NO TIME FOR SHORTCUTS

Sunovalued at US$500 million, is one such company. It’s about “building a future where everyone can make good music,” he says. “No instruments are needed, just imagination.”

What they describe is a shortcut – something that Jones, throughout his career, has had little time for. He was extremely meticulous in deciding who to work with. In his later years, he protested against the lack of mastery with which some modern artists managed to get by, thanks to technology filling in the gaps.

An important part of the creative process, he once remarked, was forcing the artists he worked with to prioritize their best work. This was made easier by the technological limitations of the time. In interviews about the making of Thriller, Jones described an anguished Jackson reducing dozens of songs to just nine so they could fit on a vinyl record.

A brutal exercise, but one that left the album, the best-selling of all time, without a single second of filler. (It’s something we could dream of today. It’s the unlimitedness of streaming sites like Spotify that allowed Taylor Swift to release a two hour album this clearly lacked an editor, according to one review.)

With AI, it seems there will soon be even fewer limitations; less need than ever for real talents or difficult decisions. But it’s a mirage.

One of my favorite writings on AI last year was by science fiction author Ted Chiang, whose New Yorker essay Why AI Isn’t Going To Make Art argued that art , in its many forms, “is something that results from creation.” lots of choice.”

Chiang used the example of a writer deciding which words to write: a 10,000-word story is, simply put, 10,000 choices, each influenced by the author’s unique perspective, lived experience, his mood, his sobriety, his pressure, etc. When you give this job to AI, those choices belong to the machine. They become a synthesis of choices already made by others and therefore will never really surprise us or move us forward.

The choices of countless others are also incorporated into an artist’s work. The choice, for example, of a Welsh slave owner, Jones believed, to rape a woman he had enslaved, who would then give birth to Jones’ father. Or the choice of many hotel and restaurant owners to deny Jones and his comrades a bed or a meal because of their skin color (once forcing them to spend the night in a funeral home). Or, Jones’ own choice to have seven children and five wives.

What all this represents cannot be measured. This definitely can’t be written in software code. And you can’t tell me those choices weren’t deeply present in Jones’ work, or behind his drive to do the same. There is no doubt that we have more to gain from art created by flawed human beings than from sterile software.

Proponents of this technology say it can only get better and more convincing. I say it will never be good enough. By its nature, AI is only capable of remixing previous work into forms that may look good enough to fool our eyes and ears, but it will never succeed in fooling our minds. In this sense, perhaps our greatest defense against AI in the arts is good taste.