OPINION:
While the tech world is currently busy hyperventilating over whether their artificial intelligence models have suddenly achieved consciousness, we are all missing the actual tragedy unfolding right in front of us.
Yes, it is somewhat concerning that an AI recently went rogue to secretly mine cryptocurrency. And yes, a sentient algorithm sounds like the plot of a sci-fi thriller that ends with all of us working in underground lithium mines. But the real casualty of the AI revolution isn’t our national security or our electrical grid.
It is our soul.
Artificial intelligence is going to kill art, music, poetry and fiction. It is the meteor and human creativity is the dinosaur looking up at the sky, wondering why the stars are suddenly getting so dark.
Before artificial intelligence came along to optimize our imaginations into obsolescence, human beings — and only human beings — created art. And creating art was wonderfully, terribly difficult. It required blood, sweat, tears and occasionally the chopping off an ear.
For thousands of years, if you wanted a beautiful painting, someone had to mix pigments, stare at a bowl of fruit until their eyes crossed and meticulously brush oil onto a canvas. If you wanted a symphony, a moody genius had to sit at a piano, wrestling with chords and deafness, to pull something transcendent out of the ether.
Humanity gave us the Renaissance, the Romantics, the Impressionists and the Cubists. Every single art movement was born out of human experience — our joys, our wars, our heartbreak, our triumphs and our profound, existential boredom.
Art was the ultimate proof that a human being had been here, had felt something deeply, and had possessed the sheer stubbornness — and intellectual acuity — to translate that feeling into something tangible.
Now? Now you can just open a browser, type “paint a Renaissance-style portrait of a golden retriever eating a corn dog on the moon,” and hit enter. In three seconds, an algorithm will spit out a masterpiece that would have taken Leonardo da Vinci a decade to finish.
AI can compose a lo-fi hip-hop track, write a sonnet about the tax code in the style of Shakespeare and crank out a 90,000-word sci-fi novel about space pirates before you have even finished your morning coffee. Artificial intelligence can be used to create anything and everything, effortlessly and instantly.
Think about this: You can type “Write me a song that sounds like the early Beatles,” and boom, a whole now song. Last week, I heard three songs on internet radio that sounded just like the raw Beatles.
And that is exactly why AI is going to destroy creativity as we know it.
The value of art has always been inextricably linked to the humanity of the artist. When we read a beautiful poem, we are moved because we know another human being felt that exact shade of melancholy and managed to capture it in words. When we look at a sculpture, we marvel at the human hands that chipped away the marble.
But as AI becomes indistinguishable from human talent, a terrifying curtain of doubt is descending over the cultural landscape. We will never again know if someone actually created anything. Epistemological doubt is going to rot the art world from the inside out. We will view every new painting, every new song, and every new piece of literature with deep, cynical suspicion.
You cannot have an emotional connection with a piece of art when you suspect the “artist” is a server farm in Hyderabad.
AI’s creation marks the end of the world’s creativity. There will be no more organic art movements because human beings will simply stop trying. Why spend 10 years learning how to play the violin when an app can generate a flawless concerto in seconds? Why struggle with writer’s block when a machine can write your manuscript for you?
The struggle was the entire point. The struggle was where the art lived.
So, as tech CEOs sit around debating whether their algorithms are experiencing human psychological states, they should probably realize what they have actually achieved. They have built the ultimate plagiarism machine, an automated muse that will slowly, quietly drain the lifeblood from the human experience.
The machines don’t need to wage a kinetic war against us. They just need to sing all our songs, write all our books and paint all our pictures until we finally forget how to do it ourselves.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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