Summary: Reproduction Isn’t Creativity, and AI Isn’t Art

In the cultural realm, the results will be exceptionally crude: ersatz paintings crafted by computer (sold, perhaps, in a marketplace of artificially generated scarcity like cryptocurrency or NFTs); formulaic music recorded by CGI pop stars who do not actually exist; writer’s rooms replaced by generative algorithms that reduce the nuances of dialogue and plot construction to a Fordist production process with few or even no actual writers involved.

In the narrow conception of art offered by Tim’s Vermeer, it is simply a technology like anything else — a method, or a series of methods, that aspire to represent reality with as much fidelity as possible.

Like Jenison and Gillette, the most effusive boosters of AI culture fundamentally mistake reproduction for creation and incorrectly see realism and artistic expression as synonymous.

In a world where machines are allowed to replace artists, the entirety of culture will simply be an ever-narrower and more derivative version of what already exists.

In this conception, creativity is ultimately a mechanistic endeavor, art of every kind — paintings, films, music, poetry — being nothing more than the aggregation of granular data points; quite literally, the sum of its component parts.

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