Something Is Lost When AI Makes Art
That’s right: a neartermist take! Cower before its sublime wrath!
The Resurrection of the Author
Here, hold my bee.
— Someone with beauty in their eye
There are many theories of aesthetics that seek to explain the value of art and the nature of beauty. On some of these theories, the artist’s role is subordinate to the viewer’s. Aesthetic value is located in a private experience between the viewer and the artistic object. The beauty of an intricate painting is not too different from the beauty of a sunset: the painter is irrelevant.
If you think of art in these terms, you might be excited by the prospect of a proliferation of cheap and beautiful AI-generated artwork. Even if you don’t think art is especially enjoyable, you might still hold a consequentialist view on which art plays a historical role in capturing the zeitgeist of the time, or a didactic role in holding up a mirror to society. Arguably, AI-generated art could carry out both functions better than human-generated art.
I am receptive to all this! But there is an argument against AI-generated art that I worry is overshadowed by artists’ vocal concerns about job loss. Is the argument important enough to outweigh the benefits of AI-generated art? Uh, I don’t know, probably not, you decide.[1]
The argument is this: The most significant way that art has impacted my life is by fostering a feeling of connection to artists. The art is just a conduit by which I learn about an artist’s experiences: then I relate to the artist and feel more understood and less alone in my own experiences. Art is uniquely suited to this purpose, in part because it allows the artist to obfuscate their message from unsympathetic audiences.
James Baldwin said it best:
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive.[2]
AI-generated art lacks this property because the artist did not have experiences, or at least not experiences that I can relate to, or at least not as well as I can relate to a human artist. Here’s FKA twigs speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee. (If you haven’t seen the full clip, it is absolute gold. She goes on to reveal that she has made deepfakes of herself.)
I am here because my music, my dancing, my acting, the way my body moves in front of the camera, and the way that my voice resonates through a microphone is not by chance. They’re essential reflections of who I am. My art is a canvas on which I paint my identity and the sustaining foundation of my livelihood. It is the very essence of my being.
Yet this is under threat. Al cannot replicate the depth of my life journey, yet those who control it hold the power to mimic the likeness of my art, replicate it, and falsely claim my identity and intellectual property.
Her testimony emphasizes that deepfakes threaten her, rather than the ways they rob her audience of connection, but she still hits on the crucial point: her art reflects her identity. By engaging with her music, listeners can access her experiences.
An Example: Lord of the Flies and Other Bugs
Look out on a summer’s day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul . . .
Now, I understand what you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity— Don McLean, “Vincent”
Let me try to make this clearer by working through an example. Go ahead and skip this section if you feel like you have a good handle on the idea.
When I was a kid, I was pretty sensitive to violence against insects and spiders. Not, like, Brian Tomasik-level, but if a spider lost a leg while I was transporting it outside, that was a small tragedy. Killing them was impermissible. My insistence on humane deportation over summary execution brought a measure of peace between Man and Bug in my house.[3]
But my domestic ahimsa did not extend to school, where anarchy governed Man-Bug relations. An exotic bug was one of the more entertaining spectacles the playground could deliver. If you spotted such an unfortunate creature, you were soon joined by a ring of other children, mostly boys. And the thing about boys is they’re cruel. They would loom over their victim for a couple minutes. Someone might dance into the circle, flirting with the idea of stepping on the bug, reifying the prospect in the minds of the others. Then the bug would invariably meet a gruesome end.
I remember the terror I would feel in those couple minutes before the shoe descended: I couldn’t speak out against them for fear of planting the idea or enticing them further or becoming a target myself. Maybe there was a peaceful equilibrium to this game! Maybe it was even preferred! But the violent equilibrium was too salient to shake. By racing to kill the bug, everyone best-responded to their beliefs that, eventually, someone else in the group would do it. One time a boy hovered his foot over the bug, and another boy—not to be left out—stomped down on top, crushing the bug beneath both shoes.
So I would stand in silence and rage as the hyperstition forced itself into reality and bear witness to the banality of evil. I did not know how to make sense of the mob mentality, and because my peers seemed eager to participate in this repulsive ritual, I felt alone.
Then I read Lord of the Flies. For the uninitiated, the classic novel takes place on an island, where a plane full of British schoolboys has crash-landed. One of the boys has asthma, for which he is often told “Sucks to your ass-mar!”, a favorite phrase of mine. Eventually, bullying escalates to murder: in a ritual frenzy, the boys slaughter a “beast,” whom they later identify as their friend Simon.
A wave of restlessness set the boys swaying and moving aimlessly. . . .
The hunters took their spears, the cooks took spits, and the rest clubs of firewood. A circling movement developed and a chant. . . . Piggy and Ralph, under the threat of the sky, found themselves eager to take a place in this demented but partly secure society. They were glad to touch the brown backs of the fence that hemmed in the terror and made it governable.
“Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!”
The movement became regular while the chant lost its first superficial excitement and began to beat like a steady pulse. . . . Some of the littluns started a ring on their own; and the complementary circles went round and round as though repetition would achieve safety of itself. There was the throb and stamp of a single organism. . . .
“Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!”
Now out of the terror rose another desire, thick, urgent, blind.
“Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!” . . .
The circle became a horseshoe. A thing was crawling out of the forest. It came darkly, uncertainly. The shrill screaming that rose before the beast was like a pain. The beast stumbled into the horseshoe. . . .
“Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood! Do him in!”
The sticks fell and the mouth of the new circle crunched and screamed. The beast was on its knees in the center, its arms folded over its face. It was crying out against the abominable noise something about a body on the hill. The beast struggled forward, broke the ring and fell over the steep edge of the rock to the sand by the water. At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.
For my younger self, this passage was a revelation. Here was my own schoolyard experience, decocted down to its essence and spooned out in prose. By seeing the phenomenon through someone else’s eyes, I obtained a firmer grasp on the mob mentality that drove my peers to persecute insects. And crucially, here was proof that at least one other person who saw things the same way as me had walked this earth.
I’ve had so many moments like this. When I have to close the book or take out my headphones to think, “Holy shit. Yes! Yes! That’s exactly it. Ohmygod, they get it.”[4]
Ok now compare this to a short story courtesy of Claude. I requested, “Write me a scene about boys who kill a bug on the playground. Try to capture the needless cruelty of the situation.” Claude obliged:
Here’s a short scene depicting the situation you described:
The recess bell rang and children poured onto the sun-drenched playground. Amid the chaos of shouting and laughter, three boys huddled in a far corner, their backs to the games and chatter.
“Look, I found one!” Tommy exclaimed, pointing at a large beetle lumbering across the pavement. Its iridescent shell glinted in the sunlight as it made its slow journey.
“Gross,” sneered Jake, wrinkling his nose. “Let’s squash it.”
Mark, the smallest of the three, hesitated. “Maybe we should just leave it alone?”
Jake shot him a withering look. “Don’t be such a baby.” He picked up a stick and poked at the beetle, flipping it onto its back. The insect’s legs waved helplessly in the air.
Tommy laughed, a harsh sound that didn’t match his cherubic face. “Watch this,” he said, raising his foot.
“Wait—” Mark started, but it was too late.
Tommy’s sneaker came down with a sickening crunch. When he lifted his foot, only a smear remained where the beetle had been.
The boys stared at the remains for a moment. Jake broke the silence with a whoop. “Awesome! Let’s find another one!”
As they ran off to search for more victims, Mark lingered behind. He glanced back at the crushed beetle, a fleeting sadness in his eyes, before hurrying to catch up with his friends.
Look, it’s fine. Good, even. If a human had written it, I would feel seen. But I don’t because I need a human to relate.
Objection 1: Why does this have to be through art?
For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
— John Milton
At this point, straw-you might be thinking. You might think: Look, all the people I know who care about art tend to say things like “good art Acknowledges and Dialogues with the Tradition of the Form” and they talk about “composition” and “temporality” and “intertextuality.” This guy doesn’t say anything about that, and in fact, I’m starting to suspect the property of art that is the subject of this post is not unique to art at all!
Alright, easy there. I concede that hearing about someone’s experiences and feeling connected to them is not the exclusive preserve of art. I even concede that a humble conversation with a friend can achieve this purpose. Does it follow that we should not mourn the loss of human-generated art? No! There are some features of art that make it especially well-suited for facilitating connection; in the absence of human-generated art, we would struggle to find adequate substitutes.
Big search space: There’s so much art out there. In 2010, Google Books estimated that 130 million books had been published since the invention of the printing press. Surely one of those monkeys typed out the string to your heart! Stuart Russell writes that “it would take two hundred thousand full-time humans just to keep up with the
world’s current level of print publication.”
Old media allows you get to hear from people who aren’t even alive today.
And art has so many dimensions! Sometimes you have an experience that goes like this: the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift. The experience is musical in nature; it would impoverish your communication of the experience to reduce the medium to fewer dimensions, say, to a spoken testimony.
Efficient search: You can get a fair number of bits from judging a book by its cover. Or an album by its cover. Or an art exhibit by its title. These tasks take ~seconds. Establishing a trusted friendship, on the other hand, takes years. Even reading the book or listening to the album or visiting the gallery doesn’t take too long, and there are pressures for artists to keep it that way.
Plus, once you find something you like, it’s easy to find related work.
Proof of Experience: For communicating the artist’s experience, the most important feature of art is its unfakeability. I claim that a viewer can tell, with high specificity, when they have shared an experience with the artist.
First, people are decent at detecting when someone is telling them the truth. One possible reason is that lying is hard: you have to generate convincing false statements, while your listener verifies their truth and consistency.[5] Even when you’re reading fiction, you can occasionally tell that the author has stopped relying on their imagination and switched to writing from their own experience. For example, an author might include a random detail that they would only know if they were really there. But okay, this is true of all communication, not just art.
The reason more unique to art is that artists face pressure to compress their work. Because the market encourages them to keep it brief, because some styles favor a little mystery, and because it is risky to earnestly share intimate experiences (or subversive messages) with the public.[6] When you are communicating sensitive information on a public and potentially hostile channel, a natural strategy is to encrypt your message so that its meaning is only available to a sympathetic audience—in this case, an audience who understands what you’ve been through.[7] When I listen to some songs, I feel like the experience that I share with the artist is the private key that I can use to decrypt their message. The fact that I can access the deeper meaning is proof that the artist really did share the same experience as me.[8]
This is the same principle behind Black spirituals that concealed advice and directions for fugitive slaves. To white listeners, songs about ‘freedom’ referred to freedom from sin, but enslaved people filtered the lyrics through their own experience to interpret ‘freedom’ as freedom from bondage.
To take a more frivolous example, this dynamic is also the truth in the joke that you know you’ve grown up when you start rooting for Candace to catch Phineas and Ferb.
So I think adequate substitutes would be scarce in a world without human-generated art.
Objection 2: If this is true, there will always be a market for human-generated art
Everything is free now
That’s what they say
Everything I ever done
Gonna give it away
Someone hit the big score
They figured it out
That we’re gonna do it anyway
Even if it doesn’t pay— Gillian Welch, “Everything Is Free”
The usual responses apply.
Smaller market → worse economies of scale → higher marginal costs, pricing some people out.
Art consumption is often nonrival and non-excludable, so the market under-provides it. This problem will persist when AI-generated art fractures the market.[9]
And the free-rider problem is especially fundamental in this case. For the shared-experience argument to go through, you can’t just commission a piece from an artist with nice style, you need to find an artist who actually shares your experiences. At the point where you’ve found someone who fits the description, you don’t need their art! So you will always be free-riding on the investments of others in that artist’s career.
If the job is perceived as riskier, fewer people will pursue careers in art, so we draw the best of n from a smaller pool. And you better believe the ones who succeed are not going to be the ones with interesting life experiences.
I’ll grant you that the Taylor Swifts of the world are not going anywhere: there will always be demand for parasocial relationships with flesh and blood pop stars who sing about lowest-common-denominator experiences. But there is a size at which a town is simply too small to sustain an arts scene.
You might say, public good problems aside, that which can be destroyed by the market should be. That’s a fine conclusion, I’m just saying we should reckon with the full consequences of a future in which the global art market could not bear anything like its current diversity of artists.
Objection 3: So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance
Maybe, the ambiguity IS the point...
— Every art history major ever
There’s a kind of sad objection that’s like: you can’t distinguish AI-generated art from human-generated art, so every time you encounter a piece of art that validates your own experiences, there is always a chance that it was human-made. (See my forthcoming post on adversarial Turing tests.)
But whether this is actually comforting depends on the viewer’s reactions to their beliefs about the distribution of AI- vs human-generated art. The true distribution might be 99% AI-generated and 1% human-generated, the viewer’s beliefs might be even more skewed, and even if the distribution is fairly balanced and the viewer is calibrated, there’s no guarantee the viewer will be able to access an emotional reaction to that probability.
- ^
I do not claim that my argument causally explains the backlash against AI-generated art. E.g., it is not meant to answer this tweet from Janus.
- ^
However, the position I am defending here is weaker than Baldwin’s in three ways:
1. I only claim that art connects you to a single artist, rather than everyone who has ever lived.
2. He makes the subsequent claim that by understanding your own experiences, you can then understand other people’s experiences.
3. For Baldwin, artists seem to be unique in their ability to make you feel seen, whereas I think anyone can accomplish what I’m describing in the course of a good conversation. - ^
The exceptions were black widows, which I could not protect from Raid. A concession to the hawkish Members of the House.
- ^
In the Lord of the Flies example, I had the experience and then encountered the art, but the reverse sequence is also common.
- ^
Obviously, sometimes generating lies is easier than verifying them.
- ^
Yes, some artists have been famously vulnerable in their art, but these instance are notable because they are exceptions.
- ^
The fear of being vulnerable in public that causes artists to compress their messages can also give rise to other face-saving tactics. Here’s Scott Alexander recently on irony:
You do everything ironically. If you did something non-ironically—wrote a deep poem that laid your entire being bare, committed whole-heartedly to a political position you truly believed in—you would be opening yourself up for judgment. Instead, you communicate only by tentatively putting out little feelers, and then, the moment someone starts to frown, retracting them with a “Haha, trolled, I was only joking”. If anyone else does things non-ironically, you deride them as “pretentious” and “cringe”.
- ^
Though we would be wise to stay wary of the desire to feel special to a pop star, which can lead to a conspiratorial sense of exclusive connection. See Barnum Effect.
- ^
I don’t have a great model, but I think the inefficiency could increase or decrease; the effect is ambiguous. Suppose a public good is only provided if there exists at least one person who is willing to pay for it in full (e.g., there is no Spotify for cost-sharing). If AI-generated art is basically costless to produce, then everyone is privately incentivized to create as much as they desire, and there is no free rider problem in that market.
Since the AI-generated art is a partial substitute for human-generated art, the marginal benefit of human-generated art will fall, decreasing the inefficiency of the market for human-generated art. On the other hand, more people will be priced out because it is no longer worth it for them to pay for expensive human labor, increasing inefficiency. The overall change in efficiency depends on which effect dominates.
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Indeed, something is lost even when AI makes dank memes.