After watching Adam Neely’s newest video on AI music, the first part of it made me relive all my struggles with trying to create things.

I often was isolated as a child. I had autism, and even though I was not diagnosed at the time, I received a lot of bullying, usually in the form of various conspiracy theories resembling the plots of some less than stellar representations of disability in media. My classmates thought I secretly had intellectual disability due to the plot of Forrest Gump, I just wasn’t told and the teachers either got paid favors by my parents, or just pitied me instead of letting my hand go. This got into almost criminal levels of bullying once a skinhead in secondary school got involved. Needless to say I skipped out on a lot of socialization, and in my country (Hungary) mental health spenditure is even more abysmal than the rest of what our government does, due to “you can go to a priest to confess your sins, same deal” (I’d need some resocialization therapy, with barely any prior socialization).

This lead to my creating careers into strange places. I tried to get my hand onto the tools of game development as a child, best I could get is the Unity of that time, DarkBASIC, which I had to buy with my own money due to adults pirating stuff for me wanted to give me TurboPascal or VisualBASIC instead. Ultimately gave up due to no access to learning material.

As a teen, after seriously listening to some metal records (which my late stepmother didn’t like, because “it’s music made by drug addicts”), I picked up the guitar. Managed to get a guitar teacher, who radicalized me into a weird earlier version of the alt-right, but also I really wanted to form a band, to play my own music. Instead I lived in a place, where mostly some weird punk/hardcore bands were the norm, or at least until the live scene collapsed. After a few failed attempts, and leaving the far-right for a more moderate right, I decided to concentrate on polishing my skills.

Now it’s 2010, and I got my hands on a used audio interface I could barely afford. I also went to college, in a place where I could suddenly get a band started. Or join one. New problem: you saw that I got an audio interface? Now I was supposed to sit back, and make my own music, on my own terms, just get EzDrummer and a cheap bass, but it will be your own music! I even pondered whether I should learn singing, but the harder part was lyrics, as I quite hated memorizing poems in school already, let alone write my own. After a while, my taste in music diversified away from metal, and had to move in with my father, where I couldn’t practice as much. My stepfather already wanted to kick me out at age 16 (!), because surely I could just found some well-paying part-time job and a cheap rent, so it was the only option for me after rent hikes in Budapest priced me out from living there.

Later on I bought a cheapo pen tablet for computer graphics class, which I didn’t end up using there for a while, but begin my interest in the arts. Despite me possibly having some dyspraxia, I noticed that it was more like a “difference of ability” for me at least rather than a disabillity. I often had to do things differently, then it suddenly clicked with me. And why did I also start it? I had some webcomic ideas, which I didn’t commit to in the end, but since no one wanted to draw it for me, I figured out I can go the “do it yourself my lord if you don’t have servants” way. I more often try to draw than play the guitar, at least I got to be a good enough character artist.

I’m having similar experiences with game development. From day 1 I tried to develop games, I got disencouraged from making my own game engine, in favor of polishing my own artistic skills, so I could be the next ZUN, Toby Fox, Chris Sawyer, or whatever solo dev was claimed to the “next game auteur” at that day. I stuck with making an engine because I enjoy the technical aspects of game development the most, tried to offer my helping hand to others, but got declined due to fears of loss of creative control.

Hyper-individualism killed the real art star. AI, at least its popularity in some circles, is just a symptom just like cancer is a symptom of exposure to radiation.