Published on May 15, 2025 6:18 PM GMT
It's tempting to call the current AI disruption a 'semantic apocalypse,' a fundamental crisis of meaning, the end of art and the world. But what's really happening is more familiar: society collectively losing its mind and scrambling to redefine 'value' or 'skill' after some new tech drops and changes the meta. This story is as old as the printing press, if not older.
The actual thing that's different this time around is the rapid accessibility of the technological disruption. Historically, ground-breaking inventions came via slow drip: super expensive prototypes only accessible to a handful of dedicated specialists and wealthy patrons, then a gradual, often decades-long, democratization. This gave culture time to adapt, and for genuine craft to emerge alongside the new toy.
But imagine if we’d somehow only invented the camera after smartphones were already in everyone’s pocket. One random Tuesday morning, every single person on Earth suddenly has a camera app. What’s the immediate, overwhelming result? An instant, planet-wide tsunami of the most banal photos imaginable, beach sunsets and cute girls and juicy burgers.
Of course everyone would be tripping over themselves to denounce it as a worthless, trivial gimmick, utterly incapable of producing anything of True Artistic Merit™ or any kind of value.
Perhaps they might change their minds when they see the first photo that came from an active war zone, or deep space, or the other end of a microscope. Or maybe it doesn't sink in until someone gets the idea to take a lot of pictures in very quick succession, dozens of times per second, and then play back the pictures on a screen at very high speed accompanied by sound. And I'm sure some will stubbornly cling on to their first, dismissive reaction, until the very bitter end.
In 1906, John Phillip Sousa published "The Menace of Mechanical Music". Rob Horning notices the similiaries to the current discourse:
Sousa regarded them as “automatic music devices” that replaced musicians’ labor, serving as a “substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul.” Unlike live performance, pre-recorded music lacks true expression; it reduces “music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things.” The phonograph orients future innovation on improvements to its own apparatus, at the expense of the “human possibilities in the art.”
Likewise, anxious critics of generative AI imagine that it will replace artists and degrade the public’s capacity to even notice what has been lost. It has the potential to reduce not merely music (as with generative models like OpenAI’s Jukebox) but all forms of human cultural production to a “mathematical system” of statistical correlations and weighted parameters. And how will the children ever learn to write if they don’t have to craft their own five-paragraph essays for their teachers? As Sousa argued,
When music can be heard in the homes without the labor of study and close application, and without the slow process of acquiring a technic, it will be simply a question of time when the amateur disappears entirely, and with him a host of vocal and instrumental teachers, who will be without field or calling.
From there, it is doom to the “national throat,” as children, “if they sing it all,” will be no more than “human phonographs — without soul or expression.”
Did live performance die, did singers become less soulful? Nope. Conversely, did new forms of vocal and musical artistry emerge because of recording? Heck yeah! Actually, when I was in elementary school, two kids just a few years older than I was met on an internet hobbyist forum for producing electronic music, which they were able to produce despite having little or no formal music training. They were able to do this in part due to significant improvements in electronic music production tools, which made it significantly more accessible for a generation of wannabe-DJs. And they went on to make the glittering, soaring, melodic EDM that shaped my adolescence, and the adolescence of my entire generation.
Currently, we're at the 'recorded music will destroy the ability of children to sing' phase of the discourse. We're obsessed with what AI can't do as well as humans yet in established domains, or how its output devalues human effort in those same domains from being a thousand times cheaper but not a thousand times worse, or how it will result in certain valuable skills going extinct. And sure, some of that is a conversation worth having.
But personally, I'd like to move on, or at least start a new conversation at a little side table. I absolutely cannot wait for the Annie Leibowitzes, the pale blue dots, the moving pictures of AI.
(Another thing happens too, by the way, after a short delay: the old art forms, relieved of the burden of being the only way to achieve a certain effect, go off in wonderfully strange new directions. Painters dived into impressionism and abstraction, and I get to appreciate Van Gogh's Starry Night and become absolutely entranced with International Klein Blue.)
Virginia Woolf, writing at the dawn of cinema, observes that directors seem to be focused mostly on adapting famous literary novels with rather poor results:
"Anna [Karenina] falls in love with Vronsky” – that is to say, the lady in black velvet falls into the arms of a gentleman in uniform and they kiss with enormous succulence, great deliberation, and infinite gesticulation, on a sofa in an extremely well-appointed library, while a gardener incidentally mows the lawn. So we lurch and lumber through the most famous novels of the world. So we spell them out in words of one syllable, written, too, in the scrawl of an illiterate schoolboy. A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is a hearse. None of these things has the least connexion with the novel that Tolstoy wrote, and it is only when we give up trying to connect the pictures with the book that we guess from some accidental scene – like the gardener mowing the lawn – what the cinema might do if left to its own devices. But what, then, are its devices? If it ceased to be a parasite, how would it walk erect?"
Well, we left cinema to its own devices for a few decades, and I think we can all agree that, as an independent art form, it can in fact walk erect.
And now there's a new question for us: what are the devices of AI art? I can't say for sure, but I suspect that Gary Huswit's 2024 documentary that changes every time it's screened, Eno, is a first step in this strange new direction.
From Ben Davis' review (worth a read in full), which he wrote after watching the film three times:
"The tone is consistent, and consistently affecting. Hustwit drew from 30 hours of interviews with Eno and 500 hours of archival footage. I imagine that it is very, very difficult to assemble all the parts and to weight all the probabilities to generate this consistent personality—it is likely more labor, not less."
(It's a great documentary, by the way. Go watch it if you can catch a showing. But, uh, cross your fingers and hope for a cut that features more David Bowie than U2. Davis again: "Admittedly, to say that you are looking at an artwork for its “personality” is also to say that you might catch it on better or worse days.")
Scott says that if you insist that anything you can come by too cheaply must be boring, then all the wonders of the Singularity cannot save you, and suggests that perhaps you should treat it like a skill issue and fix that.
Sure, you can try to re-wire your brain to enjoy one-shot slop. But is that really what you want to do?
Here's my alternate suggestion: wield this abundance. Play and experiment and try to figure out how to lever this new toy to make something in a thousand hours that would have taken you thirty thousand without it. Progressively tweak the custom instructions and your collection of style refs, experiment with different models for different tasks. Actually try to actually get it to write good poetry. And as you become more talented at this craft, you might make something new and spectacular and beautiful.
Discuss
