Hey!!!
Welcome to the last iteration of my series Culture is Boring. We’ve talked about the over-optimization of culture at large, the homogenization of big box media, and the mundanity of social content.
We’re landing in a fitting place today, talking about the future of generative AI and the role it may play in making culture less (or more?) boring.
I’m very excited about this one as I’ve looped in a colleague of mine and AI enthusiast Saif Ahmed. Saif is currently Chief Technology Officer at sparks & honey and wrote his Master’s thesis on generative AI in original rap lyrics and model-driven instrumentals back before it was cool and zeitgeisty. He has been a product manager, a data scientist, an investor, a systems engineer, and a senior executive with over twenty years of experience in management consulting, quantitative hedge funds, and at several AI-driven startups.
Let’s dive in :)
“Creative artificial intelligence is the art of the archives…art derived from the massive cultural archives we already inhabit.”
-Stephen Marche
Generative AI is increasingly playing a role in the re-mixing, re-hashing and over-optimizing of culture. It’s becoming easier to duplicate, replicate and imitate on a large scale. But is AI going to worsen the sameness of our culture?
On some levels, it seems to be making creativity a lot easier. Launched in October 2022, InteriorAI is an AI-powered image generator that can show users different ways to redesign a space using dozens of different styles — ranging from 'baroque' to 'cyberpunk'. A Cosmo magazine cover was recently designed by AI. And even urban planning has received an automated makeover with betterstreets.ai. Last time we spoke about how many creators are integrating generative AI into their content creation and planning. In fact, 86% of professional creators said that AI positively impacts their creative process, and 71% said that their fans have reacted positively to AI-driven content.
But with that ease, comes a lot more volume. When it opened to the public back in September 2022, OpenAI reported that more than 1.5M users were actively creating over 2M images a day. The algorithm is producing almost as many images daily as the entire collection of free image site Unsplash. And it won’t just stop with images — companies are already pushing forward with automated video production. Late last year, Meta released perhaps the most advanced such AI text-to-video generator yet.
With this rapid growth in volume, there’s the potential for things to get kind of…spammy? “Dead internet” conspiracy theorists have been arguing for years that the internet “died” back in 2016, and has been almost entirely taken over by artificial intelligence. Perhaps they were on to something…
That’s not to mention the creatives and artists who may be getting bypassed and ripped off in the process. Platforms like Art Station and Deviant Art used to showcase digital artwork from a wide range of creatives. But now such platforms have become filled with AI art, and they themselves were both used to train DALL-E. “It's lost all its specialness,” says Ahmed. “It’s enjoyable but it’s not special anymore because now anyone could have done it.” With platforms like Promptbase, for the low low price of $2.99 users can buy the DALL-E prompt that will allow them to exactly replicate a certain artist's style. “On one hand, I can appreciate how this is a way for a particular artist’s style to proliferate more quickly and live on. But it is unfortunate for the artists whose style (and work) has now been disintermediated,” says Ahmed.
When all is said and done, it’s possible that AI content will establish itself as a wholly new art form altogether — similar to the dawn of photography in the nineteenth century. Maybe it won’t replace us, but rather enhance our abilities. “With hindsight, it’s clear that machines didn’t replace art; they just expanded it. Photography and postwar art movements did not end anything. Instead, through them, new and wonderful things came into existence,” Stephen Marche wrote in the Atlantic. There will be artists, and AI artists. Filmmakers, and AI filmmakers.
Embedding AI into the creative process can also reduce the barriers to entry, particularly for big budget projects like films. “People risk a lot of their own money, time, and reputation on the creation of movies, so it is natural that no one wants to take a huge risk,” says Ahmed. “If you could reduce the amount of effort required, like through the artificial generation of animated characters, then you might actually see more original content. It could foster a whole new era of creativity.” By reducing the cost and therefore the risk to be creative, the ability to iterate and try out multiple new ideas simultaneously is easier than ever.
There is also something to be said of the skill required to iterate, remix, and mash-up. “In the 21st century, reconfiguration, not originality, is the essence of art,” writes Marche. Kirby Ferguson’s ongoing long-form video series Everything is a Remix is a sort of celebration of this very practice, which details the rise of remixing from NYC DJs in the 1970s, to the birth of rap music, all the way till present day with TikTok stitching + dueting and the rise of AI. “Everything is a Remix” is a testament to the brilliance and beauty of human creativity. In particular, it's a testament to collective creativity. Human genius is not individual. It is shared. Kirby makes a critical point somewhere around the 45 minute mark — three tools are the basic elements of modern creativity: copy, transform, and combine. But all the best innovations and massive breakthroughs that changed the world have resulted from the third: combine.
This idea is well exemplified by late fashion designer and artist Virgil Abloh’s cheat code: dubbed “the 3% rule”. “A creative only has to add a three per cent tweak to a pre-existing concept in order to generate a cultural contribution deemed innovative,” he once said.
In this vein, generative AI may not be the death knell for creativity. In fact, it is a seemingly natural progression of the development of culture in the modern era. The value is in the value-add. Less with the originator, than it is now with the remixer. Will that make culture less boring? We’ll see…
If you’ve stuck around for this entire series, thanks for reading! More to come.
If you want to read the previous articles, they’re linked below: