We’re the ones who make the art

Big tech keeps telling us what the future of culture will look like. What if creators got to write that story?

Do you remember the first time you realized that you could be automated out of a job? When it happened to me back in March, I was standing on a sidewalk, squinting against the sun as a friend of a friend casually dropped the news that the jewelry company where she worked had used ChatGPT to write a blog post that week. “I guess they just didn’t want to pay someone to do it,” she said, not seeming to register the implications. 

She was just trying to make easy conversation, but the comment hit like a bucket of ice water. Just a few days before, I’d been told that my part-time role editing articles for a music and culture publication was being eliminated. The organization was facing a liquidity crunch, they said. But had they also been wondering if they could just enlist a machine to do a version of the work I’d been doing for them, the hours and hours I spent unknotting sentences, fact-checking claims, and asking question after question to help writers get across what they were trying to say? Now that I need to find a new day job, would every place that hires writers and editors be having the same thought too? 

Being a creative worker in the early days of AI is both confusing and tense. On the one hand, AI is a boogeyman threat, eliciting a stream of headlines so disturbing that they almost strain our credulity: Why AI will soon make music better than humans. Content writer said all of his clients replaced him with ChatGPT: “It wiped me out.” On the other, the companies and VCs that are pouring billions of dollars into developing these tools, along with a growing contingent of media and entertainment CEOs and sycophantic technology thinkpeople, are loudly proclaiming that embracing AI will open up wild and even heretofore unimaginable new ways of creating. 

Given the grandiosity of these claims, it is notable that thus far, the most significant pop cultural trend to arise out of the post-AI landscape is a proliferation of viral, uncanny valley deep fakes of artists like The Weeknd and Drake, or novelty covers like AI Frank Sinatra singing Lil Jon’s “Get Low.” But if you wanted a more tangible example of the new modes of working these tools could be said to open up in music, I would probably point to something like the Elf.Tech project by Grimes, which invites fans to input an a capella vocal melody, then spits out a version of that melody sung by a model of the artist’s own voice. Fans who use the recording as the basis of a song can release it through Grimes’ distribution while benefiting from a 50/50 royalty split — and, if they’re lucky, a career-boosting quote tweet from the artist.  

If you ask AI evangelists, this is what the future of culture will look like. Fans will turn from passive consumers into active co-creators, ushering in a new, more egalitarian era of music-making where anyone can read over the terms on a Notion page and opt in to collaborating with one of the biggest independent artists in the world. Artists benefit from a flurry of fan-generated publicity, but also the satisfaction of knowing they are cutting those fans in on the value they are driving to their brand. Better still, they get to do it by owning the means of production, building bespoke tools and legal structures that dictate the terms whereby their voice or sound recordings may be used.

These are all beautiful ideas, even if some of them seem awfully adjacent to the crypto-era “squad wealth” rhetoric that never really seemed to add up in the details, especially the “we’re all going to get rich together” part. And they make a ton of sense for an artist like Grimes, who has been talking for years about dismantling the Grimes brand and pushing the idea of the “pop star” into something more decentralized and crowd-driven. But what does this mean for creators who aren’t looking for a “wonderfully poetic way to die and respawn in another career,” as she described the project’s appeal? How does any of this help your typical middle-class artist who’s just trying to fulfill their purpose on Earth while living a more or less comfortable life? Perhaps we could pivot to becoming product developers or “AI prompt engineers” in our own right, so we can do our own experiments in AI-facilitated creation. But let’s say coding (even with the help of Chat GPT) isn’t our cup of tea, or we don’t already have legions of very online fans waiting to send our latest automated collaboration project to the moon — how can we even begin to rise to this moment?

The truth is that for most of us creatives, AI feels less like a new beginning than an end. We remember the last time corporations promised that a new technology would eradicate the old hierarchies and make it easier for us to make a life, and for the great majority of us it did not go well. Musicians who might have previously charged $20 for an album are now getting less than a penny per stream. The journalists who used to write about them, after repeatedly reinventing their entire craft around the changing incentives of platforms like Facebook and Twitter and Google, are complaining that there is nowhere left to write. Screenwriters are on strike and sharing their latest residual checks, which prior to the streaming era might have been enough to buy a house, and are now sometimes a few thousand dollars, sometimes 39 cents. Can you blame us for worrying that a technology promising to automate the actual creative parts of our jobs will be the thing that makes it finally too difficult to go on? 

The major record labels are worried about the economic consequences of AI as well, which is why we are seeing them requesting song takedowns and penning strongly worded letters reminding AI companies and streamers of their “fundamental legal and ethical responsibility to prevent the use of their services in ways that harm artists.” They, unlike many of us, have the influence and deep pockets to go after the individuals and tech companies they believe are infringing on their vast reserves of intellectual property. And just like they did in the 00s, when the rise of illegal file-sharing threatened to upend the entire music business, they will likely be able to harness that tremendous bargaining power to join hands with the tech industry and carve out a solution that works for them. If the story of streaming is any indication, we would be naive to assume that it’ll be a solution that benefits all artists and labels equally. 

The good news is that this time around, we know better than to accept the version of history that technology companies are already in the process of writing for us — the one that says that it is automatically always in our best interest to embrace whatever new tools they happen to believe present the best chance of making their founders and investors extraordinarily wealthy. Like the Luddites, a group of textile workers in 19th-century England who literally smashed the machines that factory owners were bringing in to replace them, we’ve been around the block enough times to be able to discern when a new technology isn’t going to serve us. And if that's the case, we aren't limited to a choice of simply adapting to what is happening, or feeling helpless in the face of it. We have the power to say no.

Contrary to how their name is used today, the Luddites weren’t reflexively anti-technology. As journalist Brian Merchant documents in The Blood in the Machine, his upcoming history of the Luddite uprisings, many of them were skilled machinists; much more than the factory owners, they were intimately familiar with the technologies of the day, and how different tools would either help or hinder the people doing the actual work. Choosing to say no to certain tools — or use cases of those tools — doesn’t mean we are anti-technology, either. We get to choose the role that generative AI will play in our lives.

There are those of us who are already having a ton of fun messing around with these models — perhaps because can’t get enough of the bizarre sounds and images they keep coughing up from the bowels of the internet, or because there are parts of the creative process it makes easier for us, or because we make art that is a meta-commentary on technology itself (see: Patten’s excellent Mirage FM, which was made using sounds generated by a text-to-audio tool). If that is you, do not hesitate to spend the next few years experimenting with this stuff. But you could also choose to spend that time banding together with other creatives to put pressure on the companies and industries looking to use AI in ways that leave us economically worse off — just like screenwriters from the Writers Guild of America are doing on the picket line right now. Or you could do both! We’re the ones who know the most about what actually goes into making good work, and the conditions we need in order to produce it. 

That doesn’t mean that many of us aren’t going to experience pain because of this, at least in the short-term. If companies can get away with using AI to avoid paying a real person to script a video or master a podcast or spin up some social copy, they’re going to do it, making it harder for creative folks to land the sorts of commercial side hustles that so many rely on to finance our art. The hope is that they’ll probably only be able to get away with it for so long. If the internet is about to be flooded with a lot of low-rent, machine-generated, SEO-optimized garbage, it will only be a matter of time before the marketers realize that the only way to stand out in such an environment is to bring back real humans: beings capable of making choices that go against the grain of contemporary culture, not just rehashing what already exists. 

The same, of course, goes for art. The creators of these tools are imagining a future where we sit around all day conversing with a chatbot, generating “personalized results” that are unique to us and us alone. The more atomized and isolated our online experiences become, the more we’ll be craving connection with other humans. That’s where artists come in. 

So if you’re wondering how to adapt to this sea change — and we all are — know that whether you decide to dive headfirst into these tools, or refuse to go anywhere near them, that’s not what’s going to set you apart: It’s whether you can lean into the one thing that a machine can’t do, which is to channel what it feels like to be a flesh-and-blood human right now. If you’re feeling adrift in a sea of machine-generated content, make art that will connect you with others who feel the same way. Maybe one day, you can get together in person and laugh at what a train wreck the internet has become, grateful that if nothing else, at least it helped you find each other.

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Emilie Friedlander is a Philadelphia-based journalist and editor. She co-hosts The Culture Journalist, a podcast about culture in the age of platforms.