Yumi and the Nightmare Painter
Brandon Sanderson is wrong about this book.
Brandon Sanderson
Fiction, Fantasy
Ebook finished September 1, 2024
Review
I know the risk I run when criticizing Brandon Sanderson on the internet, being that his fans are as rabid and die-hard as Taylor Swift’s, though they skew more male. I assure you, this is a good review of a good book, but I have to get something off my chest.
Brandon Sanderson is wrong: he doesn’t know what his own book is about, or at least he didn’t admit to it. He wrote in the Postscript of YatNP that this book, his favorite of his Secret Books written during the first years of the Pandemic, took inspiration from many sources. He says, above all else, that he was inspired to write a romance at the bequest of his wife and co-president of Dragonsteel, Emily. He says he was inspired by one of his favorite games, Final Fantasy X. He says he was inspired by the manga Hikaru no Go, and an unnamed story he read years ago about two people working different shifts on a space station (it’s probably Space Affair by Peter Viney), the history and cultures of Japan and Korea (where Brando was a Mormon missionary in the late nineties) and others. He says it’s a story about two people falling in love through sharing their fantasy-world specific jobs with one another.
It isn’t about any of that. This is a book about generative AI and how it feels for artists to be consumed by the fear of replacement, while simultaneously being the only ones skilled enough to see that the machines’ approximations are not good art. The narrator, who is familiar to any fans of Sanderson’s other works, can’t help but drive this home because as the Cosmere’s favorite storyteller, Hoid is just as much an artist as the book’s author.
“Why put so much effort into describing something that everyone knows?”
It’s probably not a shock to anyone that as an artist myself, I don’t think generative AI is making art. I like playing with AI, it’s a fun toy and interesting from a technical perspective, but the output is distinctly not art. Even among laymen (non-artists) it would be difficult to find anyone willing to go to bat for the machines that are poised to “take our jobs.” Despite that, AI “art” is rampant now, seen everywhere from advertisements to Trump’s NFT playing cards.
Despite this, during 2020 and the years that followed, AI “art” was clearly getting better. GPT undeniably sifts through data faster than any person and when prompted effectively, can output some useful stuff such as clear technical data or a proofread resume. Midjourney and DALLE can make hands with the right amount of fingers now, though they still make images that are citizens of the uncanny-valley.
During the early pandemic when Sanderson was writing this book, he could not have escaped the AI hype talk. Storms, his team probably had to brief him at some point that GPT will write “in the style of Brandon Sanderson” with very little urging. I doubt he was worried (I think his secret projects, of which YatNP was one, proved that Sanderson may be the only human who can write at the pace of a machine,) but the topic of AI-generated books must have been on his mind in 2021, like so many authors.
“And here was the crux of why painters were so important, yet so disposable. Their job was essential, but not urgent.”
The titular “Nightmare Painter” of the story is Nikaro, and he’s a professional artist. In his world, that job is really important because the nightmares he paints are monsters capable (if left unpainted) of killing people and even destroying towns. Despite this, Nikaro (also called Painter) is not the artist whose work is threatened by technology. Painter’s world has photographs and even hion-powered television, but his job is safe. Unlike in our world, where the camera (and now, generative AI) threatened the work of real visual artists, Painter’s role is not threatened because he is a protector against monster attacks, not “just” a creative.
“Three local spirit scribes settled on tall stools to sing songs that, best I can tell, the spirits never noticed. (I approve of the job nonetheless. Anything to gainfully employ more musicians.”
I found it interesting that Nikaro never makes this argument to Yumi, though maybe it’s too heavy handed for the author’s style: Painter’s job wasn’t replaced by emergent technology because there was something about painting that was irreplicable by the other mediums. We never see a photograph (but Painter says it was black and white) but it is implied that they would not have the same effect on nightmares as a painting. Also, and this is crucially implied but not said, the hion-powered TV shows are written, acted, and directed by artists, too.
“But then again, there’s nothing intrinsically valuable about any kind of art. That’s not me complaining or making light. It’s one of the most wonderful aspects to art - the fact that people decide what is beautiful.”
Yumi’s art is strange, and even she doesn’t see it as particularly artful at first. Dutifully, Yumi stacks rocks in a cosmere-approximation of Fibonacci spirals like a hipster’s instagram of a trip to the river. It’s weird and boring, and probably the last thing in the world that we would consider for automation, but she soon learns that they’ve made a machine to do just that.
“If Yumi’s people wanted to declare that rock arrangements surpassed painting or sculpture as an artistic creation…well, I personally found it fascinating.”
Yumi doesn’t just stack rocks, of course. Her art, like Painter’s, is designed to interplay with the magics of their respective worlds. This would not be a Brandon Sanderson book without a magic system stewing through every part of the world like broth in Design’s noodles. Yumi is summoning spirits to help the people of the towns she visits and thus, her art is also important to her culture beyond aesthetics or personal expression.
“She was right, he thought (highly). It is an art. In her hands, at least. She was part of the art - her motions a performance to be relished, then remembered. It was… beautiful. If he’d been a spirit, he would absolutely have been drawn to this.”
Pretty early in the book, Yumi and Nikaro swap places, sort of. They are living both of their lives together, swapping to the other one when they go to sleep. In Yumi’s world, Painter lives in her body and looks like her to everyone while she follows him like an invisible ghost. In Nikaro’s world, Yumi looks like herself, and Painter is relegated to shadowing her while his job is left undone. This device annoyed me at first, because it felt unbalanced, but I promise that once the magics of their worlds unfolds, it makes sense (again, of course it does, it’s Sanderson.)
“Abuse is a more effective form of captivity than a cell will ever be.”
Despite being one of only fourteen people who can summon spirits through rock stacking, Yumi is treated like a prisoner in her prestigious role. I was reminded of the feeling of viewing a young Dalai Lama ripped from his family to a life of meditation and ceremony because of the honor of his birth. Yumi is forced into a routine of ceremony by a team of handlers because the community relies on the spirits she calls forth to power just about everything in their world. Nikaro struggles to “be her” because he sucks at stacking rocks, but more so because he sucks at being needled into submission to do seemingly random rituals.
“In school,” he whispered to her, “the teachers always talked about the importance of our job. They’d preach about the meaning of art, about theory. They said painting was about passion and the whims of creativity…Then you get into the real world, and find that it’s hard to be creative like that every moment. You realize they didn’t teach you important things, like how to work when you don’t feel passion, or when the whims of creativity aren't striking you. What then?”
The challenge of taking art from a hobby to a professional level is learning to do it when you don’t feel particularly inspired to do so. Sanderson knows this more than most; he has spoken openly about his workday approach to uninterrupted daily writing, and it’s probably the driving force behind his prolific output. That said, my advice to anyone who wants to be a better artist is always, “Draw/write/make every day.” It’s the only way to be great at what you want to do. If you wait for inspiration to strike, you’re wasting daylight. Get out and make art, make lots of bad art, make mistakes, make yourself embarrassed and tired and even bored until you feel like you can’t make anything else, and then come back the next day and do it again.
“Regardless, here’s the thing: art doesn’t need to be good to be valuable.”
If Hoid is right, and art doesn’t need to be good to be valuable, then is clearly-not-good AI generated art at least valuable? This book plays with that question constantly in myriad different ways, pulling it from all angles like the invisible string that tethers Nikaro and Yumi to one another. Let’s pull back from the question within our world and talk about it in Yumi’s: what value does the rock stacking machine give? The machine is presented by people called the Scholars who tell the community that it can stack rocks and call forth spirits just like Yoki-Hijo (Yumi’s title), except the machines can do it at scale and round-the-clock. If there are only 14 Yoki-Hijo and they can only work a few hours a day (because of all the mandatory rituals and, like, eating and sleeping,) then a machine replacement could be good right? Even Yumi ponders to herself if it might be nice to not be so special and relied-upon so that she might be able to live a normal life. And, to be fair, if the world needs the spirits to power it, then machines that can generate the spirits faster would be good, right?
“Let this be a lesson. When you Awaken a device like this, be very, very careful what Commands you give it to follow.”
The flaws of any machine are within the programming. So many studies have proven that the biases in computerized systems are always the flaws of the humans who are being mimicked through large data sets, like a funhouse mirror that skews the image of what we really are. You can never get clean data from an algorithm or an AI generator because you can’t feed it clean data, the data and the programming are human and inherently flawed. But the raw data that you feed the machine is a copy of our human output, and can never have the one thing that makes us make our art.
“This was art. Something the machine, however capable in the technical details, could never understand. Because art is, and always has been, about what it does to us. To the one shaping it and the one experiencing it.”
So, we humans have to make art every day, even when we don’t feel like it. But the machines can never feel, and therefore never make art. Seems a little unfair to the robots, to be honest, seems disingenuous even. How can art, a subjective and frivolous craft, require so much repetition from us, and yet never be repeated by automation? I think many people, like the author of this book, clearly believe it has to do with the soul: both the soul of the art-maker and the souls touched by the art. I don’t believe in souls, per se, but I believe there is something different that pushes highly intelligent beings to want to create stuff that serves no purpose beyond eliciting emotional response.
But, and this is just my take; AI can’t generate without a prompt from a human. It was trained on the works of humans. Even if AI is running automatically, the automation was the brainchild of someone who wanted to see it made. There are some dead internet outliers, of course, (deaddit.xyz comes to mind, where AI talks to AI all day,) but even that idea was sketched and framed by a human creator.
AI doesn’t want to create, like Yumi, it didn’t ask to be born into this world where its purpose is to serve our whims. Maybe, in another life, Yumi would have been an artist of another kind, but she just stacks rocks because that’s what the Yoki-Hijo are programmed to do since birth. She was trained in special facilities specifically for that purpose by others whose sole job was teaching her how to do this one function which she repeats every day. If she was Artificial Intelligence, we would say she’s not making art because she’s just copying other Yoki-Hijo, because she didn’t feel inspired, because her art doesn’t elicit emotion in her or others. But if Yumi is human, then her years of experience stacking become an art which she is the most skilled practitioner of, and even our Earthling eyes can read between the lines and see that it’s beautiful.
But AI can get thousands of years of experience in a day, by taking it from artists. Doesn’t that count for anything?
“Painter didn’t have two thousand years of experience. But in some ways, what he did have was better. Because art requires intent. Art requires passion.”
Here, at the end of Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, we are treated to the real answer. Why doesn’t Artificially Generated Art count as Real Art? Because AI didn’t intend to generate anything, the prompter did. AI doesn’t have passion, the artists whose work it is trained upon did. No matter how many words, images, sounds, or other media that AI steals, it can never steal like an artist. Nikaro learns how to stack rocks from Yumi’s examples, but when she asks if he’s embarrassed to do so he concedes that he isn’t because that’s how art school works, you copy masters. But machines don’t train like we do because they can’t learn how we can.
As I write this in 2024, and probably in my lifetime, computers can not get close to a fraction of the processing power of the human brain. When we learn how to, say, read and write in a language, we learn fundamentals and then enforce that information with content of our choosing. Sanderson was affected by all the art he mentioned in the Postface of this book, and that influenced him. But AI acts more like a Xerox, copying without comprehending. A machine can not be influenced, only prompted.
“Plus, here’s the thing. A kiss doesn’t need to be good to be valuable. It doesn’t serve any real purpose. It’s valued solely because of the person you share it with.”
This book was good, great even. I docked a half a point in my score for technical crap that I hate to read, for example, the insistence on this world’s own language for everything from rice to the Fibonacci sequence, but then saying that something is fifteen “feet” wide (why would the cosmere use the American Imperial measurement system?) There are other minor gripes, but I’ve tried my best to keep this review un-spoiled, so I’ll leave it. But tbh this is probably the highest score I’ll ever give a book, it was a blast and I could hardly put it down.
If you’ve read other Sanderson books, I’ll tell you it’s not like Stormlight, but rather more like my favorite Cosmere book, Warbreaker. It’s a great story, very lovable characters (though it took me a very long time to start to like Painter,) and is jam packed with (my favorite Cosmere-ian) Hoid’s witticisms.
This book works as a standalone for outsiders to Sanderson’s work. If you’re new to this universe, or are a fan looking to gift a book to someone who hasn’t read these works before, I’d say this is a great way to dip into the Cosmere. I’d gift this book to any artists who are living through the age of generative AI, anyone who grew up in a cult, or anyone who has been meaning to read a book by Brandon Sanderson and just can’t bring themself to crack open a (checks notes on the length of The Way of Kings) 1,280 page fantasy tome.