AJ Chronicles: This Week — Perils of the Algorithmic Culture

This week we collected 134 stories on ArtsJournal.com. [subscribe] Here’s what I learned:

The whether-AI-can-make-art debate is by now a well-worn trope. It’s actually a tedious question. If we still haven’t been able to come up with a definitive answer to the age-old college dorm room question “what is art” then how are we supposed to be able to judge whether AI can make it? A small study published this week offers a more interesting question, I think: researchers found that watching experimental films boosts creative thinking in ways that watching YouTube videos doesn’t. The algorithmic feed isn’t neutral, it turns out. It’s actively training minds toward patterns of consumption that are the opposite of what creative cognition requires.

That’s interesting enough. But consider it next to some other stories this week and an even more interesting thought arises:

Thousands of AI-generated books are flooding the market written in the style of living authors and not just competing with them economically but saturating the reading marketplace with optimized, frictionless prose. Then there are the tech companies that are racing to give chatbots emotional intelligence, engineering machines to perform the very qualities — empathy, nuance, sensitivity — that we’ve always considered distinctively human. So machines are getting better at mimicking human depth while humans are being trained by feeds that reward shallow processing. Meet you in the middle?

Even journalism is feeling it. A fascinating essay this week suggested that the anecdotal lede, that longstanding workhorse of narrative journalism, has outlived its utility in an attention economy that’s already optimizing every story opening for maximum engagement. When the algorithm is actively shaping both the creator and receiver, what’s left?

The threat isn’t that AI replaces artists. It’s subtler and more coercive: that an algorithmically saturated environment erodes the capacity for the kind of thinking that we like to think art requires. Tolerance for ambiguity. Patience with difficulty. The willingness to be bored before a breakthrough. The experimental film study reinforces something artists and educators have been saying for years — that the medium of consumption reshapes the consumer. Marshall McLuhan’s the medium is the message. Right now, the dominant medium is optimized for the exact opposite of creative risk.

As Ezra Klein recently observed on his podcast, while it’s possible to outsource the work in making something creative, that act of making is how creative people learn and grow. Art isn’t efficient. It’s struggle. Difficulty. A process in which you learn something on the journey that informs and enriches the result. Perhaps outsourcing the hard parts to AI condemns the artist to never transcending what he or she might most learn from in order to evolve.

And for a generation of audience trained on the everyday experience of consuming algorithmic feeds, perhaps there’s less tolerance for the messy unpredictability of the live artistic work, which is really where we’d like to think art lives? Why would I buy tickets for experiences I’ve been trained to filter out?

And then there was this curious counterpoint: Spotify announced a partnership with independent live music venues this week. Perhaps a quiet concession that algorithmic discovery can’t replicate what happens when people gather in a room with a stage? The feed can recommend. It can’t transform. It can’t evolve in unexpected ways. Perhaps that distinction in an AI world may turn out to matter more than any copyright debate.

Also Worth Your Attention

America’s only accredited circus school closed. Philadelphia’s Circadium School of Contemporary Circus shut down this week, not because students didn’t want to attend but because it couldn’t access federal student aid. The credentialing infrastructure, the system that decides what counts as legitimate training, didn’t have a category for this kind of instruction. It’s a small story, but perhaps it suggests something more important? When the systems that certify and fund are designed for a narrow set of institutional forms, everything that doesn’t fit the template gets quietly squeezed out, regardless of demand.

Author Helen DeWitt declined a $175,000 literary prize. The novelist turned down a prestigious award this week, and the reaction out in the world was fascinating — a mixture of admiration and bafflement that someone would refuse official rewards. In a culture that increasingly treats prizes as the validation that makes an artistic career legible, choosing to step outside that circuit is its own kind of statement about what recognition is for.

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Editor’s Note: These weekly essays are meant to connect stories from the week to larger trends and ideas across the arts world. To see all the stories on which these essays are drawn from, subscribe to ArtsJournal’s free daily and weekly newsletters. To support our work, sign up at Patreon or subscribe to our Substack newsletter.