Artists use the tools they have available: of course they do. Once someone has worked out a reliable formula for oil paints, then painters can do more and different things on their canvass. But some artists still choose to work within the limitations of watercolours or pastels. The fact that novels exist doesn’t mean that no-one will ever again write a haiku. I happen to love the cheap four colour comic books of the 1970s. I don’t think there would be so many red and blue good guys and purple and green bad guys if the artists had had a wider colour palate at their disposal. But I don’t think that if some luddites smashed the new colour separation system with lusty stroke, then a new Steve Ditko and a new Jack Kirby would inevitably arise.
People used to say that prose written with an old fashioned dip-pen was identifiably different from prose written with a modern fountain pen; and that you only have to read an article to spot whether the journalist uses a ballpoint or a typewriter. There is something to this: I would be very unlikely to write a long, looping dissertation of this kind if I had to dip my quill in an ink pot every seven words—or even if I had to use correcting fluid every time I changed my mind. Perhaps CS Lewis was right that the clatter, clatter, clatter of a typewriter made it hard for young poets to get the rhythm right. Perhaps if I had to translate my diary into an obscure self-invented cypher I would discover a stylistic affinity with Anne Lister or Samuel Pepys. For a long time I used to write longhand drafts on plain white A4 notepads; and at one stage I tried to replicate the process with an Apple Stylus. Maybe I will do that again someday and see if anyone notices the difference.
And so we come to the Hard Question.
Eventually, I will read a book or a comic or listen to a song and say “That truly is the best thing I’ve heard in years. I haven’t been so engaged with a prawn salad since Knausgaard’s fifth volume. The world building is comparable to Stephen Donaldson at his best. How did you put into such simple language exactly how I felt when the Colston Statue was pulled down? How did you communicate the exact emotional sensations I felt when I confronted my bully in middle age? I want to meet the guy who wrote this and shake their hand.”
And you will say: “The guy who wrote it? Oh, didn’t you know? It was generated by AI.”
You remember Douglas Adams’ digression about Lallafa, who wrote the best poetry in the universe? He lived and died in obscurity, but was subsequently contacted by time travellers from the future, and as a result, never had the experiences he wrote about in his poems? But (due to the way the grandfather paradox works in Adams’ universe) he was able to copy the texts from an edition of his poetry that was printed before history was changed.
“Many people now say that the poems are suddenly worthless. Others argue that they are exactly the same as they always were, so what's changed? The first people say that that isn't the point. They aren't quite sure what the point is, but they are quite sure that that isn't it.”
So: what is the point?
The philosopher Jimmy Carr says that it is a false problem: AI is very good at what he calls “left brain things” but incapable of what he called “right brain things”. I don’t think any modern psychologist would accept the left brain / right brain distinction, but it is clear what he is talking about. AI is very good at say, flying to the moon, because flying to the moon requires you to do a very large number of very difficult things quickly and without a single error. But AI would be unable to, say, write a country and western song, because song-writing is about “the gestalt”, the whole, which it can’t emulate. Songs are about human connections and human feelings which a string of code, however complex, can’t possibly have.
That sounds very clever, but I am not sure what it means.
Is the claim that the series of sound-waves that we label Fulsom Prison Blues have a form and complexity that no algorithm, in any possible world, could have produced?
That Johnny Cash’s brain is a unique piece of software, produced by his unique and complex life experience, that no piece of code could possibly emulate?
Or is Carr just saying that if an algorithm had generated Fulsom Prison Blues, it wouldn’t be worth listening to?
I am frequently bewildered by modern art. But I do understand that a male sanitary fitting can be regarded as art because Marcel Duchamp intended it to be art. If it turned out that some plumbers had just left it lying around by accident then we wouldn’t be interested in it.
I believe in the Folk Process. A professional song writer in, say, the eighteenth century writes a song. He writes it for a professional singer dressed as a shepherd to sing in an eighteenth century theme park; or to print on cheap paper and sell on the street corner for a penny. Someone hears it and sings it to someone else, and someone else sings it to a third person, and so it goes on, ear to mouth, mouth to ear, ready for Cecil Sharp to discover two hundred years down the line. By which time, the bits which are hard to sing have been rubbed off; the bits of poetry which are hard to remember have been made memorable -- and some sections very probably reduced to nonsense. It is an object of faith among folkies that an individual composer, however good, cannot replicate this Process. Chris Wood always says that the greatest song writer of all time was "Anon". You can always tell a song which someone made up from a song which just grew.
But one could surely now imagine a Marvellous Mechanical Folk Song Machine. Feed in a mediocre song at one end; copy it a hundred times with intentional errors; and you will probably find that something very like a folk-song has come out at the other end. What ought my attitude to that fake-song be?
Do I value the Folk Process because it tends to produce The Trees They Grow So High and Barbara Allen? Or do I value those songs because I believe they were produced by the Folk Process?
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