Charles C. W. Cooke had an excellent piece this morning on a new, AI-generated Beatles song. Though I am no Beatles fan myself (I plead youthful ignorance), I cannot help but appreciate Cooke’s righteous dismay at the thought that a legend such as John Lennon could be adequately imitated by a computer, or that this imitation could rightfully lay claim to the legacy of the Beatles. As he writes:
Of all the people in the world, Paul McCartney probably has the best idea of how John would think. And yet, as the cornucopia of information we have about the Beatles’ canon amply demonstrates, McCartney’s tastes were often radically different from John’s. That despite this tension the two men managed to make it work for eight years does not accord to McCartney an open warrant to harvest “John’s voice from a ropy little bit of cassette,” to carve the extracted raw materials into his own image, to simulate with computers what was not there, and then to “print” the results under someone else’s byline.
His piece touches on something that has bothered me ever since last winter, when the AI craze got into full swing. I’ll admit that I haven’t used a single piece of AI technology for any purpose. I haven’t toyed with ChatGPT (or used it for any college essays or Corner posts). I have yet to make Squidward sing the classics, though his rendition of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue would probably be magical. To be brutally honest, I find it discomforting to even listen to AI music or look at AI art.
I am no Luddite, but there is something eerie about art that is generated by artificial intelligence. Using a machine (like a calculator) for mechanical outputs is nothing new. The use of AI in fields such as coding will undoubtedly be a major boon. But there is something different about artistic expression. Art represents a transcendent part of human nature. The artistic fields are testaments to our ability to think and see beyond the mundane and the mechanized. Art is, in a couple of words, uniquely human. To think that some lines of code could ever truly replace that ability is to have a very superficial understanding of what makes art art. Cooke is right to say that the new song is not truly a Beatles song, and that it is not truly a John Lennon song. AI cannot replicate John Lennon’s soul, no matter how authentic it may sound, because AI is not and will never be human.
Cooke continues with a prediction:
If we are not there already, we are getting close to the point at which a director could make a movie with a deceased actor in the lead role and at which a record producer could generate a full album’s worth of material “by” an artist who is now unable to record a note. (One suspects that, in the future, artists will have prohibitions on this written into their estates and their wills.) When, as is all but guaranteed, this happens for the first time, we will be told by many that because the source material was genuine, the synthesized output must be, too. Those people will be wrong. They will be confusing a facsimile for authenticity. There are, in our history, such things as Lennon-McCartney songs and Beatles records, and what will soon be released purporting to be both will, in fact, be little more than a last-gasp nostalgia-driven forgery.
He is too kind. AI art is, and will never be more than, a pale imitation of the human soul.