I find these debates a confused and largely misguided. The answer to the question "can A.I. create art" is "no" in a definitional way, but this question does not have the economic or cultural stakes it is imagined to have. It's very much like asking "can a machine create handmade goods?" The fact that the answer to this question is "no" had very narrow implications for the transformations wrought by the Industrial Revolution.
The example of photography is illustrative here. Chiang revisits the debate about whether photography is art, and take some pains to explain why we decided that it is and reconcile that stance with his stance on A.I. But how much does that matter. The vast majority of people who would have hired someone to paint their portrait before the advent of photography now hire a photographer to take a picture, or take a picture themselves. Do they ask themselves whether the photographs are art? Do they care? No, because for them, the function of the portrait, painted or not, was not especially related to whether it is art. This is true in many domains in which paintings and photographs are substitutes.
Similarly, someone looking for something to put on in the background as they work or exercise is not primarily looking for art, though art can serve that function. Same with someone sitting down in front of their TV after work or someone reading a novel in bed before they fall asleep or looking to fill wall space in their apartment.
Somewhat more controversially, but for related reasons, I also think the question "will AI ever make works indistinguishable from human art" is also less important than it seems. How many times have you looked at a photograph and been disappointed that you can tell that's not a painting?
Great comment--I think the "can A.I. create art?" question is ultimately a way that a certain kind of writer/artist articulates their own anxiety about technological obviation. The problem is that (imo) they should be thinking of that anxiety in terms of their own labor, but because of a certain kind of preciousness about "writing" or "art" (what I am refraining from calling "bourgeois ideology" b/c that would be annoying) they imagine it in terms of transcendental philosophical questions about those categories--even though, as you say, what A.I. is doing and what it's being used for are orthogonal to "art" in general.
In the specific example of NNWM, the statement undermines what NNWM is: Can you - Y.O.U. - write 50,000 words of original fiction in one month?
I could probably win a marathon if I was on a segway the entire time. It ruins the entire purpose of the marathon. Having a segway marathon would be stupid and boring.
The Expanse series is a good example of a gritty industrial sci fi setting. The poor Belters working their fingers to the bone for those ungrateful Earthlings. I'll also second the mention of Andor.
I have to say that I find myself in disagreement with almost everything I read in these AI-in-art arguments. From the artistic integrity angle, every Chiang-like argument about how AI can never match the soul or the craft of a human eventually boils down to some form of essentialism that's hard to swallow, and privileges the creator over the beholder in a way I don't buy. (And on the other side, the people who have genuine aesthetic appreciation for the saccharine dross that current AIs actually produce are absolute idiots.)
From the economic angle, I find the idea of labor organizing to protect a human occupation against a new technology... kind of a foregone conclusion? It just seems that the only real question is how good the actual technological innovation is. If it's all smoke, mirrors, and podcasting VC hype, then at some point this current scrum between labor and capital will yield a new equilibrium. (I understand, of course, why some people care a lot about what that equilibrium will be). But if, in fact, an AI can write a well-paced season of television or a gripping spy novel indistinguishably from a human, then... I'm not happy about it but lol, rip.
In some sense, I think that the most interesting question is what happens to the amateur who makes bad art. Are they going to lose what was a source of meaning, if not money, in their lives? AI actually is already capable of competing with and displacing them, and I think we have a broader set of futures available to us in the social realm than the economic one.
Great comment—in general I think I'm with you on the kind of ... proof is in the pudding-ness of it all. But something Brouillette's tweets helped crystallize for me is the extent to which the technological de-skilling process tends to change not just the balance of labor and capital but also the meaning of the thing being made. De-skilling/"democratizing" writing via fanfic and self-publishing and NaNoWriMo doesn't just mean that many more, but somewhat worse, novels are being written, it also changes what novels are, what they're about, what they're for (for both readers and writers). *If* LLMs are the kind of labor-reducing technology that the Valley is hoping they are, I'm not sure what we're going to get is spy novels and prestige TV—or even novels and TV at all. IDK quite where that leaves me; I suppose in a weird way I feel more protective of the forms I grew up with more than I do of the idea that they must be authored by human beings.
Yeah, totally agree with that. When people make analogies to other technologies, I'm reminded that you can mourn the loss of something "cool" without needing to mount some kind of political Ludditism. Like, I think that slide rules and computer punch cards huge books of logarithm tables are in many ways more "badass" than a single all-powerful black rectangle. But ultimately it's a pretty low stakes opinion.
Could one not say that the meaning that humans derive from writing - both from producing it and reading the writing of others - is *entirely* dependent on whatever we associate with the word "skill"? Our relationship with writing is completely intertwined with our own acquiring it, mastering it and practicing it. And if "skill" in this sense ceases to be a factor in writing, then writing becomes something else; something completely different with different utilities for humans.
It seems to me that this development towards de-skilled writing - to the extent that it is taking place - is intimately connected with the way in which our culture has privileged informal writing over formal writing since the advent of the internet and (especially) social media. Informal writing at scale (text message, DMs, status updates etc.) is a very recent phenomenon that belongs almost exclusively to the current millennium, and in a couple of decades it has come to dominate people's relationship to writing and language like no other form of writing ever has. For the first time ever our dominant form of writing mirrors informal speech, and this type of writing is more casual, unplanned, spontaneous and immediate as well as less skill-based (or, indeed, not skill-based at all in the sense that no one studies, learns and practices this type of writing in a rote manner that is similar to the way in which formal writing skills are acquired). Simultaneously, it seems - at least judging from recent debates about the use of LLMs in students' "writing" of their school work; see for instance Ian Bogost's article in The Atlantic a few weeks ago - that formal writing, or, writing acquired and judged in terms of skill, is increasingly being outsourced to LLMs, especially among younger generations. This points to a perhaps not so distant future where people's personal and intimate relationships to the very idea of writing will almost solely be in relation to informal writing. It will then be interesting to follow what the role is going to be of (LLM-based/assisted) formal writing and everything that was previously connected to "skill".
Have you played Citizen Sleeper? Definitely Sci-Fi, although the Industrial aspect is more atmospheric and commentary on Ruthless Corpo Overlords. Still, your character personally takes part in some aspects of that work, usually as an itinerant drifter doing odd jobs here and there.
Really, I just love it a lot and will take almost any opportunity to bring it up to people. :D
The hype around LLMs makes me wonder (or did, before these programs limitations became so obvious) how high up the white collar chain automation might be able to go. So yes, movies might get written by AI, but it seems more likely that millions of marketing and comms and other misc. email jobs might slowly transition to enter a prompt type job. It's pretty easy to imagine a huge percentage of white collar work being slowly deskilled, automated, and becoming both less in demand and worse paid. Basically the theoretical threat is deindustrialization for a huge swath of white collar work.
This, as everyone else has commented, is where the art thing starts to feel silly. Yes, it's going to get harder to write for a living, and that sucks. But many things are going to get worse, and the focus on art discounts the real pride in craft or competence that people take in doing a less 'artistic' job. On deskilling, one of the more resonant parts of labor and monopoly capital, at least for me, was Braverman's points on the damage that automation did to working class communities. There was something poisonous to people's minds/ souls/ whatever in the transition from craft to repetitive labor. That seems true here too. If your job is writing emails, it is inarguably a bad thing to have that job become asking a computer to write those emails and then editing it (especially when your boss expects you to write 20x as many because the computer is helping).
Then again, as noted, this doesn't seem like an immediate threat since the tech doesn't seem to work .
I don't think AI will make art, but I think artists will make art with AI. People have been making art with algorithms for *millenia*. You can watch a documentary about weavers, and you can read books about weaving, and examine woven products. Does that mean you can buy a loom and yarn and starting cranking out woven works of art (leaving aside the craftsman vs. artist debate)? The LLMs are just new algorithms--new looms. People will undoubtedly make interesting art with them... eventually.
Terminator Salvation totally had the gritty industrial vibe for me. And if we're talking Star Wars, then Attack of the Clones had the (to 3rd-grade me) amazing scene where they are fighting their way through the droid foundry
Re: industrial sci-fi, Avatar? Of course, it's a Cameron movie, so it's resource extraction and the RDA are moustache-twirling villains through and through. Part 1 also features pretty little in terms of industry, but part 2 has a few whaling scenes that are, honestly, pretty cool.
Also, it's not sci-fi at all, but there's a documentary called Erde (translates to Earth) that you might enjoy (https://vimeo.com/ondemand/erde). It's also not hiding the fact that it's made from an environmentalist point of view, but it's light enough on talking that you might just enjoy the photography.
Avatar (like Dune, which a couple people have emailed me about) is about resource extraction but is way more interested in indigenous resistance and violent colonial administration than it is in the actual work of mining unobtanium (or harvesting spice)... maybe understandable! But it always annoyed me about Dune how little Herbert was interested in the Dune Men.
The sentence I keep coming back to: "The only tools left to writers, who have no legal way to control and negotiate the supply and pricing of their work, are indirect forms of social protectionism: snobbery, taste, and 'gatekeeping.'"
This week, owning my snobbery has given me permission to publicly point out the idiocy of a LinkedIn marketer who claims to be inventing "content theory." So thanks.
I think the Firefly TV series and movie has an industrial feel. It's implied that the planets they visit are agrarian or industrial, and then they also have the central planets with cities and higher level technology.
We need some near future movies about semiconductor fab factories or drone manufacturing for war. Twice in the last year I've read stories about rescues of lost people using drones to find them. There was a story about a toddler lost in a corn field that they found with a drone; and a guy last year lost in a national park.
Silent Running is another post-industrial sci-fi movie, with the twist that the “industry” is the preservation of biodiversity that has been destroyed by economic exploitation.
I find these debates a confused and largely misguided. The answer to the question "can A.I. create art" is "no" in a definitional way, but this question does not have the economic or cultural stakes it is imagined to have. It's very much like asking "can a machine create handmade goods?" The fact that the answer to this question is "no" had very narrow implications for the transformations wrought by the Industrial Revolution.
The example of photography is illustrative here. Chiang revisits the debate about whether photography is art, and take some pains to explain why we decided that it is and reconcile that stance with his stance on A.I. But how much does that matter. The vast majority of people who would have hired someone to paint their portrait before the advent of photography now hire a photographer to take a picture, or take a picture themselves. Do they ask themselves whether the photographs are art? Do they care? No, because for them, the function of the portrait, painted or not, was not especially related to whether it is art. This is true in many domains in which paintings and photographs are substitutes.
Similarly, someone looking for something to put on in the background as they work or exercise is not primarily looking for art, though art can serve that function. Same with someone sitting down in front of their TV after work or someone reading a novel in bed before they fall asleep or looking to fill wall space in their apartment.
Somewhat more controversially, but for related reasons, I also think the question "will AI ever make works indistinguishable from human art" is also less important than it seems. How many times have you looked at a photograph and been disappointed that you can tell that's not a painting?
Great comment--I think the "can A.I. create art?" question is ultimately a way that a certain kind of writer/artist articulates their own anxiety about technological obviation. The problem is that (imo) they should be thinking of that anxiety in terms of their own labor, but because of a certain kind of preciousness about "writing" or "art" (what I am refraining from calling "bourgeois ideology" b/c that would be annoying) they imagine it in terms of transcendental philosophical questions about those categories--even though, as you say, what A.I. is doing and what it's being used for are orthogonal to "art" in general.
In the specific example of NNWM, the statement undermines what NNWM is: Can you - Y.O.U. - write 50,000 words of original fiction in one month?
I could probably win a marathon if I was on a segway the entire time. It ruins the entire purpose of the marathon. Having a segway marathon would be stupid and boring.
The Expanse series is a good example of a gritty industrial sci fi setting. The poor Belters working their fingers to the bone for those ungrateful Earthlings. I'll also second the mention of Andor.
Yeah I was thinking that the only examples I could think of were TV. Expanse, various times on Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, even For All Mankind.
I have to say that I find myself in disagreement with almost everything I read in these AI-in-art arguments. From the artistic integrity angle, every Chiang-like argument about how AI can never match the soul or the craft of a human eventually boils down to some form of essentialism that's hard to swallow, and privileges the creator over the beholder in a way I don't buy. (And on the other side, the people who have genuine aesthetic appreciation for the saccharine dross that current AIs actually produce are absolute idiots.)
From the economic angle, I find the idea of labor organizing to protect a human occupation against a new technology... kind of a foregone conclusion? It just seems that the only real question is how good the actual technological innovation is. If it's all smoke, mirrors, and podcasting VC hype, then at some point this current scrum between labor and capital will yield a new equilibrium. (I understand, of course, why some people care a lot about what that equilibrium will be). But if, in fact, an AI can write a well-paced season of television or a gripping spy novel indistinguishably from a human, then... I'm not happy about it but lol, rip.
In some sense, I think that the most interesting question is what happens to the amateur who makes bad art. Are they going to lose what was a source of meaning, if not money, in their lives? AI actually is already capable of competing with and displacing them, and I think we have a broader set of futures available to us in the social realm than the economic one.
Great comment—in general I think I'm with you on the kind of ... proof is in the pudding-ness of it all. But something Brouillette's tweets helped crystallize for me is the extent to which the technological de-skilling process tends to change not just the balance of labor and capital but also the meaning of the thing being made. De-skilling/"democratizing" writing via fanfic and self-publishing and NaNoWriMo doesn't just mean that many more, but somewhat worse, novels are being written, it also changes what novels are, what they're about, what they're for (for both readers and writers). *If* LLMs are the kind of labor-reducing technology that the Valley is hoping they are, I'm not sure what we're going to get is spy novels and prestige TV—or even novels and TV at all. IDK quite where that leaves me; I suppose in a weird way I feel more protective of the forms I grew up with more than I do of the idea that they must be authored by human beings.
Yeah, totally agree with that. When people make analogies to other technologies, I'm reminded that you can mourn the loss of something "cool" without needing to mount some kind of political Ludditism. Like, I think that slide rules and computer punch cards huge books of logarithm tables are in many ways more "badass" than a single all-powerful black rectangle. But ultimately it's a pretty low stakes opinion.
Could one not say that the meaning that humans derive from writing - both from producing it and reading the writing of others - is *entirely* dependent on whatever we associate with the word "skill"? Our relationship with writing is completely intertwined with our own acquiring it, mastering it and practicing it. And if "skill" in this sense ceases to be a factor in writing, then writing becomes something else; something completely different with different utilities for humans.
It seems to me that this development towards de-skilled writing - to the extent that it is taking place - is intimately connected with the way in which our culture has privileged informal writing over formal writing since the advent of the internet and (especially) social media. Informal writing at scale (text message, DMs, status updates etc.) is a very recent phenomenon that belongs almost exclusively to the current millennium, and in a couple of decades it has come to dominate people's relationship to writing and language like no other form of writing ever has. For the first time ever our dominant form of writing mirrors informal speech, and this type of writing is more casual, unplanned, spontaneous and immediate as well as less skill-based (or, indeed, not skill-based at all in the sense that no one studies, learns and practices this type of writing in a rote manner that is similar to the way in which formal writing skills are acquired). Simultaneously, it seems - at least judging from recent debates about the use of LLMs in students' "writing" of their school work; see for instance Ian Bogost's article in The Atlantic a few weeks ago - that formal writing, or, writing acquired and judged in terms of skill, is increasingly being outsourced to LLMs, especially among younger generations. This points to a perhaps not so distant future where people's personal and intimate relationships to the very idea of writing will almost solely be in relation to informal writing. It will then be interesting to follow what the role is going to be of (LLM-based/assisted) formal writing and everything that was previously connected to "skill".
I guess Wall-E would probably qualify as post-industrial sci-fi? Also, Idiocracy
(Not a movie but the industrial and oppressive aspects of the prison system was something else that "Andor" depicted well)
Have you played Citizen Sleeper? Definitely Sci-Fi, although the Industrial aspect is more atmospheric and commentary on Ruthless Corpo Overlords. Still, your character personally takes part in some aspects of that work, usually as an itinerant drifter doing odd jobs here and there.
Really, I just love it a lot and will take almost any opportunity to bring it up to people. :D
The hype around LLMs makes me wonder (or did, before these programs limitations became so obvious) how high up the white collar chain automation might be able to go. So yes, movies might get written by AI, but it seems more likely that millions of marketing and comms and other misc. email jobs might slowly transition to enter a prompt type job. It's pretty easy to imagine a huge percentage of white collar work being slowly deskilled, automated, and becoming both less in demand and worse paid. Basically the theoretical threat is deindustrialization for a huge swath of white collar work.
This, as everyone else has commented, is where the art thing starts to feel silly. Yes, it's going to get harder to write for a living, and that sucks. But many things are going to get worse, and the focus on art discounts the real pride in craft or competence that people take in doing a less 'artistic' job. On deskilling, one of the more resonant parts of labor and monopoly capital, at least for me, was Braverman's points on the damage that automation did to working class communities. There was something poisonous to people's minds/ souls/ whatever in the transition from craft to repetitive labor. That seems true here too. If your job is writing emails, it is inarguably a bad thing to have that job become asking a computer to write those emails and then editing it (especially when your boss expects you to write 20x as many because the computer is helping).
Then again, as noted, this doesn't seem like an immediate threat since the tech doesn't seem to work .
I don't think AI will make art, but I think artists will make art with AI. People have been making art with algorithms for *millenia*. You can watch a documentary about weavers, and you can read books about weaving, and examine woven products. Does that mean you can buy a loom and yarn and starting cranking out woven works of art (leaving aside the craftsman vs. artist debate)? The LLMs are just new algorithms--new looms. People will undoubtedly make interesting art with them... eventually.
Terminator Salvation totally had the gritty industrial vibe for me. And if we're talking Star Wars, then Attack of the Clones had the (to 3rd-grade me) amazing scene where they are fighting their way through the droid foundry
Re: industrial sci-fi, Avatar? Of course, it's a Cameron movie, so it's resource extraction and the RDA are moustache-twirling villains through and through. Part 1 also features pretty little in terms of industry, but part 2 has a few whaling scenes that are, honestly, pretty cool.
Also, it's not sci-fi at all, but there's a documentary called Erde (translates to Earth) that you might enjoy (https://vimeo.com/ondemand/erde). It's also not hiding the fact that it's made from an environmentalist point of view, but it's light enough on talking that you might just enjoy the photography.
Avatar (like Dune, which a couple people have emailed me about) is about resource extraction but is way more interested in indigenous resistance and violent colonial administration than it is in the actual work of mining unobtanium (or harvesting spice)... maybe understandable! But it always annoyed me about Dune how little Herbert was interested in the Dune Men.
The sentence I keep coming back to: "The only tools left to writers, who have no legal way to control and negotiate the supply and pricing of their work, are indirect forms of social protectionism: snobbery, taste, and 'gatekeeping.'"
This week, owning my snobbery has given me permission to publicly point out the idiocy of a LinkedIn marketer who claims to be inventing "content theory." So thanks.
You're a labor hero, Deborah
I think the Firefly TV series and movie has an industrial feel. It's implied that the planets they visit are agrarian or industrial, and then they also have the central planets with cities and higher level technology.
We need some near future movies about semiconductor fab factories or drone manufacturing for war. Twice in the last year I've read stories about rescues of lost people using drones to find them. There was a story about a toddler lost in a corn field that they found with a drone; and a guy last year lost in a national park.
Silent Running is another post-industrial sci-fi movie, with the twist that the “industry” is the preservation of biodiversity that has been destroyed by economic exploitation.