In his recent interview with , the venture capitalist predicted that AI would lead to a creative renaissance. Here are his (abridged) remarks.
… anybody who’s a creative in any professional field all of a sudden has a new superpower… every screenwriter is going to be able to render their own movies.
… And so I think this technology could lead to a creative renaissance that is just absolutely spectacular.
… you’ll be able to have a single person who can bring into the world something that would have been like a billion dollar projects or impossible five years ago.
It seems to me obvious that significant advancements in art are often spurred by new technology: perspective and the Renaissance, indoor theatre and the Elizabethan drama (Shakespeare!), mass circulation and the nineteenth century novel, celluloid and Hollywood. Shakespeare became Shakespeare partly because he lived at a time when new technology gave him a first-mover advantage; similarly with Dickens and the popular novel—it was the financial crash of 1825 that led to the rise of cheap, serialised media, just in time for Pickwick. New technology so often leads to new art.
But this is not all that it takes. Romanticism was not the result of technology: it was birthed by ideas, being hugely interested in the new methods and findings of science and the revolution in philosophy brought about by Hume and Kant, as well as becoming politically revolutionary especially after 1789. The great period of music from Bach to Beethoven was partly the result of new instruments, but partly the result of new freedoms: Mozart was liberated from patronage and invented the piano concerto. (Beethoven had patrons but was also full of revolutionary ideas.) Similarly, poets like Milton are the result of a change in ideas, more than a change in technology. Modernism similarly, across the arts, was a new way of thinking about the world—a response to changes in society—more than a technological shift. Stravinsky was an innovation of the spirit.
And some technologies fail to deliver great art. Television has not yet done anything on the level of classical music, the nineteenth century novel or Hollywood. Breaking Bad and The Sopranos were very popular (and shows like them have become the main cultural recreation of educated people, alas) but the idea that these works have the same depth of aesthetic value as George Eliot or Alfred Hitchcock is merely the self-reassurance of a society that has become comfortable in its own mediocrity. They might have brought television to new heights of accomplishment, but they are imitative of the movies, over-long, and often with cliched dialogue. There is no FirstFolio of HBO.
Similarly, and importantly for this question of a creative AI renaissance, the internet has yet to produce any new form of art. Mediums have been suggested, such as video games, but nothing has yet emerged that can hold a relationship to our society that Tolstoy and Flaubert held to theirs. As with television, the moral content of this art is too thin, and the aesthetic criteria too weak. The problem is not that these modes are too commercial, but that their aim is mere entertainment. No significant truths are told. That doesn’t mean they aren’t very well-accomplished, but they cannot speak to our times in the manner of Jane Austen, nor can they relate what it is like to experience life as Proust did. There is no Dante, no Michelangelo, no Schubert of our age.
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