Will AI replace the artist?

not if we lean into the human-weird // an essay by Alex Dobrenko

Another week, another pronouncement from Mt. AI-lympus.  

This one, they tell us, Will Change Everything. 

Meet OpenAI's very human and not-at-all haunting parlor trick, Sora, announced this week, and watch as it takes a written prompt and turns it into an almost but not exactly real feeling video!

First comes the awe: can you believe this? Look at this video of a man running backwards on a treadmill! 

Then, the panic: given art's decidedly specific turn to "man in sweats running backwards on treadmill" motifs, will art as we know it become obsolete? 

Absolutely not. 

Culture, or Art, is the response to society. The deviation.

If tomorrow's society becomes one chock full o' AI-made drivel,  culture shall respond in kind. It can't do anything but. So it has always been and so it shall always be. 

Once videos and movies start to look like glossy, melting clay, maybe artists will respond by making stuff that's robotic. Or poorly made on purpose. If the machines start acting more like humans, will the humans start acting more like machines?

None of this is new - culture reacts to society all the time. Deviants, the lot of us. 

Dubbed the “Citizen Kane of bad movies,” The Room is a perfect example of the mistake being the point. Tommy Wiseau, the film’s director-lead actor-producer-writer, set out to make a melodramatic, earnest tale of love and loss, revenge and return. But The Room is none of those things; it is an absurd comedy that feels like it was made by an alien life form obsessed with Tennessee Williams.

In that dissonance between the intended and the real is The Room’s charm. It’s why the film become a cult classic-  a story worth experiencing in a packed movie theater at midnight as you all throw plastic cutlery at the screen whenever a framed photo of a spoon appears in the film (just one of the many traditions one can experience during a screening).

You could see AI making an exact replica of The Room and it having none of the value, because it wasn't made by someone. Because there was no human-led deviation between what was attempted and what was made. That deviation, in art and in life, is what makes us so damn human. 

Society swallows culture whole only to realize it's no longer there, molted into its new form whose very origin comes from society's attempt to destroy it.

Art will in fact thrive upon the mess that AI wreaks upon the masses. Action to reaction to commodification of said reaction. Toss in some enshittification and babe, there's really nothing better you could do for Art.

the hard question

I am not worried about art, but I am worried about the artists.

A painful transition of cost-cutting commerce shall soon befall entire industries of creatives whose jobs will become 'obsolete.' Storyboard artists, VFX teams, background actors and voice actors, previz teams, stock video teams, and so on and so on. For example, Tyler Perry halted a $800M expansion of his studio in Atlanta yesterday after seeing OpenAI’s Sora tool in action.

This is, of course, a tragedy.

A tragedy wrought upon the very people who bet their careers on a world where artistry and commerce could coexist.

But we aren’t there quite yet. We're at the moment right before. The moment where we can still choose. Where we can surprise even ourselves.

There’s an idea in improv comedy called ‘platform-tilt.’ A scene starts out normal - that's the platform - and then something weird happens - that's the tilt. The tilt is the source of the comedy.

The key is to accept the beginning of the scene as the norm, no matter how weird it is. So if the scene is a married couple planning how to cook their own children for dinner, then that's the norm. Crazy to us as the audience, sure, but normal to the people in the scene. If Betty then says "what if, I don’t know, we...raised the kids as our own and, ya know, ate other stuff instead?” and Mark reacts with shock and disgust, then that’s the tilt.  

In this world where it’s normal to eat babies, suggesting that we raise them instead is insane. A deviation. 

We - the performers and the audience both - determine the tilt. The weird thing. Had the idea of not eating the kids and raising them normally not warranted a reaction, it too would be normal, and the scene would continue until something else became the tilt.

Eventually, the scene will continue until the tilt becomes our new normal. That’s where we find ourselves today. In this platform, society’s greatest artists are paid to sell credit cards and cookware to people online. It’s crazy. Or it was, until it wasn’t.

Now, it’s the norm. Soon, it seems, a new norm is coming. AI-made everything. It’s weird now, but soon it won’t be. The tilt will become the platform and we’ll forget it was ever strange to not watch shows where most, but definitely not all, characters have five fingers on each hand.

Unless we tilt defiantly in the opposite direction. We, the performers and audience of this life, get to decide what we find interesting. To first notice, and then follow, the weird, wherever it takes us. To tilt away from the platforms that make us feel like machines and toward the rooms full of weird artists who make us remember that it is the tilt itself - the err - the weird - that makes us human. 

But we can’t sit back and hope the weird will find us. Culture does not insist upon itself. It must be sought out. Discovered. The world is full of Tommy Wiseaus and their visions of the world, strange rooms that to us feel like dreams - confusing, illogical, and surreal - until we realize that it is here - in the tilt away from society and toward the culture of the imperfect human - that we finally feel alive.

Will there be framed photos of spoons? It’d be weird if there weren’t.

Still not convinced? No worries. I reached out to a couple top execs in the AI industry to record this video helping explain things:

Related Stuff:

1. Finite and Infinite Games - A huge inspiration for this piece and my thinking generally. Two quotes specifically that shaped this essay - culture is the response to society and “culture resounds with the laughter of unexpected possibility.”

2. “What are us humans gonna do with all of our newfound time?” asks

   Scott Belsky
   …His answer? “A surge of wildly human-intensive non-scalable experiences.“

3. Freddie deBoer
   with some much needed AI skepticism.

4. The imperfect is perfect - a collection I made recently on Sublime to catalog the weird I find all around us.

5. Brian Eno on how trying to make music sound perfect too early can short-circuit the exploration process of what it might actually become.

6. All this tilt talk made me think of Don Quixote’s ‘tilting at windmills,’ an idea I’ve heard often but never fully understood until reading this lecture.

7. Loving how iA Writer closed out their latest email below:

   

let’s talk about it

1. What weird directions of human-made art do you see us tilting toward in the years to come?

2. Have you seen The Room? What other weird cult movies and art more broadly do you love?

3. How’s all of this AI-news making you feel? Is the hype real or just a big ol’ PR tale of sound and fury, told by an idiot, signifying nothing?

4. How did the very not AI video make you feel? I spent so much $ on it so I hope it was good.

5. What else!? Open comments let’s talk about whatever is on your noggin.

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