Robot-Made Art

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about robots making our art. By 'art' I mean everything from writing novels to playing music, painting, and filmmaking. I’ve been wondering how good robot-made art will become, how dominant it will be in the marketplace, and whether all human-made art will eventually be relegated to a pastime or hobby. The most important question, though, is what will happen to our sense of humanity and community if the art we consume is, overwhelmingly, machine-made.

Of course, much of art-making has already become a pastime. Painting, once a viable profession supported by academies and apprenticeships, has been economically unsustainable for most practitioners for at least the past seventy-five years. Image-making technologies played a large role in that decline—but technology alone isn’t to blame. Advances in recording, for example, created an economic boom in music for musicians, songwriters, and concert promoters. In writing, print technology made authorship a profession.

Still, technology does seem to be the story. Once applied to art-making, it eventually replaces the professional artist. Mass-market economics demand it.

Advances in AI have now reached the point where machines can produce virtually any kind of mass-market art as professionally and more efficiently than humans. The economics clearly favor machine-made art, just as factory-made furniture and clothing displaced handmade production. The concern today isn’t so much about quality, but about how to tell the difference between human and machine creation—because the machine-made is getting that good.

Here's an example. This song is described as “Discovered on a forgotten mono tape marked ‘Handle Me – May 1952.’ This juke-joint scorcher captures the unstoppable blues powerhouse Bertha Mae Lightning—a woman who could outplay, outsing, and outdrink half the Delta.” Only at the very bottom of the description does it add: “Disclaimer: A lost-session tribute—written, arranged, and composed by a human, brought to life with AI in true blues spirit. The backstory’s fictional, the music’s real.”

The music is real, only in the sense that it was generated by AI from scraped samples. It’s undeniably good—very good—and most listeners, judging by the comments, have no idea it’s artificial. The packaging is designed to fool.

What’s happening in music will soon happen in books, films—everywhere. And since streaming platforms control access, they’ll inevitably promote machine-made work over the human. There's more money in it for them.

So does it matter if Bertha Mae Lightning is real or not? How about Elijah "Hollowfoot" Turner?

I think it does. No matter how good it sounds—or looks.

Art-making has been faked before, especially in painting, and we’ve always drawn a firm line between the counterfeit and the original. That line must exist in all the arts. Admittedly, it’s trickier in music, where performance and reproduction blur. But even in the visual arts, where a canvas or sculpture is one-of-a-kind, there have long been marketed facsimiles—prints, for example.

Still, knowing that a real person produced something matters. It’s part of what makes art art.

The artist’s presence is so integral to the experience of art that we’ve always struggled to separate the artist from their work. Often, the work itself is sublime and deeply human, yet the artist turns out to be a scoundrel. Art history is littered with such examples—from the Baroque painter Caravaggio to filmmaker Woody Allen. Should the fact that Ezra Pound and Roald Dahl were avowed antisemites change how we value their poetry and stories? The point is, it matters; it makes some of us deeply uncomfortable that the author of the beloved children's book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" unrepentently hated Jews.

Whether it 'should' matter is a debate worth having—and part of what makes art so compelling. Art reflects the paradoxes and mysteries of the human journey, both the tasteful and the unsavoury. The nature of art is artifice to be sure, but it's artifice in the service of truth. 

The knowledge that there is no real experience behind Bertha Mae Lightning’s lines—I shine too bright, I cut too deep/ They talk that love, but they don't keep, means the essential component is missing. It changes the way it lands for me. I hope others feel the same way, once they know the truth.