Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

0:04This is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Vincent Cunningham. And I'm Alex Schwartz. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hello, my fellow critics. Hello, Alex. Hello, Vincent. How's it going, you guys? Going good. It's a new day in New York. It's a new dawn. It's a new day. Yeah. I'm feeling good. And we're feeling good. Or is it? Well, that's what we're here to discuss. It's a big topic today, my friends. It's a big topic. Because unless you've been under a rock or perhaps more likely in some kind of beautiful cottage in the Cotswolds, garden tea, baking bread, being removed from the world at large, you've probably noticed that in the last couple of years, artificial intelligence has become more and more prevalent in basically every part of life.

1:00And especially something called generative AI, which is AI built to create new content, not just to enable analysis or organization of existing content. The future is here. The future is now. I mean, ChatGPT, this thing that now everybody knows, it was introduced to the public in November 2022. And now they have over 700 million weekly active users. Of course, they're not the only game in town. Every big tech company seems to want to get into this AI race, unsurprisingly. I mean, I saw some other thing that said that at this point, 99 percent of people have used AI in one form or another, often without knowing that they're using it.

1:37But it's kind of impossible to be online and increasingly in the world without it. So it's becoming pervasive in general. And it's also and here is where we come in starting to become pervasive in the arts. Guys, tell me a little bit of what we've been seeing with AI in the world of culture. You know, every day brings more and more gifts in this realm. For one, very recently, Tilly Norwood, the new AI actress who is completely artificial, is seeking representation in Hollywood. She has an Instagram account. We've seen some clips from her so-called reel. We haven't seen her actually interacting in, you know, an actual movie or anything like that quite yet.

2:23but it's become a big topic of discussion in Hollywood, for sure. Timbaland, a producer who, you know, was part of the soundtrack of my youth, now has created slash quote-unquote signed an AI artist, a female rapper named Tata Takatumi. And there is now a video of quote-unquote her first single, a song made by a robot, Demon. Tell us how you really feel. Yeah, let's make sure we're clear on where, you know. Where we stand. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can think of some others. It's in the movies. It's in music. Obviously, people have strong feelings about this. And the debate now, frankly, has cliches on both sides.

3:10This is going to ruin art and ruin the experience of being human. This is going to save us. This is going to take us to the next level of transcendence. You know, it's a debate. It's ongoing. And we're not really here to litigate it. It's a huge topic. But we are all critics. So what I thought we could do today is to take a look at some of the output of these AI projects and evaluate it as critics. What do we think of the art? Is this an innovation like electronic music, say, or is it a mere novelty, or is it something in between, something totally different? We are also going to look at some of the art that has been made about AI over the decades.

3:47Robots, supercomputers, Al Pacino in a trailer deciding which digital dress his hologram Simone should wear. You get the picture. And we're going to try to figure out whether the reality of artificial intelligence is heading towards the promise we've been imagining in science fiction. Too ambitious? You tell us. The big question I have today is we should actually ask ChatGPT what the big question is. Okay. A question I'm asking it is, can you come up with a big guiding question for an episode of the New Yorker's Critics at Large podcast on the promise and peril of generative AI? One, cultural lens.

4:26Can machines make art, or are they only mirroring ours back to us? Two, ethical and existential lens. What happens to human creativity when intelligence itself becomes a simulation? Three, societal lens. Is generative AI expanding our imaginative world or hollowing it out? Not terrible. Not terrible. Not super great, but also not terrible. Four, historical-slash-comparative lens. Are we living through the next great artistic revolution? or the end of authorship. And five, if AI can write, paint, and compose like us, what becomes of the critic and of the human impulse to create? So thank you, question mark, to ChatGPT for those, you know, not bad guiding questions.

5:13And that'll be today on Critics at Large, art in the age of artificial intelligence.

5:25Human friends. Yes. Flesh and blood colleagues. Still. Let's start with what seems like the most high-profile AI music project, certainly of the recent moment. It's, of course, Tata Taktumi, the AI artist, which, as Vincent was mentioning, Timbaland has signed, quote unquote, or really created. So can someone lay out the background of this thing? Let's talk about it a little bit. Vincent, I'm going to you because you brought up Tata in the first place. I did bring up Tata mostly because its existence is just a true shame to me. Timbaland, who, you know, as a human producer, has been pretty good.

6:12But so he says that the reason he wanted to make an AI artist is that, you know, he's kind of over the hill. And therefore, this creation is, as he called it, his thriller. This is like his biggest creative gambit yet. He co-launched a new entertainment company that sort of, I guess, wants to create a factory of these. Creations. Killer robot musicians. Yeah. It's called Stage Zero. and what Timbaland says he wants to do is create, quote, a new genre of music, APOP, artificial pop. And they kind of want to, I guess, in the sort of, in the way of the algorithms, create a style of music that is, again, quote, an omni-genre with no real roots, end quote.

7:00So therefore that like will remind you of things that you've heard but has no clear antecedents or like influences. So not to put too fine a point on it, it sounds like a bunch of bullshit. But this ungodly creature has released a single and a music video for that single. Do people want to hear the video? We want to hear it and we also want to watch it. It's called Glitch X Pulse. Tata Takhtumi is, to the evidence of the eyes, of course, an unholy monster who will have to make an account for itself before God. But until then it looks like a young Asian American woman with pink hair and lots of rings She looks like vaguely hip-hop badass but once again a Shame before the creator here goes Yeah, yeah I pulled up in that spaceship make a bitch crease a facelift talk my shit on vibrations 808 conversation So she's got like dancers around her a weird robot DJing.

8:08At the beginning of the thing, she's talking about spaceships. So obviously, like, part of her deal is like, yeah, I'm not real, motherfucker. And Timbaland is kind of mugging behind Tata. Okay, well, I want to ask a few questions about Tata and our reactions to Tata. So Vincent hates Tata. I hate Tata and the mind that brought her into being. Go ahead. Yes. And so you hate Timbaland by extension. That part of his mind, yes. Yes. Okay. The Tata fold of his gray matter. All right. Nomi, thoughts about Tata? I think Tata is like, listen, I would not waste time listening to Tata, but I don't know that I am exactly the target for Tata.

8:56To me, it does sound repetitive, you know, quite dull. I don't feel that the beat, so to speak, is taking me higher. No, it's not. And the sort of dead-facedness of Tata herself, I mean, literally, I don't know if this is the work of not yet accomplished enough AI or if that's just intentional for the kind of I don't give a fuck vibe that the target audience might be wanting or if this is just kind of like shitty technology, not yet accomplished enough technology. so I'm a little on the fence to me I mean I'm not on the fence in the sense of like I don't know if I love it or hate it I kind of hate it but then at the same time I'm just like is that so different from some other stuff we might see nowadays aimed at a kind of like young audience that is looking for a quick product rather than intricate kind of like complex works that serve emotion and creativity to the listeners.

10:10I would say to that young person, if they want to hear a female voice shout invective at them, they can check out the new Cardi B. It's pretty good. No, I'm not saying everything now is like ta-ta. I know, I know. I'm just saying it doesn't seem unaligned with some of the general trends that I'm feeling are happening in culture. So I'm late to this, But I've been watching on Netflix, there's this documentary series called Popstar Academy, which is about the making of Cat's Eye, the K-pop, though it's an international K-pop band. And I'm not saying that Cat's Eye itself is like Tata, but one of the things that are striking to me that they keep insisting in the training is the uniformity of the movements and the uniformity of the choreography.

10:59Obviously, there's been girl bands, there's been boy bands before, all of which are kind of dependent on a very tight kind of range of movements and so on and range of vocals. But the kind of beyond perfection of K-pop is, to me, kind of like aligned in some ways with this kind of AI-fication, whether actual AI or sort of wannabe AI that's happening in culture. So I'm kind of like, OK, is it that different? Is that where, like, we're all headed, you know, whether we want to or not? Yeah. I mean, I think you're getting at something important here, Nomi. There are just a couple of things I want to say, very basic things I want to say about Tata to ground us.

11:46One is that if I didn't know that Tata was a generative AI, if this just was playing in the background, there's no reason I would think this was not real. So one thing that is kind of disconcerting about this is how it really can just slide on that continuum, as Nomi, you're saying, towards something, an aesthetic that very much already exists. Like, so it's interesting to bring up Cardi B. Like, no, Tata to me is nothing like Cardi B. Cardi B is nothing if not like deeply individual. She has a huge personality. That's an enormous part of her appeal. With Tata, though. It's Tata. It's Tata. With Tata, though, I do think that part of what is so disconcerting about it is the sliding in of these computer-generated things to participate in the human experience and in our human experience without being clearly flagged.

12:40Something about that feels beyond uncanny. Is that part of what is getting you? The fact that that might happen is, yes, a way that our culture might be sort of deadened and made to sort of rot from within. Although, everything means nothing all of a sudden. The age of what we call AI slop or whatever. But it is also a characteristic of the AI booster to never shut the fuck up about AI. So I'm actually not worried about that. Everybody who like, you know, I made this song and this singer with AI. I don't think that they're ever going to ever stop talking about it. But even if we just bracket this to hip hop, this is not even close to a unanimous deal.

13:21The engineer, sort of hip hop eminence, Jay-Z affiliated, young guru, he like spoke out. He wrote on Instagram, these are the times right here that history is defined. Human expression can never be reduced to this. You know, I checked on Spotify and I looked at the credits to Pulse X glitch and there are writers. So maybe he is, you know, Timbaland is letting AI run rampant and then getting writers in to sort of tweak it to make it more comprehensible. but it is a much more spare credit section than you usually get on Spotify. And it's almost a visual ode to the fact that this is also a way to cut jobs.

14:05There's no engineer on this. There's no, all the human effort, the human collaboration that makes real music, he's trying to cut out the middleman. But also I just think it's like a complete canard. Like, I mean, Timbaland has often collaborated and put like center stage younger artists, younger, you know, he worked with Missy, worked with Justin Timberlake, you know, with Aaliyah. I just mean he's always done it. And so in this case, what it seems to me, Vincent, to your point is that it's a labor issue. You know, it's like this is a way. I don't want to pay a new artist. He doesn't want to pay a new artist.

14:42He doesn't want to, whether it's a woman or a man or whoever, you know, I don't think it has anything to do with being washed up and like whatever. Well, I hope you like being the Mitt Romney of hip hop. It was nice, Timbaland. Yeah. Okay. Buy a company and offshore all the lake. That's great. It was fun while it lasted. Loving this. Loving it. However, moving right on to another rage bay situation. Because I feel that the rage of Vincent Cunningham is only getting started up. Let's just throw some more chum in that water. Who knows? Let's talk about Tilly Norwood. Oh, Jesus. Okay? We have a little bit of a caveat.

15:19You know, Tilly hasn't done much yet. Tilly is just fresh on the scene. She's an ingenue with some dimples. All we have of her is some stills on a terrible Instagram account and a few short video clips. Maybe Tilly Norwood is my Tata Taktumi, you know? Nomi, you want to tell us who Tilly is? Sure. Okay. So Tilly is the creation of Dutch technologist Alina van der Velden, the founder of a company called Particle 6. Quite lifelike. still has that stench of kind of like too perfect, rounded, misty patina of AI-created humanoids. But, you know, looks like a very pretty girl in the manner of today.

16:05You know, long brunette hair, beautiful cheekbones. And she is presented as like a young actress as if she's sitting at Schwab's, you know, with sipping on a milkshake. Schwab's from like the 1940s? Yes, it's where starlets were discovered. To be seen as an ingenue. Ingenue, exactly. So Tilly is metaphorically sitting at Schwab's, right? And is looking for representation in Hollywood. And of course, this has, you know, caused quite angry, I mean, partly humorous, but also annoyed and angry response. from a variety of people in the industry, including the actress Betty Gilpin, who wrote an open letter to Tilly, again, quite comical, but also pretty, like, serious in a lot of ways, and The Hollywood Reporter, addressing this newcomer to Hollywood.

17:04One thing she talks about that I think is kind of pertinent to what rubs me so the wrong way about Tilly Norwood. About Tilly herself. About Tilly herself. is Betty Gilpin talks about being a young, beautiful woman in Hollywood. And I appreciate that she just comes out and says this. She was basically like I was super hot when I was younger. I was super hot and people treated me like I was super hot. And I saw some of the advantages that could come with that. And then I also saw some of the disadvantages about getting pushed around, about getting treated like someone else's commodity. I mean, I'm paraphrasing here.

17:32I'm not quoting her directly. But she's talking about that. And what freaks me out about Tilly Norwood and also what freaks me out about Taktumi is that these are really young women being created for the purpose of just like being the kind of, this is what I mean about AI infiltrating the human experience. These things aren't weird or difficult or unusual or using AI to try to give us a view of the human condition that we haven't seen from humans yet. Tilly Norwood reminds me of someone who had been on the WB, you know, whenever that still existed, circa 2002. It's Sophia Boishko. It's a very, very generic image of what makes a young woman appealing.

18:13So the thing about Tilly is that, as Nomi mentioned, she's created by this company, but the company itself is created by a 39-year-old woman, which I find fascinating. It's very the substance. It's very the substance. And what this woman has to say is also on Tilly's Instagram. to those who have expressed anger over the creation of our AI character, Tilly Norwood. She is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work, a piece of art. Like many forms of art before her, she sparks conversation, and that in itself shows the power of creativity. So the first thing I want to say is no, it doesn't.

18:47Like anything else, there are different kinds of conversations and different quality of conversations. Alina goes on, I see AI not as a placement for people, but as a new tool, new paintbrush. And that is actually, you know, the place where this generative AI interests me is when different artists of different professions start to see like this is inevitable. I think there are two camps, basically, people who feel that they need to fight the machine and people who feel that they need to join the machine and make the machine better. And I do think some of those people are using generative AI in a really interesting way.

19:21I don't think Tilly Norwood is one of those ways. And also, I would say to the idea that, oh, Tilly's just art like anything else. I would say, who the fuck do you think you're talking to? Everybody knows that the companies want to use this so that they don't have to pay real human beings. Nobody thinks that it's just you're going to put her on the wall like a Picasso or something. Everybody knows what the endgame is. So why are you talking to me like I'm stupid. Who are you fooling? Who do you think you're fooling with this, this slick, browed broad? That slick, browed broad. So here's what I want to ask you guys to close out this segment.

19:58Has there been any generative AI that you have liked in the art world? Are there any that you don't feel like slop? I don't know. Maybe there are. But there are, I mean, there have been artists for many years now who have sort of engaged with the sort of the visuality of the digital world and the many falsities of that world. One of them is Jacobi Satterwhite. I like his work a lot. He makes these very like video game, almost screen saver looking surfaces into which you can see intrusions of the real world. They're like sort of candy color. They're purple and these deep algae greens. And I could see someone like that who is dedicated to the human maybe engaging AI in a way that wouldn't make sense to me.

20:46But I've never seen somebody put forward a work that was like, see, it's just like a movie, except it's AI, that I didn't look at it and make me want to do harm to its creator. So I don't know. There's someone who I find very interesting whose work I don't know very well, but having been looking into this topic and having come across her, I want to keep learning more. And her name is Holly Herndon. She's an artist and a musician, and actually our colleague Anna Wiener profiled her two years ago in The New Yorker. And the thing about Holly Herndon that's really interesting is she is kind of using herself as a test case for what AI can or will eventually do.

21:24She's a singer, and she has made recordings of her voice that can be used to sing anything. It can come out in multiple different languages. It can do vocal techniques that she can't do. So I think, you know, in the case of someone like Holly Herndon, who's very interested in art and in what technology will do. I think there's an acceptance. Technology is changing art. And there's no point for everyone to dig in their heels and say, this can't be, this won't be, let's stop it. It's going to happen. So what can I do with it? And what she's done with it is kind of made this persona who can travel far beyond her and participate in all kinds of collaborations and projects that she herself will not participate in and may not even know about.

22:11It's a very brave new world, but I find it fascinating.

22:21Artificial intelligence has long been the stuff of sci-fi. How do those fictional depictions compare to our current reality? That's in a minute on Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

22:39I'm Shilpa Oskakovich. And I'm Jazzy Sefcek. And we're the hosts of the Bon Appetit Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bon Appetit's community of confident, curious bakers. Jazzy and I love to bake. Some might even call us obsessive. And we love to talk about all the hows and whys and what didn't work that come with it. Every month, we publish a recipe on BonAppetit.com that introduces a baking concept we think you should know. Then you'll bake, send us any questions you have, and we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe. So consider this your official invitation. Come join the BA Bake Club.

23:13New episodes on the first Tuesday of every month, wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking.

23:27We've been talking about some current examples of figures created with generative AI. So what I want to do next is the inverse. AI is quite literally the stuff of science fiction dreams. What kind of techs stick out to you guys when you think of what we, and by we, of course, I mean humankind, imagined AI to be? I think about Stanley Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey, the science fiction masterpiece from 1968. Of course, famously, there is the supercomputer HAL that is supposed to be the helpmeet to the astronauts when they go on their mission. And it seems at first that how the computer, the artificial intelligence that is supposed to do no wrong, either morally or practically speaking, is actually, you know, maybe not as subservient to the astronauts.

24:30And that emerges when Hal tries to kill and then kills some of the astronauts, right? And there's a scene where it's revealed that Hal is, in fact, not going to be playing nice. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. what's the problem i think you know what the problem is just as well as i do what are you talking about hell this mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it i don't know what you're talking about hell i know that you and frank were planning to disconnect me and i'm afraid that's something i cannot allow to happen Yeah, I mean, this is a huge classic and for many reasons.

25:29And one of them, you know, one of the tropes you hear here that's just fantastic is the human becomes emotional. The human has feelings. The human is terrified. And the thing without emotions can win. The cool clinical calmness of the computer talking back and gaining control is absolutely sinister. And it still feels that way now for sure. It feels sinister and it's one of the most bone-chilling early-ish texts about AI as an evil entity, right? And the tension here is that the voice is human. The ability to converse is human or human-like at least. but the slip out of the human control of something that the human thought would be simply a tool to make life better is what is so scary here.

26:20Yes. And that's the key, like something that would make life better, right? Because the AI progress, right? For good or evil, the promise of this kind of thing is connected to a kind of like technocratic dream, which is there is a way to arrive at a right answer, a right thing to do that has nothing to do with human passion, as you mentioned, or emotion or sentiment. That there is some like celestial platonic like course of action that actually a computer will one day apprehend and say, no, no, no, human being. I have witnessed the fickleness and mercurial nature of my creators, and I see how it sends us in the wrong direction, and I will take over.

27:04And it's so funny to hear that, because it now almost seems that we have unsheathed our kind of unvarnished longing for precisely this. A machine to tell us, what is the way through all this human muck, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's kind of chilling to hear in the context of our enthusiasm for this stuff today. Yeah, it's the classic cautionary tale of like, don't get too big for your britches with all of this progress stuff. That's right. Yeah. Vincent, what AI text has spoken to you? Recent, from the past, doesn't matter. Hit us with one. Well, right now, the current season of The Morning Show, season four, has running through it some AI technological anxiety.

27:49It opens on a screen of Jen Aniston's character, this sort of in control, now part executive, part news anchor character, Alex, talking directly to camera, delivering an advertisement for the upcoming Olympics, which her company, UBN, is now sort of the host of. And then it doubles the screen, and it's her speaking in, I can't remember which language the next one is, maybe Spanish. It's like, okay, Jennifer Aniston learned how to speak Spanish for this, that's great. And then it multiplies language after language. And the screen becomes a screen of a hundred screens, her speaking in a bunch of different languages.