A.I. and the Enthronement of “Good Enough”

HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey

Much has been written about the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (A.I.) in virtually every aspect of our lives. It is now possible to simply ask an A.I. application such as ChatGPT to create any content or provide any type of information in a matter of seconds.  When I first tried ChatGPT, I asked it to write me a 1000-word children’s story about a bird and a turtle as an experiment. That’s all I provided. Within seconds, the A.I. had created a story featuring characters with names, a conflict, and a resolution. It was cute and something I could see a parent reading to their child. After my initial amazement, I reread the story several times. While moderately entertaining, there was just something about it that didn’t sit well with me. I finally noticed that as fully realized and fleshed out with details the story was, it lacked a unique voice. There was no interesting, unexpected, quirky, or even poetic turn of phrase that one might encounter with a favorite author. The more I reread the story, the more I felt that it was hollow and soulless at its core. The non-human “author” did not have children. It couldn’t empathize and remember from personal experience as both a child and a parent what story-telling felt like. There was simply no sense of wonder. The words just lay flat on the screen gleaming with cold perfection. Instead of feeling warmth when rereading the story, I was ultimately left diminished. It was like eating a beautiful looking meal and being satisfied with how it tasted in the moment but feeling hunger soon after because there was no nutritional value. It then struck me that if this was a real attempt at crafting a story for commercial publication, someone, somewhere, in some position to make decisions about creative content, might easily determine that this story was “good enough” to publish with a few tweaks and was cost effective because no author had to be contracted. That decision might have been arrived at cynically or - perhaps even worse - arrived at because the decision maker truly could not discern the difference between art and cold craft.

Among all the other red flags surrounding A.I., this is one that I believe poses a significant threat to those of us in the creative arts. A story that is “good enough.” Set design and special effects that are “good enough.” And closer to home for me, musical compositions and musical performances that are “good enough.” It’s a lazy way to create, devoid of life experience. While initially impressive and maybe even satisfying, art created this way will ultimately leave no real lasting impression. Whenever I catch myself thinking that whatever section of a musical composition I am working on is “good enough,” I immediately stop composing. I take a break and come back to the section refreshed so that I may properly work through the music and arrive at the right and best solution for that piece. This is hard work accomplished through trial and error, experimentation, and just plain thought. I am certainly guided by craft in my work but I am also guided by intuition, experience, curiosity, and talent. Is an A.I. program similarly guided? Does it have intuition or talent?

Donald Erb (1927-2008)

There is a wonderful quote from my mentor, the great composer Donald Erb, that is affixed to my office door. It concerns itself with the creative process and reads: 

“A craftsman can create entertainment, but you need more than that to create art. You need an emotional, inspirational quality, because in and of itself craft means nothing. There has to be something inside you pushing out or all a person will ever write is a craftsman-like piece. And that's not quite good enough.’’

No matter how sophisticated A.I. software gets - and I readily acknowledge it is getting more sophisticated by the minute - I do not believe it will ever have something inside it that is compelled to be pushed out. I don’t believe you can program an emotional, inspirational quality within A.I. As Erb wisely points out, you need more than just craft to create art. In looking specifically at A.I., you need more than just sophisticated coding and machine based learning to create art. Humans - real humans who have lived lives full of joy, tragedy, failure, triumph, conflict, and reconciliation - create art to describe the human condition. How can A.I. really do that? It’s true that within the arts, A.I. can create great looking art and great sounding music. It may seem to be better than just “good enough” and it is only getting more sophisticated. However, like the little experiment I conducted with ChatGPT, it doesn’t hold up.   

Ultimately the problem is not A.I. Artificial intelligence in all of its varied forms is simply a tool. The real problem is a society that devalues art because it cannot distinguish between art and craft. It’s a society that has decided that teaching the arts in schools to children beginning from a young age all the way through their high school years is unimportant. It’s a society that places more value on short-cuts and cold efficiency than in the time and life-experience it takes to create something meaningful. Worse yet, we live in a society that, even if it could distinguish between art and craft, doesn’t care. Whatever content is being flushed into our consciousness provides enough entertainment for the moment and that’s “good enough.”  It’s a society that is easy prey for cynical gate-keepers in the entertainment and arts industries. Skynet is not coming for us. We are letting it in slowly all by ourselves. 

One of the reasons that TV and film writers and actors are currently on strike is to make sure producers are not allowed to give in to their baser instincts by providing what is just “good enough” in order to maximize profits. The soulless words of that children’s story experiment I conducted with A.I. haunt me and point towards a possible world that slowly starves itself of the arts while drowning in an over abundance of music, visual art, film, and television content. 

This is a possible world that is certainly not good enough for anyone.