The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Maybe you’ve heard about the AI painting that took first prize in a national art contest. Or the AI song that went high up on the pop charts. If not, don’t worry, you will. For awhile — a short time, trust me — us artists, musicians and writers will use AI as an assistant only. That’s what we’ll tell ourselves. Just eliminating some of the drudgery to give us more time for serious creativity. You betcha.

Creativity, we tell ourselves, is the sole domain of us talented humans, nothing that a bundle of circuits and chips could manage, no doubt a gift from the gods. Oh sure, the droid helper might be able to emulate, monkey see monkey do, but no way, NO WAY, could these silicon toys manage to create new original great art. Like us humans, the crown of creation, the Rembrandts and da Vinci’s, the Mozarts and Chuck Berrys, the Picasso and Warhols, the Tolstoys and Stephen Kings.

Sure, maybe they borrowed a bit from their predecessors, might even have stolen whole cloth, but that’s how art, capital A, evolves. C’mon, it’s a synthesis, leaping forward and upward on the backs of those who came before, from cave drawings of mastodons to the masterpieces of Pollock’s splattered paint, from the humble notes of a pan pipe to the eloquent silences of Philip Glass, from the first scribbles of verse to the Burger King jingle, just a steady progression toward our own enlightened era.

How could a bunch of wires and circuit boards possibly do more than merely emulate what homo sapiens do so naturally? So what if the cyborgs can write a decent opera in a nano-second or design a painting that looks wildly futuristic or carve a sculpture with laser cutters in the time it takes to say Michelangelo. Still doesn’t make it human art. That’s why we call it Artificial Intelligence. Then again … art is sort of Artifice, isn’t it? Nothing we real artists should worry about. Worst case, we can let AI do a little more of the creating. Not too much. Just a tool, after all. Like using a paint brush or a keyboard. Just a tool. Keep saying that. We might learn to believe it. Course by then it’ll be too damn late.