II stand on an eroding cliff edge. As it moves towards me, various objects wobble cartoonishly before disappearing into oblivion. One by one, sculptures, paintings, books, buildings and other artifacts of human creativity are being swallowed up. The erosion accelerates, vertiginously, begins to give way under my feet. Stormy. Crashing waves. HD. Photo-realistic.
“Is this the end of the country?” my partner asked absently as she looked at my screen. The prompt I entered into the generator was supposed to be an expression of AI vertigo, but I clearly need to brush up on my prompting skills because the image generated is not the apocalypse I had in mind. It looks more like an advertisement for a holiday destination with Caspar David Friedrich’s Tramp.
I’ve avoided tools like this – they feel like a threat to my existence. Whether it’s image-making, sense-making, music-making or film-making, every day we wake up to some new AI-generated artifact. Give me a Stevie Wonder version of Big Yellow Taxi in 5.1 surround sound! Give me a sci-fi romcom with Timothée Chalamet, Marilyn Monroe and Ye, shot on 16mm! Scratch that – starring Marilyn Monroe and me!
I don’t know if these AI features exist, but would it surprise you if they did? They may look strange in five years. A symptom of my vertigo is a preoccupation with speculation. You spend so much time thinking about the future that the present feels primitive. It reminds me of the shot 2001: A Space Odyssey where the spinning bone thrown by the hominid cuts 100,000 years to the spaceship. Now replace the leg for ChatGPT.
In 1964 Arthur C Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, predicted AI as the next evolutionary step: “[Machines] will begin to think and eventually they will completely invent their makers… I suspect that organic or biological evolution has almost come to an end and we are now at the beginning of inorganic or mechanical evolution, which will be thousands of times faster.”
The artist at the mercy of technological progress is a theme perfectly summed up in the Buggles song Video Killed the Radio Star… “They took credit for your second symphony, rewritten by machine and new technology.“ What makes this technological leap so different from others (fountain pen to typewriter to word processor) is that these were tools for artists – but AI is different. It could be the tool and the artist.
So where does this impending redundancy leave the human urge to create? Does this mean I have to put forth my best efforts before AI dominates the field? As a musician and writer, I always thought I would manage to write a book, a screenplay, another album. But what’s the rush, I thought? It’s a bucket list. Now I feel rushed, the goals archaic, even. AI killed my bucket list!
I am gloomy. I have many questions and few answers. I wasn’t surprised that my grandmother didn’t like electronic musician Aphex Twin in the 00s, but I didn’t expect that in my soft 30s I would fail to keep up. I need to talk to artists who are in step with the technological vanguard to help me banish my malaise.
Artist musicians Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst are AI veterans. They have been grappling with it for over a decade and educating people about it. The Berlin-based collaborative partners birthed an AI baby to help them create Herndon’s 2019 album Proto. I emailed them a cry for help.
I asked if AI was going to kill the human artist. “No. Human artists will make works using AI and works that AI will reject… Art is always evolving. We have to digest that many things that would have seemed virtuosic by 20th century standards will be able to be generated by an AI model in microseconds. But a media file that sounds like a chorus is not a chorus. Culture will continue and evolve in unexpected ways.” Human artists will be fine, as long as we don’t delude ourselves that the culture and media landscape isn’t going to change significantly.
Is human performance replaceable? Or is AI in fact inspiring more human ways of performance? “We like to set the example of DJing as a reason for hope here. In most cases, DJing is very, very easy to automate. But there are all kinds of reasons why people go to see DJs perform – to meet other people, to celebrate someone, to take a break to look at a screen.”
At the same time, Herndon and Dryhurst warn that the creative industry can turn into a popularity contest. “We’ve already seen glimpses of the fading of artists and influencers. Soon the most attractive kid in the class will have all the tools to choose to be the most popular metal artist, or crime thriller writer, with very little insolence.” Plot twist: the influencers will steal my bucket list.
And what about my malaise? “As veterans of AI vertigo, it gets better. You just have to ride out the uncomfortable part of the journey. Perhaps the best analogy is the nausea one initially feels when eating a magic mushroom. The mind-expanding part will follow if you make peace with it.” It does resonate. The AI revolution felt strange and hallucinatory at times. Fighting a mushroom trip is never a good idea. Is it time to extend an olive branch?
I also contacted artist Rachel Maclean for AI Council. Her latest work, DUCK, explores themes of paranoia, authenticity and reality, through the figures of 1960s icons Marilyn Monroe, Sean Connery’s James Bond and JFK. Maclean acted all parts and used deepfake technology to transpose their faces onto hers.
She would like to point out that “apart from the deepfakes, DUCK is in many ways a conventional film, one that I wrote, wrote and directed.” Text-to-image models, on the other hand, she says, are “absolutely incredible in that the AI has a sense of creativity. You work with it like a collaborator.” She’s currently making a series of AI-generated paintings about motherhood, using a model trained on Old Masters’ paintings, she grins mischievously come out with eight fingers.” But in a few months, I warn, they’ll produce five fingers, right? to make a mistake.”
There are unexpected truths to be found in the imperfect images of mothers and babies she generates with AI. The limbs are fused together and you cannot distinguish between the bodies. “This is what it feels like to be a mother, more than a conventional portrayal of motherhood.” I admit, it sounds exciting – collaborating with an entity that thinks differently than humans, innovating the art form as well as the way we see our species. But it also exacerbates my fear that human craft, certainly in digital media, will disappear. Are we becoming redundant? “The exciting thing about this technology,” says Maclean, “is that people are still figuring out what it’s for. Its use value is made clear by people who shape it.”
A few weeks ago my partner, a freelance writer, was offered two – two! – posts from companies offering to pay writers to teach AI how to write better. The copper neck! Why don’t they give you a rope to hang yourself with, I said? But it’s a job, she said, and it can be interesting. Does my belligerence help anyone?
Interviews with those at the techno-cultural vanguard, including Herndon, Dryhurst and Maclean, gave me a sense of peace. I realize that I was clinging to 20th century ideas of art practice and the cultural landscape, one where people spent months and years writing, painting, recording and filming works that defined the culture of our species. They provided meaning, distraction, well-being. A reason to exist. Making peace can mean letting go of these historical ideas, finding new meaning. For example, as digitally generable media increasingly becomes the domain of AI, might performance and tangible art forms, such as live concerts, theater and sculpture, be revived?
“There comes a shout across the sky,” writes Thomas Pynchon at the beginning of Gravity’s Rainbow while Captain “Pirate” Prentice watches an incoming V2 vapor trail on the horizon. After considering how it would feel if the bomb landed directly on his head, instead of fleeing or making calls, he gathers some tropical fruits from his greenhouse. What’s the point of panicking? It is already on its way. People like AI researcher and decision theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky compare the threat of AI to nuclear war. This is the new apocalypse. I can see a vapor trail on the horizon. But what can I do? Run for cover, take up arms? People have survived apocalypses before. I think I’ll pick bananas.
Follow Rudi Zygadlo @rudizyga. His latest single, F*** AI, is on Spotify and the music video on YouTube
