Taking the ART out of Artificial Intelligence
There’s a lot of chatter right now about the proliferation of AI-Artificial Intelligence. To offer a super reductive definition: AI is a machine-based way of simulating “human intelligence,” which is a phrase that I find increasingly oxymoronic by the second. AI has been around in various forms for a long time, but in the last decade has grown exponentially to encompass applications that range from speech and language recognition, search engine capabilities, to self-driving cars and decision-making programs used in sophisticated games like chess. Most recently a whole kerfluffle has cropped up over the use of AI in art-based spaces: music, visual/graphic art, and writing to name a few. This has, understandably, made an already habitually neurotic community (i.e. artists) even sweatier. Artists are worried that robots are coming for our jobs. Well, the joke is on you Johnny 5: WHO ACTUALLY GETS PAID TO MAKE ART ANYMORE? Good luck trying to buy Microsoft chip upgrades with all that “exposure.”
Of course it’s worth having a nuanced, thoughtful discussion around this technology, its abilities, and, most importantly, the far-reaching effects of its applications. There are ethical questions to consider about ownership and privacy and monetization. There should be healthy dialogue about how this technology could be harnessed for positive outcomes. Maybe AI will cure diabetes! Maybe we should let it craft public policy because could it really do worse at this point? We are going to have to figure how to live with this innovation, but I’m just not too worried that we’re going to start handing out Pulitzers for books cranked out by a server farm in Nevada. And the reason for this is: The Darkness.
The Darkness is a U.K. rock band I stumbled upon a few weeks ago thanks to a filler piece in The Guardian titled: “ ‘Why don’t we just write the stupidest song ever?’ How The Darkness Made I Believe in a Thing Called Love.” It would take me too long to tick through all the things that called to me in this headline like a sweet, trash culture siren song. I can only say I was handsomely rewarded for giving into the click bait.
The image accompanying the article depicts four long-haired, scraggy bandmembers crammed into a limo, clutching flutes of champagne. One is shirtless, clad in gold pants; another wears a loose white shirt unbuttoned to the naval, splayed open like a rock pirate. They somehow manage to look both posed and surprised to find themselves drinking champagne in a limo with a photographer. The article itself is primarily a short oral history-style back and forth between the two brothers who also founded the band, Dan and Justin Hawkins, discussing how their smash hit “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” came into being.
Each deliver some profound insights:
Dan: “For me, The Darkness was about albums and being an incredible rock band. I wasn’t bothered about being popular.”
Another from Dan: “The crab that features in the music video meant something to the band. It was a reference to when you’ve taken lots of cocaine and your eyes are basically on stalks. It has appeared on numerous occasions throughout our career. We’ve always had an affinity with sea creatures, possibly because we’re from Lowestoft in Suffolk.
Justin: “I was almost on a pathological quest to put “love” in every single song. I’m always in love, that’s the reality. It’s one of the first and most abiding addictions of my life.”
And also from Justin: “My goal has always been to get every pair of hands in the air. We’ve seen a lot of hands in a lot of different airspace.”
If you read any of these quotes in the voice of Spinal Tap’s David St. Hubbins, then you get how quasi-cartoonish this one-hundred-percent-not-at-all-satirical-band is and how that is a thing of creative majesty (chef’s kiss!). More on that in a minute, but I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the video for their rock-pop love opus. It is worth the 12 minutes of your life. The video is about three minutes long, but you will end up watching it at least four times. At least.
The music video (still actually a thing!) for “I Believe in a Thing Called Love” is a stunning visual offering that consists of cramming nearly every hair metal music video trope from the 1980s into, as I mentioned, about three minutes of film. They are as follows:
Outer space (both on a ship and generic inhospitable planet)
Smoke/fog/fire
Water elements
Writhing around on an odd-shaped bed of satin sheets
Partial nudity
Holographic floating heads
Bad CGI of lead singer super-imposed on hostile planet
Slow motion running
Woman clad in red latex paint resembling a demon-alien creature
Guitarist soloing in a room of floor to ceiling Marshall amps (*that one is pretty cool)
Guitars and drumsticks that shoot lightening lasers
Guitars and drumsticks that shoot lightening lasers in order to fend off giant space squid viciously attacking and/or mating with the spaceship
Giant space squid
What does any of this have to do with AI? Humans are riddled with deeply idiosyncratic elements, sort of like finger prints within finger prints, that AI will never be able to replicate. Every human that creates anything at all brings their, for lack of a less woo-woo term, essence to the work—their flaws and fears and desires and tastes and beliefs and neuroses and a whole raft of ineffable things that account for that person’s distinctive humanness. Those things are different than voice and style, which can be imitated. Consider the art forgers who have managed to fool experts. AI might approach something to that degree at some point, but when I come across something like The Darkness and their video with all its goofy, weird, so-enjoyably-bad elements that coalesce into something earnest, something that feels pretty genuine in respect to this group of creatives, I feel reassured. As Rick Rubin notes in his powerful Zen-influenced book The Creative Act: “No matter what you use to create, the true instrument is you.”
Because when all is said and done, AI can come for our words and images, but it will never have our souls.
"The joke is on you Johnny 5" LMAO
You are spot-on about the music video. It feels like satire but is also kind of earnest? Endlessly rewatchable, anyway.
Why doing that tree with AI?, there are millions of trees like that out there. Am I wrong?