There’s a lot of discussion about artificial intelligence these days. And a lot of concern about this technology’s talent for producing cultural products that compete in mediocrity with those manufactured by real people — cue Australian post enfant terrible Nick Cave arguing that AI writing poor song lyrics is “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human”1. There are of course reasons to worry about the unstoppable progress of AI and how this Moloch is being trained naively by so many of us. But many of those worried about the expansion of AI in culture ignore a basic fact: most of the culture we consume today is already algorithmic in nature — the fight against its automatisation was lost a very long time ago.
I watched a video by music producer Rick Beato argue something along these lines the other day. This unlikely critic of spectacular society was specifically addressing how autotune — a tool that was once deployed to aid pitch-challenged singers on albums — has become ubiquitous, meaning all human voices now sound robotically alike. A while back I also read someone — I can’t remember who — discuss the overuse of compression in sound engineering. An effect once used mainly by heavy metal bands — so that albums sound louder on the radio — has become the default option, to the extent that there is now little dynamic range2 in most contemporary albums, regardless of genre — once more, the result is eerily artificial. And less technically, what is a phenomenon like the X Factor (and similar hells) but an algorithmic tampering of popular musical tastes? By the way, this is not a lament in the style of “music was better in the past”, since there was always shit music by the shovelful while artists with some density can be counted with the fingers of one hand in each generation. What I’m hinting at is that by looking at music we can see that there was already a tendency towards automatisation in the Spectacle, that this tendency precedes AI, and that what we are living through right now is just another phase. Granted, we are now closer to the perfection of the algorithmication of everyday life, culture included. It was bound to happen in these digital times. It might surprise and outrage Nick Cave but it doesn’t have to surprise you.
Read opinion pieces in any broadsheet, read them for some time (and may god bless your soul) and you’ll start to see the algorithm of clickbait at work3. Watch two or three blockbusters in a row and you’ll see the algorithm emerge, no matter what demographic the blockbuster is directed to. And the same applies to any bestseller, to genre literature, to literary fiction, to TV series, to art, to music, even to that music that imagines itself as “serious” and unique. I’d go as far as saying that unless a cultural product actively aims to short-circuit the spectacular society in which it exists it is impossible for said product to be anything but algorithmic. The vast majority of contemporary culture is largely the repetition of pre-agreed formulas4 — to the point that anything that doesn’t betray a formula at first sight is forced into the “outsider” label. (And yet the Spectacle abhorret a vacuo and whatever exists extramuros it will eventually be sucked in, with the centripetal impetus of a black hole swallowing matter.)
How did we arrive here? I would argue that we were always going to arrive here from the moment that culture stopped being a means of communication in order to become another commodity manufactured by professionals — when it stopped being a game, centuries ago. In order to sell products there is no better option than to embrace the algorithm, since not even our mothers know us better than this goblin made of zeros and ones. The landlords of the virtual playgrounds where we spend our every day know this very well, as do advertisement executives, as do cultural producers, as does anyone trying to sell something, whether songs or toilet paper. The fear of losing what we have already lost can’t change this.
Longing for a Divine Human Right to produce cultural commodities, at a time when life feels like a succession of targeted ads, is both naive and anthropocentric to a laughable degree. Machines are better at selling us things and they’ll unavoidably be better at selling us culture (content?) — it’s now too late to hit reverse. If there is something uniquely human that we must defend from mockery this can no longer be found in culture, in any of its commodified manifestations. There are reasons to fear AI and what it will mean to our jobs, to our survival, to our humanity. On the other hand, AI might liberate us from art, at least art from a certain kind of art. What we will do with our free time — if machines allow us any — remains to be discovered.
One can only hope we will start playing again.
Makes one wonder what Coldplay or Ed Sheeran are, to name just two of so many factories of lyrical excrements…
The difference between the louder and quieter sounds.
It is at work in this piece too, by the way. What is its title but an attempt to hook you into reading it through the use of sensationalism?
If we want to take this to its logical conclusion languages are also algorithmic, which means that thinking is algorithmi, and so on… Uniqueness is such a strange delusion… Is there anyone more arrogant than those who write “opinions my own” on their Twitter bio?
oh yes all the way. Classic FM uses compression to make it possible to hear classical music while driving - otherwise it would veer from the inaudible to the ear-spltting, but it is inevitable when music is used as ambience. Join Pipedown UK to campaign against piped music in supermarkets, banks, wherever. A form of noise pollution.