Will AI Replace Artists or Inspire Them?
During a livestream not long ago , Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, tweeted the single word 'her' during a demonstration of the company’s latest AI-powered voice assistant model, ChatGPT-4o. The message was a clear reference to the assistant’s voice resembling that of actress, Scarlett Johansson, who played an AI assistant involved in a romantic relationship with a man in the movie, Her. Sam Altman was a fan of the film.
OpenAI’s decision to create a flirty female persona for its chatbot was already a dubious ethical choice given that it perpetuates gender bias. Then came a statement from Johansson implying that OpenAI may have created a facsimile of her voice after she declined an offer to voice the AI assistant for the company. The scandal caused OpenAI to retire this particularly bot.
The controversy underscores the existential threat AI poses to artists who fear being replaced by AI tools, even as AI makers use their copyrighted work and likenesses to train models without permission or compensation. While proving direct lines of appropriation isn’t always easy, we know its happening as tools proliferate in every creative discipline. Some of the most well known: AIVA (music composition) DALL-E and Midjourney (image generation) ChatGPT-4 and Claude (writing) Synthesia (video creation) and ScriptBook (screenwriting).
AI tool makers train models by scraping existing visual and textual data from the internet like a trawler scraping the ocean floor for lobster. While most aren’t yet approximating the output of human artists, these tools are increasingly creating viable products. When not busy composing cover letters and grade school reports on butterflies, OpenAI's ChatGPT4 is authoring entire books sold on Amazon. Soon, we’re told, large language models will be generating literary content on par with human authors.
As for the upper echelons of the visual art markets, AI is already cresting mountaintops. In 2018 AI-created artwork, 'Portrait of Edmond de Belamy,' sold for $432,500 at Christie’s. More recently, in fall of 2023, New York City’s MoMA acquired Refik Anadol’s “Unsupervised—Machine Hallucinations”, in which a machine-learning model generates artworks based on those in the museum’s collection.
So where does this leave artists in the coming era, those for whom work is not only labor, but purpose and calling? Economists and business leaders writing for the Harvard Business Review offer various predictions:
Generative AI authored art will not replace artists, but allow creators to work with greater efficiency and productivity.
Unfair algorithmic competition and inadequate governance will lead to the crowding out of authentic human creativity, with budding talented creators opting out of the market.
Human-created art will command a premium in the aftermath of a “tech-lash” in which people place an even higher value on authentic creativity.
The most likely scenario is that all three predictions, and probably a few more, will play out across different pockets of the creative markets.
And yet for those of us who are deeply invested in the more fundamental question about the role of the artist in an AI-driven future, this answer does little to inform or inspire action. This matters fundamentally because the future we face isn’t foregone, rather it’ll be determined by those who take a firm hand in shaping it. For this reason it feels important to dig deeper to address this more fundamental question. I just wasn’t sure where else to look for answers.
It was a couple days later, frustrated in the quest, I began mindlessly scrolling YouTube, as one does, until I came upon a TED Talk called "What is an AI Anyway?” by Mustafa Sulyeman, Head of Google’s Deepmind innovation lab.
Speaking from the stage, Mr. Sulyeman began:
“For years, we in the AI community, and I specifically, have had a tendency to refer to this as just tools. But that doesn't really capture what's actually happening here.
AIs are clearly more dynamic, more ambiguous, more integrated and more emergent than mere tools, which are entirely subject to human control.
So to contain this wave, to put human agency at its center and to mitigate the inevitable unintended consequences that are likely to arise, we should start to think about them as we might a new kind of digital species […] Clearly they aren't biological in any traditional sense, but just pause for a moment and really think about what they already do. They communicate in our languages. They see what we see. They consume unimaginably large amounts of information. They have memory. They have personality. They have creativity. They can even reason to some extent and formulate rudimentary plans. They can act autonomously if we allow them [...]
This is a super arresting thought but I honestly think this frame helps sharpen our focus on the critical issues.”
For me, works of art have always been a grounding reference point when confronted with overwhelming information.
Did he just say that AI is a new digital species? A species that does what it wants - unleashed on an unwitting public? I believe he did!
Now, I couldn’t help thinking of a poem that has been a touchstone in moments of change and chaos for more than a century, The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats. Read on and I think you’ll see why.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
And there it is. The answer I was searching for. All this time I’d been looking to economists, commentators and AI leaders to help me understand the role of the artist in this new era when I should have looked to the great artists themselves.
At the time The Second Coming was written in January 1919, a revolutionary Irish Parliament was meeting in Dublin to declare independence from Britain. WWI was barely over and the Russian Revolution was still unfolding. The devastating scale of mechanized warfare made the endurance of the species seem uncertain. Not only that, the Spanish flu had just just torn through Europe. If the apocalyptic tone of the poem seems overwrought in hindsight, it most likely did not at the time.
50 years later in 1968, Joan Didion borrowed the famous last line of Yeats's poem for the title of her seminal essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. This collection, grounded in months of investigative journalism, offers a vivid portrayal of the 1960s counterculture in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district and examines the broader unraveling of the social fabric during a time marked by political and social turmoil.
The job of artists in any era is to bear witness to human experience, to comment on critical issues, question societal values, and reveal the human condition.
Even as the future of creative markets in a world flooded with computer generated art remains uncertain, artists should be emboldened, and those who value art should take comfort, knowing that the role of the artist and the essence of human creativity will endure.