Compulsion Doesn't Pick Tools
She's right about compulsion. Wrong about who has it.
Howdy, folks.
Three weeks back I asked a small question and inherited fifty-one comments. I covered the first wave of responses here. I covered the cheap rhetorical substitutions last Friday.
Today’s piece is for the comment that didn’t dodge.
Today’s piece is for Ann K. Sterzinger, who took the question seriously, made the strongest version of the anti-AI-art argument in the whole thread, and pre-empted the comeback at the same time. Today’s piece is what I owe her.
Here is what she said, in full, because it deserves to be seen whole:
“Art is not a series of plot points to be filled in because they predictably cause the primate amygdala to light up and trigger hunting/gathering joy at the most base level. PAC-man can take care of those needs. It is communication with a mind that is trying to tell you something that doesn’t fit into straightforward words. If it only produces pleasure via aping the structure of an actual art form it isn’t art, it’s entertainment. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a hack writer filling out beats from a ‘writing guide’ that tells her ‘how to produce a professional sounding novel or screenplay’ or an AI doing the same thing. If there’s a positive side to AI it is that maybe it will put hack writers out of a job they don’t deserve. Good. Robots can make slop entertainment for us. Actual art will continue to be produced by people who have a genuine compulsion to make it rather than this identity/status seeking you think you are arguing with.”
Let me pull this apart slowly. There’s a real argument inside it and a few things wrapped around the argument that aren’t.
What she’s pointing at is real.
The compulsion-vs-status distinction is not something I’m going to fight. There are people who write because they have to write — because not-writing produces a pressure inside them that the writing eventually relieves. There are also people who write because they want to be writers — because the identity, the social position, the legibility of “person who has produced a novel” is the thing they’re after, and the words on the page are the receipt.
Both groups produce books. The first group produces books that sometimes do the thing books are supposed to do, which is communicate from a mind that has something specific to say. The second group produces books that often don’t, because the books were never the point. The books were the costume.
Sterzinger calls one of these things art and the other entertainment. That’s a defensible naming. I might use slightly different words — I think there’s good entertainment that has minds in it, and bad art that doesn’t — but the underlying distinction holds. Some makers are driven from inside. Some are performing being driven from inside. Both can produce work. The work tends not to feel the same.
I am not going to argue with her about that.
Where the argument breaks.
The break is in the next move — the one where compulsion-vs-status maps cleanly onto AI-vs-no-AI, with the compulsion-writers on one side and the status-writers on the other.
That mapping doesn’t hold. It just doesn’t.
Some compulsion-writers use AI. Some compulsion-writers refuse AI. Some status-writers use AI. Some status-writers refuse AI. Tool adoption doesn’t sort people onto Sterzinger’s two sides of the line. It correlates with neither.
I’ll say this cleanly because I am one of the data points.
The compulsion to make the work I make existed before I had a language model on my desk. It existed before I had the desk, honestly. What changed when I started building Psyche — the system that helps me write — was not that I started having things to say. It’s that the things I had been having to say for twenty years started being able to come out at the rate I had them. The bottleneck was never the ideas. The bottleneck was the translation from “I see how this connects” to “here is a sentence a stranger can read.” That bottleneck is heavier for some brains than others. Mine is one of the heavier ones. The tool extends a capacity that was already there. It doesn’t graft a status onto someone who didn’t have a thing to say.
If Sterzinger’s frame were correct, I would not be writing this. The compulsion would have driven me out of AI use. Instead, the compulsion is what built the tool that makes the work shippable. The tool exists because of the compulsion, not as a substitute for it.
That’s not an edge case. There are a lot of us. You met some of them in the comment thread on the original piece — “I thought I was alone”, plural, repeatedly. They were not alone. They are out there in numbers, doing the work, partnered with the tool, and they are not status-seekers. They are brains the discourse hadn’t accounted for.
So the test Sterzinger wants to run — real artists won’t use AI, status-seekers will — fails on first contact with the actual population. Tool choice isn’t diagnostic. It correlates with cognitive style, available time, financial constraint, neurological wiring, and a dozen other things. It does not sort people onto the side of the line that matters.
The hack-writer-replacement tell.
There’s a sentence in the middle of Sterzinger’s comment I want to come back to. “If there’s a positive side to AI it is that maybe it will put hack writers out of a job they don’t deserve. Good.”
That’s not an aesthetic argument. That’s a market-discipline argument wearing aesthetic clothes.
It says: the tool is bad when it threatens artists, but good when it removes the people who shouldn’t be writing in the first place. That is a position about who deserves to participate in literary culture, dressed as a position about what art is.
Notice what just happened. The same tool, in the same hands, doing the same work, gets sorted into “killing real art” or “cleansing the field of slop” depending on which population is using it. The aesthetic content is constant. The valuation flips entirely on the identity of the user.
That is what people mean when they say AI discourse is downstream of cultural anxiety. The argument about the tool is doing the work of an argument about which writers are legitimate. And the structure of that argument — I am fine with this tool when it disciplines the people I dislike; I am not fine with this tool when it threatens the people I identify with — predates AI by a long way. It is the structure of every gatekeeping argument since the printing press lowered the cost of producing a book.
Now anyone can publish. Yes. That has always been the panic.
Most novels have always been hack-writer novels.
The unspoken thing inside the anti-AI-art panic is the reality of how much published work has always been slop. This is uncomfortable, so people don’t say it out loud, but it is true and it is important.
Walk through a Barnes & Noble. Most of what is there is genre product. Plot beats from the writing guide. Characters from the workshop manual. Sentences that could have come from any keyboard in the country. That work — work made by humans, with no AI within a thousand miles — is the bulk of literary production and has been for a hundred years. The hack writer Sterzinger correctly named is not a new species. The hack writer is the dominant species. Has been since publishing scaled.
The thing that AI tools do — and this is the unflattering admission for everyone who has been pretending otherwise — is they make the slop visible. They make it obvious. They do at scale, in seconds, what hack writers have been doing slowly with conferences and workshops and beat sheets for a century. The pattern was always there. AI just rendered it legible.
When people say “AI is going to flood the market with slop,” what they often mean — without quite knowing they mean it — is that AI is going to make it harder to pretend slop wasn’t already the bulk of the market. That is not a threat to art. That is a threat to the comfortable fiction that human-produced equals not-slop. That fiction was always wrong.
The honest version of Sterzinger’s point lands here, and I want to give it to her: a tool that makes it easier to produce structure-aping pleasure may, in fact, fill the market with more of it. Plausible. But the floor was already there. The flood is just letting us see how high the water has been the whole time.
What it actually looks like to be a compulsion-writer with AI.
Let me describe my actual relationship to the tool, because most of the discourse hasn’t made room for it.
I have things I have to say. I have had them for longer than most humans believe the internet has existed. I have written my way through them on yellow legal pads, in journals, Obsidian, Logseq, Notion, and an ungodly sprawl of Google Docs. The compulsion is not new. The compulsion is older than my career.
What’s new is that the compulsion now meets a piece of infrastructure that does the part of the work where the compulsion historically lost steam — the part where the seeing has to become saying. I see structure. I see across systems. I see when an argument is doing the work of a different argument in disguise. I have always seen these things. Getting them into a sentence a stranger can follow has always been the cost. AI lowers the cost.
Notice the order of operations. I do not ask the tool to have the insight. I have the insight. I ask the tool to help me put the insight in the form a reader can metabolize. The insight is upstream. The tool is downstream. This is the same place a typewriter sat, when typewriters were the new thing people were panicking about. It is the same place a word processor sat. It is the same place spell-check sat. The gradient of tool-makes-it-easier-to-publish is not a step function that bottoms out at AI. It is a continuous slope, and AI is the current point on it, and there will be another point later, and there will be another panic, and somebody who looks like Sterzinger will say something that is partly right about it.
The piece you are reading right now exists because of the compulsion and because of the tool. Take either away and you do not get this piece. That is not a confession of inauthenticity. That is a description of how a particular brain ships work.
The harder question.
Sterzinger ends her comment with: “Actual art will continue to be produced by people who have a genuine compulsion to make it rather than this identity/status seeking you think you are arguing with.”
Yes. Agreed.
I just disagree about who that population is.
The compulsion-writers I know — and I know a lot of them now, because the If You Like It comment thread surfaced them by the dozen — span every relationship to AI you can imagine. Some refuse it on principle. Some use it daily. Some use it for one specific bottleneck. Some haven’t decided yet. They are unified by having things to say, not by which keys they hit to say them.
The status-seekers I know span the same range. There are status-seekers who refuse AI because the refusal is the costume. There are status-seekers who use AI because the use is the costume. The costume changes. The seeking does not.
If you want to tell the two populations apart, the test is not what tool they used. The test is what happens when you remove the costume. The compulsion-writer keeps writing, in whatever medium they can get to, because the writing is the relief. The status-writer stops writing, because the writing was the receipt for the identity, and there are easier receipts. That is the test that actually sorts.
Not the keystrokes.
So when someone defends their relationship to AI in this discourse, I am not going to read it as evidence that they are status-seeking. I am going to read it as a person trying to be honest about how their work gets made. And when someone attacks AI in this discourse — particularly someone serious, like Sterzinger — I am not going to read it as evidence that they are protecting real art. I am going to read it as a person defending a frame that almost holds, but doesn’t quite, because the frame is more comfortable than the truth that compulsion has always run on whatever tool was available.
And always will.
That’s it for this week.
Stay feral, folks.
Like writing. The input matters. Good structure, input, and ideas will do well with AI.
When the fundamentals under the tool are bad, the output will be bad.
AI are good at leveraging good ideas.