We forget, but it hasn't been but so long that novelty and originality have been a focus and goal of art/cultural production. Although it has always been kind of important for each generation of artists/writers/musicians etc. to bring a little something fresh to their production, only in the late 19th/early 20th century does it become a fetish, which not coincidentally coincides with the rise of mass media, advertising, fashion cycles and manufactured obsolescence, the commercial corollaries of high culture's love of novelty.
Maybe generative AI -- with its ability to consume and spit out all kinds of music/narrative/pictures blah blah blah, will finally give the lie to the ongoing novelty/creativity fetish and allow us to clearly foreground connection, identification and insight into their own lives as what so many people want from art. Yes, decades of literary theory has problematized all of these concepts and a part of this is the endless post-modern focus on identity politics.
In any case, if AI can crank out plots and scripts, they're likely going to seem canned and uninteresting and humans will always be better at creating content that connects with other humans. Case in point: The Stranger on Netflix. It feels like it might has well have been written by an AI, though in fact it is based on a novel by one Harlan Coben. It has many familiar elements but they all feel kind of misshapen and don't really fit together. There is at least one character (the female detective) about whom we can kind of care. Also it's always nice to see Stephen Rea because he's a solid actor. Otherwise who gives a fuck about any of these people?
Caveat: Mary and I got to the end of episode 5 of The Stranger last night and maybe it's getting a little more interesting. Maybe Harlan Coben is not an AI.
1 comment:
Quite right.
I'm interested in what AI manages to say about us humans:
1. There's such a regularity to most human language past what we'd have expected. Wolfram hits on this point well here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flXrLGPY3SU
2. I'm not worried about the AI Moby Dick coming out anytime soon, but almost as a corollary of (1), so much of our "content"--ad copy, Hallmark movie plots--is filler or near-filler. Plausible padding that asks little, and at some level isn't even engaged with on its own level, a kind of penumbra of human thought. I see much of that automated away: will this wind up improving human output or drowning it away in industrialized schlock?
3. The point about novelty is exactly right and very astute. Renaissance art had a fairly narrow base of religious/classical subjects plus a bit of portraiture. And yet it was often sublime. I'd argue that the chase to have novelty of form started around Picasso's time jumped the shark after Pollack. Go the Whitney. . . and it's all, yeah, yeah, you are subverting technique. . . just like everybody else.
Post a Comment