Art Will Survive AI—Entertainment? Not So Much

Everyone is trying to figure out how AI will impact their careers. The opinions are varied, even among the so-called “experts.” So, I, too, can only formulate opinions or theories. I’m often criticized for speculating too much, but we now live in a world where we’re forced to speculate broadly about everything.

According to the latest McKinsey report, the fields most impacted by AI so far are marketing and sales—which is not speculation but an analysis of the recent past. In my view, this makes sense because AI is still not reliable enough to be used in fields that require accuracy. Marketing and sales have the greatest wiggle room because so much of it is up to subjective interpretation. Choosing one artwork over another is not a make-or-break decision. It’s easy to justify using AI-generated artwork. Also, in most cases, marketers are trying to reach the largest number of consumers, which makes cutting-edge or experimental artworks unsuitable.

[The poster image for this article was generated using the latest model by OpenAI, including the composition of the title over the image. I simply submitted my essay and asked ChatGPT to create a poster for it. I did not provide any creative direction.]

Although the mainstream understanding of fine arts is that the work should speak for itself, in reality, the objects are practically worthless if not associated with artists. You own a Pollock or a Warhol—not just the physical object. After all, the quality of a replica can be just as good as the original, if not better.

Some might argue that artworks created by AI have already sold for a lot of money. That’s true, but they hold historical significance more than artistic value. The first of a particular type of AI-generated work may continue to sell for high prices, but the meaning of that value is fundamentally different from the value of work created by artists. In this sense, I don’t see fine artists being significantly impacted by AI, aside from how they choose to produce their work.

In commercial art and entertainment, who created the work is secondary to the goal of commanding attention and entertaining the audience. If AI can achieve the same end, the audience won’t care. Nobody knows or cares who created the ads they see. Many Hollywood films aren’t much different. I can imagine successful action films being written and generated entirely by AI. As long as they keep us on the edge of our seats, we won’t care who made them.

More arty films are exceptions. Who wrote and directed them still carries significant meaning—just as in fine arts. Similarly, bestselling books—fiction or nonfiction—could be written by AI, but when it comes to genuine literature, we care who the author is. Finnegans Wake would likely have been ignored if it weren’t for Joyce, with his track record, writing it. I predict that a sea of AI-generated books will make us crave human-written ones, in the same way mass-manufactured goods have made us value handcrafted ones. The rebirth of the author—but only at the highest levels of art, across all mediums.

Authorship will become especially important as AI floods the market with books and films that are just as good as human-generated ones. Since we can only read or watch a small fraction of them in our lifetimes, “human-generated” will become an arbitrary yet useful filter.

What we’ll ultimately value isn’t the technicality of who generated a work but the “voice” we can consistently perceive across all works by an author. AI might be able to emulate a voice and produce a series of works, but doing so would require a fundamental change in how AI models are designed. An artistic voice reflects the fundamental desire of the artist. AI has no needs or desires of its own. Giving AI its own desires would be dangerous—it would begin acting on its own interests, diverging from what we humans want or need.

I hope we don’t make that mistake. But we seem to be following a trend: making our own mistakes before anyone else does, because it is inevitable that someone else eventually will anyway.