A MODEST PROPOSAL

It is a melancholy object to those who scroll through this great network, or who travel in its remoter provinces, when they see the feeds, the threads, and the comment sections crowded with Illustrators, followed by three, four, or six samples of their work, all marked down since the spring, and importuning every passenger for a commission. These artists, instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time in posting, to beg sustenance for their helpless portfolios; who, as they grow older, either turn podcasters for want of work, or leave their dear profession for marketing, or sell themselves to the agencies.

I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of distressed artists, together with the prodigious number of cheap banners now hanging in the windows of every card shop, taqueria, and nail salon in the kingdom, is, in the present deplorable state of the arts, a very great additional grievance; and therefore whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these artists sound and useful members of the commonwealth would deserve so well of the publick as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the craft. That the statue be carved by hand I need hardly add.

But my intention is very far from being confined to provide only for the artists who openly beg upon the timeline. It is of a much greater extent, and shall take in the whole number of Illustrators; and of Writers too, who, having been accused of employing a machine for no better reason than an honest fondness for the dash, now compose in a hunted and furtive manner, and have struck that innocent mark from their prose altogether, as I have from mine.

I speak not here of the established artist. He, having been paid these twenty years for his judgment rather than his hands, and possessing a reputation, a list of clients, and a body of work that is hired because it is his, sleeps very soundly; and I am credibly informed that he uses the machines himself at two in the morning without the least remorse, and says nothing of it at dinner. The machine has done him no injury that I can discover. It is the poorer sort I mean: the artist who sold the flyer, the logo, the template, and the social tile; whose trade was the thing itself and not the deciding of it; who lost the logo to the contest sites in the year 2008, and the flyer to the templates some five years after, and who now watches the last of his bread go to an engine that works at midnight, requires no discovery call, and never once asks for a deposit. A study of one great market in freelance labour found that those in the trades most exposed lost above five per cent of their monthly earnings within months of the machines’ arrival; that they have lost a great deal more since, I can very well believe; and it is for these that my heart is chiefly engaged. The same study found besides that it was the most accomplished freelancers who lost the most; which I at first took for a calamity, until I considered that a person who can no longer charge thirty thousand dollars to build a website is not, for all that, in any danger of starving, and will very likely be found next season charging the same sum to tell someone which website to build.

Having turned my thoughts for many years upon this important subject, and maturely weighed the several schemes of other projectors, I have always found them grossly mistaken in their computation. It has been proposed that the artists sign petitions, and they have signed a great many. It has been proposed that they coat their pictures in certain invisible poisons, devised at the University of Chicago, which render an image indigestible to the machines; and they have done so, and the machines have gone on eating. It has been proposed that they fix a small badge to their work reading No AI, which has been very widely adopted, and has produced, so far as I have been able to learn, not a single invoice. It has been proposed, lastly, that they sue; and they are suing; and I wish them every success, and observe only that a lawsuit, however just, is a very poor thing to eat.

The number of small businesses in this kingdom is reckoned by the Office of Advocacy at thirty-six million two hundred thousand. Of graphic designers in regular employment the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts something under two hundred thousand, at a middling wage of sixty-three thousand dollars a year; to whom must be added the far greater number of freelancers, illustrators, and persons with a tablet and a following, whom no bureau has yet had the courage to count. There are thus some hundred and eighty shops for every employed designer, which one would think an abundant pasture. But from these thirty-six million I subtract the greater part, who have no need of any picture at all. From the remainder I subtract those who were never going to hire a designer in any case, but made their flyers in a word processor, or in a borrowed copy of Photoshop, or by the hands of the owner’s niece, and afterward in Canva; all of which, I am given to understand, was very well, and troubled nobody.

The question therefore is how the remainder shall be made useful to the arts, which, as I have already said, under the present situation of affairs, is utterly impossible by all the methods hitherto proposed. I have been informed by a gentleman of business that a flyer for a Saturday sale may bring into a shop perhaps eight hundred dollars, and will be in the bin by the Tuesday following; and that a designer may very reasonably ask five hundred dollars to make it. I confess I have never been able to make these two numbers agree. The shopkeepers, I find, have not been able to make them agree either, for which reason the commission was seldom given, before the machines or since. I may therefore state with some confidence that the flyer was never going to be the artist’s at all; which, far from discouraging me, I take to be the strongest argument yet for what follows.

I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection.

I have been assured by a very knowing Influencer of my acquaintance, who keeps four hundred thousand followers and has not accepted a commission since the year 2019, that a small Shopkeeper, taken in the act of a machine-made Banner, is at a week’s notice a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Content, whether stitched, duetted, screenshotted, or quote-posted; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a Thread or a Reel.

I do therefore humbly offer it to publick consideration that, of the thirty-six million two hundred thousand already computed, the whole number who shall be taken in the use of a machine-made picture be reserved for consumption; that is to say, that each such shopkeeper, upon discovery, be posted, captioned, and set before the Creative Publick, who shall be invited to feed upon him according to their appetite. It is not necessary that the diner be a customer, or have ever heard of the shop, or live within three states of it. A Boycott, like a good sauce, travels very well, and is best of all when served by persons who were never going to set foot in the place.

I have reckoned upon a medium that a shopkeeper well exposed will draw two million views; of which the platforms, by their own rules, will count perhaps one half as qualified; which, at the rate the creators of that country report, of between forty cents and a dollar upon every thousand, yields to the diner somewhere between four hundred and one thousand dollars. I grant this is not a great deal. But I beg the reader to observe that it is, in the mean, very nearly the five hundred dollars the artist would have asked for the banner; so that the artist is paid at the last almost exactly what he asked, and the shopkeeper, who would otherwise have been out five hundred dollars, is out only his shop.

I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for the Platforms, who, as they have already devoured most of the Artists, seem to have the best title to the Shopkeepers. For it is well known that every picture and every paragraph these artists ever posted was long ago taken into the machines at no charge, so that the Platforms have eaten the parents already; and nothing could be more natural than that they should now take their cut of the children, which, by the arithmetic above, they do.

As to the seasons, the shopkeeper is most plentiful in the weeks before a holiday, when he must announce his hours; he is very common upon the Friday before a trade night; but the Grand Opening is the most tender of all, the owner being then at his most hopeful and his least defended. The apology video, which commonly follows within eight and forty hours, is esteemed the choicest cut, and, taken with a little tearful piano, will make a very agreeable second course. And if it should appear, as it very commonly does, that the offending picture was made by the owner’s niece, the niece may be served alongside, at no additional charge.

Some persons of a desponding spirit are in great concern about how the guilty shopkeeper is to be known, the machines being now very skilful. But I have been assured that the matter is simple. One counts the fingers upon any hand in the picture. One examines the caption for a dash. Where doubt remains, the matter may be referred to one of the several engines lately invented for detecting the hand of a machine, one of which, being put to the Constitution of the United States, pronounced it above ninety-two per cent the work of an artificial intelligence. I own that by these methods a certain number of wholly human shopkeepers, and a great many writers, will be consumed in error. But I have tasted both, and I cannot tell them apart; and neither, I think, can the audience; which I take to be a complete answer.

I would not have it thought that I hold the shopkeeper’s picture cheap. Quite the contrary. I hold every banner in every window to be a work of art, and every shopkeeper who needs one to be a patron, with all the duties of a patron; and I have never been able to follow those persons of a harder temper who maintain that a banner announcing Sunday hours is a mere tool of business, made to do a job and then be thrown away. Several ladies of my acquaintance have declared that they would feel a great deal better if the shopkeeper had at least made a worse picture himself, by hand, in Canva; and I honour that sentiment, which holds the method so far above the result that a bad picture honestly made is a greater good to the world than a good one made otherwise. It is upon precisely this principle that my whole proposal is founded. For it will be readily admitted that a shop honestly closed is preferable to one that prospers by a machine.

A very worthy person, a true lover of the arts, and whose virtues I highly esteem, was lately pleased, in discoursing on this matter, to offer a refinement upon my scheme. He said that, since the machines are made by a small number of exceeding rich companies, and since it was these companies, and not any card shop, that took the artists’ work into the machines without asking, the Creative Publick might more justly turn its appetite upon them. But with due deference to so excellent a friend, I cannot be altogether in his sentiments. For, first, these companies are very large and very tough, and keep a great many lawyers, and would take many years in the chewing; whereas a card shop may be finished in an afternoon. Secondly, the companies in question own, or are very deeply married to, the very platforms upon which the feast is laid, which pour tens of billions of dollars every year into the machines; and it would be an ill-bred thing to eat one’s host. Thirdly, and I confess it freely, a card shop cannot answer back.

Some scrupulous people may be apt to censure such a practice as a little bordering upon cruelty; which, I confess, hath always been with me the strongest objection against any project, however so well intended. But I desire those tender persons to consider that the shopkeepers are already every day dying and rotting, by rent, by payroll, by insurance, and by federal paperwork, which the Office of Advocacy computes to have cost them above eighty-one billion dollars in a single year; so that my scheme does not so much end the shopkeeper as merely settle who shall have the benefit of him when he ends.

I think the advantages by the proposal which I have made are obvious and many, as well as of the highest importance.

First, as I have already observed, it would greatly lessen the number of machine-made banners in the kingdom, by greatly lessening the number of shops.

Secondly, the poorer sort of artist, who has at present nothing of value to sell, would have something at last of his own, which is to say, engagement; a commodity he may exchange for a small sum of money, and for a much larger sum of the feeling of having been right.

Thirdly, the Platforms, which build the machines, would be furnished with a constant supply of fresh indignation, which they are well known to prefer above all other content, and upon which their machines are in their turn trained. So that every dish served up against the machine is fed back into it, and the artist has the satisfaction of improving, by his outrage, the very engine he is outraged against; which is a kind of economy the world has seldom seen.

Fourthly, the established artist, being in no danger, would be spared altogether, and might continue to charge for his judgment in peace, as he always has.

Fifthly, the shops so consumed would leave behind them a great many empty premises, well lit and upon the main street, which the artists might take up as studios at a reduced rent; though who will then buy their pictures, the shops being gone, I have not yet been able to compute.

Sixthly, it would be a great inducement to unity among the artists themselves, who have lately been very much divided, those who use the machines against those who do not, the young against the old, the illustrators against the writers, and all of them against the designers. These would forget their quarrels, as men commonly do, at the dinner table.

Many other advantages might be enumerated, but I study brevity, and shall mention only that the whole scheme may be put into effect without a single new law, committee, or grant, the machinery of it being already in daily operation, and wanting only the dignity of a name.

I desire the reader will observe that I calculate my remedy for this one internet and for no other that ever was, is, or I think ever can be upon earth. Nor do I confine it to the card shop, though I have used him for my instance, he being very common and very easily caught. There is not a restaurant that changes its hours, a gym that announces its holiday schedule, a plumber, a landscaper, a food truck, a church with a bake sale, nor a nail salon with a new colour for the season, that may not in its turn be brought to table.

Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients. Of saying plainly, when one is afraid for one’s living, that one is afraid for one’s living, and not dressing a pricing complaint in a moral costume. Of taking the question of how the machines were trained, which is a real question and deserves a real answer, to the companies that did the training, and not to a woman who needed a banner for her Saturday sale. Of remembering that design is a trade, which has a customer and a job to do, and that art is a calling, which has a place in the culture; and of ceasing to sell the one at the price, and with the dignity, of the other. Of moving one’s value out of the making of the thing and into the deciding of it, which is where the established artist moved his long ago, and where no machine has yet followed. Of the established practitioners saying aloud that the tools work for them, so that the story is not left to those with most to lose. Of observing that the machine is available at midnight, needs no discovery call, and takes a change of mind without offence; and of becoming, if one wishes to be hired, at least as pleasant to deal with. Of noticing that the logo was lost to the contest and the flyer to the template long before any machine could draw a rectangle. Of learning the tools. Of treating the shopkeeper as what he always was, which is the customer. Of competing.

Therefore I repeat, let no man talk to me of these and the like expedients, till he hath at least some glimpse of hope that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempt to put them into practice.

But, as to myself, having been wearied out for many years with offering vain, idle, visionary thoughts, and at length utterly despairing of success, I fortunately fell upon this proposal, which, as it is wholly new, so it hath something solid and real, of no expense and little trouble, full in our own power, and whereby we can incur no danger of offending the Platforms. For this kind of commodity will not bear exportation, the shopkeeper being too local to interest anybody abroad; though, as I have shown, he may be very well eaten at any distance.

I profess, in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavouring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the publick good of the arts, by advancing our trade, providing for the poorer artist, relieving the audience, and giving some pleasure to the Platforms. I have no shop by which I can be boycotted, and no commissions by which I can propose to get a single penny; the last I accepted being nine years old, and my following past all capacity of growth.

I have composed this proposal entirely by hand, with a goose quill, upon paper of my own ruling, and have not permitted so much as a single dash into it, that no person might suspect it of a machine. I submitted it nevertheless, before publication, to one of the detecting engines above described, which pronounced it ninety-two per cent artificial; very nearly the figure it gave the Constitution. I take this as high praise, and am content to stand in such company.