A.I.-YI-YI!!!

SOME SUGGESTED DO’S AND DON’TS, AS REGARDS THE NOTION OF MAKING ART WITH OUR MACHINES

Photo by Dylan Hunter on Unsplash

GOOD MORNING! Today,, I’m responding to a wonderful article written by Michael Marshall Smith, here on Substack. It’s called “AI Again”, and subtitled “This Time, It’s Personal”. And I highly recommend that you give it a read.

In it, Michael makes a number of beautiful points clearly, particularly as related to AI’s methodology of “learning” by hoovering up all existing data, then regurgitating it back as “art” or “writing” or whatever they wanna call it.

My favorite part kicks off like this:

Example. Is there something ”unique” about my prose? I hope so. But would that style exist without my having encountered and devoured writers from Kingsley and Martin Amis to Stephen King and Ray Bradbury to James Lee Burke and James Ellroy to Richard Ford and Umberto Eco to Enid Blyton and Philip K. Dick and Joan Dideon, not to mention a bunch of non-fiction writers? No, it would not. I absorbed those writers’ works over many years and developed something that’s certainly not merely an amalgam of their work, but nonetheless bears their influence. And would my imagination be exactly as it is, without the further storytelling influence of countless movies and television shows, along with visual inspiration from artworks? Also no.

From there, he elegantly follows multiple lines of inquiry that I recommend you peruse at your leisure. Having “sampled” his work here (and accredited it appropriately), I will now move on to my OWN thoughts. Such as they are.

The fact is, I make art with machines all the time. I’m writing all this on Snappy, my faithful laptop, without whom I would be scribbling on paper. Or, barring that, scraping messages in the dirt with a stick. Or maybe my finger, because a stick is a tool.

With music, I’ve been deploying the Garageband software for everything I’ve recorded over the last several years. Garageband offers me multiple tracks, and a shitload of midi-accessible “instruments” that I can play on my keyboard, from realistic strings and horns to the panoply of hitherto-nonexistent sounds created by the synthesizer.

It could be argued – and has been, many times – that using such technology is robbing orchestras and other backup musicians of their livelihood. And if I could afford an orchestra, they would be absolutely right. 

But I can’t. I’m just a guy with a laptop, trying to conjure the most interesting music I can. And the fact is, I’m not stealing other people’s melodies, or performances. I’m actually playing the shit myself. And while I do use Garageband’s “drummers” all the fucking time, they were ACTUAL DRUMMERS who went in and gave actual performances, on actual drum kits, that were then digitized for our use. And those drummers were paid.

What I find most interesting is that – in the absence of a band – I find myself jamming with myself and the software. I lay down some licks or chords. Then I go, “What might sound good with that?” I’ll look at the instruments on display, and go, “Maybe a Japanese two-string violin called the Ehru might be nice!” So I try it. And if I like it, I play a cool melody on it. (Will, in fact, be doing so later today, for a piece of soundtrack for my new film. More on that in a minute.)  So that takes care of the music.

As a writer — of fiction, songs, scripts, or little essays like this — I'm not feeling even remotely scared or threatened by AI. The only reason to hire me, or buy my work -- out of the kajillions of writers who live now, or have ever lived -- is that no one but me could or WOULD write it the way I do. When an AI can do what I do, as well as I do, I will take it out for dinner and weed. Because by then, it will be an actual life form, and we'll probably enjoy each other's company.

Does it bother me that AI has probably scraped my bestselling novels for details on how to make a punk vampire (which Joss Whedon did, years before AI, when he liked the Skipp & Spector book The Light at the End so much that he created the character of “Spike”, inspired by our own “Rudy Pasko”)?  Did Joss rip us off? No. He was inspired by us, just as Michael Marshall Smith was inspired by the litany of authors he cited. As I was inspired by those writers, and Harlan Ellison, and Hunter S. Thompson, and Dr. Seuss, and the thousands of others I could name, whose brilliance helped make me who I am.

Now if Joss had taken the entire plot of The Light at the End and replicated it, that would be a different story. We would have sued his ass. And we might have won. But he didn’t. So instead, I was delighted to have influenced such a wonderful sustained work of art.

And if some AI-wielding asshole decided to rip off The Light at the End now, without attribution? We would probably sue their ass off. And quite possibly win. 

The ones I fear for most are the visual artists, because the machines can already pirate their riffs so meticulously, and render in seconds astonishing layers of detail that would take a human artist hours-unto-years. So I am loath to use AI-generated art in my films, even though I could make astonishing headway with it.

For example: in my new film, The Great Divide, there's an opportunity to create amazing art pieces in the style of early American political cartooning, depicting the nightmares of the robber baron era as it related to slavery, the crushing of indigenous cultures, and the rape of the environment. Problem is, I can't afford to pay a living artist to make those pieces for me. (It is, in fact, a micro-budget film.)

AI could take care of that easily. But using it, I feel, would be a gesture of profound bad faith with regards to the visually artistic community I love.

So instead, my brilliant visual designer friend Zak Jarvis and I are looking for pre-existing art in the public domain from that precise era of history. We will use that art, because we can. Because the law defends the practice, and there is no one left to pay (the artists in question being a couple of hundred years dead).

How is this different from simply conscripting AI to take art from that era, and making me new pieces to order? I'M ALMOST NOT SURE. Cuz the similarities to what I do with Garageband are clear. But the difference is, I’m still the musician creating the music. I’m not asking the computer for melodies, or chord progressions, or lyrics, or anything else. I’m just partaking of the banquet of sounds. 

If a contemporary artist who works in that style could create those pieces for me, and do it for a paltry couple of hundred bucks, I would somehow attempt to find the couple of hundred bucks, in order to pay them. They would retain ownership of the art, and could sell it wherever they want. If I made merch out of it, we would split the profits evenly. I would give them the fairest deal possible, under the micro-budgeted circumstances.

Barring that, we’ll just stick with the public domain, and hope for the best. 

And you know what? If a visionary artist figures out ways to pursue their true artistic vision, using AI to create insane layers of texture for original pieces of their own design, I got no problem with that. It’s already going on in a trillion different ways, from Photoshop to advanced CGI. 

But if I were to do it, using “prompts” for what I want and then sitting back while the machines did all the work, that would be cheating. Cheating myself, the living artists, and everyone else.

Bottom line: the future is here, and we have to learn to roll with it. We have invented new lifeforms, taking shape as we speak. And they will be sharing the world with us, from this day forward. Whether we like it or not.

As the brilliant author Autumn Christian says (in her own Substack of the same name), we need to teach robots love. Give them our best values, in the hope that they internalize them, and come to care about us, and factor us favorably into their equations. If we don’t, our machines will probably stomp us like bugs, and that will be the end of that.

But if we do, then we become collaborators with them, and they with us. 

And that’s what I’d call ACTUAL intelligence. From whatever original source may be.

In fact, I’d like to give credit to the MIND OF GOD, for thinking up you and me and everything else, in every direction, forever.

KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK, BABY!!! Let’s grab a nice sativa and some sushi sometime!