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How to Think About How AI will Change the Arts?

January 7, 2024 by Douglas McLennan 4 Comments

Image by norabot from Pixabay

A lot of the stories about AI and art right now are about legal issues — artists and content companies suing Big AI for copyright infringement — or reporters prompting AI models to create essays, novels, poetry or images and then explaining why AI will never be able to truly compete with human artists. Both stories, in my opinion, are distractions. (current copyright law never anticipated how AI trains on existing creative work, and judging the potential of AI based on current models is looking backward rather than forward).

But yes, AI will change everything, because it will alter how we think about what creativity is, what ownership of creativity means, how and who can be creative, what an artist is, and how we share and interact with art and artists. Just as significantly, the business of creativity — the models and marketplaces that support creative production — will be disrupted.

But how to illustrate? Over the next few months, I hope to give some examples of how my thinking has evolved about it. At the moment, “how to think about it” may be the most important place to start. It’s easy to be distracted playing with ChatGPT and being dazzled by stories of potential but having no idea what it might do for, say, a symphony orchestra.

So an example. Last month at The New York Times‘ Dealbook conference, Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, the world’s leading maker of the graphic GPUs used in most AI computers, said that beginning several product generations ago, AI had replaced humans in designing the architectures used for Nvidia devices. Was this a difficult transition, he was asked? Yes. He had noticed that while human engineers made steady but incremental improvements from generation to generation, when the company tried using AI to design architecture, it broke all the design rules humans had played by and created shortcuts that far outperformed human designs. The difficulty for him, he said, was conceptual, in letting go of the things he knew about GPU design and trust the AI as it created and built on its own language which he didn’t necessarily understand himself. Today, he said, there’s not a human that could compete with AI in designing Nvidia architectures. The same is happening in software coding and in other industries.

So what might be such a conceptual shift for an orchestra? It’s not in having an AI write new symphonies. But for humans, composing a piece for an orchestra and getting a successful performance on a stage requires a dizzying array of technical skills. A composer needs to know how to translate the sounds she hears in her head into notation, has to know how every instrument works and what it’s capable of, how the sounds of instruments blend together and how to orchestrate them. Then you need dozens of musicians each skilled at their instruments. And a conductor who can not only read the composer’s score, but also translate it into an interpretation, effectively communicate that to players and then, in a performance, hope that everything comes together.

How many people are there in the world capable of marshalling the skills and opportunity necessary to go from head to stage to recording? A few hundred? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? But how many people might be hearing music in their head but not have the traditional skills (or opportunity) to get them created? A million? Ten million? A hundred million?

Many popular musicians can’t read music and who cares? It’s the music they make that counts. But perhaps with AI, someone who hears a symphony, instead of having to learn how to write it down, describes it in words to the AI (as one would do now with ChatGPT for text or Dall-E or MidJourney for images). Someone who got very good at prompts could create not only a sophisticated symphony (and print scores for human musicians to play) but also create the composer’s ideal performance/recording of the piece. Maybe the new work might have instruments performing notes or passages that aren’t possible with human musicians on traditional instruments. Perhaps such “extended” instrumentation might evolve the musical language in ways physical orchestras might work to adapt. In the historical evolution of orchestras, major shifts in style and language were often driven by new technology.

So let a million symphonies bloom. If history holds, most of them will be crap. But bringing the ability to compose to vastly more people would inevitably stir things up. It would exponentially expand the number of people who have a creative relationship with orchestras. And it will influence what we value and what we listen for. It would inevitably bring more people from outside the Western European tradition into creating in the orchestra idiom, expanding and diversifying the language and revitalizing the artform.

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Filed Under: arts & tech

Comments

  1. no says

    January 7, 2024 at 2:51 am

    This “article” is nothing but bootlicking for tech companies to hijack human creativity. Fucking AI should be used for solving world hunger, curing diseases, mowing the lawn and doing your taxes; Not for tech companies to appropriate human creativity to make yet another buck at great expense to humans and civilization at large. Promoting it with fanciful scenarios about it being some magical key to advance creativity is delusional bullshit, it is not and never will be what it is actually used for. It will be used for war, mechanized killing, propaganda, and commerce. AI “art” is consistently a shallow pastiche of nonsense. A sad parody of actual creativity. A pale simulacrum of real art. AI artists dont exist as theres no such thing; derivative illustrators at best, hackneyed frauds at worst, and promoters out shilling for tech companies like this are the lowest of the low. .. nothing but complicit garbage.

    Reply
    • Douglas McLennan says

      January 7, 2024 at 4:41 pm

      AI is already here. Already working on “solving world hunger, curing diseases, mowing the lawn and doing your taxes.” Also creating images, text, video and sound. The reason artists need to be thinking about how to use AI is so tech companies don’t write the rules by themselves and further gut the ability of artists to earn a living as they did in the digital revolution.

      Waiting while tech experiments and business figures out how to wring money out of it is what got us in this mess. AI isn’t going to replace us. Humans who know how to use AI in their work will have a big advantage over those who don’t.

      Reply
    • John McCann says

      January 9, 2024 at 4:17 am

      Might the writer consider a series, maybe on the, ‘great expense to humans and civilization at large’ of say the evolution of language, the invention of fire, the introduction of paper and the printing press? Then, time permitting, onto the telephone and 911, the World Wide Web and telemedicine, oh, and the alarm on my Smartphone that got me up just in time to read your incisive commentary?

      Reply
  2. Michael Christian says

    January 7, 2024 at 8:38 pm

    This article by Douglas McLennan makes a very intriguing prediction about what AI might be able to do in composing symphonies. I look forward to his views on how to think about what artists are. The ridiculous claim by a commenter on his article that “AI ‘art’ is consistently a shallow pastiche of nonsense” fails to grasp a fact obvious to any intelligent observer, namely that AI art is on the cusp of equaling and superseding everything humans have ever created.

    Reply

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Douglas McLennan

I’m the founder and editor of ArtsJournal, which was founded in September 1999 and aggregates arts and culture news from all over the internet. The site is also home to some 60 arts bloggers. I’m a … [Read More...]

About diacritical

Our culture is undergoing profound changes. Our expectations for what culture can (or should) do for us are changing. Relationships between those who make and distribute culture and those who consume it are changing. And our definitions of what artists are, how they work, and how we access them and their work are changing. So... [Read more]

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