This was the year (ask your stockbroker or the disgraced management at Sports Illustrated) that artificial intelligence went from dream projection to environmental threat to perpetual sales pitch. Do you think this is the future or has ai already taken on the stagnation and scam of technology/2023/sep/22/nfts-worthless-price” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>the non-fungible token that now has no value?
After all, artists have long been implementing ai technologies: Ed Atkins, Martine Syms, Ian Cheng and Agnieszka Kurant have been using neural networks and large language models for years, and orchestras were playing ai-produced Bach variations in the 1990s. I suppose there was something nifty about the first time I tried ChatGPT, a slightly more sophisticated grandson of Eliza, the 1960s chatbot therapist, although I've barely used it since; ChatGPT's hallucinatory falsehoods make it useless to journalists, and even his tone seems like an insult to my humanity. (I asked him: “Who was the better painter, Manet or Degas?” Response: “It is not appropriate to compare artists in terms of 'better' or 'worse', since art is a highly subjective field.”)
Still, the explosive growth of text-to-image generators like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Dall-E (the latter named after the cheesiest artist of the 20th century; that should have been a clue) sparked anxiety that ai was coming for culture: that certain capabilities that were previously understood as exclusively human were now facing computational rivals. Is this really the case?
Without specific prompts, these ai images default to some common aesthetic characteristics: highly symmetrical composition, extreme depth of field, and bright, radiant edges that appear on a backlit smartphone screen. The figures have the waxed skin of the fruit and the deeply sunken eyes of video game characters; They also usually have more than 10 fingers, although we hope for a software update. There is little I would call human here, and any of these ai images, on their own, are an aesthetic irrelevance. But collectively they do point out a danger that we already face: the devaluation and trivialization of culture until it becomes just another type of data.
ai cannot innovate. All it can produce are approximations and rapid reconstitutions of pre-existing materials. If you believe that culture is an imaginative human endeavor, then you should have nothing to fear except that…what do you know? – many humans have not imagined anything more substantial. When a TikTok user posted an ai-generated song in the style (and with vocals) of Drake and the Weeknd in April, critics and copyright lawyers howled that nothing less than the self-definition of our species was under threat, and A simpler type of listener was left wondering: Was this a “real” song? (A soulless engine that strings together a bunch of random formulas can pass as Duck —hard to believe, I know….)
An appropriate question is: Why is the music of these two uppity Canadians so algorithmic to begin with? And another: What can we learn about human art, human music, human writing, now that good enough approximations of ai have revealed its nakedness and thinness?
As early as 1738, as musicologist Deirdre Loughridge writes in her interesting new book “Human sonar: music and machines, 1740/2020”, Parisian crowds marveled at a musical automaton equipped with bellows and flutes, capable of playing the flute. They loved the robot and happily accepted that the sounds it produced were “real” music. An android flutist was not, by itself, a threat to human creativity, but it prompted philosophers to understand that humans and machines were perpetually intertwined, and artists to up their game. Doing the same in the 21st century will require us to take seriously not only the capabilities we share with machines, but also what differentiates us, or should we.
I remain deeply relaxed about machines posing as humans; They are terrible at it. Humans act like machines. This is a much more probable danger and one that culture, as the supposed guardian of virtues and (human?) values, has not been able to combat in recent years.
Every year, our arts and entertainment become even more resigned to recommendation engines and ranking structures. Each year, our museums, theaters, and studios have further internalized the tech industry's reduction of human consciousness to simple sequences of numbers. A score out of 100 for joy or fear. Love or pain, surprise or anger: it's all metadata. To the extent that ai threatens culture, it's not in the form of some cheesy HAL and Robocop fantasy with runaway software and killer lasers. The threat is that we will be reduced to the scale of the limited capabilities of our machines; the threat is the polishing of human thought and life to fit increasingly standardized data sets.
It surely seems like ai will speed up or even automate the composition of elevator music, the production of festive and colorful portraits, the writing of coming-of-age multiverse quest scripts. If so, well, like Cher Horowitz's father. says in “Clueless”, I doubt anyone will miss you. These were already products of “artificial” intelligences in every way that matters, and if what you write or paint has no more depth or humanity than the creations of a server farm, then you surely deserve your obsolescence.
Instead of worrying about whether robots can do what humans do, we would do much better if raise our cultural expectations of human beings: expect and demand that art, even and especially art made with the help of new technologies, bears witness to the full extent of human powers and aspirations. Ukrainian composer Heinali, whose album “Kyiv Eternal” I have held close to me throughout 2023, reconstructed the wartime capital through beautiful reconciliations of medieval plainchant and contemporary synths. Nairy Baghramian's sculptures, which I sought out this year in Mexico City, in Aspen, in the MoMA garden, and on the façade of the Met, display the most contemporary methods of manufacturing the most fragile and tender forms. These artists are not afraid of technology. They are also not replaceable by technology. Technologies are tools for human flourishing.
I spent much of this year thinking about stylistic exhaustion and the pervasive feeling that, in digital times, culture is going nowhere fast. The worries that accompanied artificial intelligence in 2023 reaffirmed this fear: that we have lost something vital between our screens and our databases, that content has conquered form and novelty has come to an end. If our culture has become static, could we then call our sneaky chatbots and insta-kitsch image engines what they are: mirrors of our diminished expectations?
Viewed that way, I might even allow myself to wonder if ai might be the best thing to happen to culture in years—that is, if these machines of perpetual mediocrity, these supercharged engines of clichés, end up pressuring us to revalue the things we It's just humans. can do. Leaving behind “a narrow fixation on how machines can function humanly,” as Loughbridge writes, now is the time to discover “what it means to work with them and exist in relation to them.”
For something to count, you'll have to do more than rearrange preceding images and words, like any old robot. You're going to have to put your back, your back and maybe also your soul.
