Should artists be terrified of AI replacing them? | Life and style

I’m standing on an eroding cliff edge. As it inches towards me, various objects teeter cartoonishly before disappearing into oblivion. One by one sculptures, paintings, books, buildings and other artefacts of human creativity are swallowed up. The erosion is accelerating, vertiginous, starting to give way beneath my feet. Stormy. Crashing waves. HD. Photo-realistic.

“Is that Land’s End?” my partner asks absentmindedly as she looks at my screen. The prompt I entered into the generator was supposed to be an expression of AI vertigo, but I clearly need to brush up on my prompting skills because the image generated is not the apocalypse I had in mind. It looks more like an ad for a holiday destination starring Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer.

I’ve been avoiding tools like this – they feel like a threat to my livelihood. Whether it’s image-making, sentence-making, music-making or film-making, every day we wake up to some new AI-generated artefact. Give me a Stevie Wonder version of Big Yellow Taxi in 5.1 surround sound! Give me a sci-fi romcom starring Timothée Chalamet, Marilyn Monroe and Ye shot on 16mm! Scratch that – starring Marilyn Monroe and me!

I don’t know if these AI features exist, but would it surprise you if they did? They may seem quaint in five years’ time. A symptom of my vertigo is a preoccupation with speculation. You spend so much time thinking about the future that the present feels primitive. It reminds me of the shot in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the spinning bone tossed by the hominid jump-cuts 100,000 years to the spaceship. Now, substitute the bone for ChatGPT.

In 1964, Arthur C Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, predicted AI as the next evolutionary step: “[Machines] will start to think and eventually they will completely outthink their makers… I suspect that organic or biological evolution has about come to its end and we are now at the beginning of inorganic or mechanical evolution, which will be thousands of times swifter.”

The artist at the mercy of technological advancement is a theme perfectly summed up in the Buggles song Video Killed the Radio Star… “They took the credit for your second symphony, rewritten by machine and new technology.” What makes this technological leap so different from others (fountain pen to typewriter to word-processor) is that these were tools for artists – but AI is different. It may be the tool and the artist.

So where does this impending redundancy leave the human creative urge? Does it mean I need to churn out my best efforts before AI dominates the field? As a musician and writer, I always thought I’d get around to writing a book, a screenplay, another album. But what’s the rush, I thought? It’s a bucket list. Now I feel rushed, the goals archaic, even. AI has killed my bucket list!

I’m gloomy. I have many questions and few answers. I wasn’t surprised that my grandmother didn’t like electronic musician Aphex Twin in the 00s, but I didn’t expect that I’d be failing to keep up in my tender 30s. I need to speak to artists who are in lockstep with the technological vanguard to help me exorcise my malaise.

Artist-musicians Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst are AI veterans. They’ve been grappling with and educating people about it for more than a decade. The Berlin-based collaborative life partners birthed an AI baby to help them create Herndon’s 2019 album Proto. I emailed them a cry for help.

I asked if AI is going to kill the human artist. “No. Human artists will make works using AI and works that will reject AI… Artistry is always evolving. We have to digest that many things that would have appeared virtuosic by 20th-century standards will be able to be generated in microseconds by an AI model. But a media file that sounds like a choir is not a choir. Culture will persist and evolve in unexpected ways.” Human artists will be fine, so long as we don’t delude ourselves that the culture and media landscape are not about to change considerably.

Is human performance replaceable? Or is AI in fact inspiring more human modes of performance? “We like to raise the example of DJing as a reason for hope here. In most cases, DJing is very, very easy to automate. But there are all kinds of reasons why people go to see DJs perform – to meet other people, to celebrate someone, to take a break from looking at a screen.”

At the same time, Herndon and Dryhurst warn that the creative industry may turn into a popularity contest. “We have already seen glimpses of the blurring of artists and influencers. Soon the most attractive kid in class will have all the tools to choose to be the most popular metal artist, or crime thriller author, with very little impudence.” Plot twist: the influencers will steal my bucket list.

And what about my malaise? “As veterans of AI vertigo, it gets better. You just have to ride out the uncomfortable part of the trip. Perhaps the best analogy is the nausea one initially feels when eating a magic mushroom. The mind-expanding part will follow if you make peace with it.” This does resonate. The AI revolution has felt uncanny and hallucinatory at times. Battling against a mushroom trip is never a good idea. Is it time to extend an olive branch?

I also contacted artist Rachel Maclean for AI counsel. Her latest work, DUCK, explores themes of paranoia, authenticity and reality, through the cyphers of 1960s icons Marilyn Monroe, Sean Connery’s James Bond and JFK. Maclean acted all parts and used deepfake technology to transpose their faces on to hers.

She is keen to point out that “aside, from the deepfakes, DUCK is in many ways a conventional film, one I wrote, scripted and directed.” Text-to-image models, on the other hand, she says, are “totally incredible in that the AI has a sense of creativity. You work with it like a collaborator.” She is currently making a series of AI-generated paintings about motherhood, using a model trained on Old Masters’ paintings. “We’re in this sweet spot at the moment,” she grins mischievously. “It is fallible. People come out with eight fingers.” But in a few months, I warn, they’ll produce five-fingered people, won’t they? Maclean is a circuit bender: “I’ve been looking into capturing the models that produce eight fingers and encouraging them to continue making that error.”

There are unexpected truths to be found in the imperfect images of mothers and babies she has been generating with AI. The limbs are fused and you can’t differentiate between the bodies. “This is what it feels like to be a mother, more so than a conventional depiction of motherhood.” I confess, that does sound exciting – to collaborate with an entity that thinks differently to humans, innovating the artform as well as the way in which we see our species. But it also compounds my fear that human craft, certainly in digital media, will disappear. Are we becoming redundant? “The exciting thing about this technology,” says Maclean, “is that people are still figuring out what it’s for. Its use-value becomes apparent by people shaping it.”

A couple of weeks ago my partner, a freelance writer, was offered two – two! – jobs from companies offering to pay writers to teach AI how to write better. The brass neck! Why don’t they give you some rope with which to hang yourself, I said? But it’s a job, she said, and it might be interesting. So is my belligerence helping anyone?

Interviewing those at the techno-cultural vanguard, including Herndon, Dryhurst and Maclean, has given me some sense of peace. I realise that I have been hanging on to 20th-century notions of art practice and the cultural landscape, one where humans spent months and years writing, painting, recording and filming works that defined the culture of our species. They provided meaning, distraction, wellbeing. A reason to exist. Making peace may mean letting go of these historical notions, finding new meaning. While digitally generatable media is increasingly becoming the domain of AI, for example, might performance and tactile artforms, such as live concerts, theatre and sculpture, be reinvigorated?

“A screaming comes across the sky,” writes Thomas Pynchon at the beginning of Gravity’s Rainbow as Captain “Pirate” Prentice watches an inbound V2 vapour trail on the horizon. Having considered what it would feel like were the bomb to land directly on his head, instead of fleeing or making calls, he collects some tropical fruit from his greenhouse. What’s the point in panicking? It’s already on its way. People like AI researcher and decision theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky are comparing the threat of AI to nuclear war. It’s the new apocalypse. I can see a vapour trail on the horizon. But what can I do? Run for shelter, take up arms? Humans have survived apocalypses before. I guess I’ll pick bananas.

Follow Rudi Zygadlo @rudizyga. His latest single, F*** AI, is on Spotify and the music video on YouTube