AI is creating a 'human premium' for art made by people. But will it hold?
A few weeks back, in a former bank building that’s now a music venue in Falmouth, Cornwall, I was DJ-ing at a night I run called Rave Machine. It was a noisy, high-energy, sweaty affair, just as a night’s dancing should be.
All of the elements – the crowd, performers, staff, music, the journey home – connected to create something special, a one-off. It was also completely human.
Something, in theory, well out of reach of what technology could possibly offer.
In the DJ world, though, technology has already changed the equation. In the 1990s, a DJ had to not only pick the tracks, but also thread them together armed only with vinyl records, a pair of turntables and a mixer. Now, much more assistance is on offer, including software that will sync beats on different tracks should you ask it to (I don’t). Apple Music and Spotify have an AI tune-mixing option too.
Ros Atkins at his DJ night in Cornwall – a fundamentally human experience, he writes
If you were out dancing, would it matter to you if a DJ was, well, not really DJing? If you loved the music being played, would you care if technology was doing the work?
It’s a question that generative AI – the type of AI that creates content – is asking of us all. One of the thrills of that night in Falmouth was seeing our special guest, Andy Cato from Groove Armada, artfully weaving an array of tracks. How would I feel if a DJ was just pressing play? (And that does happen).
I mention all of this because that experience in Falmouth connects to a far broader question: whether we actually care if a piece of art has been created by a human, be that a painting, song, book, poem, or any other type of art.
The music platform Deezer says 44% of tracks uploaded to it are AI-generated. Its research also found that 97% of listeners couldn’t tell what was AI-generated and what wasn’t. But here’s a third statistic: more than half of those surveyed said they did care if it was made by AI. They want humans to be involved.
Daniel Susskind, an economics professor at King’s College London, says many of us place huge value on the human role in making art. It’s what makes the creative process different from more functional, practical tasks, he thinks.
“I was once in a room of accountants, and one of them stood up and said, ‘My clients come to me for the personal touch, the human process’,” he remembers. “And I said, ‘That isn’t why they come to you, they come because they want their taxes done properly’.”
But it’s different with art, he says. “If I walk into the Sistine Chapel and look at the ceiling, I think not only is that extraordinarily beautiful, but isn’t it amazing that a human hand, flesh and blood like my own, came up with that. A mind like mine dreamt that up,” he says.
As Susskind describes it, what we value isn’t just the destination, it’s the knowledge that a human – one of us – got us there. We can wonder at that achievement.
Many people feel awe when they look inside the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, says Daniel Susskind
Of course, it could be argued that computers and AI software were themselves created by humans. If Susskind feels awe walking into the Sistine Chapel, others might experience awe of a different type using a chatbot like ChatGPT.
Susskind points to another example, this time a chess match in 1997, when a world champion, Garry Kasparov, lost for the first time to a computer, Deep Blue. At the time, there were fears the computer’s success would mean our interest in chess would wane. In fact, chess is more popular than ever, played by millions.
“It wasn’t simply the moves on the board that people care about. It’s the fact that it’s a human being sitting behind them, moving those pieces along that matters,” Susskind argues.
And some think that the advent of AI has actually placed extra value on things created by people. You might call that a human premium.
Kyle Chayka, a journalist at The New Yorker focused on technology, says AI writing is now widely considered to be “generic, obsequious and banal”. As a result, he says, “I think readers are coming to value very obviously personal writing, and maybe even writing that’s messier, less structurally sound or composed or perfected, than they maybe once would’ve desired.”
Chayka goes on: “I think illustration and graphic design is going in the same direction, where the average is too easily accessible, and so designers are leaning into being weirder and more eye-catching and more unusual, trying to find things that AI can’t generate so easily.”
In response to the surge in AI-created content, academics are racing to develop a universally recognised symbol to denote something that is “human made” (similar to the “Fairtrade” label that emerged in the 1980s). Labels like “AI-free” are already appearing on covers of some books, films, and albums.
For C Thi Nguyen, a philosophy professor at the University of Utah, it’s a question of our underlying values.
He says you can often work out your values by following what he calls a “why chain”. If you like something or want to do something, ask “why?”. If the answer is to make money or be successful, keep asking ‘why?’ When the process ends, that will be what you really value, he explains.
The question, he says, is whether human involvement and shared human experience will keep its place at the end of the “why chain”.
Author John Lanchester is optimistic. He thinks the value of what only humans can do will prevail. In fact, he sympathises with the idea of a ‘human premium’.
“If you commodify one kind of thing, the things you can’t commodify start to seem more important,” he tells me.
All of that might sound heartening for people hoping that humans will remain central to the creation of culture.
But I’m not so sure. The amount of AI-generated content is increasing so quickly that we may soon struggle to distinguish what has or hasn’t involved AI.
You may well have seen coverage of the AI ‘actor’ Tilly Norwood, made last year by a company that bills itself as the world’s “first AI talent studio”. The Screen Actors Guild in the US was not impressed. “It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion, and, from what we’ve seen, audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience,” they wrote.
I’m not saying AI will replace actors – of course not. But what feels untethered and strange now, may not, in some situations, feel so strange in time.
It’s also worth remembering that long before Large Language Models went mainstream, we’d already allowed technology to shape our cultural tastes.
As recently as the 2000s, we still sought out lots of the culture we consumed. We’d buy a book, a cinema ticket, an album. Sometimes we still do.
Ros Atkins thinks technology is dramatically shifting what we value in the worlds of friendship, culture, finance and work.
But increasingly, culture just arrives – in an endless stream, sorted and served by an algorithm that is constantly predicting our tastes.
At first glance, this sounds convenient. The work’s being done for us. But as the role of the algorithm goes up, so the role of humans goes down.
“There’s the mythical figure of your big brother’s friend or something, who passes on good music taste to you,” says Chayka, whose book Filterworld explores the impacts of algorithms on culture. “And now we rely on algorithmic recommendations to do that same thing for us. To introduce us to new things.”
The AI-generated ‘actor’ Tilly Norwood has created controversy
I recognise this from my own habits. Back in the 1990s, when I started collecting dance music, I’d find new music through record shops and recommendations from people I trusted. I can still do that, and do. But these days the algorithm’s doing a lot of that work for me – and it can be really helpful. I’ll find tunes I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
To an extent, I am letting technology guide me.
Chayka thinks algorithms have made us lazy, and “prevent us from going deeper” in our cultural taste. Sometimes we might find a piece of art that requires work – a long, difficult book, perhaps, or a weird-seeming movie. “It might alienate us initially, but eventually it inspires us,” Chayka says.
“I think that kind of culture has fallen by the wayside in favour of culture as content to consume that’s not going to change your life, it’s just going to turn your brain off for a few hours.”
Live, in-person events are becoming more popular. Above, a crowd at Glastonbury Festival last year at an 11.30am concert for the musician Lorde
And it’s a self-reinforcing loop; creators adapt their work as they seek out the attention the algorithm can provide.
And here’s the key point: this shift – to discovering culture via algorithms – is one we’ve already largely accepted. So when AI starts making books, films, and music in large numbers – might we just shrug and accept that too?
Back in 1986, in Washington DC, protesting teachers lined the streets outside a convention centre. They weren’t angry about their wages or budget cuts. In this case, the object of their ire was the calculator. Maths teacher John Saxon had taken up the cause. “The kids are not learning their math facts because they’re becoming calculator hooked,” he proclaimed. “ If they had given me a black box, I wouldn’t know that… six times eight’s 48 ’cause it rhymes, and seven times nine is 63 ’cause it does not.”
We all have our ways of remembering times tables.
Needless to say, this is an argument that Saxon lost. But some of those arguments feel familiar.
Of course, some things are definitely out of range of technology, at least for now. Think of my sweaty DJ night in Falmouth a few weeks ago, with 250 other ravers.
Alex Mahon says she’s noticed an uptick in appreciation for in-person experiences like these – perhaps as a backlash to the amount of our lives now spent on a smartphone screen.
She’s chief executive of Superstruct Entertainment, one of the world’s leading festival and live entertainment groups.
“People want to go to more live things,” she says. “They want to have things that are unforeseeable… unpredictable. The special moment is live. The excitement, the discovery is hearing it in person with others.”
In the case of culture, when is it OK to outsource to technology, and when is it not? The more I look at this, the less I’m sure we can assume what choices we’ll make.
Each of us will have to decide when it matters if something is made by a human.
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