People assume Terribleism must hate artificial intelligence. An art movement built on deliberate failure, human mess, and the magnificent imperfect animal behind the filter \u2014 surely we'd want the machines burned in a skip?<\/p>
No. Sorry to disappoint. Terribleism is not anti-AI. Terribleism is anti what people are doing with it.<\/p>
Let me tell you what AI has actually done for me. It did my accounting. It helped me set up a limited company, It handled legal matters I could never have afforded a solicitor for.<\/p>
That matters more than it sounds. Artists are locked out of the professions that protect people. The legal industry overcharges; artists undercharge \u2014 that's the arrangement, and it has held for centuries. An accountant will rarely buy a piece of art, but an artist has to buy an accountant at least once a year. AI levels that. It gives artists legal protection, business structure, and financial competence without surrendering the little money they have. Terribleists welcome that without apology. Anyone in the professions outraged by this can console themselves that they were never buying our paintings anyway.<\/p>
And creatively? I recently made a video of a polystyrene head dancing across my studio table. The AI did it beautifully \u2014 exactly what I asked, like animation, hours of work done in minutes. My idea, my head, my table, my studio. The machine facilitated it. That is the correct use of artificial intelligence: a tool in service of a human idea, like the camera before it. When cameras arrived, painters were up in arms \u2014 this invention would steal their work. And in a way it did. Painting survived by becoming something else. So will we.<\/p>
Then there's the building of things. An artist can now vibe-code an actual working application \u2014 describe the thing, shape it, argue with it, and end up with software that would once have needed a development team and a budget we never had. Build things that enhance your ability to connect with other people. That is a profoundly Terribleist use of the machine: tools that bring the imperfect animals together rather than mirrors that keep them apart. All my life I've had ideas that sat in drawers because I couldn't afford the people who could build them. Now the drawer is open. Use AI to do the things you always wished you could do. That is the whole principle in one sentence.<\/p>
Terribleism draws three firm lines, and holds them.<\/p>
Do not steal the living.<\/strong> Typing \"in the style of\" a living artist \u2014 or one barely cold \u2014 is not creativity. It is a cheat. It takes a lifetime of someone's labour and reduces it to a prompt. And this goes for every discipline, not just painting. Do not prompt a machine to write in the voice of a living novelist, sing with a working musician's throat, or shoot like a director who is still paying rent. If you want to develop your work with AI, feed it your own drawings, your own paintings, your own sentences, your own ideas. That's a tool. The other thing is theft with extra steps.<\/p> Writing, I'll admit, is the awkward one. These language models are built out of everybody's sentences \u2014 the influence is baked in before you type a word, and no prompt hygiene will remove it. But then, so is every writer. Nobody writes uninfluenced; you are a compost heap of everything you've ever read, and so is the machine. That is the conundrum, and we can't escape it \u2014 culture has always worked by absorption. What we can do is refuse to aim the machine at a named, living writer and pull the trigger. Influence permeating is nature. Imitation on demand is a choice. Terribleists make the other choice. And until the law catches up \u2014 and it will \u2014 Terribleism stands with every artist, writer, musician, and videographer whose work has been scraped, stolen, and fed into these systems without consent.<\/p> Do not make slop.<\/strong> Content generated not because an idea demanded it but because an algorithm rewards it \u2014 churned out for rankings and followers \u2014 is the opposite of art. The primary process of a Terribleist is humanistic. We are pro-human. If there is no human idea at the centre, there is no work. There is only filler for a feed that was already full.<\/p> Do not build the perfection machine.<\/strong> This is the big one. Terribleism exists to fight the projection of perfectionism \u2014 the manufactured ideal that advertising and social media have been selling humanity for decades. AI is now the most powerful perfection engine ever built. Ask it for a face and it gives you the pixie face: symmetrical, poreless, ageless, impossible. And who absorbs this? The young. The most permeable. Eleven to nineteen, staring at machine-made ideals of faces and bodies no human has ever possessed, and quietly filing themselves under failure<\/em>.<\/p> Real bodies decay. You get a brief span where everything works and looks the part, and then the wrinkles come, and you have to learn to cope with being an actual animal. That is not a flaw to be engineered away. That is the point. Behind every filter is a magnificent, chaotic, imperfect creature, and Terribleism says: good. Any use of AI that teaches people to hate that creature, we rally against \u2014 loudly, and in poor lighting.<\/p> ## The position, plainly<\/p> We are not afraid of artificial intelligence. Fear would flatter it. We use it, with caution and with enjoyment, the way we'd use any tool \u2014 badly on purpose, when the work demands it.<\/p> Use AI to do your accounts. Use it to protect yourself. Use it to build the app you always dreamed of. Use it to make your polystyrene head dance. Do not use it to imitate the living, to flood the world with slop, or to build ever-shinier mirrors for people to fail in front of.<\/p> Use artificial intelligence to do the things you always wished you could do \u2014 not to duplicate other people's work and profit from the duplication. Terribleists stand firm on this point. The machine is not the problem. The perfection is the problem. It always was.<\/p>","urlTitle":"the-terribleist-position-on-artificial-intelligence","url":"\/blog\/the-terribleist-position-on-artificial-intelligence\/","editListUrl":"\/my-blogs","editUrl":"\/my-blogs\/edit\/the-terribleist-position-on-artificial-intelligence\/","fullUrl":"https:\/\/terribleism.com\/blog\/the-terribleist-position-on-artificial-intelligence\/","featured":false,"published":true,"showOnSitemap":true,"hidden":false,"visibility":null,"createdAt":1784304142,"updatedAt":1784304502,"publishedAt":1784304502,"lastReadAt":null,"division":{"id":396111,"name":"Terribleism"},"tags":[{"id":4371,"code":"terribleism","name":"Terribleism","url":"\/blog\/tagged\/terribleism\/"},{"id":4372,"code":"badart","name":"badart","url":"\/blog\/tagged\/badart\/"},{"id":4649,"code":"terribleist","name":"Terribleist","url":"\/blog\/tagged\/terribleist\/"},{"id":4650,"code":"jack-myntan","name":"JackMyntan","url":"\/blog\/tagged\/jack-myntan\/"}],"metaImage":{"original":"https:\/\/images.podos.io\/4gaxk203zobgulg6nh6p7abw9cmeuujroy8vbqegfspmwptp.png","thumbnail":"https:\/\/images.podos.io\/4gaxk203zobgulg6nh6p7abw9cmeuujroy8vbqegfspmwptp.png.jpg?w=1140&h=855","banner":"https:\/\/images.podos.io\/4gaxk203zobgulg6nh6p7abw9cmeuujroy8vbqegfspmwptp.png.jpg?w=1920&h=1440"},"metaTitle":"The Terribleist Position on AI","metaDescription":"People assume Terribleism must hate artificial intelligence. An art movement built on deliberate failure, human mess, and the magnificent imperfect animal.","keyPhraseCampaignId":null,"series":[],"similarReads":[{"id":54012,"title":"Terribleism: A Battle for Sanity in an Increasingly Perfectionist World","url":"\/blog\/terribleism-a-battle-for-sanity-in-an-increasingly-perfectionist-world\/","urlTitle":"terribleism-a-battle-for-sanity-in-an-increasingly-perfectionist-world","division":396111,"description":"The founding moment came through an experiment. After reading Wilson Bryan Key's \"Subliminal Seduction\"\u2014an expos\u00e9 of hidden sexual imagery in advertising\u2014the question arose: what if you created deliberately terrible art embedded with subliminal messages? Would the \"badness\" matter if unconscious messaging was powerful enough?","published":true,"metaImage":{"thumbnail":"https:\/\/images.podos.io\/x3ynstpoteend7zpykkzog5x9mhbp8fus4thinjpa1qpkxvo.jpeg.jpg?w=1140&h=855","banner":"https:\/\/images.podos.io\/x3ynstpoteend7zpykkzog5x9mhbp8fus4thinjpa1qpkxvo.jpeg.jpg?w=1920&h=1440"},"hidden":0}],"labels":[]}