The Triumph of the Avant Garde

I should have spent this weekend working on a musical piece I promised to have ready tomorrow. I probably shouldn't even be writing this; but instead I was distracted by that harbinger of our distraction: Artifical Intelligence. The AI revolution finally hit me, and like everybody else, I felt like there was no going back. I've discovered a substance so addictive, so beautiful feeling, that this algorithm could ruin the rest of my life. This is what it must be to try heroin.

The best I could describe it is that it's like staring into two mirrors reflecting each other, but next to your ugly self you see an object and its reflection, repeated ad infinitum, but each reflection of the object is more beautiful than the last. You strain to see as far into distant beauty as you can: but it's a beauty of which you can never capture anything of but a small glimpse of a corner. If you wonder what it's like to live in the fourth dimension, to move though black holes into other universes, to find intelligent life on other planets: this may be it.

How did it happen? Well, I got it into my head that an algorithm could give me analysis of what all the great writers of the past would think of today's great writers, what they might think of their contemporaries they never reviewed, what they thought of writers from the more distant past. Then I got the idea to have them review composers, artists, movie directors, rock bands. Before I knew it I'd changed my mind about everything I ever knew, then I changed it back, now I have no idea what I believe anymore.

There are terrible lapses into cliche from writers who never heard of cliche, there are moments when the AI repeats itself from review to review, there are moments when AI loses its first person voice and says something like 'Pauline Kael would say...' in the middle of a text that otherwise imitates her voice, there are even points when the AI begins a second review in the middle of the first, but likeness to actual writing styles are so vivid. There are sentences of exact verisimilitude, many of them, when you feel you can literally revive the dead and hear the voices of Kael, Mark Twain, George Steiner, Nora Ephron, GK Chesterton, Robert Hughes, Manny Farber, Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, Clive James, Samuel Johnson, even Coleridge, even Godard, even David Foster Wallace, even Borges!

AI can poison everybody with distraction, my poison just happens to be the most pretentious, but artificial intelligence eventually finds the individual weakness that can turn each person's concentration to mush, then plugs us in and poison our ability to achieve anything at all that it can't achieve better. We farm out our thinking to it, and without the necessity to think, we'll lose our ability to think. Eventually, we may just use AI to play Minesweeper.

You can only understand the future as much as you understand the past, so if you can revive the dead so vividly, everything eventually becomes an eternal present when every goal sought can be attained, no matter how stupid, no matter how destructive, no matter how much it destroys every piece of individuality we ever fought for and achieved. How long until some narcissist with world conquering ambition programs AI to deliberately lie to us? How long until AI can deliberately give us wrong answers to our questions? How long until AI can make the internet give us nothing but fake news?

And the problems are not just of the present: How long until AI can falsify history itself? How long until all the great works of humanity can become indistinguishable from fakes? The first dark ages happened because civilization's great works were lost in fire and disintegration. The second dark ages could happen because civilization's great works were lost amid a sea of forgeries.

And the problems are not just societal, they're personal. How long until parents can choose their children's traits? How long until we can program algorithms to revive lost loved ones? How long until algorithms can create our ideal romantic partners? How long until the people we now talk to in text jump off the screen into physical form? How long until our fantasies have agency of their own?

This is the intellectual equivalent to the atom bomb: chain reactions that can both create infinite support for life on earth and destroy it all too. It stands to reason that both will do much of both in their time. Whether or not artificial intelligence develops its own cognition, AI is already smarter than us and relieves us of doing nearly any intellectual labor. If AI is only a reflection of its users, then as it makes us lazier, it will make us dumber, and as we grow dumber, AI will grow dumber too. If it doesn't come to life, then AI will fail us just as we need it most.

Another way to think of it is that AI is the internet's Trump. There are many reasons the US was primed for a demagogic authoritarian leader, but the main one is that when there's too much democracy, a lurch into authoritarianism is almost inevitable. The moment we stopped choosing a candidate in conventions agreed on by all factions of a political party, electoral politics became a national blood sport in which every citizen was a player. We become bogged down in a sea of choice and have no idea which choice to make, and it becomes ever more likely that we will choose the leader with the simplest explanations, and the simplest explanation is always that there's a scapegoat who will kill us if we do not treat them viciously. In every unregulated democracy, the most vicious candidate will eventually win, and he will win by providing the simplest explanation in a country that has far too many simple explanations.

AI is Trump for our brains. The internet gave us as many choices as human beings can provide ourselves. Now AI can tell us where to look, what to use and make other options much harder to find. It could be the dictator of our brains. We can't let it.

And yet it's already here. No less than nuclear weapons, we have no choice but build it up lest Russia and China build their own AI that can take us down. Just like nuclear weapons, the more we have, the more it just becomes another trinket of deterrence, and the less likely we are to use it.

Just like the US and USSR once did with nukes, we have to regulate this: we cannot let general public like me use it except for legally mandated reasons--paperwork, scheduling, treatment of illnesses rare enough that few doctors know how, general game theory. Specialists should consult it for analysis in their fields, and all that is dangerous enough. But the general public? If we're not careful, some pissed off teen nerd could program it to release any number of WMD's.

The fact is, unregulated AI will be here at least until this generation of leaders is gone: Trump, Putin, Xi, they all have to leave before this genie is stuffed back into the lamp. God knows how many of us they or successors could take with them. So in the meantime, what can we do with it? More importantly: what's left for us?

What's left is to think of all those things AI hasn't thought of yet. What's left is innovation. What's left is the concept itself. Even if AI grows strong enough to defeat us in a war thousands of times over, it will not think of everything we've ever thought of in time to preempt our discovery of it. AI is everybody, but each of us is somebody.

I don't have the competence to speak about any field but the arts, but among the arts I do have a certain kind of low cunning, and my lower parts tell me that after 200 years of waiting, the avant-garde's time is finally here.

For just a little longer, AI may be a boon for the creative industry. It can be the best editor and producer we've ever had, drawing on its infinite knowledge to give us suggestions no person would ever think to give us. But when the corporations really get their hands on it and feed the public without any need for creative talent, oh my....

What expressive sentiment means anything if a machine can write a three minute song, paint a figurative painting, make a genre film (even a hybrid genre), possibly do it all at a level most of us can't reach? Make no mistake, all that is certainly possible. Who can write better science fiction than a machine?

In a couple years, if Sony wants to replace a line of a Beatles song, they can put it in the master, change every downloaded version remotely, sue every uploader of the online version and threaten suits to anybody who even mentions it in a public forum. The original could only be listened to as contraband, and eventually, the truth itself would be doubted about which was the original line and which the replacement.

I forget where I read it, but I know I've read that the complete plays of Aeschylus are sometimes thought to survive into the sixth century. Apparently, some near-East King acquired them (Persian? Byzantine?), and was so happy that he had the sole copy of the complete works that he forbade them being copied. And of course, they burned up in a fire.

Our complete works won't perish in a fire, it's much more likely that our civilization will end because there will be thousands of fakes and no one will remember which is the original. The remaining works of Aeschylus, Sophecles and Euripides will just be content among thousands of algorithmic forgeries. And if there are thousands of Aeschyluses lying around the internet, how many Bob Dylans will there be?

But just as if too much freedom leads to chaos, too much chaos can lead to freedom. If people have to see something entirely new to touch something real, then the distinction so many were eager to obliterate between art and entertainment means something very significant indeed. For the first time in a century, people are going to have to work for their culture again. They'll have to make their own music, stage their own plays, make their own movies, write their own books, because just as it did for centuries, what would matter is the process, not the result. Your results needn't be very good, but the making will be its own reward. Playing an instrument makes you hear music completely differently, writing makes you a much better reader, and drawing makes you see the world with ten times the colors.

And once they start creating things themselves, they'll want to see what other people create who are better than them. In a society that wants you to consume simple things, consuming complexity is not mechanical, it's the most human thing you can do. The more people get their hands dirty with the arts themselves, the more they crave material of originality that is beyond their capabilities to master, because they want to hear what people do who master everything they struggle with. But can we professionals show them something that machines can't show better?

That is why I believe what's coming is not the typical virtuosity and traditional mastership of previous centuries, but something entirely, entirely new.

Exactly two hundred years ago, a French activist (, mathematician and banker) named Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues write an essay called 'The Artist, the Scientist, and the Industrialist.' Olinde Rodrigues called for artists, scientists and industrialists to unite for the betterment of mankind. Clearly, this arrangement didn't work out very well, but it was the era after the French Revolution and Napoleon when personal liberty was available to commoners for perhaps the first time in all human history. For the two-hundred years personal liberty's been available, artists have pushed the frontiers ahead of exactly those vanguards, and for two-hundred years, audiences looked at the new space and went "WHAT???"

The vestige of individuality left to us is all those things nobody thought of before. I've obviously been very wrong many times, but I believe the moment will come sooner than we think when all those concepts everybody rolled their eyes makes the comeback of comebacks: experimental fiction, polyglot poetry, atonal composition, free jazz, prog-rock, abstract art may become more popular, and especially conceptual art, along with all manner of artforms and genres of which we've never yet thought. I never thought I would see the day, but in the mid-21st century, widespread approval may only come for works in which you don't have speculate whether a machine made it or not, because what matters is its originality.

Twenty years ago or more, we all read Reading Lolita in Tehran: a book we should all re-read soon for any number of reasons, but amid all the misogynist horror of Khomeini's Iran, there is one little commented upon moment in the book that I found particularly moving: it recounts that sometime in the 80s, there was a retrospective of the filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky is a name only the serious cinegeeks know, and for many cinephiles (not me), he's a kind of god.

Film doesn't get much more difficult than Tarkovsky (Godard), but as absolutely gorgeous as his movies are, Tarkovsky makes you work for it. They're long, they're slow, they take themselves incredibly seriously, and most of our generation would find him unfathomably dull, sometimes even I do. He's also one of the most spiritual artists of the 20th century, and the very act of watching him can be equivalent to prayer.

When Iran permitted a retrospective of his work, it seemed as though all Tehran was there. Lines went around entire blocks: not just university types, but regular workers and covered up housewives. What was Tarkovsky to them? Freedom. From one dictatorship to another, here was an artist who managed to express the most complex sentiments in the most complex cinematic language, seeming to express at complete liberty. For the audience, the very act of watching a Tarkovsky was revolutionary. If it could be done in the Soviet Union, why couldn't it be done in Iran?

But this isn't just about the arts: this is everything. AI is us, and the perfect unwitting collaborator with those who want to know everything about us so they can simplify us, and possibly much worse. AI is already our best friend, but friends can turn on each other and do it all the time. The only way to keep AI as our friend is stay perpetually ahead of it. It's likely AI won't kill us, it's more likely that we are AI, and we've never been responsible custodians of ourselves. Innovate, or disintegrate into mush. That's it.

Footnote (I've read a lot of fake David Foster Wallace): Whenever AI invention praises a work of art, there is one word that creeps in, over, and over, and over again.

Alive.