A few weeks back, in a former bank building that’s now a music venue in Falmouth, Cornwall, I was DJ-ing at a night I run called Rave Machine. It was a noisy, high-energy, sweaty affair, just as a night’s dancing should be.
All of the elements – the crowd, performers, staff, music, the journey home – connected to create something special, a one-off. It was also completely human.
Something, in theory, well out of reach of what technology could possibly offer.
In the DJ world, though, technology has already changed the equation. In the 1990s, a DJ had to not only pick the tracks, but also thread them together armed only with vinyl records, a pair of turntables and a mixer. Now, much more assistance is on offer, including software that will sync beats on different tracks should you ask it to (I don’t). Apple Music and Spotify have an AI tune-mixing option too.
If you were out dancing, would it matter to you if a DJ was, well, not really DJing? If you loved the music being played, would you care if technology was doing the work?
It’s a question that generative AI – the type of AI that creates content – is asking of us all. One of the thrills of that night in Falmouth was seeing our special guest, Andy Cato from Groove Armada, artfully weaving an array of tracks. How would I feel if a DJ was just pressing play? (And that does happen).
I mention all of this because that experience in Falmouth connects to a far broader question: whether we actually care if a piece of art has been created by a human, be that a painting, song, book, poem, or any other type of art.
Renaissance frescoes and chess champions
The music platform Deezer says 44% of tracks uploaded to it are AI-generated. Its research also found that 97% of listeners couldn’t tell what was AI-generated and what wasn’t. But here’s a third statistic: more than half of those surveyed said they did care if it was made by AI. They want humans to be involved.
Daniel Susskind, an economics professor at King’s College London, says many of us place huge value on the human role in making art. It’s what makes the creative process different from more functional, practical tasks, he thinks.
“I was once in a room of accountants, and one of them stood up and said, ‘My clients come to me for the personal touch, the human process’,” he remembers. “And I said, ‘That isn’t why they come to you, they come because they want their taxes done properly’.”
But it’s different with art, he says. “If I walk into the Sistine Chapel and look at the ceiling, I think not only is that extraordinarily beautiful, but isn’t it amazing that a human hand, flesh and blood like my own, came up with that. A mind like mine dreamt that up,” he says.
As Susskind describes it, what we value isn’t just the destination, it’s the knowledge that a human – one of us – got us there. We can wonder at that achievement.
Of course, it could be argued that computers and AI software were themselves created by humans. If Susskind feels awe walking into the Sistine Chapel, others might experience awe of a different type using a chatbot like ChatGPT.
Susskind points to another example, this time a chess match in 1997, when a world champion, Garry Kasparov, lost for the first time to a computer, Deep Blue. At the time, there were fears the computer’s success would mean our interest in chess would wane. In fact, chess is more popular than ever, played by millions.
“It wasn’t simply the moves on the board that people care about. It’s the fact that it’s a human being sitting behind them, moving those pieces along that matters,” Susskind argues.
And some think that the advent of AI has actually placed extra value on things created by people. You might call that a human premium.
Human touch
Kyle Chayka, a journalist at The New Yorker focused on technology, says AI writing is now widely considered to be “generic, obsequious and banal”. As a result, he says, “I think readers are coming to value very obviously personal writing, and maybe even writing that’s messier, less structurally sound or composed or perfected, than they maybe once would’ve desired.”
Chayka goes on: “I think illustration and graphic design is going in the same direction, where the average is too easily accessible, and so designers are leaning into being weirder and more eye-catching and more unusual, trying to find things that AI can’t generate so easily.”
In response to the surge in AI-created content, academics are racing to develop a universally recognised symbol to denote something that is “human made” (similar to the “Fairtrade” label that emerged in the 1980s). Labels like “AI-free” are already appearing on covers of some books, films, and albums.
For C Thi Nguyen, a philosophy professor at the University of Utah, it’s a question of our underlying values.