Art’s Purpose When AIs Generate All Possible Contents
Why human artists will carry on even when AIs dwarf human abilities
Painters, musicians, sculptors, novelists, poets, and perhaps all other artists have begun to fear that the programming of large language models (LLMs), or image and sound-generating software that seems artificially intelligent is disastrous for their livelihoods. These AIs will be able to produce artwork in any modality, including sculptures with 3D printers, and will be able to do so faster and cheaper than human artists.
Art itself will have been automated.
Projecting a decade or two into the future, we can imagine that this problem won’t be just financial. That is, the problem won’t be merely that AI will take the jobs of artists. Suppose AI will soon enough surpass the artistic skills of any human artist, by being able to duplicate any human work of art, and to produce art that no human alone could ever create.
Or let’s imagine a more concrete scenario. Imagine all the paintings, songs, sculptures, novels, poems, and so forth that humans have produced in our whole history up to the twenty-first century. Now add to those the artworks that human artists could have produced but didn’t in that timeframe. Finally, imagine that within, say, two decades, AIs not only…
