I think every creative on the Internet has read Ted Chiang's recent New Yorker piece in the past 48 hours.* I find its thesis deeply resonant.
Chiang argues that generative AI won't make art because art, at its core, is a series of human choices. Art is a conversation between its creator and its audience. The choices made in creating a piece of art are inseparable from that conversation.
Generative AI, by contrast, is a plagiarist thrown into a blender. It makes no choices; it has no point of view or purpose; it seeks to achieve nothing.
Given this, Chiang argues, what AI generates isn't art. It's something, certainly. Something comes out of DALL-E or ChatGPT when you ask it about "a Dalmatian on a bicycle" or "an ad for soda." But because the essential practice of choice-making in pursuit of a connection is absent, so is the art.
I'm with this argument as far as it goes. Yet, after spending 15 years of my career in marketing, there's a second point that needs discussing as well. I don't fault Chiang's piece for not doing it; the point I'm about to make is related but orthogonal, and I don't think it would have done the New Yorker piece any favors to take this tangent.
But I'm going to take it, and it's this: While AI generated content may not be "art," it's still going to play an outsized role in our lives going forward. Because art isn't where the money is. The money is in marketing - and marketing "art" thrives on a lack of soul.
In the New Yorker piece, Chiang acknowledges that not all written or visual works need to be "art," however "art" is defined:
Not all writing needs to be creative, or heartfelt, or even particularly good; sometimes it simply needs to exist. Such writing might support other goals, such as attracting views for advertising or satisfying bureaucratic requirements. When people are required to produce such text, we can hardly blame them for using whatever tools are available to accelerate the process. But is the world better off with more documents that have had minimal effort expended on them?
Respectfully, no marketer in the history of propaganda has ever asked if the world is "better off" with more advertising copy or monetized eyeballs in it.** Frankly, modern marketers don't care. They bump you to the head of the "downsizing" list for even asking. Your goal is to "drive traffic" or "increase conversions" or "monetize attention." It's not to improve the world - or at least, not the world beyond the shareholders' pockets.
Why does it matter what marketers want? As millions of creatives know, marketing is where the money is for creative work. I can claim my primary occupation is "writer" because I get paid to write what are, broadly, marketing materials - things that sell one party on doing what another party wants. The novels I've written, the articles I've penned, and the blog posts I've generated over the years add up, collectively, to an amount so low it wouldn't buy my groceries for the year. (I could have increased that amount, probably...with marketing.)
It's true that really good marketing campaigns often do play on the emotions. The best ones short-circuit reasoning just enough to convince the viewer that their emotional reaction is reasoning. But millions of advertisers don't want or need the best marketing campaigns. They only need something that grabs your attention long enough to monetize it.
As long as generative AI can do that, we'll have generative AI. As long as generative AI can create images and text that seem "real enough," marketing will use them to make money (and displace human workers in the process).
To marketing, the fact that AI can't make "art" is a feature, not a bug. Creative choices require human time, effort, and skill. Currently, the only way to get human time, effort, and skill is to pay for it.*** So companies pay armies of human marketing staff. Grudgingly, and poorly, but they pay us.
To use a machine to generate text and images that do the same thing as art but without the investment is a dream come true. A marketing department that delivers conversions without a payroll is pure profit.
To creatives who create to live, it doesn't matter if AI will never create "art." We aren't paid for art. We are paid to convert audiences into customers. Art is a messy intermediate step. That generative AI does away with it is a net benefit to shareholders.
I agree with Ted Chiang that generative AI doesn't make art. I agree that it probably never will. But that doesn't mean generative AI is going away. The fact that AI doesn't make art is probably the single strongest argument for its continued use - and the feature that makes it most likely to put actual artists, including writers, photographers, and videographers, out of business.
*12 ft Ladder (12ft.io) will get you over that paywall.
** This is not exactly true. Edward Bernays, the "father of modern advertising," argues in his now-famous work Propaganda that advertising done correctly does make the world "better off" insofar as it shapes human behavior toward the ends set by the rich and powerful, who are better suited than the ignorant masses to decide whence human behavior and opinion should trend. (Ask the microplastics in your brain tissue how that's going.)
*** Sweatshops and prison labor notwithstanding.
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