In The Bleak Midwinter and the Workmanship of Risk

Refuse to let the certainty of machines win.

Barn in the morning fog, taken on December 3, 2023.

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I.

In the hours before writing this piece, a friend texted, said he was using AI tools to create the images on his Christmas card. He’d taken a portrait, a fun-loving and expertly composed portrait—he’s a professional photographer—but he wanted to up wow! of the image. So, he plugged the photo into his tool of choice and asked it to generate Christmas accouterments—presents, text, perhaps some snow. The result was mesmerizing. What would have taken hours to prep, stage, and compose, was created with the push of a button. It was magnificent, a truly wow!-worthy image.

I hated it.

Why? What's the big deal, Seth?

Allow me a bit of a tangent.

II.

In December 2019, a friend gifted David Pye’s book, The Nature and Art of Workmanship, to Amber and me. It was an inspirational book, one that helped him wrap his mind around the humanity of transcendent craft. He asked that we read it and be ready to discuss it in March of the following year, and well, if you consider the context of March 2020, you can imagine how that turned out. We never connected, never sat to discuss the book over cups of coffee. Worse still, in those pandemic days, The Nature of Art and Workmanship moved off my coffee table and out of my memory. It stayed out of my memory until I stumbled across it last week, exactly four years after we received it.

A great deal has changed in those four years. For one, we’re no longer in a pandemic, and I couldn’t be more grateful for that. Pandemic aside, we’ve entered the age of AI, an age in which innovation has taken over so much human creation. Artificial Intelligence has been applied to writing, photography, and art. As it has, and with every additional advance in AI technology, I’ve grown increasingly concerned that we’re giving up something fundamental to human existence. What was it?

I dusted off The Nature of Art and Workmanship this weekend and opened to the foreword, where contemporary art critic John Kelsey distinguishes between “workmanship of risk” and the “workmanship of certainty.” Workmanship of risk, he wrote in the mid-1990s, “means that at any moment, whether through inattention, or inexperience, or accident, the workman is liable to ruin the job.” Conversely, workmanship of certainty is the kind of work in which “the quality of the result is predetermined and beyond the control of the operative.”