Artificial Creativity. How AI teaches us to distinguish between humans, art, and industry

Really brilliant monologue on creativity and AI, putting the current moment in a historical context of industrialisation stretching back to the invention of the printing press.

"If we really could substitute for our labor with machines — ones that don’t pollute or create even more work — it wouldn’t be a problem, as long as we all felt okay about letting people live and enjoy the bounty... [but] The creative industries are different... creativity is different".

AI is "fine for industry. They’re a product of industrial age thinking, and reinforce its [assembly line] values. They do not create, they model... writing or composing by looking at all the texts and songs and generating an approximate average... the most typical version of something possible... This industrial approach to the arts is what brought us autotuning of vocalists, and an aesthetic that would condemn James Brown’s reaching up to a note as a form of noise, not signal."

While that may be OK for the entertainment industry, it will destroy jobs there as industrial automation reduced factory work. A lot of those jobs, however, will be the entry-level work given to young graduates as they enter the industry: rookie sports journalists "putting the overnight sports scores into language... [and] reading screenplays and writing ... a summary and evaluation".

Noone loved those jobs, but they are where today's experts started, it's how they started. "When we relegate all this engineering, reading, and writing to machines instead of human apprentices, how does the next generation arrive at a level of mastery?"

You can replace a session musician with an AI and tell it "to come up with a solo “like Slash” would play... the AI will dutifully listen to all of Slash’s solos and construct the most average Slash solo ever. More typically Slash than Slash himself... [but] There’s something anonymous about AI music and art that is ultimately unsatisfying" as it doesn't satisfy "our natural, healthy tendency to seek out the human being on the other side of any cultural creation".

Riffing off "we create a tool and from then on, it creates us", Rushkoff explores the industrialisation of print and music:

• "handwriting gave way to the mechanized units of typesetting. Every M would be the same, no matter its context"
• with keyboard instruments "each note ... could only be tuned the same way"
• with the printing press we also "got hourly wages and a clock on the highest tower ... Human beings were to be understood as units of labor, and as interchangeable as typeset letters or keyboard notes"

So AI progresses: an industrial tool expressing a business model "depending on the same old industrial age premise of making money by getting rid of people, or at least people with skills... digital businesses only succeed in getting venture capital if they can prove they don’t need human workers in order to scale infinitely."

This leads inexorably to monopoly: if "all the book publishers, music makers, art producers, and film studios are using the same AI technologies ... how does anyone gain a competitive advantage? ... The only way to win is to become the only player". In the same way technology "turned every letter and note the same, AI will commoditize every industry in which it is deployed".

The result is to move humans "further down the hierarchy of skills: instead of AI doing the grunt creative work for us, Rushkoff finds himself "feeding my characters and their histories, and source materials into the AI, so that it can do the fun work of thinking up the scenes".

The only actual value, perhaps, is: "show us perfect examples of what to avoid... identify when we have stopped being truly creative, and have fallen into regurgitating tropes."

Perhaps instead of presenting AI's finished products to enjoy, the true value lies in the work with the AI during production: "Looking at someone’s Midjourney picture is like listening to someone talk about their acid trip. You had to be there. Likewise, the value of AI is the opportunity to play with the AI itself. AI can still be a creative partner rather than an extension of the same industry that’s been squashing creativity ... [we should be] crafting accessible, transparent, and direct experiences of artificial intelligence itself."