This makes me kind of depressed. What is the future of art going to look like? What will happen to future artists?
There's a new "Nirvana" song on YouTube called "Drowned in the Sun" that was created by A.I. Honestly, it sounds more like Bush than Nirvana, but here's the thing -- it's pretty damn good. It's been playing repeatedly in my head for days.
Honestly, as a guy approaching middle age who lived his first 40 or so years in a world that didn't have any decent A.I.-generated art, the future is looking kind of...cold. And that freaks me out more than a little.
Apr 20, 2022·edited Apr 20, 2022Liked by Erik Hoel
> And yet that line was written by a thing that never loved, saw, nor heard. It was never told, and it never told. It never experienced a day in its life.
In some sense, the human aggregate (call it "god" or "devil" if you are mad) is talking, and it captures the pain and love of all the people that has existed, into a single encapsulated recording. Much like the Bible and other canonical works, this shall become revolutionary, and an epicenter on future meaning. The pure consumer shall end, and the creatives, through assistive creativity, shall prosper and be immortalized.
Erik, this was a great piece, I’m glad I came across it. Feels so relevant and connected to what I’ve been thinking about lately.
I’m curious if your thoughts have evolved any more in the last few years on this? It feels like you pegged the trajectory pretty well, but I would be curious to hear how your thinking has changed.
You nailed something really important here, Eric. The "indexical quality". It's easy for me to analogize this to analog, but in fact materiality may not, necessarily, be required. Related to art, I often find that art doesn't mean much to me until I talk to the artist and understand her emotional connection to what she is trying to manifest. So indexicality is related to emotion and analog is in there somewhere. My brain is happily fed. Plus thanks for the composer tip.
As a mere consumer of art, I wonder how it matters where the art comes from. It seems to me that, if it were proved that Rachmaninoff was actually a fictional character, and his music actually all composed by a committee, I think I probably would enjoy his music much less.
And if it turned out that Beethoven never existed, and in fact all his piano sonatas were generated by some algorithm, maybe I wouldn’t enjoy playing them as much - but I might? I know next to nothing about Bach and I like to play and listen to his music.
But even in the cases, which is most of them, where I don’t really know much about the origin of the art, there’s some sort of feeling that there is a story there and that it adds to the meaning, even if I don’t know it - which, even not knowing, adds somehow to my experience of it.
So in fact I do think it’s true that knowing that some art is real matters to my enjoyment of it, in that in some way it is assuring me that there’s something there on the other side of it - the artist there, then - that is literally resonating with me here and now.
There’s something it’s like to be asking, what does this mean? You take that feeling away when it turns out the art is not made by a real thinking, feeling person.
The question of starting a style needs then more study. Has it to do with learning going awry, with something like an adolescent brain, with outright mistakes in imitation?
Perhaps as our social strictures around what can and cannot be written will become so narrow that we will rely on AI to create stories too transgressive to be written by a human without sanction.
One of the beauties of humanity is that we're pretty adaptable. John Henry framed his identity around being a steel-driving man, so a steam-powered machine was a threat to his self-conception and sense of meaning. But I don't think anyone today is bothered by the fact that a car drives faster than we can run or that a forklift is stronger than we are. Our tools becoming more capable than us in some ways can be disconcerting, but ultimately we can choose how we see ourselves and how we derive meaning. Maybe the current generation will be too set in its ways to let go of attachment to being the best go player or the best illustrator, but I'm optimistic that our children or grandchildren will have no problem leading a meaningful life orchestrating these amazing tools and benefiting from the wealth that they create.
On a related note, people also do a pretty decent job of trudging onwards even with a decided lack of meaning. The average job may not exactly be BS, but it's also not exactly designed for self-actualization. Right now, searching for meaning is still a bit of a luxury. When AI does all the grunt work for us, maybe we'll find that although we have to leave our current rather boring identities behind, the change will be for the better overall.
“It’s affecting. It signifies a loss, like the loss of summer itself, or at least a fragility, that fragility that exists between lovers. And yet that line was written by a thing that never loved, saw, nor heard. It was never told, and it never told. It never experienced a day in its life. It has no idea what these words point to, what they refer to. All it knows is that some words are associated with other words, and the whole web of word associations has its internally coherent patterns, and these patterns can be extrapolated in ways to create new sentences.”
It is, in short, it is a love poem written by a f*ckboi. Just a pattern recognizing creature trying to be impressive.
This whole thing made me think about intentionality and how possible it is to be a stimulus - response and quite shallow person, or a thoughtful and intentional person.
This is a really powerful piece. I think this idea of the "semantic apocalypse" - this kind of permanent doubt about whether or not a sentence you're reading passed through the gate of human consciousness - is incredibly significant.
"So I don’t find it a coincidence that literary fiction has moved toward auto-fiction, almost as if to preemptively protect itself."
Is it protecting itself or killing itself? The declining audience for literary fiction has been remarked on by quite a few commentators over the past decade.
This makes me kind of depressed. What is the future of art going to look like? What will happen to future artists?
There's a new "Nirvana" song on YouTube called "Drowned in the Sun" that was created by A.I. Honestly, it sounds more like Bush than Nirvana, but here's the thing -- it's pretty damn good. It's been playing repeatedly in my head for days.
Honestly, as a guy approaching middle age who lived his first 40 or so years in a world that didn't have any decent A.I.-generated art, the future is looking kind of...cold. And that freaks me out more than a little.
> And yet that line was written by a thing that never loved, saw, nor heard. It was never told, and it never told. It never experienced a day in its life.
In some sense, the human aggregate (call it "god" or "devil" if you are mad) is talking, and it captures the pain and love of all the people that has existed, into a single encapsulated recording. Much like the Bible and other canonical works, this shall become revolutionary, and an epicenter on future meaning. The pure consumer shall end, and the creatives, through assistive creativity, shall prosper and be immortalized.
Erik, this was a great piece, I’m glad I came across it. Feels so relevant and connected to what I’ve been thinking about lately.
I’m curious if your thoughts have evolved any more in the last few years on this? It feels like you pegged the trajectory pretty well, but I would be curious to hear how your thinking has changed.
You nailed something really important here, Eric. The "indexical quality". It's easy for me to analogize this to analog, but in fact materiality may not, necessarily, be required. Related to art, I often find that art doesn't mean much to me until I talk to the artist and understand her emotional connection to what she is trying to manifest. So indexicality is related to emotion and analog is in there somewhere. My brain is happily fed. Plus thanks for the composer tip.
As a mere consumer of art, I wonder how it matters where the art comes from. It seems to me that, if it were proved that Rachmaninoff was actually a fictional character, and his music actually all composed by a committee, I think I probably would enjoy his music much less.
And if it turned out that Beethoven never existed, and in fact all his piano sonatas were generated by some algorithm, maybe I wouldn’t enjoy playing them as much - but I might? I know next to nothing about Bach and I like to play and listen to his music.
But even in the cases, which is most of them, where I don’t really know much about the origin of the art, there’s some sort of feeling that there is a story there and that it adds to the meaning, even if I don’t know it - which, even not knowing, adds somehow to my experience of it.
So in fact I do think it’s true that knowing that some art is real matters to my enjoyment of it, in that in some way it is assuring me that there’s something there on the other side of it - the artist there, then - that is literally resonating with me here and now.
There’s something it’s like to be asking, what does this mean? You take that feeling away when it turns out the art is not made by a real thinking, feeling person.
The question of starting a style needs then more study. Has it to do with learning going awry, with something like an adolescent brain, with outright mistakes in imitation?
what glorious writing on AI, and so little brought to a general attention because it was published early.
Perhaps as our social strictures around what can and cannot be written will become so narrow that we will rely on AI to create stories too transgressive to be written by a human without sanction.
One of the beauties of humanity is that we're pretty adaptable. John Henry framed his identity around being a steel-driving man, so a steam-powered machine was a threat to his self-conception and sense of meaning. But I don't think anyone today is bothered by the fact that a car drives faster than we can run or that a forklift is stronger than we are. Our tools becoming more capable than us in some ways can be disconcerting, but ultimately we can choose how we see ourselves and how we derive meaning. Maybe the current generation will be too set in its ways to let go of attachment to being the best go player or the best illustrator, but I'm optimistic that our children or grandchildren will have no problem leading a meaningful life orchestrating these amazing tools and benefiting from the wealth that they create.
On a related note, people also do a pretty decent job of trudging onwards even with a decided lack of meaning. The average job may not exactly be BS, but it's also not exactly designed for self-actualization. Right now, searching for meaning is still a bit of a luxury. When AI does all the grunt work for us, maybe we'll find that although we have to leave our current rather boring identities behind, the change will be for the better overall.
“It’s affecting. It signifies a loss, like the loss of summer itself, or at least a fragility, that fragility that exists between lovers. And yet that line was written by a thing that never loved, saw, nor heard. It was never told, and it never told. It never experienced a day in its life. It has no idea what these words point to, what they refer to. All it knows is that some words are associated with other words, and the whole web of word associations has its internally coherent patterns, and these patterns can be extrapolated in ways to create new sentences.”
It is, in short, it is a love poem written by a f*ckboi. Just a pattern recognizing creature trying to be impressive.
This whole thing made me think about intentionality and how possible it is to be a stimulus - response and quite shallow person, or a thoughtful and intentional person.
This is a really powerful piece. I think this idea of the "semantic apocalypse" - this kind of permanent doubt about whether or not a sentence you're reading passed through the gate of human consciousness - is incredibly significant.
I wrote about a similar dynamic here, although I used a different term for the concept - "meaning deflation": https://www.decentralizedfiction.com/p/of-drone-swarms-and-phalanxes-wordcel
"So I don’t find it a coincidence that literary fiction has moved toward auto-fiction, almost as if to preemptively protect itself."
Is it protecting itself or killing itself? The declining audience for literary fiction has been remarked on by quite a few commentators over the past decade.