“Star Trek,” Zeppelin, and Why I Hate AI

I have thoughts about Artificial Intelligence. A LOT of them.

Yes, I recognize that “it’s here.” Yes, I know it’s a tool. No, I’m not against progress. However…

As a writer, I’ve seen how AI is decimating that business and publishing overall. The irony, however, is that many companies now say that, despite the convenience,  they don’t want AI-generated material for their business content.  Too sterile, I suspect.

Yet I’m currently freelancing with a firm that has its writers run their posts through a filter to “check for AI.” Said filter comes back all too often with the message, “This appears to have been written by AI.”

In essence, a machine is telling an actual human that they’re not
(human, that is). This is some Kubrick-level sh*t. And I admit that the illogic irritates me to no end.

In the creative space, AI keeps expanding. Images, videos, short films, re-imagining back catalogs of classic music; it’s mining all human artistic creations and providing novelty mechanical regurgitations.

Now, for the first time, an AI-generated song by a completely fictional artist has reached Number 1 on Billboard’s Country charts. It’s wildly ironic – a music genre long devoted to deeply human stories, voices, and handmade instruments is now being picked over and mimicked…by a computer.

As an unrepentant Star Trek (TOS) fan, there’s a throughline in the series of both appreciating the “logic” and the extensive knowledge of computers. But the series also recognized the danger when computers are too much in charge or when they go rogue.

In “The Ultimate Computer,” for example, a system is installed to run the ship and make decisions, instead of leaving them up to supposedly fallible humans. However, as it “learns” more, it becomes as erratic and rigid as its inventor. This theme was repeated in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Outside of the practical (like search engine results), I wonder about AI’s role in creativity and the arts. It’s presently cannibalizing the output of musicians, filmmakers, writers, photographers, and illustrators that have been developed across the centuries.

Will it “learn” from it? Likely.

Will it replace the (for lack of a better word) “divine spark” that makes something memorable? I doubt it.

Paul McCartney heard the melody to “Yesterday” in a dream. Keith Richards woke up with the riff to “Satisfaction” in his head. Bands will tell you about the primitive magic that results from jamming and the classic tunes that arise.

Actors and dancers know when one performance stands apart from another. It’s the same drive that has a painter or writer go without sleep as they work on a piece. It’s the sheer magic (and chaos) of creation – even within certain established boundaries, set pieces, or techniques.

Emotion and intuition are distinctly separate from reason and intellect; they’re quicksilver. Technical considerations — chords, steps, visual composition, language –are the means by which we create art. Certain pleasing combinations can be replicated (such as the three or four basic rock chords), but the thing that sets a classic apart from another song with those same elements is a beautiful mystery.

Exhibit A: Here’s Paul, steeped in thousands of hours of playing and listening, coming up with an enduring hit as George and Ringo build on it with their own ingredients. It’s a flash here, a spark there. It’s fluid, unpredictable.

That kind of channeling or noodling about is too “illogical,” as Spock would say, to be wired onto a motherboard.

As I write this, I’m re-watching Becoming Led Zeppelin. I’m struck by how four skilled, but distinctly different people, combined their own technical abilities to forge something utterly unique that listeners still feel. John Paul Jones remarked that Zeppelin was essentially “the air” between their disparate influences and experiences.

Art has a peculiar magic, a mix of human elements, plus something intangible, all vibrating within a mutable boundary.

Will AI ever be able to tap that on its own?  I doubt it.

More importantly, I profoundly hope not.

OK, rant over. Share your thoughts on the place of AI in creative pursuits.

-Cindy Grogan

Photo: Pixabay