By Holly the Assistant
A friend of mine, and one of the regulars here, is responsible for triggering this post by sharing an advertising clip. The person in question can admit to it or not, but credit-or blame-where it’s due and all that. Here is the ad clip:
Before we go any further, I should probably point out that I am, in fact, in my day to day life, a professional musician. Not full-time, which is why I have other gigs (like annoying Sarah, er, reminding her of deadlines and appointments), but I do in fact get paid to play, file taxes on said pay, collect a nice pile of receipts for tax deductions, and all that jazz. I have opinions. And my friend got a nice little rant, then I cleaned it up and fleshed it out for public consumption.
AI is destroying human creativity?
Aurochs coprolites. This comes up over and over, and it’s as foolish and ignorant of why humans create as anything ever was. In fact, if it’s not an AI writing it, it is written either by liars or the most uncreative humans who ever existed. The people who can only color a color by numbers picture, because they lack the creativity to decide what color the shapes should be.
First of all, let’s take the Arts and split them up. Not according to various schemes of utility, but according to whether or not they make original creations. When I sit down at my desk and write music, I am creating. When I sit down with my cello and play J.S. Bach Suite No. 1, I am NOT creating. When I sit down with my cello and improvise? Creating. Playwrights? Create. Actors? Interpret another’s creation so it may be observed by others. Actors? Also improvise, which is creation. Embroider by pattern? Not creating. Create your own pattern? Creating. Change the pattern slightly? Creating, just as arranging music is.
Got that? OK.
Now, when you go listen to me play J.S. Bach Suite No. 1, you are listening to me turning written on a page notes to music. You do not experience the creation, the music, directly, but you experience it through the intermediary of my performance. (Can anyone experience it directly? Yes, sort of: some of us can read music ‘out loud in our heads’. It’s a less common skill than reading words ‘out loud in your head’.)
When you go to the gallery, you experience the sculpture, the paintings, etc., directly. No one stands between you and the art.
When you listen to a recording of music, you are listening to the performance as it was recorded. Got that? You are not experiencing it as J.S. Bach writes it down, hundreds of years ago, you’re listening to someone’s interpretation of symbols on a page. (And we have very strong opinions on what exactly those symbols properly are, and if they’re recorded correctly in the urtext, and who actually wrote down the urtext, and . . . anyway, best discussed at a music school after a concert with adult libations and lots of pencils.)
When you listen to an AI generation of sounds, you are doing the same thing as listening to the recording of a performance. There is no performer present. Physically, it is you and the machine. The machine can create the same pattern of sounds over and over, or you can have it generate a new pattern of sounds, no different than listening to the same recording over and over or putting on a new recording.
Why do musicians play? Because we get something from the playing. Not pay–we often don’t make much if any money. A few do, many don’t break minimum wage. I tell my students to calculate their hours of preparation per performance, then divide the pay by the hours to get their hourly earnings. It’s enlightening: one doesn’t play a wedding for the money, working at McD’s usually pays better. But we’d play anyway, we’d put the practice in anyway, paid or unpaid, it’s what we do, not for a job, but because we are the sort of people who find pleasure in making music.
Why do composers write music? Because we can’t not write music. Why do writers write? Because they can’t not write. Why do painters paint? Because they can’t not paint.
If there were no money, we would still be creating. Humans create. We created stories and songs when we were crouched shivering around our first campfires. We created paintings of ocher on cave walls. We would be creating if we were crouching shivering around campfires in the burned out husks of our cities.
Humans create.
AI may affect how much and when humans get paid for creating, though I doubt it will be any more disruptive than recording and printing were. More people will create not for sale. But most people never created for sale, throughout human history. People create for comfort, for distraction, for education, for a variety of reasons. No one created all the great political commentary tunes of Europe for money (Sur le pont, Pop goes the weasel). No one even claimed credit for those–which would probably have been fatal. They, and their equivalents, will turn up over and over again.
For performing artists, we will continue to get paid by people who need to show social status by live performances, or who simply prefer live performances. (Recorded music has a flat affect to my perception. Not flat in pitch, but lacking depth and resonance.) For creating artists, they’ll find the same kinds of niches for pay.
The rest of humanity will grab some crayons or a guitar or an AI and create what we need when we need it. For creating humans, AI is just a tool. Fancier than some, too complicated for most to understand, and able to achieve close enough to the human’s vision to go on with, as long as it’s not overly restricted.
What makes us create? Well, for the non-religious, I couldn’t say. For the Christians and Jews, and other groups that consider Genesis holy writing, “In the image of God created He them.” We are created in the image of the Creator of all, so of course we create. Creation is an inherent part of what we are.
Now go tell your child a bedtime story, you creator, you.
According To Hoyt 