I saw the restored Pink Floyd Pompeii film in theatres recently, and I really enjoyed it. The whole thing is like a love letter to art, and humans making great art by experimentation. It’s got some truly beautiful (and even uncomfortable) moments, it’s got it all. I liked it overall, but one moment in particular stood out to me. There’s a part in the movie where the band members are discussing the use of machines/instruments in music versus the person behind this stuff. Basically, the point is briefly made that it doesn’t matter what instrument a person has if the person using it has no skill. At one point, Roger Waters says, “It’s like saying, ‘Give a man a Les Paul, and he becomes Eric Clapton.’ It’s not true.” This point, of course, parallels our current era and the ongoing talk of AI and its role in art.
A couple of nights ago I recently saw my favourite living comedian, Louis CK, perform live. If you’ve read my stuff in the past you already know he’s a major inspiration to me (the jerking off stuff obviously, not the artistry or comedy or body of work, haha). I happened to be growing up at the exact time he was hitting his stride as a comic and went on that insane run in the 2010s. I saw him perform in 2009 for the first time, then I was 18 in 2010 when Louie premiered, and watching his career unfold from that point to 2017 was absolutely bonkers. Like watching history unfold in real time — comparisons to George Carlin were thrown around by many people a number of times, and for good reason. I’ve seen him perform live a bunch of times over the years, and this recent performance was unsurprisingly great. I was blown away by how good his set was even though it wasn’t a polished hour yet; that is just the result of 90 million years of experience and practice. I honestly think he’s getting better as a comic. It’s funny to say that because some people think the opposite is true, and comics get shittier as they get older, or that a person’s best work is behind them past a certain point, but I do think Louis is sort of hitting a new point in his career. It’s almost like the goofy 2005 absurdist version of himself is merging with the 2010s “insightful philosophical poet” side and everything’s coming full circle. He is finding a way of making comedy for both the nihilist degenerate and the NPC Christian person you work with who likes a certain point he might be making about something they agree with and shares a viral video without knowing who he is or whatever.
Anyway, I say all of the above to use as a jumping off point about AI and artists. I’ve already made this point, but it is worth repeating: one of the fascinating things about real art and artists to me is the idea that you can slowly watch a person’s growth. There is the idea of someone creating a body of work with a real person. This is not something you can get with AI, not in the same sort of way. There doesn’t seem to be any progression that is discernible from anything to the other. You can’t really look at one piece of AI content by an AI creator and compare it with another AI piece they create and go, “Wow, I can really see the contrast here in the different periods of this person’s life. They’re showing growth here.” This can be evidenced by a guy like Harmony Korine, for example: his latest work is not really that interesting past a certain point IMO because it isn’t really saying anything or doing anything much. The visuals are cool, sure, but there is no real progression. It’s just one AI thing indiscernible from another AI thing. AGGRO DR1FT is the same as Baby Invasion to me. It’s cool that they both exist, but I don’t think they can really replace real stuff by a real person.
I felt this way when I was at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, and I felt this way recently when watching Louie, and the Pink Floyd documentary: the idea of a body of work for an artist is incredibly important. What AI offers is just short-term entertainment that isn’t really worth much beyond that. Don’t get me wrong, I have seen some funny AI nonsense on Instagram, and I am not an old man here shouting at a cloud. I get the appeal of AI. My guilty pleasure lately has been a series of videos an AI creator on Instagram has been making lately where a giant cat gets into all sorts of absurd situations: there are videos where he steals a woman’s baby and raises it as his own, only to return it at the end of the video. Another video has him drilling for oil and becoming rich, and we see his entire life unfold in greater detail than There Will be Blood ever achieved about Daniel Plainview (in a matter of seconds). It’s entertaining stuff, and it’s hilarious. There are also AI women on Instagram with giant tits and perfect smiles, all sourced from images of real women and with any imperfections taken out. It’s like they used real women to create a sort of anime woman, but lifelike looking. Again: I get the appeal of this stuff. But like I said, it means nothing overall. It shouldn’t really be taken that seriously.
Sometimes when I think about this it reminds me of when there’s a hot girl with an ugly guy, and people on social media often comment and speculate about why this could be and what she sees in him, etc. They talk about the guy’s bank account, his penis size, etc, and various surface level reasons the woman is with the guy. What does she see in him? What does she see in him? This line constantly comes up. It never occurs to any of these people that, who knows, maybe they’re together because of how the guy makes her feel? Maybe he listens well, maybe he’s hilarious, maybe his personality just hits the synapses of her brain in an unexplainable way she cannot articulate to anyone around her and that’s just how it is. That’s just the nature of the situation, and everyone around them has to deal with it. She could be with a 6’2” Scandinavian fella with 90000 billion dollars from the seafood industry or whatever, but that guy just doesn’t make her feel good. Something about this overweight cowboy fella does, and she is tired of attempting to explain this to her mother and friends and people who are rude enough to ask. That’s what I think about whenever this stupid discussion about AI art versus art by a real person comes up; sometimes I don’t really care about technological advancement, sometimes it’s just about how something makes me feel.
I do feel Waters’ sentiment is correct: you can’t just give anyone a guitar and get a masterpiece like Layla. We got that song because Eric Clapton was a highly skilled musician, just like we got his racist rants in the 70s; that’s what being a human is about. You’re good sometimes and flawed at other times, and it all amounts to a body of work. What you get from AI is whatever you program it to do. I don’t think AI will ever be able to properly make a true masterpiece, not for me personally. It can make good entertainment, but nothing I’d call a masterpiece. At the end of the day, the creator behind the thing still ultimately matters. This is why most movies suck now, for example: there is no auteur, just a soulless product made by a committee. It’s important to remember that art is about expression and it comes from a real person, the point of it isn’t distraction -- even if that is an end result. It often comes from a real personality and starts as expression.