As a working class person coming from middle class everything, I was brought up to always provide value. Art in my mind, must turn a profit. Perhaps still a lingering echo, if I couldn’t sell or draw a crowd, I must not be valuable and therefore, not good. Doing something which didn’t contribute to my overall financial well being, art of art’s sake, is laughable and silly.

I continue to write sporadically and often in secret. Which makes what I write now, without the help of even a proofreading AI more of a moment than a spectacular all encompassing answer. I’ve completed only six books in my “writing career” but have started literally hundreds of others. Thousands of ideas sit in clear plastic storage bins in my closet. The reams of paper and notebooks in them are becoming brittle, faded, and perhaps, with my age, become forgotten. Perhaps you reading now are picturing the same, a canvas leaning against darkened walls, notebooks stacked high, cotton, metal, and wood gather dust and mold. Other mediums, like clay, are neglected and harden, never to become what nags deep in the meat of our hearts and marrow in our bones. This idea, that our ideas will die with us becomes more tragic when considering what is truly lost. I beg you to read on.

My life today is enhanced in many ways by artificial intelligence (AI). I’ve access to material for presentations, business cases, and even writing code at my job. I’m not writing this using AI, and I thank you for your patience, but AI has given me access to proofreading and development feedback for my coming books I would neither have been able to afford or have benefitted from in the past.

AI uses a cocktail of technologies on massive repositories to infer and conclude. I recall at its inception, AI drew on massive repositories containing – well everything. Now artists, authors, and even researchers have taken steps to ban their work from being used in these repositories; AI companies could not draw upon their hard-earned pieces to inspire its own conclusions and inferences.

It’s blush gone and many AI driven tools now crowding and clawing for our attention, AI is seen practically now as simply, a tool. Specific tools are built on narrower repositories so a person can get quicker to answers they need. Like a screwdriver in my kitchen drawer or a favorite pan, I have found I have an exclusive, intimate relationship with AI. The outcomes as only as good as the craftsman; a chisel and years of woodworking, good ingredients and a lifetime of staying at Nonna’s side to perfect a dish, now all share company with a carefully crafted prompt.

I’ve said in my books, as they are an extension of me and my perspective, that technology in all of it’s majesty, wonder, and novelty, will reflect a human way of doing things. “X” is still the cocktail conversation, Twitter once was with a far more contentious crowd. Facebook is the coffee table sharing of photos and the perpetual Sunday catchup with friends. Instagram and Tiktok, like so many of this ilk, harness our unhealthy desire for approval and validation found on our playgrounds, and now, unfortunately, in our offices and other business environments. AI is still that finite repository of what we know, whether its between two people, a village, a country, or a platform accessible by the whole world.

This should not diminish the accomplishments of the technology but see it for its utility. Our scientists and engineers have created something which can wonderfully move beyond a statistical sample. In the past there was the painful process of tagging one or two and assuming this individual animal, often with a name, would represent the patterns of their herd. AI can process millions of pieces of data at once; therefore instead of monitoring a few buffalo and glean a nuance of their migratory patterns, now we can consider data provided by every animal. There are no longer statistical samples, everyone and everything could be considered and used.

And that is where art – specifically your art, your craft, your work, your playfulness – must continue to play a most astoundingly critical role.

When we first crawled from the ooze, either the proverbial or the literal, our reptilian minds looked heavenward and made song in our reptilian hearts of the warmth and beauty of the sun. Our genetic data was our repository, internal and unshareable but to those who we dragged along with us to the earth and to the trees. Each artistic endeavor enriching a seemingly simple task expanded our knowledge and the collective repository of potential conclusions.

Art is the variability from the statistical norms which are captured and frozen in the repository. Now that we, the buffalo, must all be considered, our art creates exceptions. Your art does what art has done since the inception of life. Creating anomalies. Reveals different paths. Expands humanities perceptions. However small; between two people, a village, or a destination museum, art creates thoughts beyond the realm of our current repository; “I never would have thought about it that way.”

You must be thinking of artists, large and small, who created this in you. Whether a piece of cooked meat, a humorous story, a larger than life painting, a small earring on a craftsman’s bench.

Your art inspires. Your art expands. Your art creates crucial statistical anomalies which make us all human.

I pass a house every morning on my way to work cluttered with chipped, worn, homemade windmills. Useless? No. They will never know how they inspired me, possibly in some unconscious ways more than this article. They will never know this article inspired others.

Your art is our humanity. The unsteady step moving our intellectual migratory patterns into greener pastures and warmer suns.

Inspire and expand.

Note: I use the buffalo here for another very specific reason. In America, the American bison once spanned the plains of the MidWest, traveling for seasonal resources. As we move into their areas to sleep, eat, and work, we’ve constrained them and their migratory patterns have all but disappeared. Their chance for art will disappear with them should we not encourage them to continue to roam.