AI & Craft Fairs

I woke up last week with the strange realization that I have the same feelings about Generative AI as I do about craft fairs. It's this noxious cocktail of cautious optimism that, upon being exposed to daylight for too long, ferments into hollow disappointment and lingering betrayal. Explaining this is going to take some effort and this is definitely going to be a wierd hill to die on, but let's do it anyway.

Grab a cup of tea, there's a lot of words and meandering thoughts...and it still probably won't be enough.

My wife is ridiculously talented when it comes to working with fabrics and fibers. I'm not just saying that because we share a bed. The stuff she makes blows the pants of any of the clothing you find in stores, especially if they are pants. You can see her work on Bluesky (linked below) if you like, but just know that she's the type of gal that sewed pockets into her wedding dress, then recycled that dress three years later to make an Aurora Borealis-inspired dress for our anniversary in Iceland. Beautiful madness.

At some point, I managed to convince her to try selling her stuff at craft fairs, which, in retrospect, I realize must be a super annoying thing about being a crafter. Everyone you know sees your work then immediately suggests capitalizing on it, as though there is no other purpose to do a thing but to make money. As we were about to realize, those people are mostly wrong and often miserable. It's quite hard to sell genuine crafts at craft fairs because they are opium dens of exploitation wearing a Trenchcoat of Wholesomeness, something to which the average consumer seems to be frighteningly apathetic about.

Yes, that sounds harsh, but hear me out.

Pretty much immediately after suggesting she try to sell at craft fairs, I became the booth helper (I also proposed to her at a craft fair, but that's another post for another blog). This was the only useful way I could support this venture since I am not a creator by any stretch, at least not on her level. At first it was pretty cool, watching the other crafters set up and display their talents, offering hand-made goods to people looking for something unique and interesting. At first, it seemed like a remarkably simple and effective model of commerce that works for everyone; a direct customer-producer relationship without thieving middlemen, the ridiculous pleasing of shareholders or vague "supply chain issues" being used to mask artificial inflation caused by straight up greed. That's what we thought was happening, anyway.

After doing about five or six shows, evidence emerged that cracked the veneer our self-imposed niativity. The "craft" booths that were doing well were either multi-level marketing (MLM) companies pretending to be crafters, or resellers of kitsch from drop-shippers (Temu, Oriental Trading, Amazon, etc). All told, less than 30% of the booths of the craft fairs we participated in over the years housed people who actually made the thing they were selling. Some organizers made the effort to start drawing a line in the sand by calling their events "vendor markets," but that turned out to be just another low-effort and ineffective strategy to keep actual crafters placated. We were living in a farce and having trouble justifying the time and effort she had to put in just to be there. Fellow crafters we had come to know stopped signing up for shows, giving up and hoping for the best on Facebook Marketplace or worse, Etsy.

On top of that, the customers were gobbling up the product offered at the non-crafter booths, and we could not figure out why. In our minds, you showed up to a craft fair because you were looking for something made by hand, preferably by the person you are handing the money to. But our expectations didn't hold up.

Pricing her crocheted stuff was soul-crushing. As an example, we could not compete with someone who was ordering factory-made blankets from Temu for less than $9 USD each, then reselling them for $65 USD. It takes my wife about 10 hours to crochet a blanket, something a machine cannot do. In the eyes of a consumer comparing her blanket to the one from the drop-shipper nextdoor, she would have to be willing to pay herself less than $5 USD an hour and use the lowest quality yarn to compete with that. It simply isn't worth it.

Side note on that; if someone is selling crocheted items, it is highly likely they made it, unless they are minding the booth for a friend or something. Crochet is one of the few things left in the craft world that cannot be replicated by a machine. Knitting, on the other hand, machines can do all day, and with aplomb, a very touchy subject for knitters, indeed. We have even seen some vendors trying to pass machine-knitted items as crochet, but a keen eye knows the difference. There's a link below that has a bit more info (via other links), but beware, the world of industrial knitting vs crochet is a spicy rabbit hole.

The whole thing was so cheapened by low-effort profiteering that we finally quit after three years of trying to build a brand, lest our souls be sucked from our very bones and we join the rest of the ghouls in hawking cheap plastic produced by abused workers in foreign contries. What's even more alarming is most consumers are aware of these questionable conditions, but they rationalize their spending by convincing themselves that they cannot afford to pay what products are actually worth, so they have to buy the cheap stuff...as they trigger an Apple Pay terminal with an iPhone they leased for 167% more than its retail value. Irrational is not the word I would use to describe consumer behavior, since that brushes it off as something other than the systemic problem it is. Instead, we need to step back and recognize that consumers are driven by three distinct factors; instant gratification, convenience and tribalism. I have not found cost to be as big of a concern as most claim.

You might see where this is going, already.

Now, Generative AI arguably hits the same. Addressing the phrasing first, I speak only of Generative AI, as in the models being used to generate text, images and now music based on a prompt from a user. When the general public says "AI" this is what they're talking about and these are the ones that are currently hurting real creators, the same way MLM shills do at craft fairs; by drawing business away from the individual creator in favor of a cheaper, mass-produced and unethically sourced product that satisfies the consumer's need for instant gratification, convenience and belonging to the group.

AI is otherwise doing a lot of interesting things beyond the talent-robbing world of Generative AI, so it would would be unfair of me to poo-poo it as though everyone working in AI is some evil shitstain who is only interested in making a quick buck. There are specialized AI being employed in biomedical research, assisting with threat modeling for better cybersecurity practices, or even being used to provide greater digital accessibility for individuals with disabilities. Of course, we can argue that any one of these possibly positive impacts on society is a double-edged sword. The information is also couched in an enormous amount of bias, since, even ethical uses for AI stand to make a pretty substantial profit, so it's difficult to find reporting agencies that don't have skin in that game. That said, take the links I provide below with a grain of salt and as always, I recommend you look for neutral sources and form your own opinions. The waters are very, very muddy, so I have less interest in trying to change anyone's mind, prefering instead to examine my own position.

I cannot stress to you how difficult that is, being an ageing aspiring writer who is not all that good to begin with. I have wanted to write professionally since high school, but my anxiety prevented me from ever making any real effort. So, I ignored that dream to focus on "normal" jobs, becoming a cog in a machine that I didn't really understand or care for. It's only fitting that, just as I started to rekindle the spark, Generative AI would show up and make me question "well, shit, why bother now?" From where I sit, I'm up against an uncountable amount of people more talented than me, and now robots? I'm never going to survive.

This is an easy mode to slip into, when we go back to that annoying thing that people always do to crafters, that dreaded question "omg, why don't you sell this online?!" When we step back and examine our motives for doing a thing, our version of what success actually means gets called into question. We are forced to ask ourselves what markers we use to guage success. Where is that point when we can say that we have been successful in an endeavor? Perhaps more importantly, are you happy with where you ended up? I'm not going to answer those questions here since they would largely be subjective, but it is something each of us needs to examine, once in awhile.

Darling of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that is reframing, it does have some use when we start looking at the impacts of AI on our lives, our world, and our future. It is difficult for me to seperate the idea that Generative AI is quite literally stealing money and content from creative people, not because I identify as creative (I don't), but because I am enamored with people who are. When it comes to the visual arts, be it drawing, graphics, photography, etc, what those folks do is magic to me. They can show me things, both real and imagined, that I would otherwise never get to see, which has immense value to me. Writers do the same, just with a different medium and the added bonus of teaching me something once in awhile. The existential threat of a Generative AI model replacing a novelist or screen writer is clear and present, returning me to wondering why anyone would pay me to write when they don't even want to pay the professionals to write?

But, crafters gonna craft.

When we do a thing for the love of it, then little else tends to matter, including whether or not it's being ripped off. I know, I can hear the folks who made their art a source of income typing the angry emails, now. I get it, despite not being in their position. It would would be like someone inventing a robot that goes and repairs industrial machinery, eliminating the need to pay me to do the same, since the robot has no need food or shelter the way I do. I'd be pissed, because repairs happen to be one of my few marketable skills when it comes to today's job market. Still, if we do not focus on the love of what we do, that love will not shine through in the work. The artist imparts themselves upon the page or canvas, or into the ears of listeners, which is invaluable to the right people. Gratitude does not pay bills, though.

This dive into my own position on AI solves nothing for artists losing their jobs to Generative AI, or crafters losing their customers to MLMs, though. To make art, you have to love art, though this maybe does not seem as obvious to the artist who hates their own work. The evaluation of whether or not we are "good enough" to do a thing is something seperate, but equally important, from the love of the thing itself. I love writing, but I consider myself pretty terrible at it. But I also try to reframe that thought into recognizing that I have opportunities to grow as a writer and I am capable of doing just that. Suddenly, things look a little different.

The aformentioned "hollow disapointment and lingering betrayal" both Generative AI and junk-vendors at craft fairs brought to their respective scenes is identical, a creeping malformed movement that is sucking the soul out of something that once was very full of humanity, the light fading from its eyes and being replaced by the cold, vacant stare and ersatz smiles of people who cannot create anything but more money. The market, full of such people who envy that money, reward it with their own meager allowances, clutched in hands that have never known the joy of combining raw materials into something new, or ushered their own thoughts into the physical world with love, care, and individuality.

The creators will never die. Historically speaking, we've tried to kill them a few times, but they proved resiliant and perhaps most amazingly, able to grow in the face of oppressive doom. It may yet prove to be that challenge is the spark that causes creators to, well, create. Perhaps one of those challenges is the ever-present instrusive anxiety lich that whispers "you will never be good enough" at the back of our minds, a challenge to which creators have timelessly risen, brow-beaten and hands bloodied from pummeling themselves with doubt only to find that they could not destroy the spark that made them who they are, and neither could anyone else.

As I watch that energy rise on places like Bluesky in crafters, musicians, photographers and artists aplenty, my one eye on the creatives of the world while the other is steeped in technology, a much more interesting and welcome threat emerges, one of humanity, for all its psychic virtues and violence, evolving once again to defeat the soulless that wish to take away all that makes us us. The canaries have sounded the alarm that the air is already poisoned, but like every other time before that, there will be such a wealth of emotion, thoughts so subversive and dissenting, broken molds and shattered shackles, that future generations will be just as inspired as we were by those that came before us. Thus the cycle continues, creation and destruction whirling through space.

The AI uprising is not to be feared. We are.

Now get out there and create.