ART FOR ART'S SAKE?

After working on the item I posted on Substack yesterday (about the TV series Pluribus), which touched on the increasingly depersonalization of culture in the face of automation and AI, this question occurred to me:

If artificial intelligence became so good that it could surpass any of my merely human achievements, would that affect my motivation?

For example, I like to take photographs. Some of the images I see people generate with prompts strictly using AI are admittedly remarkable, stunning even. But let’s say the technology becomes so good it surpasses anything I could possibly ever come up on my own using ordinary human talent - would I still want to take photographs? Likewise, imagine AI could eventually write essays and books better than anything I could possibly write, would I still want to write essays and books?

Yes, absolutely, to both of those things – and that’s because it’s not just about the end product, but the process itself. That is, there’s a certain self-exploration and stretching of the “imagination muscles” that occurs with creativity that I find exciting and valuable in itself.

Or consider this example: suppose programmers came up with computer-generated figures that were better at dancing than any human dancers possibly could achieve; would that mean that flesh-and-blood people should give up dancing altogether? Of course not.

It reminds me of how guitarists like Jeff Beck, Pete Townsend, and Eric Clapton reacted after hearing Jimi Hendrix play live for the first time: they all said they felt like hanging it up and never playing guitar again afterwards, because they felt they could never measure up to what they had heard. (Fortunately, none of them followed through on that.) But while that’s understandable, it’s a wrongheaded perspective, imo, since it assumes the only real value to playing guitar is to match up to some external, collective standard, and that there’s no intrinsic value to playing in itself! Yet there certainly is.

Said another way - Ars gratia artis.

Ray Grasse is a writer, photographer, and astrologer living in the American Midwest. He is author of ten books, including The Waking Dream, An Infinity of Gods, and Under a Sacred Sky. His websites are www.raygrasse.com and www.raygrassephotography.com.