The advance of artificial intelligence unsettles some people as if some unknown invader were drawing slowly closer through space. For them, AI is 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 is their use in the market for artistic and leisure products (illustrations, music, stories, and so on). What moves me to do so is the unease I do not share at the prospect of throwing the creative genius — that quintessentially Romantic fantasy — into the corner of the useless and 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, let me start with the example of chess. Specialised programs have been playing for some time at a level far higher than that of the best human players. Has anything happened? Have humans stopped playing? No. What is it exactly that 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 made up on the spot and changed if it suits — 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 deeply human factors play a fundamental role: need, identity, enjoyment, every kind of passion, and the limits of the body. Add the context of preestablished rules and competition, and we have games like chess. When we play chess, we do far more than move pieces: we exercise memory, intuition, 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 right algorithms applied to it, allows it to skip unnecessary calculations and gain forward depth. In the end it is one specific computer application among many. We could almost say that the ones who play are the designers — indeed, there are competitions among them. What we have, in the end, is a human team that has developed a specific product for a specific activity: to execute games of chess against the moves an opponent presents to it.
Where does a television series come from? Is there not also a team that develops it — 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 so for the greatest profit, the kind that makes the work viable and gives continuity to the human labour involved. Rules are needed to compete in that field too, because a series, a film, a bestseller, or a number-one hit, whatever their 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 bring their own ideas and sensibilities into line in order to produce something that fits the conventions and demands of the industry as it stands — something that will draw in and hook an audience used to a particular kind of narrative and aesthetic — something built to rules of its own, less strict than those of chess, but rules nonetheless. The same goes for music, stories, and illustrations, which generally share a family resemblance that, to anyone who has gone deeper into their formal languages, is striking. Their originality is no more than the appearance of originality, because here originalities are not driven 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, with too short a shelf-life in terms of profit.
In short, by way of 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 piece of software — controlled, of course, by human programmers and human designers who will guide the process all the way to the desired product.
One last thing, the cliché of the conflict between machines and human beings. To my mind, those who see that horizon as imminent have minds flooded with science-fiction fantasies. Beneath such assumptions, the ideas of consciousness, intelligence, and life are mixed together in muddled and indiscriminate fashion — a philosophical problem we shall not explore here. Let me note only that this confusion conceals the real conflict, which is not one of machines against humans but of some humans against other humans: a dialectic of empires of which the technological struggle is one of the most powerful expressions.