AI, Art, and Actuality

Derek Thompson responds to the momentary popularity of an AI generated song featuring "Drake" and "The Weeknd":

Some observers look things in a dystopian direction. It didn't take much to imagine a near future where fake songs and real songs intermingled, where, for every authentic Taylor Swift track, the internet was replete with hundreds, thousands, even millions of plausible Taylor Swift knockoffs. Inundated by AI, pop culture would descend into a disinformation hellscape.

And comes to the conclusion I did with one of my recent posts. He continues:

[L]ately I've become a little bored by the utopia-dystopia dichotomy of the AI debate. What if writing a song and dubbing in celebrity voices doesn't clearly point us toward a disinformation hellscape or a heaven of music-writing creativity? What if the ability to send media that make you sound like a celebrity to your friends is, fundamentally, just kind of neat?

AI-generated art is going to distract people for awhile. The novelty of it will leave less time for audiences to appreciate living artist's work. More great art allowed to fall out of sight. We'll encounter dozens of things like AI versions of Beach Boys songs sung by Paul McCartney, for example. Neat. But forgettable. These things will eventually descend to their natural place at the bottom of cultural importance. Never entirely gone, but also never more than brief curiosities.

This isn't an argument against AI's effect on other forms of labor. In those fields, there will be massive waves of new efficiencies. Art, however, is human first. Any technology, new or old, is only a tool to connect human minds to other human minds. AI, as it relates to art, is only another one of those tools.

And you can't go to an AI-generated concert performance. When Albarn first launched Gorillaz, he tried to perform while hiding behind a screen on which the cartoon band was projected. Fun, for a moment. He quickly dropped the whole cute conceit and played on stage like any other group. In the end, being human is what counts.