansel Adams, AI, and the Essence of Creation

What will we have left when we do nothing ourselves?

AI Prompt: “ansel adams clouds snow peaked mountains.” Substack’s built-in image generator.

Two days ago my family visited the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, which is currently housing a wonderful collection of Ansel Adams photographs. I was not familiar with Adams’ work previously (I know—I’m ignorant), but it was lovely seeing not just his early works but also his correspondence and compasses and to read descriptions of his experimentations with photography as he marveled at God’s creation (my language, not his, as I understand it). Aside from the stunning beauty of the photographs was the artistry involved in their creation. The intentionality of the f-stop, the light meter, the darkroom, the framing, the hiking, the exploring across Yosemite, the patience to wait for the light to move in just the right angle. A human did all this to make something beautiful. Something which spoke to the beauty of God’s creation.

And then it hit me. How long before all of this, all of this is gone? Before we expect A.I. to produce these same kinds of works for us without the f-stop, the light meter, the darkroom, the framing, the hiking, the exploring of nature, or the patient waiting for the sun to rise or set? For many daily applications, the answer is, today. The image you see above (which is the only AI image I’ve knowingly used for this Substack) will replace ones like that below:

Looking across forest to mountains and clouds, "In Glacier National Park," Montana.; From the series Ansel Adams Photographs of National Parks and Monuments. Wikipedia.

It seems to me that part of the essence of true creation is labor, striving, wrestling, and overcoming. It calls forth the virtue of courage to beat back the doubts and insecurities and fears, and surge up something fresh and true. It demands a presence in the world, a willingness to interact with creation and people, to touch things and be affected viscerally. This is true whether your creation is painting or photography or film or poetry or fiction or nonfiction. The human element matters. It is a testament to the history of a person’s sacrifice of attention, and therefore love—if it is done right, for something worthwhile, something worth the attention and love of other people.

I understand the irony of writing this on Substack, where I’m not mailing this newsletter out on individually handwritten letters to friends I’ve personally met and shared meals with. Substack is another tool for reducing labor and making creation more accessible. And some would say that once you accept that it’s permissible to shortcut labor at all in the creation process, then you’ve already sold the farm. Everything is up for grabs. You might as well use whatever tool you have available achieve your goal. But I don’t think that’s true. I think we can make a delineation between tools and practices that preserve the essential act of creation and tools that usurp that act.

For example, spellcheck preserves the essential act of writing an article. But when a web browser automatically turns on auto-predict, the act of writing gets usurped. I’m interrupted. When I talk with my wife about an idea for an article, it preserves the essential act of writing and feeds the process of brainstorming and wrestling with ideas. When I ask A.I. for article topics, I usurp an essential act of writing: brainstorming. You can multiply this process for other mediums. I know I’ve written about this basic idea before. I won’t belabor the point.

My main concern here is what the future will be like. That’s what hit me when walking through that museum. What will happen when all the lovely, creative, time-intensive, attention-intensive works have ceased to be made by humans because we can render them immediately through A.I.? What happens when Hayao Miyazaki dies and we no longer have lovingly made, hand-drawn animated films? Will anyone bother taking the time to learn how to create careful, embodied, crafted works when we can experience the same outcome produced by machine?

But is that last sentence true? Is the experience the same? In my walk through the gallery of Ansel Adams’ photographs, I did not just experience abstracted awe at images of creation. I saw intentionality. I witnessed a man pausing to wonder at creation through a lens. I didn’t just encounter a product or output, but a creation. One lovingly made, with intention and attention and focus and labor and design and meaning. There was an “I” behind the lens, and that “I” mattered. His personhood and agency mattered. His effort to create mattered.

But that’s not how things work with A.I. There is no ghost in the machine. Only an illusion of one. The tools overcome the “I” until intentionality, attention, focus, labor, design, and meaning all dissipate. And what you are left with is utility, and you disappear. You are merely the writer of the prompt and the chooser of the outputs. Whether you are using it to create video or an image or write a story or a paper or a sermon, in the end, the goal becomes output and product, or in other words utility, not creation. And the embodied experience of being in the world and engaging with it with intentionality to create something meaningful is exchanged for the need to produce.

I think, I hope, a part of us will always be drawn to great works that were created by men and women who labored in embodied forms with intentionality and love and attention. I hope we’ll always be inspired by the story of Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Or

Makoto Fujimura

’s “slow art.” Or T.S. Eliot agonizing over lines in “The Waste Land” with Ezra Pound. The wrestling matters.

It calls forth a great deal of the virtue of courage to create something without depending essentially on the work of machines. Courage to fail, over and over again. The courage to endure criticism and scorn and correction and praise. You risk something of yourself when you create. Courage always demands vulnerability, which is why it’s so frightening. You risk your time, your labor, your love, your attention, your passion, your vision, and so on. But with the machine, there is no risk. If your output is unsatisfactory, it’s not you who has failed, it’s the machine.

I guess what all of this is trying to say is that we ought to value human creation, insofar as it is human, as it echoes God’s creation. Once again, we need to relearn how to be human. If you are a creator of any kind, lean into your embodied abilities and resist the pull of A.I. alternatives. They are not true alternatives. They are digital perversions. And whether you are creative or not, seek to patronize those who are making or who have made great works through their labor. This is part of how we preserve our humanity.