Not since the industrial revolution has humanity faced as drastic a shake-up to the status quo of daily societal living, with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), we find ourselves once again questioning what it means to be human and what our place in this ever-changing world is and will be. AI has stepped beyond the realm of science fiction into that of science fact. Despite the numerous warning signs from an array of popular media over the decades, here we are making friends with the machines as The Terminator’s John Conner shakes his head at us through a variety of online memes.
What could possibly go wrong? Perhaps my steering towards being a humanist in this current climate of AI uncertainty is a result of growing up in the 80s and 90s, where having a healthy fear of the future’s technological advancement and impending arrival of our robot overlords was seen as normal. It’s clear that this mindset hasn’t quite left my psyche and may have shaped the person I am today. Or maybe my hesitancy is brought on by the fact that we seem to have collectively developed amnesia of those fears we once held of losing our place as the dominant species of this planet?
This piece will concentrate on the threats that AI poses to the arts and how the creative landscape has been slowly shifting without many of us paying much attention. This revolution will definitely not be televised, but we may just catch it on an Insta-story or TikTok viral video when it’s far too late.
The AI debate has become one that most choose to avoid, and understandably so — when faced with either being labelled as a conspiracy theorist weirdo or a doomsday fatalist, both alternatives have the potentiality to make one seem as though they’ve recently escaped from the infamous psychiatric hospital, Sterkfontein. The most common avoidance tactic which I’ve experienced is that of the positive Polly, who usually would state that we’ll find a way to deal with it if it becomes a problem. And history would show that in the arts, we certainly have found a way when technology and its advancement have threatened to eradicate modes of human creativity — the most prominently cited example being that of the advent of the film camera, which forced the visual arts landscape to adjust and pivot because at the time it seemed nonsensical to attempt to best this new invention used to represent reality. The result of the camera’s invention inevitably led to the advent of artistic movements the likes of Impressionism, Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, to name a few. Art history lesson aside, when overcoming the stuttering era of the camera, to eventually using the camera as a tool. Naturally, the cheerful Charlies would say of course the advent of AI will bring the same result. And maybe it will.
My fear is that so rarely does one hear of those instances in history when humanity conceded to the machine, and technology won the battle. A computer, for example, like any other job done by a human was once a designation where someone (often a woman), would perform mathematical calculations by hand. Today the job title of computer is so well erased that I would bet that a large percentage of readers of this article would not have known that fact. Such is the normalised erasure of technology, cyberspace and the internet at large.
Right now AI tools such as ChatGPT are seen as harmless tools used to make our lives easier and more, dare I say it, fun. But for many creatives, this so-called fun comes at a cost. Writers, for example, were some of the first to feel these negative effects with many corporate writers, i.e. those creating copy for banks or other corporate institutions, soon felt the numbing panic of the prompt; which led to hours slaving away at the perfect prose replaced by a key swipe. CEOs rushed to this latest advancement because it meant one less pay cheque. Arts writers were the next on the chopping block, as the artist statement, wall text and catalogue write-up no longer needed the skillset of that person who had spent years refining technique and developing relationships with artists in order to better understand the artists’ practice. This, however, was not enough to spark enough of a concern for most artists.
The trend that swept across social media platforms not too long ago, which saw everyone and their grandmothers filtering themselves into cartoon characters, may have been cute and fun but for those who recognised that the effect borrowed heavily from the Japanese Studio Ghibli aesthetic without credit or acknowledgement, it stirred up concerns from animators and creatives in pockets around the globe. If this could happen to a studio which is dubbed the Disney of the East, what chance would the rest of us have of fighting off AI tools and systems?
Not even when musicians cried foul about record labels and the exploitation of recording artists by corporations such as Spotify. While this is far from headline news, what is news is the eradication of the musician completely, replacing them with “non-human entities”, or AI. Instagram platforms the likes of Lil Miquela are slowly bringing this seemingly dystopian futuristic sci-fi reality into the reality of the now. Sure, groups like the masked French duo Daft Punk and the UK cartoon band Gorillaz created entire identities (pun intended) by minimising the human factor of their creativity. I would argue that the reasons behind each of these groups’ creations were as a form of commentary on the fake, non-human nature of the music industry and the manufactured nature of the music scene at the time.
Each of these bands’ creations shone a light on the extent of boardroom-constructed musicians being churned out by the industry during the 90s and early 2000s, thanks to reality shows such as X Factor or Idols. While variations of this idea of the death of the author have been a part of creativity for decades, when it comes to music, that idea has presented a variety of incarnations depending on the political landscape of the times. More recently, the backlash surrounding Justin Timberlake’s live tour performances may not make sense when observed at face value, but when interrogated a little more closely, reveals that the age-old practice of singing a few lines and pointing the microphone at the audience to complete the verse or song didn’t land so well with modern audiences.
I feel as though the reason for these negative reactions is in part due to music lovers subconsciously wanting to connect with humanity in an era where the threat of being replaced by non-human entities pervades our daily lives, and once that experience of not connecting to the musician you’d paid to see was reduced, it didn’t land well. Time will tell how music lovers and musicians will react to Sadie Winters, the newly created AI female alternative Indie/emo rocker, and how her latest single, “Walking Away” will be received. Producer Rick Beato and CBS News used her to demonstrate the advanced state of the technology, creating a song and virtual musician’s looks and persona in a matter of seconds with a single prompt.
When it comes to the realm of visual arts, I believe that a possible reason for the delayed response to the inception of AI as a possible threat may be due to the narrative that stated that automation is not yet at a stage where it could be a threat to the fine art or visual arts space. New York-based painter JJ Ellis is one of many artists who are speaking out on how artists are being exploited. For Ellis, this realisation came with the discovery that his work is being chopped up, stolen and sold without his permission through ARTSAKE, an AI drop shipping company.
This is yet another example of this latest technological advancement being used as a means to not pay artists for their time, labour and creativity. To illustrate how harmful this current era of AI ingenuity is and can be, we need only look at the recent Australian Productivity Commission, which has proposed a “text and data mining” exception to copyright law. This would allow AI companies to use copyrighted material to train their models. For this to be taking place in a country with some of the most heralded copyright laws in the world is alarming because it sets a precedent for the same to occur elsewhere across the globe. Put simply, this means that writers, poets, authors, musicians and visual artists will now hold a smaller stake in the ownership rights of their creative practices, in order to allow AI to better learn from us as humans. This is a slippery slope, as it could lead to uncompensated work for creatives.
The unfortunate truth is that until such time as governments and organisations create legislation that can properly understand and control how this technology is used and who it is used by, artists will be forced to pivot and adjust for the foreseeable future as they attempt to make sense of these ghosts hidden in the devices we wield. Before all of our livelihoods are a distant memory, it is to our collective benefit to understand what it is we are grappling with and how it can both be of harm and benefit to us as humans moving forward. Until such time, take comfort that the current landscape of fear and uncertainty is one felt by a large majority of the 8.2-billion humans on the planet.
The arts are but one sector having to contend with the arrival of AI, only time will reveal how this story ends.
