Oh Brother, Where AI Art Thou?
Exploring the quickly expanding artistic abilities of AI and their implications
I’m not gonna lie, recently I’ve been feeling like my feet have been cut out from under me. After logging onto twitter the other day I saw the new examples of OpenAI’s “Sora” text-to-video model and amazing is an understatement.. I thought it would be a while until we had this kind of video generation but here we are.
If you haven’t seen this, buckle up and go here.
To provide a bit of context, I’m in the middle of a music video project that has been months in the making and is really important to me so to add insult to injury, as I was browsing the threads of mind-blowing AI videos, I came across a tweet that said something along the lines of “People like art/artists because they do/make something that doesn’t exist and that is novel. Not everyone can do that. But now anyone can make anything and that degrades the value” I don’t know if I fully agree with this but it generally takes skill, vision and passion to make good art. Whether you like it or not, we are probably about a year away from AI being able to make or digitally replicate anything a human can make whether it’s music, video, art etc…
The online discussion about this is pretty contentious. People disagree about the ethics as well as how AI will affect them or their craft. As I read through and contemplate all of this I can’t help but think that most people are missing the point. I want to explore this by asking the fundamental questions and thinking from first principles.
Why do people make art?
Obviously, there are going to be differing answers for this. People might say that they like the process, some people might say they can’t help it. Often people make art to deal with and process complex emotions. I, for one, am interested in the act of bringing something novel into the world via an expression of my feelings and experiences as well as just trying to make the specific art that I want to consume myself. I would argue that most people are going to fall somewhere within these bounds.
So why do people consume art?
To me, this is more simple. It basically boils down to “people consume art to effect their emotional state in some way”. At the end of the day people just want to feel how they want to feel. Whether it’s listening to heavy metal so you feel pumped up at the gym or watching a sad movie that ends horribly and makes you cry. People just want to FEEL. You can go to a modern art museum and just observe all the people experiencing curiousness, intrigue, inspiration, etc..
Now, back to AI. If the above assumptions are true then we are about to see some major changes take place. In part, this is because it will become more and more difficult to bring anything novel into the world. If you don’t think so, just go to the midjourney homepage and scroll through the top rated images of the day. I do this often and every time I do I see the coolest images I’ve ever seen in my life. However, I’m noticing that I’m becoming accustomed to this and now most, if not all, of the digital art I come across that is made by a human is infinitely boring or at least underwhelming. Things that would have absolutely blown my mind and captured my attention are now ubiquitous and I hardly bat an eye at this point.
You might say that the human and personal aspect of the music or art is what makes it special but I would argue that is only true some of the time and probably not as often as you might expect. Imagine a scenario where Drake releases a new song that was fully created by AI but doesn’t tell anyone it was made by AI. It would most likely just rip up the charts and be accepted and consumed by everyone without a question. If you can’t tell the difference between a Drake song and and an AI Drake song.. what IS the difference?
This gets to the heart of my concern in terms of my own path and career. It’s not hard to see that if a computer can copy or create something just as good as I can in seconds and at scale it could easily render what I do useless and uninteresting to anybody. Now if I didn’t have to worry about making a career out of it then I would just jam out and make music and not worry about it but my main goal and the whole point of this blog is to turn being an artist my job.
What to do about this?
Even though I’m admittedly worried and most likely catastrophizing, I’m determined to embrace this technology and use it to my advantage. This brings me to the next point I want to make.
I think it’s reasonable to assume that music and art as we know it today is going to look incredibly different very soon. Think about it. We basically consume art in the form of 3 minute mp3 files on an app on our phone that were pre-recorded. We use playlists to try and group them together for certain vibes or occasions etc.. Why does it have to be like that? I recently came across an AI music generation app and the ad for it was someone about to walk home and they told the app “make me a happy song to walk home to” and then it just whipped up a custom bop for that. You can see how the ability to just generate custom music on demand will be super popular, especially for gaming, studying, etc.. The applications are practically endless.
I point this all out to say that I think a large part of being able to benefit from this AI wave will be the ability to dream bigger, be open minded, and to question and reimagine things that “have just always been like that”. I’ve noticed that this new technology divides people in two distinct ways. The ‘victims’ who are consumed by fear, complain, and throw their hands up and the “optimists” who accept the reality and choose to look on the positive side and are excited about the future and embrace it with open arms.. It’s actually painfully obvious who is going to come out on top here. I’m committed to being in the latter category. If there’s anything I want you to take away for this, it’s that ^
As a side note I could see the slight possibility of AI being banned or at least shunned out of society but most likely the benefits it will confer to us will be too great to ignore. I’m focusing on AI art here but in the fields of science, medicine, security, etc… I don’t see it stopping.
All in all it seems like all I can do is keep my ear to the street and find creative ways to use the new tools that become available to me. I’m choosing to view whatever fear or anxiety I have as *excitement*
Danny
What a difficult topic. If I’m honest, since the beginning I didn’t like AI for multiple reasons, but as you say, it’s better if we take the best part of it. AI is not going away just because we don’t like it and is better if we take advantage (in a good way) of it. There’s a quote I like in Spanish that says something like this: If you can’t avoid it, then enjoy it. 🦋