Down with all kings but King Ludd*
I have come to bury human creativity not to praise it.
My thoughts today are not with those employed in creative industries, but that army of creative people toiling away at what they love to do in the solitude of their own homes. I might get to the former another day.
Gen AI has launched a grenade into artistic circles and the lamentations have begun; an outpouring of opprobrium on the inauthenticity of the outputs. It makes nothing new, the critics cry, it can only plagiarise what has gone before. The end of the world is nigh.
And then we all laugh because the machines don’t understand hands, or how many legs someone should have.
Everything we do is derived from something else
All true. But imitation also true of the majority of human artistic endeavour. Once in a generation we might get a genius, a Mozart or a Miami Sound Machine, that pushes art to a new level. If we get more than one it elevates the moment in history into a golden age. Everything else is derived, a pastiche, an homage when we admit we are doing it.
Most of what we produce is distinguished only by going to the effort of producing it. I count myself among the writers. The subtle difference between me and a non-writer is that I have extruded the wires of imagination and exploration into a basket of words on a page. I can’t claim to have advanced the human condition any more than infinitesimally, and certainly no more than any other writer had you chanced upon their work instead of mine.
Of course, I think I have the great [pick an identity] novel within me. I am spurred on by the belief that one day the stars will align and I will find that ecstatic link between brain and fingers, the perfect synchronicity of lungs and viscera that will deliver a draft of it onto the page.
Whether that moment arrives in my allotted span, who knows?
In the meantime, like every other artist out there, I weave together the sum total of my experiences, what I have read, what I have heard, my preferences, the what-ifs I am willing to ask myself and graft. Have I ever broken free of the seven basic plotlines? I doubt it. So too the painters following a style or school, the musicians starting out with the standards of their favourite bands before re-ordering the limited range of chords the human ear can hear. Ed Sheeran proved that in court. Don’t get me started on the internet poets and their tortured prose with added line breaks, there are no new thoughts there (they tell you in their bio they are a poet because how else would you know).
Let’s not call it copying, that sounds bad, instead let’s call it honouring what has gone before with imitation. You know the quote:
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness (Oscar Wilde)
Sound and fury, signifying nothing
What happens to all that output? Mostly nothing. Speaking for the writers, the acceptance rates of most publishers are one in a hundred. Much of that is free, or paid a small honorarium, in tiny journals that sustain themselves with a few thousand readers and then die. God bless those beautiful souls who launch them. The stories will lapse into obscurity and the best we can hope for is that they will be discovered by grandchildren in a dusty attic one day.
AI will improve. Like any dedicated art student, it will learn to do hands. All the time my fellows and I stare at a blank page, nursing that combination of expectation and despair, some scoundrel will have thrown half a dozen prompts into a tool and generated a pile of perfectly readable fare. As slush readers and editors drown under the weight of these unearned stories, these manufactured works, the competition for the precious few paying berths will intensify, and that most valuable resource for all of us – the audience -will be presented with an array of what appear to be substitutes.
So what?
If the audience are served, does it matter how?
Perhaps not. You pays your money and you takes your choice. This is the irrefutable logic of the market. Caveat emptor and all that.
Except most of the writers I know are not in it for the money. Apart from a tiny fraction at the top of the bestseller lists there just isn’t enough in it. We all have jobs or have retired from a lifetime of wage slavery. It’s this fact that unlocks the reason why this all matters.
Price or value?
AI may bring economic efficiency to the production of creative stuff. Hours sweating over what would be humdrum anyway replaced by a few keystrokes and all that human time available to drive an Uber instead. Progress.
But this is not a game of quantity and cost. However much I might aspire to be Ondaatje, somewhere in what I write is a sliver of me, my experience, my reaction to the world. We make art for the chance, however slim, to affect someone else with what has affected us. Whether that is a smile, a tear or just minutes of pleasurable distraction from everything else in their world while they visit ours.
Making art is a narcotic. There is a joyful exhaustion that comes with laying down a first draft. The knowledge that the bones of what will become a story are present, there is something to hone and craft. Closing the file on something ready to share with the world is a sense of fulfilment. Getting an acceptance after a dozen rejections is a pure high – another human being has seen something of value in what we have made. A review or just some positive feedback is a shot of adrenalin.
Very rarely does it pay the bills.
Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis
We are nothing if not connected
We make things and share them with others because it is how we connect with the rest of the species. It is bound up in our DNA. Around those early campfires of our ancestors were the storytellers, spinning the tales of our shared humanity, the things we value, the limits we accept. Accompanied by a hide drum. Recorded with lines drawn on a cave wall.
In time the reader may not be able to tell if the words they read, the painting they view, the music they listen to are made by hand or machine. Individually they may not care, but collectively they should. One is the product of genuine human experience, atomistic, populated with diverging perspectives, outliers and outsiders. The other is an agglomeration of shadows, a vast exercise of averaging in which the individual is lost. Without people at the heart of creation the world will be a greyer, desaturated place. Like the transition from analog to digital AI generated art will sacrifice depth and richness on the altar of efficiency. We will lose another part of what binds us.
Economists call this sort of intangible benefit, this thing that sits above the commerce of product and price, an externality. Markets are notoriously bad at dealing with them. It takes societies, and the governments that represent them to put a marker down and say: this matters too.
And what if, in an age of oversupply of things poured out of the GPTs, the next toddler Mozart does not run their sticky fingers over a piano keyboard, or sketches of the next Raphael, with all too few years among us, are buried under prompt generated fabrications?
AI will improve, I have no doubt. It may well outstrip the massed ranks of scribblers, daubers and buskers on some measures of quality. But it does not itself live, feel and express. In the end, its product is just that – a product. It is not real. Without the artist, without the toil, without the desire we risk being left flailing around in a world of ersatz emotions and synthetic understanding.
Untamed, AI will leave us diminished.
End
*Song for the Luddites, Lord Byron
I’ve not credited the Shakespeare quotes and borrowings, if you’re here you’ll recognise them.
As ever, all opinions are strictly my own and do not represent those of employers past or present.
Ali Abbas 