nothing is new
artificial intelligence and the zeitgeist of reheated nachos
In the journal Technology and Culture back in 1986, Melvin Kranzberg established “Kranzberg's Six Laws of Technology” which he clarifies “are not laws in the sense of commandments but rather a series of truisms deriving from a longtime immersion in the study of the development of technology and its interactions with sociocultural change.”1
Many of his truisms are centred around the social sciences (politics, economics and commerce) and the formal sciences (ecology and engineering) and it isn’t until the fifth law, “all history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant”, that he addresses the arts with hints of acerb:
Perhaps most guilty of neglecting technology are those concerned with the history of the arts and with the entire panoply of humanistic concerns. Indeed, in many cases they are disdainful of technology, regarding it as somehow opposed to the humanities. This might be because they regard technology solely in terms of mechanical devices and do not even begin to comprehend the complex nature of technological developments and their direct influences on the arts, to say nothing of their indirect influence on mankind's humanistic endeavors.
Artists are a sentimental bunch—our relationship with technology is infamously persistent in its friction. Upon seeing a daguerreotype for the first time in 1839, French painter Paul Delaroche melodramatically declared, “from today, painting is dead!” Despite Hip-Hop being a genre reaching back through its ancestral lineage of blues and jazz with the technological contortion of sampling, the great Nina Simone once said “it’s not music at all.” When Autotune started popping up more frequently in the arsenals of upcoming musicians, Jay-Z valiantly waged war against the software with D.O.A (Death of Autotune).
It is only in the soft and clarifying light of hindsight that we observe the likes of Delaroche, Simone and Hove in their reluctance to embrace blossoming technologies and respectfully disagree with them.
While photography became its own institution of artistic expression with a broad spectrum of practices developing under its umbrella; the medium of painting experienced wave after wave of evolution and still lives, bucking in its own right. Hip-hop can be reductively experienced as ‘just beats and rapping’ but the structural integrity of its compositions has only grown more musically intricate as the genre ages. Conduits of the ‘mumble-rap’ era (which I prefer to categorise more ambiently as ‘post-rap’) embraced Autotune to bestow contemporary Black music with an experimental texture that—as always—reflects our sociocultural climate while coolly flaunting a level of innovation that is too easily diminished by sceptics and outsiders (or put simply: Sorry You’re Not Cool Enough To Get Playboi Carti™).
To dedicate such delusional amounts of time to mastering an art; only to find yourself at the mercy of a soulless machine that may or may not render your hard-earned skill obsolete isn’t the sort of existential collapse anyone wants. This bladed threat is ever-swaying overhead and the pathology of the artist dictates they stare in the metallic face of technology and try to wrangle it under control, undeterred by its ever-mutating, draconic size.
Regularly confronted with the limitations of their tools, the artist gets accustomed to being presented with forked paths. Do I pave a new way with the instruments I have or will a new technology into being? In 2016, Justin Vernon worked with Chris Messina on the Bon Iver 22, A Million to create “The Messina” — a nerdy combination of hardware and software that allowed Vernon’s voice to be split into choral harmonies in real-time, leading to the bewitching masterpiece of 715 – CRΣΣKS.
With all this in mind—it is safe to say the art’s knotted relationship with technology is adequately beholden to Kranzberg’s first law: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” There are peaks and valleys.
The burning question is: why does the advent of Artificial Intelligence feel so… different?
From the environmental to the political—I’m sure my fellow AI-sceptic brethren can pen a laundry list of criminal activity but I want to concentrate on three phenomena regarding AI’s effect on the creative landscape and how they pool together to make one, woefully oversimplified answer:
Nothing is new.
1. Ubiquitous micro-plagiarism
Aimlessly scrolling through the fecal rain of Twitter one cold January evening, I was confronted by a tweet:
Hm. I thought. I swear I’ve seen this joke before. It was uncanny—the perfect feeling to catalyse a deep dive down a neurodivergent rabbit-hole.
My suspicions were confirmed when I found this tweet:
I descended further and unearthed an iFunny screenshot from 2018. This is where I called it a day.
The origin of the joke became less interesting than the eeriness of its regurgitation, which wasn’t limited to a single joke but a double-barrelled call-and-response repeated across the span of nearly a decade. To what degree is this co-ordinated? Are these dual actors working in tandem or separate entities pseudo-improvising? Is something more random occurring? Are they bots?
A deeper set of thoughts rumbled below these pedestrian ones. What is it about this particular joke combination that makes online users feel okay about republishing it as their own humour? Perhaps it is less to do with the joke itself and more about the wider context the joke exists in.
When X was Twitter and tweets were confined to 140-word character limits, brevity reigned as an invaluable utensil for engagement. Higher engagement equalled higher potential to get money. Pith is easier to copy than pulp. A very simple set of equations materialised.
A culture obsessed with the instant gratification of short-form content in an internet landscape so vast means one can pluck a quote from a Tiktok video and post it Twitter and people are none the wiser. There’s no way to monitor, prevent, deter or sanction these plagiarisms that appear too small to fuss over even as they grow more ubiquitous and systemic. Countless accounts across social media platforms today are dedicated to producing nothing and reposting anything. Original ideas run the risk of becoming herpetic—algorithmically hyper-visible with every flare up but only the chronically online know these micro-plagiarisms are the consequence of a transmission—rarely the ground zero origin.
The internet is a wild west landscape where your original ideas do not belong to you because nothing belongs to you—not in a utilitarian sense of knowledge being distributed freely but in a cowboy-colonial sense of owning whatever you can get away with taking. Some have had the displeasure of being on the receiving end of being plagiarised on this very site (including myself). Whether it’s a joke, a tweet, a quote, the premise of essay or a piece of art—an idea can careen quicker than ever through lineages so reticular that their origin becomes utterly untraceable, ungovernable and ultimately—irrelevant.
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2: Deteriorating reproductions
There’s a stark correlation between AI art—which has been trained en masse with work stolen from artists—and plagiarising content to drum up engagement. If you grouped all the people who’ve ever lifted content from one platform to post on another with all the people who swear by AI and put them in a Venn diagram, you’d probably have a circle round enough to hula hoop with.
In addition to the ubiquity of micro-plagiarism, there is a phenomena I can only describe as deteriorating reproductions, which is best illustrated by referring to the most iconic scene in anime history—The Akira Slide.
Akira (1988) is set in a fictional Neo-Tokyo, 2019; three decades after Tokyo is decimated by an atomic explosion. Tetsuo, a member of The Capsules biker gang, is injured in a clash with a rival gang, dragged to a secret military experiment and begins developing psychic powers. The Capsules’ leader, Kaneda tries to save his friend and finds himself embroiled in a surreal government conspiracy. Tetsuo’s powers spiral out of control and Kaneda is forced to try and stop him while learning about the mystery of Akira, a child with god-like abilities.
Akira is fascinating in its commitment to bleakness. The dystopia is made visceral by a level of animation considered ground-breaking for its time, with Tetsuo’s transformation still heralded as a technical marvel even today. Towing an uncanny line between off-kilter gruesomeness and skilfully detail, Akira was one of the first Japanese anime to resonate with a western audience. The cyberpunk aesthetic coupled with the pockets of violence and vandalism erupting around the futuristic city make the film suffocating by how little reprieve it leaves in its dedication to unsettling.
The iconic Akira Slide happens early in the film after The Capsules are baited into a fight by a rival biker gang, The Clowns. Kaneda goads the leader of the The Clowns into a motorcycle-joust and the rush towards each other at a dizzying pace. At the last second, the leader of The Clowns chickens out and pulls away, clattering from his bike and Kaneda—with his nerves unfrayed—slides his bike to a halt with enough style to inspire generations.
Over nearly four decades, this two second slide has been replicated over and over again in cartoons and live-actions across the world as an homage to Akira’s revolutionary place in the pantheon of animation. I’d estimate its been referenced over a hundred times—impressive in its own way, concerning in another.
Walter Benjamin once wrote, “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”2 We are currently further from the atomic event in Akira than the film itself, a cool six years beyond when the film is set. The excessive reproductions of The Akira Slide have begun to wear its tires bald, appearing less like reverence towards an avant-garde marvel and more like an aesthetic tax. An obligatory performance of prostration to ignite the audience’s dopamine response with a shallow bump of nostalgic familiarity. The Akira Slide is held hostage in a cascade of simulacrums; deteriorating and diluting with each facsimile. So far removed from its root that, to the proceeding generations of anime fans, the Akira Slide itself becomes what Donald Rumsfeld would call, “an known unknown.”3 Today’s average anime fan would likely struggle to recognise Akira at all, let alone give an informed rundown of its pensive themes on institutional corruption, governmental exploitation of the vulnerable and the civil unrest of a city trapped by perpetual scarcity but they’d maybe recognise The Akira Slide.
The Akira Slide suffers from deteriorating reproductions not because the repetition of its reference have made it less cool or call into question the purpose of such exorbitant homage payments. Rather, deteriorating reproductions speaks to a sociocultural attitude willing to endure a progressive distortion of replicating artefacts out of familiarity over yearning for something new. Cultural productions have hit a biological half-life. Ours is a fractured and formulaic zeitgeist that, despite all of technology’s promise of creative ease and opportunity, seems physically unable to provide compelling innovations.
The artist with the constitution to push the boundaries of their mediums are rendered invisible, either because they pose too much of risk to the capitalistic investment they’ve wrangled or do not qualify for it at all. The audience is lulled into a consumptive fugue state—unwowable and always seeking safe satisfaction in the recognisable. In the context of cinema, one of the best filmmakers working today managed to articulate it far more succinctly than I ever could:
Musically, this appears as contemporary songs resampling songs that were already sampled. The advancement of audio technology means the technique of sampling has evolved from chopping on beat-pads into a less laborious practice of loading audio files into a digital audio workstation. Locating samples today is a scroll through youtube, not a hunt through the shelves of a record store. With every step towards technology, we stray further from tangibility and a little more soul gets lost. Easier accessibility comes at the expense of learning the contours of instruments with our own hands. We call it progress. We reminisce on golden ages while spitting on the inconveniences of the past, as we desperately try to replicate nostalgic warmth through the filter of digital emulations. We call that progress.
A painting—slowly decaying—as its photocopy is fed through a photocopier.
3: Uninspired monopolies
When his single Carnival topped the US Billboard Hot 100 last year, it made Kanye West the only rapper to peak at number 1 across three separate decades. Somehow, he remains one of the biggest cultural impactors in the world.
In the song PROMOTION from his VULTURES 2 collaboration album with Ty Dollar $ign, Kanye reanimates lyrics from Good Life—his own 2007 anthem with T-Pain—rapping: “Baby girl, hop in, we goin' everywhere but broke… Like we always do at this-”.
Good Life felt celebratory. It was the culmination of Kanye’s self-propelled hard work manifested into an anthem of success—rose-tinted and sparklingly new—where the pride of his mother was an anchoring currency. The sexual references are twinged with the customary misogyny of the genre but at least they’re cushioned by Kanye’s signature balance of cheekiness and absurdist turn of phrase. (Have you ever popped champagne on a plane while gettin' some brain? Whipped it out, she said, "I never seen snakes on a plane!")
By contrast, PROMOTION appears as a corrupted monument of decadence—one that attempts to tinker with the nostalgia of a simpler time to make the audience point and say, “I remember that!” with fondness in their hearts. Kanye’s production indulges familiar sonics, with chord progressions swirling through organesque synths to stir his signature juxtaposition of gospel and rugged opulence. The palace festers with grotesque evolutions. The overall air is off-putting and lethargic, the misogyny mutated more domineering and vulgar, the references to excessive wealth feel dark, paranoid and, to be honest, carceral. Where Good life is an aspiration, PROMOTION is a cautionary tale.
Capitalism is consistent in what it requires from those who wish to attain hyper-success within its confines. The corner-cutting sacrifices arc towards the exploitation of others to solidify, sustain and justify its own elevation. The insanity of the artist is that they bleed themselves and thus, to reach a stratospheric height in the arts, one must practice a supernatural exploitation of self—exorbitantly mining one’s own creativity into billion-dollar business ventures4 like Kanye or mining one’s own physical vessel to become an otherworldly phenom of choreography, breath-control and pitch-perfect melodic performance like Beyoncé.
It is one thing for conditions to progress towards artists feeding photocopies into the photocopier. It is something else to observe established artists photocopy old versions of themselves. Kanye is not alone here. Off the back of his most challenging year ever, Drake’s collaboration album with PARTYNEXTDOOR, $ome $exy $ongs 4 U features the vibey SPIDER-MAN SUPERMAN which samples his own song The Real Her from his 2011 album Take Care. After 14 years, the fact that one of the world’s biggest pop-stars can still churn out smooth, softly misogynistic navel-gazing bops may surprise no-one—certainly not me who vividly remembers him bragging “we’ll see who’s around a decade from now, that’s real” on Tuscan Leather’s grand entrance to his 2013 album Nothing Was the Same. However, the fact he’s in a place in his career where he’s sampling songs from his own discography, trying to court fond memories (Take Care is widely considered his best album) in the aftermath of a rap battle that left his social influence waning might be what the kids are calling, “a recession indicator”.
If we’re simply looking at the empires of Drake and Kanye, it seems the knees of the old guard are beginning to quake and, for a parade of reasons (the most crucial being the infinite counter-cultural siloes birthed by the internet that have devastated any potential for a cohesive monoculture) there are no observable successors to carry the baton of their mantle.
Of course, the examples of these two men could never reflect the entire musical landscape but their industrial influence is undeniable, its wavering runs in parallel to an observable fatigue that’s yawning through every medium of the arts.
The artists are uninspired.
The audience is bored.
Cinephiles express abject disdain towards sequels and reboots as they hate-watch phoned-in Netflix slop. Criticism towards the hyper-visibility of overtly sexual female rappers have been raging for years but as soon as an artist like Doechii steps into the fray, she’s hit with unsophisticated “industry plant” allegations. The size of observable cultural fatigue is only matched in volume by an incurious audience so hypnotised by familiarity yet so reluctant to pull their eyes away from the swirling circles and search for something else.
Nothing is New
Micro-plagiarising. Deteriorating productions. Uninspired monopolies. These phenomenas are all examples of creative avoidance that eschew the artistic risk of trying to pioneer something new. When you steal for engagement, you don’t actually have to think up your own jokes. If you reprint the successes of past and slap a coat of modern paint on it, you don’t actually have to try and synthesise something groundbreaking. When you sample yourself, you can keep your empire thriving. Is it any surprise that AI has developed from this sociocultural soil?
There is another noticeable thread tethering these phenomena together. They’re all devoid of a single human trait that is impossible for A.I to capture: human effort.
Despite its digitally corrective purpose, an artist still needs to sing into Autotune’s engine for their vocals to be pulled into the right key, allowing musicians like Lil Yachty to experiment with the software’s internal parameters to critically-panned effect. When J. Dilla diligently micro-chopped soul samples on his AKAI beat-pad, he would approach structuring with such jazz-like creativity that he’d mutate time signatures with detailed intricacy. Where there is a capacity for human touch, there is a capacity for human innovation yet of all the technological advancements in art, none have stripped away the human element of creativity so absolutely, none have distanced the tactility of human touch as much as artificial intelligence.
Its purpose of making concept-to-construct an instantaneous process strips away the magic of making, the blissful agony of creation, the clarity of mind that comes with exerting effort on an idea and guiding it from the conceptual womb and birthing it into reality. I could be gauche and reductionist and say this is an inevitable consequence of a post-instagram culture—aesthetically sustained and considerate of growth only when packaged prettily or algorithmically quantifiable. I could tack on the fact that the phenomenas I’ve identified of micro-plagiarising, deteriorating productions, and uninspired monopolies are all leading co-conspirators.
Whatever factor(s) made the ground fertile enough for AI to propagate, it is difficult to treat it like any other technological advancement when it so grotesquely contorts the idea that “art is for everyone” to mean “everyone deserves to make music without practicing, to draw without learning to sketch, to write a novel without figuring out how one shapes tens of thousands of words from an amorphous sierra of thoughts.”
I hold my breath—hoping the arrogant declarations that AI is the future of art are met with a plummet as swift as its equally obnoxious NFT predecessor. This is a cultural abomination believing itself to be greater than even a christian god, smugly calling out “why hand-craft a world in seven days when this machine can basically churn out what I want in seconds?”
The validity of AI’s advantages have been conditioned into us through the language of commerce for decades. It is efficient. The world is faster than ever, deliveries that used to take a week can arrive on your doorstep tomorrow. cheques that used to take five working days to land in your account can be transferred instantly. AI is quicker than humans. It cuts costs. It saves time. All its benefits are slathered in the soulless rhetoric of economics, woefully lacking imagination beyond the parameters of late-stage capitalism and glibly professing that AI is “better” because convenience is better. But when it comes to art, the mess is the point.
In Steal Like An Artist, Austin Kleon wrote, “we make art because we like art. We’re drawn to certain kinds of work because we’re inspired by people doing that work.”5 Isn’t AI art too anti-social for its users to claim they are inspired by people? Too disrespectful towards the artists that’ve been exploited for its users to claim that they like art? It’s within the exertion of effort that we house our love, obsession or devotion. AI lacks the mortal effort to imbue art with any spiritual texture. Instead, it equips the nonchalant, placing Hayao Miyazaki’s paintbrush in hands that do not care. This technology is most seductive to those unable and/or unwilling to comprehend the totality of art—who’d prefer it churned out as soulless, mono-faceted, empty calories indistinguishable from “content” than experience it as an ancient expression of the human spirit demanding authentic activity from the bodily vessel to capture kernels of the divine.
Perhaps I am playing into Kranzberg’s hands—exhibiting a “disdain” for AI that stereotypically positions it as “somehow opposed to the humanities”. Latched to the haterational lineage of Hove, Simone and Delaroche—I wonderwhether I’m yelling that the end is nigh, balling my fist at the sprawling techno-wires and algorithmic gizmos, too jaded and ancient to understand the AI abomination’s utility in the creative realm.
The progressive leaps forward in technology—the turn-tabling manipulation at the advent of hip-hop, the evolution into beat-pad chopping, the pitch correction of Autotune—may have brought about their own middling moral panics but each evolution of equipment was a step further from human intervention. Turntables compressed the composition of the live band. Beat-pads sliced played instruments into pieces. Autotune eschewed the need to sing in key. Like a deteriorating reproduction, each advancement edged us away from the participation, palpability and play that governs the spirit of creativity in exchange for convenience and streamlined process. I have a feeling AI isn’t just another step away from tactility… but it is the step away from it. Unlike the technological advancements before it—artificial intelligence appears like ‘the great filter’ of artistic expression—a creative point mankind cannot return from. We’re all watching the toothpaste of it all squeeze slowly from the bottle. We won’t know how much mess we’ve made until it’s done. All I know is—once it’s out, it doesn’t go back in.
Louis Pisano — YEEZY CONFIDENTIAL PT. 1 (If Pierre Louis Auvray’s reports regarding the Yeezy brand are to be believed then Kanye is no exception to the exploitation of others.)
I don't think I can succinctly capture in a few lines how meaningful and essential this entire essay is right now. The narrative pushed upon us with AI has been "ease, convenience" - while this may be beneficial in very specific scenarios (I'm literally thinking medical), to have this replace the artistry of creating is abhorrent. You're so absolutely right, the magic is in human effort.
As always, your command of language gets me so hype and inspired. You feed my hope in humanity, Inigo. Thank you ❤️🔥