My frustration with the use of LLMs in arts writing in the UAE.

My greatest satisfaction as a writer and editor is getting feedback that my words accurately captured what an artist wanted to say. This feeling of succeeding, with just language on paper, is a precious joy. And this joy is being robbed from me, and I have a severe problem with it.

Even before the advent of public use of LLMs, there were myriad problems with the way the art world spoke: borrowing from academia, needlessly complex. Nearly 3 years ago, I wrote about my issues with how art institutions were too busy appeasing the West to look at what accessibility in the UAE should look like, including with language. But despite these issues, at the very least, I could say that writing still had the hope of changing. Whether the writing succeeded or failed to connect with audiences, it reflected the admirable or flawed nuances of human thought.

Today, with ChatGPT (and others) at the fingertips of gallerists and artists, it is becoming even more difficult to separate absurdity from authenticity. When I see artists post in English with the distinct layer of LLM-speak…it hurts. ‘Quiet confidence’. ‘Woven threads of meaning’. ‘Layered media in the form of storytelling’. In an effort to belong to the market, which institutions and galleries are aligned with, artists have started falling back on a machine to sound refined. And galleries and institutions, with which I can only call laziness, have also started producing exhibition texts with this LLM layer.

The result is that, for me, it is becoming increasingly meaningless to even work with text in the art world anymore. Why bother writing or reading about art if the choices of words are not even human? What is ‘it’ even trying to communicate?

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Back in 2022, when ChatGPT first became public, I was also an avid user. For two years, I willingly submitted not just my words, but my thought process also, to the judgment of a machine. ‘It’s my personal sounding board’, I thought. I was not under any misconception about how LLMs worked, I knew it couldn’t ‘think’, but I still felt like it helped me find new language and logic that I would’ve had to read a thousand books to acquire.

Over time, as I stepped back to question the principles that guide my work, I started to grow disillusioned with it all. Not only did editing texts for clients become nearly impossible, as I couldn’t decipher the intention of the artist, I also found it to seem like a fruitless exercise. Where does the writer end and a machine begin?

All this to say, I understand the allure–the urge to open up the app, share your writing or thoughts, and generate text that looks like it belongs to the walls of a museum. But I really believe that the mindless use of this tool is going to further sink us deeper into a dystopian future for the arts, where machine-generated language is used to convey all human thought and creativity. I don’t think it’s enough to have guardrails around the use of AI in artwork, I think guardrails need to exist around how art is produced, consumed and shared as well.

To all artists in the UAE: write poorly, write crudely, write in an awkward manner. Write how you speak. Write in the language you are most comfortable in, and have it translated. If you’re not confident about it, take your text to your friend, your mentor, your editor, and tell them what it is you wanted to say, and ask if it comes across the way you intended it to. Inquire with your galleries and curators about their format and guidelines, and make that extra effort to communicate your work in the way that you can. And if resources are limited, and you have to use an LLM, use it for proofreading, not writing. I promise you, this effort pays off. You will start to find the right words, with time and practice, that express your intention. Do not do yourself this disservice of using a machine to ‘refine’ yourself. 

And to gallerists, curators and institutions: With respect, your machine-generated exhibition text and publications convey very little thought, intention or humanity. You have come this far without an LLM, it should not be too difficult to continue putting in the same effort. You carry the responsibility of shaping how the art world in the UAE responds to the market and global trends, and you set the wider standards that artists adhere to. Consider what you’re building for the generation after us, and what your choices mean for the future of creative and cultural industries in the UAE.