It’s the same story with text generators. Last year Neil Clarke, the founder of the sci-fi and fantasy literary magazine Clarkesworld, shut down submissions after ChatGPT-generated works accounted for nearly half of what was submitted. “When this hit us last year, I told people they’re worse than any human author we’ve ever seen. And after one update, they’re equal to the worst authors we’ve seen,” he says. “Being a statistical model, it’s predicting the next most likely word, so it doesn’t really understand what it’s writing. And understanding is somewhat essential to telling a good story.”
Why AI art will always kind of suck
If you look at art and all you see is content, that’s all you’ll get out of it.
Great works of storytelling tend to work not just on one level but on multiple — they contain subtext and meaning that a statistical model likely couldn’t grasp with data alone. Instead, Clarke says, the AI-generated stories were flat and unsophisticated, even if they were grammatically perfect.
“Right now, you could have GPT-4 generate something that looks like a full screenplay: It’d be 120 pages, it would have characters, they would have consistent names throughout and the dialogue would resemble things you might find in a movie,” says John August, a screenwriter on the WGA bargaining committee, which gained huge protections against AI last September. “Would it really make sense? I don't know. It might be better than the worst screenplay you've ever read, but that's a very low bar to cross. I think we’re quite a ways away from being a thing you’re going to want to read or watch.”
AI is already being used in film in a few ways, sometimes to make it appear as though actors’ mouths match up with dubbed foreign languages, for example, or in creating backdrops and background characters. More controversially, AI has also been used in documentary projects: 2021’s Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain used AI to make a fake Bourdain speak three lines, a similar tactic was used in 2022’s The Andy Warhol Diaries. In April, the leaders of the Archival Producers Alliance drafted a proposed list of best practices for AI in journalistic film, including allowing for the use of AI to touch up or restore images, but warning that using generative AI to create new material should be done with careful consideration.
This future is far — although nobody can agree on how long — from the one that AI boosters have preached is just around the corner, one of endless hyper-personalized entertainment with the click of a button. “Imagine being able to request an AI to generate a movie with specific actors, plot, and location, all customized to your personal preferences. Such a scenario would allow individuals to create their own movies from scratch for personal viewing, completely eliminating the need for actors and the entire industry around filming,” teased one AI industry group.
Marvel filmmaker Joe Russo echoed this vision in an interview, positing, “You could walk into your house and save the AI on your streaming platform. ‘Hey, I want a movie starring my photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe's photoreal avatar. I want it to be a romcom because I've had a rough day,’ and it renders a very competent story with dialogue that mimics your voice, and suddenly now you have a romcom starring you that's 90 minutes long.”
It’s certainly possible that the next generation of AI tools makes such a leap that this fantasy could conceivably become a reality. Still, it inevitably begs the question of whether a “very competent” hyper-personalized romcom is what most people want, or will ever want, from the art they consume.
That doesn’t mean AI won’t transform the creative industries
However dystopian this might sound (not least because, as any woman on the internet is well aware, this technology is being used to make nonconsensualsexual images and videos), we actually already have a decent corollary for it. Just as AI is meant to “democratize” artmaking, the creator industry, which was built on the back of social media, was designed to do the same thing: circumvent the traditional gatekeepers of media by “empowering” individuals to produce their own content and in return, offering them a place where their work might actually get seen.
There are clear pros and cons here. While AI is useful in giving emerging creators new tools to make, say, visual and sound effects they might not otherwise have the money or skill to produce, it is equally or perhaps more useful for fraud, in the form of unthinkably enormous amounts of phone scams, deepfakes, and phishing attacks.
Ryan Broderick, who often discusses the cultural impact of AI on his newsletter Garbage Day, points out another comparison between social media and generative AI. “My fear is that we're hurtling really quickly towards a world where rich people can read the words written by humans and people who can't afford it read words written by machines,” he tells me. Broderick likens it to what’s already happening on the internet in many parts of the world, where the wealthy can afford subscriptions to newspapers and magazines written by professionals while the working classes consume news on social media, where lowest-common-denominator content is often what gets the most attention.
Crucially, social media may have disrupted media gatekeepers and given more people to platforms to showcase their art, but it didn’t expand the number of creatives able to make a living doing those things — in many ways it did the opposite. The real winners were and continue to be the owners of these platforms, just as the real winners of AI will be the founders who pitch their products to C-suite executives as replacements for human workers.
Because even if AI can’t create good art without a talented human being telling it what to do, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t pose an existential threat to the people working in creative industries. For the last few years, artists have watched in horror as their work has been stolen and used to train AI models, feeling as though they’re being replaced in real time.
“It starts to make you wonder, do I even have any talent if a computer can just mimic me?” said a fiction writer who used the writing AI tool Sudowrite. Young people are reconsidering whether or not to enter artistic fields at all. In an FTC roundtable on generative AI’s impact on creative industries last October, illustrator Steven Zapata said, “The negative market implications of a potential client encountering a freely downloadable AI copycat of us when searching our names online could be devastating to individual careers and our industry as a whole.”
Cory Doctorow, known for both his science fiction and tech criticism, argues that, in any discussion of AI art, the crucial question should be: “How do we minimize the likelihood that an artist somewhere gets $1 less because some tech bro somewhere gets $1 more?”
How to think about the artistic “threat” of AI
Even as we should take seriously the labor implications of AI — not to mention the considerable ethical and environmental effects — Doctorow argues that it's essential to stop overhyping its capabilities. “In the same way that pretending ‘Facebook advertising is so good that it can brainwash you into QAnon’ is a good way to help Facebook sell ads, the same thing happens when AI salespeople say, ‘I don't know if you've heard my critics, but it turns out I have the most powerful tool ever made, and it's going to end the planet. Wouldn't you like me to sell you some of it?’”
This is how AI salespeople view art: as commodities to be bought and sold, not as something to do or enjoy. In a 2010 essay on The Social Network, Zadie Smith made the case that the experience of using Facebook was in fact the experience of existing inside Mark Zuckerberg’s mind. Everything was made just so because it suited him: “Blue, because it turns out Zuckerberg is red-green color-blind … Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what ‘friendship’ is,” she writes.