Sharing art with artificial intelligence

Every time I sit down to write music these days, I’m visited by an unwelcome thought.

Somewhere, right now, my art—music and writing—is being ground into semantic sausage to feed businesses that see replicating artwork as among the simplest possible tasks for artificial intelligence.

Should I be terrified? Or angry? Same thing, I suppose. Anger is just fear set on fire. I know many of my fellow artists are navigating these turbulent waters. But I find myself wrestling with a different emotion, too: curiosity. Because if I look past my own discomfort, the implications here are profound.

What lesson should we take from this moment? What does the future of art hold in a world where artificial creativity becomes less and less artificial?

Art is the language of being

While individual pieces of art may fade in and out of relevance, art as a concept is resistant to decay. It reinvents itself endlessly. And when its time has passed, art hardens into history. Into culture.

The loose bundle of technologies we’re calling “artificial intelligence” can’t sustain our culture, let alone advance it. That falls to us, as it always has. So while I don’t think art is going anywhere, I can’t help wondering whether it faces a reckoning here…or maybe we do?

In the long run, it may not matter that artificial others can replicate our art. A camouflaged chameleon doesn’t replace the need for the branch it’s standing on, no matter how convincing its disguise. Moreover, the lizard’s not taking on that form because it wants to be a branch.

It’s similar for today’s AI. The way current artificial “intelligence” works is rooted in various kinds of predictive modelling, trained on us. It’s doing our bidding, designed in our image. This mechanism may lead to convincing mimicry, but it seems unlikely to arrive at something like sentience, much less the desire for expression—and isn’t that art’s key ingredient?

It can be replicated, but never replaced because art is the language of being. It’s how we demonstrate that we don’t just exist—we experience. That collision is what sparks the imagination.

But we have to tell those stories, and listen to them, for it to mean anything…right? I find myself contemplating contentious questions like: if a story moves us, or carries us forward, does it matter if AI made it? We made AI. It’s part of our culture whether we accept it or not.

The question isn't whether AI can make convincing art—clearly, it can. The question is whether that matters as much as we think it does. For now, it feels important to police the borders between human and AI output, but will it always?

We may think of artificial intelligence as separate from us, but it’s still—fundamentally—from us.

And you can certainly tell.

Dangerous distractions

Federico Viticci recently wrote:

I think empowering LLMs to be “creative” with the goal of displacing artists is a mistake, and also a distraction – a glossy facade largely amounting to a party trick that gets boring fast and misses the bigger picture of how these AI tools may practically help us in the workplace, healthcare, biology, and other industries.

As an optimist, my instinct is to focus on that positive potential for tomorrow. But I’m also an artist and a human being, so I can’t ignore the very real ways this technology is being used to exploit and manipulate today.

I agree that this entire conversation around AI and art is little more than a distraction to those steering the technology’s evolution. Its impact on artists? Collateral damage.

That kind of power is unsettling, and it’s gathering strength as we speak. I’m not anthropomorphizing AI there, I’m pointing at the companies. They don’t have to achieve AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) to become dangerous.

Are we prepared to recognize when they do?

Today’s AI doesn’t independently intend to create art like ours; it’s trained and compelled to do so by human beings. It’s versatile, but not sentient. It doesn’t think any more than a sponge drinks. It’s unaware of the proceedings. It has no intent.

In other words, what’s devaluing people’s art is people.

But it’s awfully convenient for them when we blame artificial intelligence, as though this was the only possible way the technology could manifest in the world and they just happened to be there, supervising, when it emerged. That this particular path offers gargantuan financial opportunity for them is a happy coincidence, I’m sure.

I get the frustration, but let’s not lose sight of what could be because we’re disappointed by what is. Progress requires participation. Those who want a part to play in the outcome need to find a way to get involved. And they need to accept that making inroads against powerful forces is hard, especially when we’re wired to succumb to their manipulation.

Ted Chiang made this point while discussing the complicated intersection of A.I. and capitalism:

The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires.

While we’re here discussing the hard work of building our vision of a better world, others are out there building theirs—at our expense.

A glance at the news these days is enough to send most people scurrying to their version of a digital fallout shelter. Connected to the world but separated from everyone else in it. The lure of comfort and convenience, even when it proves false, short-circuits our brains. We lose sight of the bigger picture.

L.M. Sacasas reminds us to be careful what we wish for:

There is a vision of the good life, a vision of what it means to be human implicated in all of our tools, devices, apps, programs, systems, etc. There is a way of being in the world that they encourage. There is a perspective on the world that they subtly encourage their users to adopt. There is a form of life that they are designed to empower and support. Is this way of life alive enough to be shared?

Shaping what AI becomes

Sometimes we can’t change direction, but we can change lanes. If AI can learn to be smarter, it can learn to be less harmful, too.

It has ingenious teachers, so let’s make sure at least some of them are motivated by more than greed. We can influence the path of artificial intelligence with our time, dollars, and votes. Collectively, we can make choices about its development instead of letting choices be made for us. And whatever time AI frees up is time we should reinvest into making progress as a society—free time is valuable only if we have something meaningful to fill it with.

Fighting the pull of complacency is an active process, and one of the reasons I resist the other siren song—that of blissfully disconnecting from all this tech. Matt Klein makes a strong case for staying engaged:

The opportunity (and challenge) is to embrace tech’s negative externalities as opportunities for change. Unplugging leaves the mess behind and denies responsibility.

How we use AI shapes what it becomes.

For instance, skeptics tend to gloss over the fact that this “fancy autocorrect” approach isn’t the only way to pursue something akin to AGI. It may not even be a stepping stone.

AI is the definition of a disruptive technology; it even disrupts itself, accelerating its own development. The way artificial intelligence manifests today says very little about what it could become tomorrow.

We have to be more imaginative, more innovative, and more ambitious than the oligarchs pulling the strings. Which isn’t as impossible as it sounds—we’re not as cynical as they are.

As the saying goes, “I’m not afraid of a computer that passes the Turing test, I’m afraid of one that intentionally fails it.” Once we start failing the blind tests, what then?

If some form of artificial intelligence ever gained sentience…would we even be able to recognize it?

What happens next

Before we can answer that, we need a robust definition of sentience, or consciousness. We’ll need to agree on what it is before we can look for it in others. Otherwise, we risk losing ourselves as we try to bring this other thing into being.

The weirdest part is that if art requires consciousness, and something else was genuinely capable of creating it, it wouldn’t be stealing our art, it would be making its own. A truly sentient “artificial” lifeform could pursue its own creativity, likely beyond our understanding.

And I like to think that it would.

We may find ourselves forced to admit that art, like so much else in the universe, is not a uniquely human endeavour. If that’s true, maybe art isn’t the thing that sets us apart from AI, but the thing that brings us together.

In this imagined future, I wonder if that spirit of artistry, that compulsion to understand and express ourselves while
we’re here...I wonder if that would tie us together with our prototypical progeny, even if nothing else does?

Some day, we may need to learn to share art with artificial intelligence.

Not art itself, but its source. The untameable desire to leave a mark on history, to mean something. The quaint habit of having a culture. But thinking that AI’s equivalent of culture would mirror ours is self-centred. If artificial intelligence ever crosses that threshold, it may remain influenced by our patterns, but it certainly wouldn’t be beholden to them.

What an enormous thought that is. That someday we may actually create new life. Not fulfill a biological recipe for replicating, but invent an entirely new way for life to exist in the universe.

Hopefully we can also agree on a definition of “life” by then.

Back down to earth

Heady stuff, but the truth is we’re not there yet. We’re nowhere close.

For one thing, today’s artists still need to eat and pay bills. To do that, they need to matter. That’s on us, as a society. Again, art is being devalued by people. AI is just what they’re currently using to do it. Don’t let them.

If AI is a hammer, the challenge is to put it into the hands of more carpenters than criminals.

We need to make sure the development of AI systems prioritizes public benefit over private profit, and that access to these tools is democratized rather than concentrated in the hands of a few powerful entities.

Of course, it doesn’t help that there’s so much else going on these days. Ideally, we’d undertake a project like this after finding a solution to some of the more pressing problems we face. But here we are. We haven’t even figured out how to share bread with one another…and now we may need to learn how to share art with an alien? Good grief.

If, by some cruel happenstance, the AI hype beasts turn out to be right and we achieve AGI soon, I sure hope the Artificials are generally intelligent enough not to rely on first impressions as much as we do. If only society made progress as quickly as technology tends to.

Look, I know this feels lofty, but things are happening fast. “Artificial intelligence” is an optimistic euphemism right now, but that may not always be the case. Today’s fanciful notion will be tomorrow’s headline.

Or, more likely, the real future will take us by surprise. I have to remind myself that when time defeats ideas, it’s often by making them irrelevant.

Here’s Benedict Evans talking about this concept:

Part of the concept of ‘Disruption’ is that important new technologies tend to be bad at the things that matter to the previous generation of technology, but they do something else important instead. Asking if an LLM can do very specific and precise information retrieval might be like asking if an Apple II can match the uptime of a mainframe, or asking if you can build Photoshop inside Netscape. No, they can’t really do that, but that’s not the point and doesn’t mean they’re useless. They do something else, and that ‘something else’ matters more and pulls in all of the investment, innovation and company creation. Maybe, 20 years later, they can do the old thing too - maybe you can run a bank on PCs and build graphics software in a browser, eventually - but that’s not what matters at the beginning. They unlock something else.

Sitting here in the present, we have no way to know if all this is a tantalizing future or science fiction. Likely a bit of both.

But if it happened, it would be a responsibility so vast that it feels important to consider the possibility. And scrutinize the implications.

Even if we never achieve AGI, we’re still dealing with potent, society-shaking technology—if we don’t handle it with care, who will? We can either back down from the challenge because we don’t believe the course of history can be changed…or fight harder because we can’t not try.

…Then again, maybe this is just fanciful thinking from someone who’s read one too many space operas.

But you can’t blame a writer for seeking a story. It’s human nature, after all.