AI and the Artists

It was a cliché of science fiction that a high-tech world of advanced automation would see the inhabitants relieved of drudgery, and free to pursue what calling truly attracted them--a scenario that for many doubtless looked attractive, with one possibility a world where a very large number of people were artists of some type or other. (Certainly those kept from their genuine vocations by the inability to make enough money at them seem to have expected, or hoped for, something of the kind.)

However, it looks as if artists--a group which has, on the whole, not done very well out of an era in which science triumphed over letters, and engineering over artisanship--are going to see even less opportunity to be an artist as a result of automation. Already we are hearing of the Chinese video game industry dispensing with its artists in favor of AI-generated art, with artists who had recently been making a fairly good living at their craft finding demand for their work collapse as they are reduced to providing "small fixes, like tweaking the lighting and skewed body parts" in AI-generated art for a small fraction of their prior income.

What is already happening to artists in China is unlikely to be confined to China--while I would imagine that generators of words are even more vulnerable to displacement than generators of images, with one reflection the way the matter has entered into the big WGA strike out in Hollywood.

Considering this those whose intellectual bent is Luddite are likely to simply feel that "technology" has, once again, played humans a dirty trick. However, those who know better--who know that, contrary to Margaret Thatcher, there is such a thing as society--recognize a more complex reality, one where technological change, for all its potentials, has not been about liberating humans from drudgery or anything else but serving the needs of the powerful, as by cutting their wage bills, which is, of course, something that replacing an artist with an app does.

The situation bespeaks alongside this not only the successes of artificial intelligence research, but its failures. AI researchers have long struggled to develop systems which can cope with the demands of "perception and manipulation," and "finger" and "manual" dexterity--struggled so ineffectively for so long that their progress has been outstripped by efforts in other areas, like those at which the chatbots seem to excel, such that rather than automation's relieving humans of the drudge works frees humans to be artists, our art-making will be automated as humans go on enduring the drudgery required to keep the world running.