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"Who taught you
to love efficiency, and call it creativity."
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Of all the questions that stop me writing, perhaps the most insidious is: ‘What’s the point?’ What’s the point, if you’re never going to be published, no-one is going to read your stuff and you’re not even making any money?
It’s a voice that I regularly have to tie up, gag and stuff into the bottom of the wardrobe, but the little git always manages to get out, and lately I’ve noticed it’s getting louder.
I think that’s because of AI.
Because, let’s face it, If an AI engine can spit out a perfectly played and orchestrated song, or a decent poem, in seconds, then what need is there for a human to do it? What need is there for me to do it?
Those are some scary ass questions for an artist. But, I think the real teeth of them depends on a lie. A lie that, in a consumerist culture like ours, is so ubiquitous we hardly even notice it’s there:
You are only as valuable as what you produce.
It’s worth taking a moment just to say that this is absolute, unqualified horse shit!
Put it this way. What if there was an AI that was absolutely brilliant at watching Netflix?
Would you be worried?
But really though. What if it laughed at all the right places, and cried when it should and could chat enthusiastically about all the series to anyone who showed an interest? Would you stop watching because there was someone else out there who could do it better?
Me neither.
Because the point of watching Netflix is not how well you do it, or how many series you can get through in a night. The point is to enjoy yourself. Actually it’s more than that. A really story takes you on a journey. You might feel a lot of things: excitement, fear, righteous indignation; but the point is you feel like you're connecting with characters, learning about them, feeling for them.
It’s about relationship.
If the only point of art is to produce lots of stuff then yes, AI is indeed an existential threat. But production was never the main purpose of art? We’re not doing this thing to turn out three widgets a week. We’re doing it because it tells us something deeply true about ourselves, because there are some things that have to be felt, not just said. Because there is a chance, no matter how small, that someone out there in the universe might pick up what you made, and say, “Oh wow, me too!”.
That’s why we create.
The real danger with AI is not not that algorithms might become human, but that humans accept the algorithmic within themselves: optimization over wonder, speed over depth, polish over risk.
So long as we remember that fundamentally art is about love, not products, then it will never truly die. Somewhere, in some corner, some courageous soul will still be sitting under a tree staring at the sky and trying to find just the right word, or just the right note. Not because no other person, or thing, could do it better, but because it’s the best way they know to tell the truth.
And because, when they find that right word, in some magical way it helps them love.
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