Why Ted Chiang was wrong

the mystery of AI art

In the New Yorker recently, Ted Chiang said AI “isn’t going to make great art.” I recently made a similar argument. But I think Chiang’s essay is wrong and I want to set out some thoughts about each of his main arguments.

My question was why AI isn’t currently writing good poetry, even though it is pretty smart at other things. Chiang sees the nature of the technology as a blocker to art of any sort. AI will never produce good art. That’s where we disagree. I still think some mystery remains at the heart of the question of why AI is making such bad progress artistically. Chiang is not so interested in the mystery.

Chiang has three stated arguments. Art is choice. Writing is effort. Art is communication. I’ll say why I think each is wrong and what I think his real argument was.

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Art is choice

Art, Chiang says, “is something that results from making a lot of choices.” This definition (he calls it a generalisation) is so bad I will quote it in full.

When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

What this misses is that AI can make very different choices depending on how you prompt it, that you can iteratively re-prompt. Chiang thinks this is the antithesis of how the model works.

The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

Well, isn’t the true selling point more like “this is a new sort of computer”? Chiang’s argument is starting to fold in on itself. What he cannot bring himself to say, because he seems ideologically or instinctively opposed to this technology, is that what we have here is a new medium, a new creative technology.

Sometimes new technology leads to new art like perspective and the Renaissance, indoor theatres and Shakespeare, celluloid and Hollywood; sometimes it leads to entertainment but not high art, like video games or television. Chiang says,

the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords.

I think what this means is that while AI is unlikely to become a traditional novelist or poet, it does have potential to make an entirely new form of art. We don’t know yet whether it will be Shakespeare or Grand Theft Auto. Lots of “sampling technology” has led to the production of original art. As Séb Krier says,

As ever we've seen this so many times before. Sampling, synthesisers, hardcore rap, VSTs, phone photography — each of these each considered by early detractors are impure, cheating, lesser creations, ‘not how one ought to make music’. At least the author brings up a key crux with the example of photography; fair that he doesn't think it’s analogous, but I think this is where he and many others are wrong, constantly underestimate AI and betray their own lack of curiosity. Is it different this time? Again, no.

Séb hasn’t seen any great AI yet either. But that’s not to say it won’t arrive.

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Writing is effort

Chiang’s second argument is that “any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it.”

We just don’t know if this is true. Lots of writing is the result of effort. Lots of it comes flowing from a writer’s pen without much effort at all. To be a good writer you must practice a lot and learn some technical things and have information and ideas and feelings to convey. But it is also a mysterious process. Some pages are written without any conscious effort; some come from labour.

But, this isn’t even Chiang’s argument here!