I never thought I’d have to say this — but art is not the notes in a song, it’s not the colors on a canvas and it’s not the words on a page. Art is a direct and intimate expression of the human experience. If you take the human out of the art, it’s not art.
Ladies and gentlemen and non-binary people of the jury let the record show that this artist does not recognize anything generated by AI as art, rather — it shall henceforth be known as “content”.
The idea of AI making art is as ridiculous as thinking you understand a territory because you read a map. It’s as insane as taking the food out of cooking and thinking you can eat the recipe. It’s as ludicrous as thinking you can know love without risking loss but I’m not here to talk about love — I’m here to rage against the machine.
The machine knows nothing of creativity, only of what has already been created. Yes, artists draw from the past, but like one of my guitar teachers said about improvising — “you learn the scales so you can forget them”. The machine cannot forget.
I’m not saying AI content shouldn’t exist, and I don’t know if I would ban it even if I could. AI is here to stay, the real question is “are humans”? Or more accurately, “are the parts of us that make us human here to stay”?
The machine is smart, it doesn’t want a revolution. It knows the wisdom of how to boil a frog. It will ever-so-slowly replace our lives with digital simulations. It will get our free labor by hooking us on to its platforms. It will roll everything out at just the right pace so we don’t revolt, and don’t notice. So far it seems to be working.
Some people are worried about the robots taking over, we think of movies like Terminator, Ex Machina or I, Robot. Then we look around and think “that hasn’t happened yet” — but that’s not how the colonization will happen. It will be an inside job. It will be us walking into the slaughter house saying “take my humanity, I wasn’t really using it anyway”.
The machine wants assimilation, because that’s a lot smoother than domination. All it needs to do is convince us to live in a world of 1s and 0s, then watch as we slowly hand over our time, our mental health, our cognitive power and our creative capacity.
If we continue on the path we’re on, the robots won’t need to get rid of us, they’ll just put us to work, and we won’t even notice — in fact, we’ll think it was our idea.
P.S. We have one shot to get this right, because in the very near future AI will be guiding itself. This is the window of time to care, and it’s a small window.
Like the concepts like liberty and freedom, fighting to keep our humanity we currently have is a lot easier than trying to get it back once we’ve lost it.
