Some of you may be able to guess what’s been on my mind lately. In April 2010, film critic Roger Ebert made an infamous claim. He said, “Video games can never be art.” His blog post set off a firestorm of discussion, centered around the idea that he was an out-of-touch, old man who didn’t understand games. While I disagree profoundly with Mr. Ebert, he was an intelligent, articulate scholar, and had a better point than his clickbaity quote might imply.
His argument was this: games are about mechanics and winning, not about aesthetic enjoyment. Summarizing him briefly (if you wish to know more, he had a blog post two years later that delved more deeply into his thoughts) he essentially said that while video games can contain art (such as an amazing digital painting or music), they’re not at their core art, because their focus is on obstacles to overcome in order to “win.” By being “victory”-focused, he argued they were an innately commercial product, like a toaster, and not worth being considered art.
Now, I’m not going to spend this speech taking down an old essay by a man who has been dead for over a decade. Anyone who deeply loves video games will know his argument fails to understand what gaming is on a fundamental level. Those of us who are gamers know that the mechanics themselves can be part of the art. And in fact, video games let us tell stories that you couldn’t tell in another medium because the mechanics are part of that artistic experience. Winning isn’t the art, but the emotions of winning can be part of it.
Why do I bring this up? Well, my goal today is to tackle a few questions that Mr. Ebert raised, which I think are more important today than they’ve ever been. I am going to talk about what is art and why we make it.
Now, I know some of you are flinching right now and you’re thinking Brandon’s going to whinge about AI art again. But no, I’m going to whinge about AI art again with slides, so it’s different.
In a more relevant way, I want to dig into my own feelings on this topic from a philosophical standpoint. The surge of large language models and generative AI raises questions that are fascinating, and even if I dislike how the movement is going in relation to writing and art, I want to learn from the experience of what’s happening. We’re being forced to ask ourselves about art in a way we never have before. Now, some do say we’re in an AI bubble. Perhaps a collapse is coming, but even if it does come, I think what has happened so far is enough to force us to confront these questions of, “What is art?” “Why do we make it?”
Now, I explore my ideas through writing, and so I ask you to join me as I explore this idea, and why I, Brandon Sanderson, rebel so strongly against the idea of AI art. It was in writing this essay that I figured it out.
Have any of you heard the song Walk My Walk? It was pretty big a few weeks ago--it’s an AI-generated song that was the #1 song on Billboard’s Digital Country Songs list. When it happened everyone said, “Wait, an AI song is #1?” Billboard admitted that there had in fact been at least six chart-topping songs released in the last few months that had been generated by AI.
In addition, earlier this year, author Mark Lawrence, one of fantasy novelist colleagues, did a series of tests where he had AI write a short passage and then had novelists do the same. The test included Robin Hobb, friend of the convention and fantastic writer, among others, including Mark himself. He posted all of these passages without attributions, and had people see if they could figure out which were written by authors and which he’d had the generative AI create. The results, which you can find on his blog, indicate that the audience couldn’t tell the difference. Now, he does quickly explain this wasn’t a very scientific test. AI is bad at long-form storytelling right now. If you ask it to write a book, it does very poorly. But if it writes a passage, it can in some situations write prose that we can’t tell is AI.
So this is why I say that even if the bubble happens and this all collapses, we are at the point where we have to be asking these questions right now. AI can already imitate some of your favorite authors.
When I hear of these two examples, my stomach turns and I am worried, genuinely, that I’m against AI just because it’s new and unfamiliar--that I am the Roger Ebert in this case. Actually, he was just the last in a long line of artistic disbelievers. When prose began to be used for storytelling a lot instead of poetry, some considered its practitioners, many of whom were women, to be creating lesser art than those who wrote poetry. In the 1800s, critics explained that photography shouldn’t count as art because it merely captured what already existed in the world. And in the early 1900s, some high-profile critics argued that film shouldn’t be considered art because of how base a form of entertainment it was--an argument I am sure that Mr. Ebert would have disagreed with vehemently.
It stands to reason that if all these critics were wrong, just as Mr. Ebert was wrong about video games, then maybe I am wrong about AI. Isn’t it just another form of expression? Some people certainly think so.
What is art?
Why do we make it?
And why do I rebel against the use of AI in its creation?
Let me first examine a few common objections. Do I dislike AI because of the economic and environmental impacts? Well, those do concern me, but if I’m answering honestly, I would still have a problem with it even if AI were not so resource hungry. Do I dislike it because the models have been trained on the works of artists in ways I consider unethical? Well, I don’t like that. But even if it were trained using no copyrighted work, I’d still be concerned. These are valid objections, but they don’t get to the soul of it for me.
Maybe I just hate the idea of a machine replacing a person. For a while, I’ve imagined that if we needed a heroic symbol of resistance against AI art, we actually have the perfect choice in American folklore: John Henry. For those unfamiliar, he’s an American folk hero who was a steel-driver. Basically, his job was to cut holes through thick rock and make a tunnel for a railroad--by pounding a spike-drill into the stone with a hammer and making a spot where dynamite could be placed. The myth of John Henry is of this man who was the best steel-driver ever. And then a steam powered drill was invented. He challenged that drill to a contest to drill a tunnel through the stone and see who could do it faster. (You might have seen the Disney interpretation of this.) So he did it--John Henry was able to steel-drive better than the drill, and then he died from the exertion.
This is a result I circle around because it seems the story illustrates what I have to acknowledge. John Henry beat the steam powered drill, but it cost him his life--and while he proved he could beat a steam powered drill personally, he didn’t change the world. We respect him, but as a society we chose the steam drill.
And I would too. Let’s be honest, I’m not sure that I fully dislike AI just because it’s replacing a human. It’s getting closer to the reason, but there’s more. The truth is, I’m more than happy to have steam engines drilling tunnels for me to drive through. I don’t even dislike AI because its art is poorly done. Because as we’ve shown, not all AI-created art is discernable as AI--what is machine and what isn’t--although I like to think I can tell what is good. I’ve listened to Walk My Walk, and it’s catchy. I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between it and a human-made song. Likewise, I read the Mark Lawrence test, and I couldn’t tell which passage was from Robin Hobb and which one was AI.
So why? Why does it bother me so much? Like a lot of things, we can look to Star Trek for help. I am a nerd, after all. My Star Trek was Next Generation like a lot of you Gen X-ers. I’d stay up late to watch it because it was on at 11 o’clock on Sundays. My mom would want me to turn off my TV because there was school the next day, but I wouldn’t because I had to watch my Star Trek.
Anyway, in Star Trek: The Next Generation we have Data. He’s an android, and a lot of his character arcs were about exploring what it means to be human. One of the recurring themes in the show was his attempts to create art: painting, poetry, music, becoming a comedian. (“Take my Worf, please.” Classic line.) I rooted for Data, a synthetic being without emotions trying so hard to understand the human experience. I still do. I have no problem with Data creating art; if he were real, I’d applaud him.
Why do I empathize with Data yet not the AI large language models? This question starts to get to the core of the issue for me.
One of my favorite essays comes from the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. (I recommend it. It’s only a page long--the book is fantastic too, but I’ve always preferred the prologue to almost anything else he’s written.) In it, Oscar Wilde (with characteristic wit) makes multiple arguments about art, but then ends with these lines: “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”
Now, of course, this is Oscar Wilde being a little bit silly. He tended to do that. He took lobsters on walks. But if you look at this idea, there is a point to making art that doesn’t have to do with its usefulness. It doesn’t have to do with what you can sell it for. It has to do with the intrinsic need to make art. I do think that part of the reason I dislike AI is because it is too focused on the product and not the process. (Yes, the message is Journey Before Destination again. It’s always Journey before Destination. But there’s a specific take on it this time.)
This slide has a page of my first book. I wrote it longhand in giant notebooks in Korea. We call this White Sand Prime. I started it when I was 19, and it’s not very good. It’s one part rip-off of Dune, one part rip-off of Les Misérables, and one part rip-off of The Wheel of Time, but I wrote it. I did it myself, first word to last word--and there’s a seed of something there that is all me. Part of it tells the story of a man who is weaker at magic than everyone else and has to learn to win by finesse and understanding how said magic works instead of by raw power. That’s a very Brandon sort of thing--I would much later write a better version of this story, which we turned into the White Sand graphic novel.
That said, I have no question that using the language models currently released, everyone in this audience could prompt AI to create a book that is better than White Sand Prime. It was truly awful.
But here, this is a picture of my second book, Star’s End. While it also leans a lot on authors I’d read before, the me is more apparent. In my third book, Lord Mastrell, where I returned to the world of White Sand, suddenly it starts to feel original. The plots are tighter, and the characterization is more solid. The worldbuilding goes beyond its influences. In my fourth book, Knight Life, I experimented with twists and started to develop my style of the Sanderlanche. And in my fifth book, The Sixth Incarnation of Pandora, I started experimenting with theme, specifically in relation to the books I’d read before--laying the foundation for me telling stories that are in conversation with the legacy of science fiction and fantasy I had read, rather than just copying that legacy.
Finally, we reached Elantris, where I brought all this together.
This is when I emerged for the first time as the author I would become; it’s a fully realized fantasy epic that applies all the lessons I’d learned so far. After Elantris I started to create the Cosmere, eventually landing at Mistborn and the Stormlight Archive.
Maybe someday the language models will be able to write books better than I can. But here’s the thing: Using those models in such a way absolutely misses the point, because it looks at art only as a product. Why did I write White Sand Prime? It wasn’t to produce a book to sell. I knew at the time that I couldn’t write a book that was going to sell. It was for the satisfaction of having written a novel, feeling the accomplishment, and learning how to do it. I tell you right now, if you’ve never finished a project on this level, it’s one of the most sweet, beautiful, and transcendent moments. I was holding that manuscript, thinking to myself, “I did it. I did it.”
This is the difference between Data and a large language model, at least the ones operating right now. Data created art because he wanted to grow. He wanted to become something. He wanted to understand. Art is the means by which we become what we want to be.
The purpose of writing all those books in my earlier years wasn’t to produce something I could sell, it was to turn me into someone who could create great art. It took an amateur and it made him a professional. I think this is why I rebel against AI art products so much: because they steal the opportunity for growth from us.
When prose came along, people didn’t stop writing poetry. Photography didn’t kill painting, and film didn’t kill the stage play. Video might have killed the radio star, but video games didn’t kill film. But how many steel-driving men do you see these days? John Henry died and was replaced by a machine that could do his job. But he proved something important about the human spirit. Where will we go when there is no room for humans in art? You might say, “Well, if AI gets good enough and the product is the same, what’s the difference?” The difference is that the books aren’t the product. They aren’t the art--not completely. And this is the point. The most important thing to understand is that the process of creating art makes art of you.
My friends, let me repeat that. The book, the painting, the film script is not the only art. It’s important, but in a way it’s a receipt. It’s a diploma. The book you write, the painting you create, the music you compose is important and artistic, but it’s also a mark of proof that you have done the work to learn.
Because in the end of it all, you are the art.
The most important change made by an artistic endeavor is the change it makes in you. The most important emotions are the ones you feel when writing that story and holding the completed work. I don’t care if the AI can create something that is better than what we can create, because it cannot be changed by that creation. Writing a prompt for an LLM, even refining what it spits out, will not make an artist of you. Because if you haven’t done the hard part--if you haven’t watched a book spiral completely out of control, if you haven’t written something you thought was wonderful and then had readers get completely lost because your narrative chops aren’t strong enough, if you haven’t beat your head against the wall of dead ends on a story day after day until you break it down and find the unexpected path...you’re not going to have the skill to refine that prompt. The machine will have done the hard part for you.
And it doesn’t care.
It could be writing a shopping list or a story about the death of a family member. It cannot be changed. It can be changed by feeding it more copyrighted material, but creating the new work will not change it. It will not learn. It will not grow. It will not care.
Art is useless, as Oscar Wilde said. Therefore, we have the power here and not the machine, for it was created to try to make something useful. But it cannot admire what it made. For a long while, I thought our position was the same as John Henry: that we are inevitably going to lose. But I’m starting to think we don’t have to.
Fifteen years ago, Roger Ebert made a well-reasoned but ultimately uninformed statement. How many of you think he was wrong, and video games can be art?
You’re right. Not because I say it, but because we as a society say it. That’s the great thing about art--we define it, and we give it meaning. The machines can spit out manuscript after manuscript after manuscript. They can pile them to the pillars of heaven itself. But all we have to do is say “No.” If we do, they lose. John Henry couldn’t ultimately stop the steam-powered machine, but we can fight the battle, and we can win--because we get to choose what victory looks like.
What is art? Art is what we define it to be.
Why do we make art?
Well, remember, art is not just the story. It is not just the painting or the sculpture or whatever else you love to create. It’s also the process of creation and what that process does to you. We make art because we can’t help it. It’s part of us.
We understand what it is. We are drawn to it because we are of the same substance. We are the art.
Thank you.
This speech was originally given during the Tailored Realities release event at Dragonsteel Nexus, 2025. The full recorded event is also available on Brandon's YouTube channel.