Artificial Creativity

How AI teaches us to distinguish between humans, art, and industry

I hinted at some thoughts about AI in my last Team Human monologue, and those generated as many emails as the main subject — which was learning to disengage from the pace of the internet. These ideas are related, of course: making a conscious, human choice about whether and how we use AI requires the same application of agency as disengaging from the pace of digital industrialism.

But understanding the reasons and complications, and history, are pretty specific in the case of AI.

I just had the pleasure and honor of speaking at a wonderful music industry program at Eastern Tennessee State University. They wanted a talk about how AI would impact the creative industries, and specifically music. And as I looked out at the bright young faces, I couldn’t help but begin with “First they came for the cab drivers, and I said nothing because I am not a cab driver…”

Of course, only two older professors knew the reference I was talking about — a poem by Pastor Martin Neimoller, a one-time nazi supporter after his liberation from Dachau. I wasn’t trying to equate AIs with Nazis so much as to suggest that the way to come to an understanding of how AI may someday impact whatever we do is to look at the people it is impacting today.