As We May (Not) Think

The relentless marketisation of everything continues apace. We live in an age where what was once a funny home video of a baby biting his older brother’s finger becomes a security that can be traded like stock. Where every activity and skill must be monetised to be something worthwhile.

In 2023, Joe Russo of the Russo brothers, the slop-merchants who brought us Avengers: Endgame, aka the fanservice event of the century, predicted that inside two years, generative AI would be making films. He foresaw that in the near future, it would be possible for people to insert digital avatars of themselves into romcoms starring celebrities – both alive and dead.

The inherent scuzziness of that idea aside, it’s part of a continuing trend in the intersection of creativity and technology, where the act of creation is seen as transactional and individualistic.

When the video game No Man’s Sky came out in 2016, it failed to live up to the promise of its marketing hype (and we all know how that goes). The result was that angry consumers – and I use that word deliberately – demanded that the game’s presentation bend and change to better resemble the game they had imagined in their heads, on the premise that they were “owed” it, having spent money on the game.

I will not weigh in on whether or not the developers falsely advertised No Man’s Sky to the public. Perhaps they did. But this both reflects our present malaise and sets a bad precedent. It implies that artistic intention is trumped by market forces. If a work of popular art, such as a game, or a film, or a TV show, disappoints its audience, it is now common for people to expect recompense, as if they had purchased a faulty washing machine or a car that won’t start.

Under capitalism, art is assigned a monetary value, and that value is privileged over its aesthetic value. What this means is that all art, and especially popular art, comes to be seen as a consumer product.

How often have we heard a crushing bore look at a work of modern art and complain about how something which took such little effort to make sold for so much money? When the value of art is defined by its market value, rather than its pure aesthetic value, it becomes a profanity that an artwork which took little effort and material expense to produce should sell for a high price.

Dissatsifaction with a work is not interpreted as an aesthetic complaint, but as receipt of faulty merchandise. And if the work has sat in a hype cycle for a long time, not even a refund will suffice; no, the consumer demands immediate repairs, to bring the faulty goods into good working order.

Thus, we see works such as Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a 2021 re-cut of the poorly-received 2017 film Justice League. Fans demanded the film’s release for months. The four-hour-long film was met with better reviews, and perhaps it was a better work. But should audiences be given the power to demand works of art be shaped in their own image?

(It should be noted that Warner Bros., the studio which released the recut, also recently filmed and produced an entire comedy film about Wile E. Coyote suing the Acme Corporation, then proceeded to not release it as a tax write-off, and will in all likelihood destroy the finished film. I leave it to your judgement as to whether free-market, deregulated capitalism is a good system in which to produce and distribute cinema, or indeed any form of art.)

It is on that note that I return to the topic of Generative AI, and Russo’s dystopic vision of a future where filmmakers are, if not obsolete, then certainly taking a backseat to technology. A future where characters are no longer separated from the audience, but utterly subsumed by the audience. A future where you or I can be an action hero, a sex machine, save the world, fall in love with a beautiful woman or a handsome man, where we can play the piano at an expert level or be a star athlete.

A hyperreal future where there is no delineation between the real and the simulated, where our identities are extruded and fragmented into external works that scrape away all imperfections and serve only a purely individualised experience. A future where all art is reduced to a disposable commodity, the audiovisual equivalent of a Big Mac.

We have already seen the way in which generative AI has begun to intrude on the literary space. Go on Amazon and you will find no shortage of dross churned out by generative AI. I have seen a children’s picture book with dead-eyed, unsmiling children, whom the blurb assures me are genius inventors. A grim irony, given that precisely no invention went into writing it.

Forgive me if my tone seems harsh or exaggerated, but as a person who enjoys telling stories, and stories being told to me, I cannot feel anything for the notion of this hypermarketised storytelling but utter disgust.

Artificial intelligence technology has the potential to remove much of the drudgery from daily life, and to open up free time, and avenues for the production of art, ironically enough.

That human ability is innate and it is sacred. We have always made art, always told stories. The oldest known work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, dates back to at least twelve hundred years before the birth of Jesus Christ. To put that another way, the Epic of Gilgamesh was as old to Jesus Christ as the invention of gunpowder is to us.

But as a cruel twist of fate would have it, this technology has arrived just in time to be put to use not in reducing workloads for us all, freeing up more time in which to be human. Rather, it is being put to use in enriching a class of asset-stripping vultures who regard the expectation that artists be compensated for their labour as a nuisance.

Meanwhile, the rest of us must work. And perhaps in a few years, we will find ourselves pacified by getting to appear in a goddamned film with some hollow revenant of Marilyn Monroe.

In his prescient novel Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut envisions a future in which all labour has been replaced by machinery. One of the characters proclaims: “The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings, not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.”

I fear that the double threat of a hypermarketised, individualist market for art, combined with technology that makes it easier than ever to eradicate all human input in the production of art, will obliterate our humanity.

We may yet become more machine-like, and the machines may yet get to make a living creating art. And those who run the machines and program them will get rich and live fat off the works of those machines, just as in Vonnegut’s novel.

Unless humanity as a species recognises the threat posed by unchecked technological development to our most innate and precious abilities, it is inevitable that we will find artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers crushed, outcast and destitute. Not to mention everybody else.

We can bring these machines under control. That is not outside the range of our collective power. We stand at a fork in the road. Which lane we pick depends entirely on the willingness of people to do something about it.


This work is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License.
The illustration is by Joshua Woroniecki from Pixabay.