How AI and automation are changing art

I was playing venues up and down the east coast before I could drive, and I learned the internet because my band needed promoting. So I have never seen technology and art as opposites. The tools were always part of the craft. A sampler is a tool. A MySpace page was a tool. A model that can finish your chord progression is a tool. The question has never been whether to use the tool. It is what you are using it for.

What is getting automated

Most of what gets automated in art is not art. It is the work around it.

• The production chores. Cleaning up a vocal, separating stems, tuning a drum, colour-grading a video, laying out a book, cutting a trailer. Hours of tedious work that used to need a studio now need an afternoon and a laptop.
• Distribution and the business. Releasing, promoting, licensing, collecting. When I ran a talent agency this was the whole job. It is now a workflow. Every artist can have the back office a label used to provide.
• The first draft. A sketch of a melody, a palette, a scene, a hundred variations of a logo. The blank page stops being blank. Whether that helps depends entirely on who is sitting in front of it.

What is not

A model can generate a song that sounds like a thousand songs. That is the whole problem: it sounds like a thousand songs. The thing people come to art for is the one song that sounds like a person, and the person is the part the machine cannot supply. Taste, intention, the specific life behind the specific choice. Twenty years of playing have convinced me that is not sentiment. It is the actual mechanism by which art works.

So I expect a flood of competent, forgettable work, and I expect it to make the real thing more valuable, not less. When anyone can make a pretty picture, the picture that means something stands out more.

What gets better

Three things I am excited about. Immersive work, where music, image, and story respond to the person experiencing them, which was always too expensive to make by hand. Access, because a kid with a phone now has a studio I would have given anything for at fifteen. And translation, in the broad sense: art crossing languages, cultures, and formats without losing what made it work.

The music corner

In the 3D version of this page there is a piano and a guitar to the left of the desk. Hover over them and they say “new music coming soon,” which is true. The practice pad on the desk is playable. I am not going to let a machine play it for me. But I am absolutely going to let it clean up the recording.