The advance of artificial intelligence unsettles some people as if some unknown invader were slowly approaching through space. For them, AI is already on the verge of waking up to take control of itself. This haloed horizon conceals the real reality of these technologies, which is their insertion into our structures of production. What I want to talk about here is their use in the market for artistic and leisure objects (illustrations, music, stories, and so on). What moves me to do so is my own discomfort — which I do not share — at the prospect of throwing the creative genius (that quintessentially Romantic fantasy) into the corner of the useless, of replacing it with a soulless machine. My thesis is the following: AI does nothing that the leisure industry, or the world of graphic and industrial design, has not been doing all along.
To make this clearer, I will start with the example of chess. Specialised programs have for some time now been playing at a level far higher than that of the best human players. Has anything happened? Have humans stopped playing? No. What exactly do chess engines like Stockfish, Leela, or Komodo do? What does it mean to play chess? If we reduce the definition of the game to the application of a set of rules, we could say that those programs play — but is that playing? There is a first sense of play that has nothing to do with competition or with prior rules — the rules are invented on the spot and changed if convenient — that is the activity of the child who invents and builds out of whatever materials are at hand, who practises, tries things out, and shares them, and in all of which very human factors play a fundamental role: need, identity, enjoyment, every kind of passion, and the limits of the body. If we add the context of preestablished rules and competition, we get games like chess. When we play chess, we do far more than move pieces: we exercise memory, intuition, and the emotions. We play bodily, with a body that enjoys itself, gets tired, gets stuck, gets angry, gets nervous, makes mistakes, and has well-aimed intuitions that are not the fruit of mere calculation. From this perspective, when we play against a machine, we play alone. A chess engine calculates, and its capacity rests on the power of hardware designed by humans. Its memory is a database under continuous construction which, with the application of the appropriate algorithms, allows it to skip unnecessary calculations and gain forward depth. In the end it is a specific computer application like so many others. We could almost say that the ones who play are the designers — in fact, there are competitions among them. In the end, what we have is a human team that has developed a particular product for a particular activity: to execute games of chess in competition with the executions presented to it by an opponent.
Where does a television series come from? Is there not also a team that develops it — a team of writers, producers, technicians, actors? And they develop it as a product to compete against others within the leisure industry, to compete for the largest audiences and therefore for the greatest profit, the kind of profit that makes the work viable and gives continuity to the human labour involved. Rules are also necessary to compete in that field, because a series, a film, a bestseller, or a number-one hit, regardless of their greater or lesser formal complexity, are not put together just any old way.
If a chess engine replaces the human player, who does an AI that builds scripts for series replace? A team of writers. Not an artist and certainly not a creator, but a team of professionals who have to harmonise their own ideas and sensibilities to produce a product according to the conventions and needs of the industry as it stands — a product that will attract and hook an audience accustomed to a certain kind of narrative and aesthetic — a product that is also built according to rules, less strict than those of chess, but rules nonetheless. And the same goes for music, stories, or illustrations, which generally have a family resemblance that, to anyone who has gone deeper into their formal languages, is rather striking. Their originality is no more than an appearance of originality, because here the originalities are not motivated by some supposed subversive or freedom-loving will, but by the need to refresh audiences and shake off the redundancies of products too similar to one another, and which therefore have a short shelf-life in terms of profitability.
In short, and as a conclusion: the washerwoman is replaced by the washing machine, the human designer by the digital designer, the manual dexterity of the illustrator by the controlled combinatorics of a software. Controlled, of course, by human programmers and human designers who will guide the process all the way to the desired product.
Finally, there remains the cliché of the conflict between machines and human beings to be examined. In my view, those who see this horizon as imminent have minds flooded with science-fiction fantasies. Beneath such assumptions, the ideas of consciousness, intelligence, and life are confusedly and indiscriminately mixed together; this is a philosophical problem we shall not explore here. I shall only note that the confusion conceals the real conflict, which is not that of machines against humans, but of some humans against other humans. That is to say, a dialectic of empires, in which the technological struggle is one of its most powerful expressions.