“None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands.”
(Pope St. John Paul II, ‘Letter to Artists,’ 1999)
Back in the fall of 2022, before Inkwells and Anvils began, a small group of Catholic storytellers gathered for a writer’s retreat themed around the ‘Letter to Artists’ This small group, who called themselves ‘The Wordsmiths’, had forged something together that they soon realized they wanted to share with the wider world: a community that fosters art, an intimately human expression of the transcendentals and an act of co-creation with God. The original aim was a group just for writers, but we realized that there were many other branches of tellers of tales, too. So we broadened our scope and branded ourselves as “A community of Catholic storytellers.”
It should be no surprise, then, to learn that the desire to build community led to what is now Inkwells & Anvils. Inkwells & Anvils launched on January 24th, 2023 and within weeks expanded to include its now thriving Discord Server Community in February of 2023. We are united in our desire to share the stories within us, expressed through art in many forms—writing, drawing, painting, music, etc. —sharing in that idea that to create is something that goes beyond our mere selves. To create, to engage in the creative act, is to use the spark of divine wisdom with which we have been blessed. As Pope St. John Paul II explains in his Letter to Artists, “With loving regard, the divine Artist passes on to the human artist a spark of his own surpassing wisdom, calling him to share in his creative power.”
Art cannot escape from the transcendentals any more than we can escape from being human; the expression of beauty, truth, and goodness is what makes art art when combined with the co-creative act of humankind. Art that, as put by Jacques Maritain, has all its teeth. We do not shy away from the grim nor the gritty, nor from the simple and straightforward, instead we revel in the ways beauty and truth make themselves known alongside goodness when the artist engages in the creative act. Art reveals the divine spark passed on to the artist from the divine Artist. This is something unique to humanity and our relationship with God—the creation of art bears witness to humanity being made in God’s image and likeness.
CCC ¶2501: Created "in the image of God," man also expresses the truth of his relationship with God the Creator by the beauty of his artistic works. Indeed, art is a distinctively human form of expression; beyond the search for the necessities of life which is common to all living creatures, art is a freely given superabundance of the human being's inner riches. Arising from talent given by the Creator and from man's own effort, art is a form of practical wisdom, uniting knowledge and skill, to give form to the truth of reality in a language accessible to sight or hearing. To the extent that it is inspired by truth and love of beings, art bears a certain likeness to God's activity in what he has created. Like any other human activity, art is not an absolute end in itself, but is ordered to and ennobled by the ultimate end of man.
If it is in the beauty of our artistic works that we express the truth of our relationship with God, then it is easy to understand how the creative act is something distinctively human. No other creature can have any expression of the truth of a relationship with God the way we can. Each persons’ art is as unique as their relationship with God, no two humans are alike in that regard. Once again we can turn to JPII in his Letter to Artists to exemplify this: “In producing a work, artists express themselves to the point where their work becomes a unique disclosure of their own being, of what they are and of how they are what they are.”
By our art we reveal much, not just our relationship with God, but also what we are, and perhaps more important still—how we are what we are. We say by the art we create that “this is how I became what I am.” It is not about churning out content, or pushing out as much as we can. At its heart, art is about sharing the superabundance of inner riches which we possess. By the fact that it is humans who create art, art is the human expression of the transcendentals and a unique co-creative act with God. Some art, such as sacred art, does this much more explicitly and boldly. Some art reveals a beauty or truth by its lack. Some art gives us cause to wonder or ponder until we arrive at the expression revealed—and we learn something about the co-creator in those moments too. As Pope St. John Paul II explains,
“In so far as it seeks the beautiful, fruit of an imagination which rises above the everyday, art is by its nature a kind of appeal to the mystery. Even when they explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, artists give voice in a way to the universal desire for redemption.”
Our works show how we are what we are, revealing ourselves and allowing ourselves to be seen by the world—and by God—in an intimate, uniquely disclosed, way. Art appeals to the mystery, and artists give voice to the universal desire for redemption: our pursuits of perfection in our lives that persist despite the way we often fall short and fail, for our works of art show that we were picked up and set on our feet again after we fell.
Our art reflects this. For it is true that often our minds find ideas or give us glimpses of what we wish to express that we, in our own humanity, using our own gifts and talents, simply cannot. We create and we spend hours creating only for it to fall short, no matter how wonderful, of that which we saw in our mind’s eye. Not only is this an acknowledgement of our limitations but of the simple fact that the glimpses of true beauty that the artists gleans with their spark of wisdom cannot be fully realized. It is humility that calls us to accept this—and produce that which is the true best we can. We do not have a right to have what we see in our mind’s eyes fully realized. In fact, we must accept that in many cases we simply cannot have that. The glimpse received in the creative moment remains unreachable, and yet, we pursue it because it is what we strive for—an earthly expression of our desire for true Beauty itself. We once again refer to the Letter to Artists:
“All artists experience the unbridgeable gap which lies between the work of their hands, however successful it may be, and the dazzling perfection of the beauty glimpsed in the ardour of the creative moment: what they manage to express in their painting, their sculpting, their creating is no more than a glimmer of the splendour which flared for a moment before the eyes of their spirit.”
This is a gap we all know too well. The story, once on the page, is not as clear and masterful as it was in our mind. The painting, though done with every bit of skill we could give to it, the dazzlement of perfection that remains just out of reach. The song, though it moves the heart to feel more deeply than before, is not as full as it was when we heard its notes in our mind for the first time. This gap becomes even greater when the medium with which we try to create is not one that we have great skill with. Those of us who are primarily writers have a larger gap between our stories and the images of them we can create with visual mediums. The primarily visual artist has a larger gap between what lies on the canvas before them and the words to tell its’ story, or to write a poem about a glimpse of goodness they see—there are limits to our abilities to express, to different degrees, that which we see in the creative moment.
This becomes both a frustration and a gift. It is a frustration because we desire it and we cannot fully have it. It is a gift because it reminds us that we are not creating alone. What we glimpse in the creative moment is a glimmer of splendor granted to us not by our own mind’s creation—but by the Creator himself. Every genuine inspiration contains within it “some tremor of that “breath” with which the Creator Spirit suffused the work of creation from the very beginning.” as Pope St. John Paul II said.
This is why the artist practices, repeats their process over and over again until they figure out how to get a specific element right—or rewrites and edits a story time and time again until it begins to match up with the vision in their mind.he artist knows that with each revision there is a greater chance of capturing what has been given to them in that spark of genius. They are not complacent and satisfied with mediocrity. They hone their God-given skills by performing their craft in repetition. This forms, not only the art, but the artist. This is how the artist comes to know how they are what they are: how they are an artist at all, a creative at all. The notion that we can skip steps and gain skills by having a tool do the work for us means we will not actually find growth in our skills. Taking short cuts might get us a product in the short term, but ultimately, it does not hone our craft. The fruit of the struggle is improvement.
This means the artist must work. They must sit down, stare at the dreaded blank page and pull the creation from their minds. They have to push past the discomfort when they want to quit. It’s hard. Artists are not all called to be famous or masters in their creative pursuits, only to use their creative acts to make masterpieces of their own lives. They build the skill they have been given, not having each doodle from the pen be a great work of art, every line in a poem be one that changes souls— but the skill becomes part of their art and the masterpiece of their life. They persist in the creative act, pursuing perfection of their craft, even though they know it may never be as fully beautiful as it was in their mind’s eye.
It is for these reasons, for this love of art and the way that which we create, as co-creators with God, that we emphasize and carry our belief that the creation of art is a distinctly human form of expression into Inkwells and Anvils. Distinctly human. It is how we use those gifts, those talents, given freely in a superabundance by our Creator, to give the truth of reality a form that we, and others, can perceive. Art, as the CCC paragraph above reminds us, is not an end itself. We are not merely artists, we are human and made in the image and likeness of God. Our art, to the extent that it has that genuine breath of inspiration at its source, is ordered to the ultimate end: the Eternal Beatitude itself.
We believe that to remove or replace the human element in the creative act is to destroy the creative act, to corrupt it into what it is not. We cannot inspire a machine to create by our words, prompts, or action. We can direct a tool to do a task. We can use an online spreadsheet to organize thoughts. We can draw on a digital canvas. We can manipulate images and text, but we cannot give to a machine the breath of inspiration that our God gives to us when we sit down to create. We cannot have a tool replace our creative act by giving to it entirely the inspiration which we received. No tool can create.
Tools are used to craft, but they cannot take the inspiration from the creator and turn it into a unique expression of truth. Only humanity can do this, and we stand firmly against so-called ‘tools’ that attempt to replace the human aspect of creation. A tool which attempts to do such is an affront to the very nature of art or to any human aspect of creation. There are marked differences between looking through a database for inspiration or references and prompting a generator to tell the seeker what they are seeking instead.
Artificial Intelligence cannot receive inspiration from the Creator, cannot co-create, and we cannot give to it the inspiration we receive—for it cannot create at all. Our words can inspire another human, but we cannot inspire a machine, nor should we pretend that we can in the pursuit of fast-art or cheap alternatives to the artists of the world, no matter their medium. We do not have a ‘right’ to art that we cannot ourselves create. The writer does not have a right to see their characters brought to life by the stroke of an illustrator’s brush. The painter does not have a right to see a poem written about their latest expression of self and the world. This is a point of frustration, and one of humility, for the artist to recall that their skill is something unique and honed.
For every artist can take the inspiration they receive, the tremor of the breath of the Creator, and with it make a uniquely human form of expression that reveals the truth of the world in a form we can perceive.
The attempted use of artificial intelligence as part of the creative process removes the human element. There is the understandable desire to use AI to make something the artist cannot, whether for assisting the artist or as an end itself. And yet, feeding a prompt into a machine does not creation make, for the machine cannot create. The machine scrapes and brings together and aligns according to what its creators instruct it to do—but it has not the spark of life within it to truly create and craft. It will always be lacking in the ability to be inspired, and it is by our inspiration that we create art. Nor can artificial intelligence fulfill the desire for art, for creations, because it is humanity’s place to co-create.
Inputting prompts or directions into a generator means we will receive what that generator has been coded or “trained” to give us in response. We let the machine tell us what our inspiration equates to, instead of creating it ourselves or discovering it for ourselves. There remains a stark difference between inputting a description into a generator and receiving an image in response, and taking the time to use the tools and talent we possess to bring that same description to life in words or visual medium. With one we are told what the description equals, with the other we determine that ourselves - not giving even part of the creative process to something that cannot create.
Artificial Intelligence as part of the creative process also brings with it a sense of isolation that says ‘I can create on my own. I can inspire my tools. I can reap the rewards without the effort of learning the trades myself.’ The words that an AI model spits out are not the artist’s own, the images that an AI generator pastes and scrapes together are not the artist’s own. Neither are they the machine’s. It is true that individual artists rarely possess in themselves everything which they need to succeed. A great writer still needs an editor, but even more than that every co-creator needs community. Isolation is not something intended for artists; the very nature of the creative act is co-creating. We co-create with God and in community we together bring him glory by our crafts.
In community we learn from one another, we share in joys and challenges together, we find humility in giving and accepting criticism in the pursuit of the perfection of our craft—and those are things that AI models cannot replace. But AI models are designed, intentionally or not, to pull us away from the community. They encourage artists to seek answers and affirmations from their “tools” instead of from one another. We are told to be satisfied with the mediocrity of an amalgamated average result than with the fruit of asking one another, researching, and using the talent, time, and resources of those around us as a community. We acknowledge that art is hard. It takes resources— talent, money, time— and not everyone has an equal amount of those things. But in a community, those burdens are lessened. Connections are made. New ideas can grow and flourish. We would not have Lord of the Rings if Tolkien himself had not had his own writing community.
This is why, amongst a host of other reasons, we take a strong stance against AI as part of the creative process. Image generators, writing tools, writing aids—these things pretend to fill gaps in our own knowledge, skills, and abilities, isolating us in our work, by quickly spitting out what we don’t want to spend the time to do ourselves, or what we don’t want to spend the money on to acquire from genuine artists. The use of AI in the creative process attempts to replace the relationship of the artist and the Creator, and we cannot stand for that in any way, shape, or form.
We at Inkwells & Anvils do not endorse, promote, or encourage the use of AI models for the creative process [generative images, ChatGPT & similar, writing aids, etc]. The usage of AI models as part of the creative process is prohibited in any official capacity for Inkwells & Anvils, whether in branding, promotional content, I&A published works, submitted works to I&A contests, or elsewhere.
We understand that individual members of our Discord Community may have differing opinions on this matter. We maintain that everyone is welcome in our space and community no matter their opinion, and we encourage the discussion of AI technology & its usage between members of our community. There is fruit in discussion and in understanding one another’s points of view and we do not want to have anyone feel they cannot speak their piece on matters of AI in the creative process and have space in our community for those of all points of view—so long as they understand our official stance.
This stance is motivated, as demonstrated by the beginning of this article, by our conviction that any expression of art, including storytelling, is an act of co-creation with God. Storytellers are rightly included in Pope St. John Paul II’s ‘Letter to Artists,’ and are described alongside all other artists as “ingenious creators of beauty.” Art, as the Catechism explains in ¶2501, ‘is a distinctly human form of expression, a freely given superabundance of the human being’s inner riches’.
Thus, in addition to the legitimate ethical and legal issues that come with AI, which alone are enough for us to take the stance that we do, we believe that the usage of AI models for the creative process dehumanizes art in an attempt to change the fact that creative expression is distinctly human. AI cannot create art, for it lacks the ability to be inspired, the capacity to participate in the creative act and possesses nothing of the inner riches of the human being within its models and algorithms. AI cannot create references or images or brainstorm - not without replacing the human act of those aspects of creation.
For these reasons we prohibit the usage of AI in the creative process in any and all official capacities under the Inkwells & Anvils umbrella.
We close our statement by sharing in the closing of Pope St. John Paul II’s Letter to Artists:
“may your art help to affirm that true beauty which, as a glimmer of the Spirit of God, will transfigure matter, opening the human soul to the sense of the eternal.”
Signed,
The Wordsmiths, Founders of Inkwells & Anvils
Catherine, Elizabeth, Kelly, Paige, Lauren, Robert, Grace, & Tyler
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