Into Darkness: AI and the Death of the Artist
Does it matter who makes what moves us?
The world was dangerous then
It still is now. But for us cossetted toddlers in the wealthy parts of the planet, the danger is impersonal. Perhaps some maniac will drop a bomb on our heads from the other side of the world. Perhaps our own bad habits will catch up with us and tear apart the delicate helical structures that keep our cells from bursting into the riotous life that will undo us.
For our ancestors, it was different.
Every rock held a shadow, and every shadow hid a threat. The frozen Siberian plains that stretched across southern Europe in the shadow of grinding glaciers were populated by huge and hairy beasts, lions and cave bears and woolly mammoths trumpeting wrathfully at the sinking of the pale sun.
The caves provided shelter. But they brought danger too. There was no light, except what they brought with them. The sullen red glow of a smoking branch; the oily flickering of a lamp made from animal fat. Every cold drip that echoed between the stone walls must have made them jump, made them turn their heads, made them grip torches and spears more tightly.
But they still went in.
Down those lightless black passages home to bears and bones. Down those gloomy tunnels where at any moment, the rock might shift and bury them forever, or the water might rise and trap them underground. They went down through the darkness not in spite of their understandable fears, but because of it. They went there to paint.
The birth of art is the birth of the human.
You can tell the real thing
I’ve already fired a writer for using AI to generate content. On another project for another client, I found the same thing happening again.
You can always tell. Even if the details are right — and they aren’t always — the words are wrong. Or not wrong, exactly. Grammatically correct and properly spelled, they add up to meaning without any heart behind them. Dull and repetitive, the formula appearing like old bones through thin skin. The highly hyped machines can string words together. But there’s more to writing than that.
I’ve worked with this writer a long time. Long enough to learn his voice, his mannerisms, his humor. There are parts of him that flicker through his writing like burning branches in the dark. I didn’t want to fire him. So as gently as I could, I told him that his writing read like a robot.
I didn’t accuse him of using AI. I just said it sounded like he did. And if he didn’t, it didn’t matter. Because if that was the quality of the writing he was producing, he may as well be a robot.
Altamira was a temple
One of the first examples of prehistoric art to be discovered in the modern era. It remains one of the most spectacular.
In other caves in Cantabria, haunting handprints reach out through the melting cave walls to touch your own, and animals dance in the flickering torchlight. But at Altamira, the whole ceiling of a cave blooms with red and black life, the animal spirits that defined the world of our ancestors 15,000 years ago recreated on the bare rock.
They used ochre and charcoal and their filthy fingers to define the arch of a horn, the snarl of a mouth, the muscular hump of a back. They used the natural swellings and protrusions of the cave ceiling to give the animals shape and form, to give them dimensionality that would make them move in the moving light they carried. They risked something to create something new, to birth something into the world it had never seen before.
Art. An expression of the individual and the collective vision of the tribe, a reinterpretation of the world as they saw it. The magic of making the inner world external, and at the same time, drawing the external one further in.
They didn’t do it for money. There was no money back then. They had no concept of fame the way we do. They lived in a hugely underpopulated world, their social circles conforming to the Dunbar number, and probably the best they could hope for notoriety was that the next tribe over the hill might have heard of their painting skill. Or maybe not.
We’ll never know their names. We can speculate and guess, but we’ll probably never know exactly why they painted what they did, where they did, and what they hoped to get out of it. But the same blood runs through your veins, the same torchlight glowing in your eyes. You know why they did it just as well as I do.
To create something. To leave a mark, never guessing it would last so long and still be visible in a different world. Anything done with love echoes through the ages, and the oldest art in the world still speaks to us now, even after the people who painted it and the animals who inspired it are long vanished. Our world could hardly be more different, but our hearts remain the same.
Altamira is closed
In seeking to admire, we can’t help but destroy. The breath of the many visitors to the painted cave was causing mold to grow on the irreplaceable artwork. The Spanish authorities closed the cave to all but carefully selected researchers who are allowed in at rare intervals to try out new techniques to learn more about the paintings.
Meanwhile, the rest of us make do with a forgery. Just below the cave, a museum recreates the real thing. Every mark and painting studied in the cave has been painted on the walls, with fake rocks made to display the protrusions on the roof the painters used to bring life to their work.
It’s a noble effort. To allow us to see the haunting work of our distant ancestors without destroying it in the process. The floor of the fake cave is smooth, and slopes gently down from the entrance at an angle designed to be easy on the knees. There’s a wheelchair lift tucked discreetly in one corner. The mystery belongs to us all, and you don’t need to be able-bodied or in good health to see it.
But it’s not real. It photographs better than it looks, but you would never mistake it for the real thing. There’s no 99% humidity hanging in the air to plaster your hair to your scalp. There’s no cold quiet drip of water through stone, the same sound that would have made our ancestors turn their heads and pray to their gods. There’s no slippery floor, no mineral deposits glinting in the torchlight. No miracle to uncover. Just a careful simulacrum of the real thing that is superficially interesting and, admittedly, better than nothing. But it doesn’t touch the heart at all.
Does reality matter?
I’ve always believed in the death of the author. I’m not interested in what Shakespeare was trying to say as much as I am interested in how it feels to hear his words today. Art is not made on the wall of the cave or in my attic room under the roof. Not completely, anyway. It’s made by you, the audience, when you read these words or when your eyes sparkle as they catch photons thrown back from 15,000-year-old paintings on the glittering wall of the cave. The audience makes the art at least as much as the artist does.
But somehow, the story still matters. A work of art shouldn’t become more beautiful depending on who made it and how and why, but it does.
There is other graffiti in the caves, names and dates from modern times, and no one takes a tour to see it because nobody cares. Things become hallowed by age, made sacred by the distance between our world and theirs, so that a discarded hairpin or a bent key can become priceless once they accumulate a sufficient patina of rust.
What passes for artificial intelligence these days is little more than auto-correct. And it’s nowhere near making true art. It doesn’t even understand the concept.
But what if it did? What if one day, a program could generate something entirely new and as moving to a human audience as that speech in King Lear or Lucette’s death or The End of the Affair?
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been shaken to my core by art produced by someone I knew literally nothing about. Sometimes not even a name. It’s the art that matters, I’ve always maintained, not the artist.
But what happens when there is no artist?
We’re not there yet. Something tells me that we’ll never get there. That the computers, no matter how sophisticated they become, will never understand why anyone would draw a bison or a reindeer or a horse on the wall of a cave. They can’t see the flickering torch light. They can’t hear the drums echoing, the rising heartbeat in the darkness of the cave.
They can’t understand why a perfect copy of a priceless thing is worthless.
I hope it always stays that way. Give me the mystery, the story, the fallible human risking a life worth keeping in a dangerous world to birth something new for no one to ever see. A hundred billion computer-generated drawings of hideous hands and ghoulish faces aren’t worth as much as one smeared thumbprint made of soot and grease.
Because maybe the audience is what really makes the art, but without an artist speaking through it, who cares?
