Art Ain’t A Mirror, It’s A Hammer (Part 3 of 3)

Thanks to rapidly advancing tech, the person on the receiving end of the digital food chain who just wants to be entertained will only need to push a button -- or utter a word, or think a thought, or perhaps not even do that but passively accept whatever the gods of the algorithms decide to present.  AI (or whatever that evolves into) will pick a genre / story / style / cast based on their prior responses to earlier entertainment and generate a brand-new entertainment for them.

As Rick Beato points out, the overwhelming majority of the audience Simply Won’t Care if their entertainment is provided by a real human being with genuine thoughts and emotions, or by a program that can fake it.
To be honest, this does open up a new field of content creation, especially for those proficient at screenwriting. 

Writers who can create original highly detailed screenplays -- "directing on paper" in the old animation writing style -- to be translated into cartoons / concerts / short subjects / mini-series / grand operas will find their creativity in demand.
This will create a market for brand name writers the same way Stephen King or Danielle Steele are brand names regardless of the actual stories they write.  Audiences will never actually read what they create but will need simply say "Show me the latest David Gerrold story" and it will unfold before them.

The stories can be calibrated for individual tastes and predilections.  The kids can watch a G-rated James Bond adventure where 007 uses a variety on non-lethal gadgets supplied by Q to capture the supervillain while mom and dad can view an NC-17 version loaded down with blood & guts / tits & ass / sex & death.

(Sidebar: Creators will enjoy a secondary revenue stream of product placement, taking fees from companies to have characters use those brands in stories.)

While it will be possible to permanently record any version of any entertainment, a big appeal will be how each retelling will be slightly different, slightly unexpected the same way a play is never performed exactly the same way twice.

It will be a new art form with a new language, a new style.

We can’t leave it to soulless machines and programs.

We need human hearts and minds, thoughts and emotions to hammer out a future culture.

. . .

We’re not going to avoid the intrusion of AI into every aspect of our lives.

It’s already here and we’re already interacting with it.

We are going to see rapid technical and cultural changes as a result.

Remember Mary Quant’s miniskirt.

Nothing prevented anyone from wearing an extremely short skirt before 1963, and some show biz types did wear them when performing.

But Quant said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be kicky to wear this right now out in public?”

Not the deepest intellectual idea ever expressed, true.

But definitely a very human idea.

And it resounded with her audience / customer base.

And they took that silly little piece of fabric and used it to help them change the world.

If no one provides art with ideas, audiences will create their own meaning.

That could mean a golden age if that audience wanted ideas.

But from what we know of human history, the overwhelming majority don’t want to think, they just want to be entertained.

Bread and circuses.

I may be misremembering, but I recall in John Brunner’s classic sci-fi novel Stand On Zanzibar there’s a spaced out druggie couch potato who pops up periodically in the book, watching TV and crooning to himself, “Man, what an imagination I’ve got…”

The irony, of course, is that the character possesses no imagination, hardly even thinks at all.

He just observes the media unfolding before him and utterly fails to grasp the message.

He can attach no meaning to it on his own because he possesses no frame of reference.

We the artists, the creators must stay in the struggle to provide meaning to the world.

. . .

We opened with Dylan, let’s close with Springsteen:

“Outside the street's on fire in a real death waltz
Between what's flesh and what's fantasy
And the poets down here don't write nothing at all
They just stand back and let it all be
And in the quick of a knife, they reach for their moment
And try to make an honest stand
But they wind up wounded, not even dead
Tonight in Jungleland”

© Buzz Dixon