Art doesn't exist without humans

ART WILL LIVE ON

So a music producer named Timbaland is starting a new AI entertainment company. He has also created two AI bots that will be acting as “artists.” Yes, these AIs will be releasing music. They are not real people.

As expected, this announcement caused a bit of an uproar, and not in the way I’m sure Timbaland expected. Musicians, both emerging and established, were not happy and they were not afraid to let him know. The vitriol became so loud that Timbaland had to put up another post addressing the criticism and scheduled a Live to answer any questions.

For some, this moment was inevitable. For me, it doesn’t make any sense.

The purpose of art is human expression. That is literally it. From cave paintings to oral storytelling to folk music to novels, the reason art exists is as an expression of human imagination and ingenuity. If you remove those aspects, the human aspect, there is no more art. It’s something else.

I always think about the first person to do something. The first person to construct a home, the first person to write a single letter, to draw something for no other reason than to satisfy their imagination. From a literary perspective, I often think about Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein. Like imagine being that level of creative that you invented a story that is now a concept we continue to draw from hundreds of years later. It’s mind-blowing.

I even think about this Maxwell song that I grew up on called This Woman’s Work. It’s literally ingrained in me as part of my childhood, so much so that I can tell you where I was in different moments listening to that song. What’s interesting is that This Woman’s Work is originally a Kate Bush song. I met someone recently who had never heard the Maxwell version yet both of us share a love for this song that was initiated in our childhood.

Imagine being Kate Bush. You’ve created something that has influenced the lives of millions of people from completely different geographies and environments and all from your creation. You’ve inspired Maxwell, an incredible musician in his own right, to recreate your song because he felt a connection to its lyrics, to the beat, to the voice, to the story the song was telling and wanted to create that feeling for other people.

That is art.

We connect to the stories and the storytellers because they have created something that relates to our own lives. We sense something in their creations that feel familiar and that replicate our experience, in part or in full.

This is art. This is art’s purpose: human expression.

Take away the human and the art no longer exists.

Some people are on the fence about this. I am not one of those people. AI has incredible qualities and the potential to make real change in our world. But I think removing real people as the creators, as the storytellers, as the initiators of creativity actually removes a part of what it means to be human in ways we can not imagine.

Because if human expression is the purpose of art and human connection is the outcome, what happens if the human is no longer the creator? What are we connecting to? Or are we supposed to completely disassociate with the artist (the AI one) and the fact that they have never had any real experiences, never been in love, never been heartbroken, never been angry or sad or joyful or scared, but because they can imitate these emotions through programming, it makes the supposed connection okay?

What does it do to our souls, to our beings, to our existence, when the thing we’re asked to connect to is lifeless?

For these reasons, I don’t believe AI will become the threat to art that some think it will. People like Timbaland will continue to try and push harder and harder to get us to accept things like AI musicians, tech companies will continue to build AI systems that mimic the characteristics of true artists, but I think that society as a whole will reject this.

I could be naive, I could be ignorant, but I just have a feeling that before we get to full-blown elimination of human artists, society will realize that we are in a fight for our souls and there is no price you can put to take that away from us.

Read my novel Boys And Girls Screaming

The very essence of humanity is creating. The world we live in now exists because we created it (I mean everything within nature, not nature itself). The device you’re reading this on, the couch or chair you’re sitting on as you’re reading this, the systems (good or bad) that we’re living under; these are all human creations.

But that’s my opinion. What do you think? Can art exist without humans? Should art exist without humans?