NAOMI:
This is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Nomi Fry. I'm Vincent Cunningham.
ALEX:
And I'm Alex Schwartz. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hello, my fellow critics. Hello,
NAOMI:
Alex. Hello, Vincent. How's it going, you guys? It's going good. Yeah, it's a new day in New York.
ALEX:
It's a new dawn. It's a new day. Yeah,
VINSON:
I'm feeling
NAOMI:
Good. And
ALEX:
We're feeling good,
NAOMI:
Or is it
ALEX:
Well, that's what we are here to discuss.
NAOMI:
Exactly.
ALEX:
It's a big topic today, my friends. It's a big topic because unless you've been under a rock or perhaps more likely in some kind of beautiful cottage in the cots walls, God and how lucky, lucky Bread
Being it remove from the world at large. You've probably noticed that in the last couple of years, artificial intelligence has become more and more prevalent in basically every part of life, and especially something called generative ai, which is AI built to create new content, not just to enable analysis or organization of existing content. The future is here, the future is now. I mean, chat, GPT, this thing that now everybody knows, it was introduced to the public in November, 2022, and now they have over 700 million weekly active users. Of course, they're not the only game in town. Every big tech company seems to want to get into this AI race. Unsurprisingly, I mean, I saw some other thing that said that at this point, 99% of people have used AI in one form or another, often without knowing that they're using it, but it's kind of impossible to be online and increasingly in the world without it so it’s becoming pervasive in general. And it's also, and here is where we come in starting to become pervasive in the arts. Guys, tell me a little bit of what we've been seeing with AI in the world of culture,
NAOMI:
Every day brings more and more gifts in this realm. For one very recently, Tilly Norwood, the new AI actress, who is completely artificial, is seeking representation in Hollywood. She has an Instagram account. We've seen some clips from her so-called Reel. We haven't seen her actually interacting in an actual movie or anything like that quite yet, but it's become a big topic of discussion in Hollywood for sure.
VINSON:
Timbaland, a producer who was part of the soundtrack of my youth now, has created slash quote, signed an AI artist, a female rapper named Tata Tumi, and there is now a video of unquote her first single, a song made by a robot demon that's make sure
ALEX:
Tell you really,
VINSON:
Yeah. Let's make sure we're clear on where,
ALEX:
Anyway, where we stand.
VINSON:
Yeah.
ALEX:
Yeah. I mean, I can think of some others that's in the movies. It's in music, obviously. People have strong feelings about this, and the debate now frankly, has cliches on both sides. This is going to ruin art and ruin the experience of being human. This is going to save us. This is going to take us to the next level of transcendence. It's a debate. It's ongoing, and we're not really here to litigate it. It's a huge topic.  but we are all critics. So what I thought we could do today is to take a look at some of the output of these AI projects and evaluate it as critics. What do we think of the art? Is this an innovation like electronic music say, or is it a mere novelty, or is it something in between something totally different? We are also going to look at some of the art that has been made about AI over the decades. Robots, super computers, Al Pacino in a trailer deciding which digital dress his hologram Simone should wear.
You got the picture, and we are going to try to figure out whether the reality of artificial intelligence is heading towards the promise we've been imagining in science fiction too, ambitious. You tell us. The big question I have today is… we should actually ask Chachi Bt what the big question is. The question I'm asking it is, can you come up with a big guiding question for an episode of the New Yorkers critics at large podcast on the promise and peril of generative ai? One cultural lens. Can machines make art or are they only mirroring ours? Back to us two, ethical and existential lens. What happens to human creativity when intelligence itself becomes a simulation? Three societal lens Is generative AI expanding our imaginative world or hollowing it out, not terrible, not terrible,
NAOMI:
Not super great, but also not terrible.
ALEX:
Four historical slash comparative lens. Are we living through the next great artistic revolution or the end of authorship? And five, if AI can write, paint and compose like us, what becomes of the critic and of the human impulse to create? So thank you to chat GPT for those not bad guiding questions, and that'll be today on critics at large art in the age of artificial intelligence.
________________


human friends, yes, flesh and blood colleagues still Let's start with what seems like the most high profile AI music project, certainly of the recent moment. It's of course Tata Uni, the AI artist, which as Vincent was mentioning, Timberland has signed unquote or really created. So can someone lay out the background of this thing? Let's talk about it a little bit. Vincent, I'm going to you because you brought up Tata in the first place.
VINSON:
I did bring up Tata mostly because its existence is just a true shame to me. Timberland, who as a human producer has been pretty good. But so he says that the reason he wanted to make an AI artist is that he's kind of over the hill, and therefore this creation is, as he called it, his thriller. This is his biggest creative gambit, yet he launched a new entertainment company that's, I guess wants to create a factory of these
NAOMI:
Creation
VINSON:
Killer robot musicians.
It's called Stage Zero. And what Timbaland says he wants to do is create a new genre of music, apop, artificial pop, and they want to, I guess in the way of the algorithms create a style of music that is, again, an omni genre with no real roots. So therefore, that we'll remind you of things that you've heard, but has no clear antecedents or influences. So not to put too fine a point on it, it sounds like a bunch of bullshit, but this ungodly creature has released a single and a music video for that single Do people want to hear the video?
NAOMI:
We want to hear it when we also want to watch it.
VINSON:
It's called Glitch X Pulse. Tata talk to me, I believe, is to the evidence of the eyes, of course, and unholy monster who will have to make an account for itself before God. But until then, it looks like a young Asian American woman with pink hair and lots of rings. She looks like vaguely hip hop badass. But once again, a shame before the creator here goes.


        CLIP - TATA TAKTUMI
VINSON:
So she's got dancers around her, a weird robot DJing at the beginning of the things that she's talking about spaceship. So obviously part of her deal is like, yeah, I'm not real motherfucker,
NAOMI:
And Timberland is kind of mugging behind Tata.
ALEX:
Okay. Well, I want to ask a few questions about Tata and our reactions to Tata. So Vincent hates Tata.
VINSON:
I hate Tata and the mind that brought her into being, go ahead.
ALEX:
Yes. And so you hate Timberland by extension,
VINSON:
That part of his mind? Yes.
ALEX:
Yes. Okay. Okay. The
VINSON:
Tata fold of his gray matter.
ALEX:
Alright. Alright. Naomi, thoughts about Tata?
NAOMI:
I think Tata is like, listen, I would not waste time listening to Tata, but I don't know that I am exactly the target for Tata. To me it does sound repetitive, quite dull. I don't feel that the beat, so to speak is taking me higher.
VINSON:
No, it's not.
NAOMI:
And the sort of dead faced ness of Tata herself, I mean literally, I don't know if this is the work of not yet accomplish enough AI or if that's just intentional for the kind of, I don't give a fuck vibe that the target audience might be wanting or if this is just kind of shitty technology not yet accomplished enough technology. So I'm a little on the fence to me. I mean, I'm not on the fence in the sense of, I dunno if I love it or hate it, I kind of hate it, but then at the same time I'm just like, is that so different from some other stuff we might see nowadays aimed at a kind of young audience that is looking for a quick product rather than intricate kind of complex works that serve emotion and creativity to the listeners,
VINSON:
I would say to that young person, if they want to hear a female voice shout invective at them, they can check out the new Cardi B. It's pretty good.
NAOMI:
No, I’m not saying everything now is like Tata. I’m just saying like,  it doesn't seem unaligned with of the general trends that I am feeling are happening
In culture. This is I'm late to this, but I've been watching on Netflix, there's this documentary series called Pop Star Academy, which is about the making of Cat eye. The K-pop though it's an international K-pop band, and I'm not saying that Katai itself is Tata, But one of the things that are striking to me that they keep insisting in the training is the uniformity of the movements and the uniformity of the choreography. Obviously there's been girl bands, there's been boy bands before, all of which are kind of dependent on a very tight kind of range of movements and so on and range of vocals. But the kind of beyond perfection of K-Pop is to me kind of aligned in some ways with this kind of AI ation, whether actual AI or sort of wannabe AI that's happening in culture. So I'm kind of like, okay, is it that different? Is that where we're all headed, whether we want to or not?
ALEX:
Yeah, I mean, I think you're getting at something important here, Nomi. There are just a couple of things I want to say very basic things I want to say about Tata to ground us. One is that f I didn't know that Tata was a generative ai, if this just was playing in the background, there's no reason I would think this was not real. So one thing that is kind of disconcerting about this is how it really can just slide on that continuum is Nomi, you're saying towards something anesthetic that very much already exists. So it's interesting to bring up Cardi B, like no Tata ta Tomi is nothing like Cardi B. Cardi B is nothing if not deeply individual. She has a huge personality that's an enormous part of her appeal. With Tata though, it's Tata with Tata though, I do think that part of what is so disconcerting about it is the sliding in of these computer generated things to participate in the human experience and in our human experience without being clearly flagged. Something about that feels beyond uncanny. Is that part of what is getting you
VINSON:
The fact that that might happen is yes a way that our culture might be sort of deadened and made to sort of rot from within. Although,
NAOMI:
Oh, not to put too fine
VINSON:
Point out, everything means nothing all of a sudden the age of what we call AI slop or whatever. But it is also a characteristic of the AI booster to never shut the fuck up about ai. So I'm actually not worried about that. Everybody who I made this song and this singer with ai, I don't think that they're ever going to ever stop talking about it. But even if we just bracket this to hip hop, this is not even close to a unanimous deal. The engineer sort of hip hop eminence, Jay-Z affiliated young guru, he spoke out, he wrote on Instagram, these are the times right here that history is defined. Human expression can never be reduced to this. I checked on Spotify and I looked at the credits to Pulse X glitch, and there are writers, so maybe he is, Timberland is letting AI run rampant and then getting writers in to sort of tweak it to make it more comprehensible. But it is a much more spare credit section that you usually get on Spotify. And it's almost a visual ode to the fact that this is also a way to cut jobs. There's no engineer on this. All the human effort, the human collaboration that makes real music, he's trying to cut out the middleman,
NAOMI:
But also I just think it's like a complete canard. I mean, Timberland has often collaborated and put center stage younger artists, younger, he worked with Missy, worked with Justin Timberlake, with Aaliyah. I mean, I just mean he's always done it. And so in this case, what it seems to me, Vincent, to your point, is that it's a labor issue. It's like this is a
VINSON:
Way, I don't want to pay a new artist.
NAOMI:
He doesn't want to pay a new artist. He doesn't want to, whether it's a woman or a man or whoever. I don't think it has anything to do with being washed up and whatever.
VINSON:
Well, hope you like being the MIT Romney of hip hop. It was nice. Timberland. Yeah.
NAOMI:
Okay.
VINSON:
Buy a company and offshore all the late. That's great. It was fun while it lasted.
ALEX:
Loving this,
NAOMI:
Loving it. However, moving however, onto another rage bay,
ALEX:
I feel situation. I feel that the rage of Vincent Cunningham is only getting started up. Let's throw some more chum in that water. Who knows? Let's talk about Tilly Norwood. Okay. We have a little bit of a caveat. Tilly hasn't done much yet. Tilly is just fresh on the scene. She's an ingenue with some dimples. It's all we have of her is some stills on a terrible Instagram account and a few short video clips. Maybe Tilly Norwood is my Tata Tumi. You want to tell us who Tilly
NAOMI:
Is? Sure. Okay. So Tilly is the creation of Dutch technologist Alina Vander Velden, the founder of a company called Particle Six, quite lifelike, still has that stench of two perfect rounded misty patina of AI created humanoids, but looks like a very pretty girl in the manner of today, long brunette hair, beautiful cheekbones. And she is presented as a young actress, as if she's sitting at Schwab's sipping on a milkshake. Schwab's from the 1940s. Yes. It's where Scarlets were discovered,
VINSON:
Be seen as an ingenue.
NAOMI:
Ingenue, exactly. So Tilly is metaphorically sitting at Schwabs, right? And is looking for representation in Hollywood. And of course this has caused quite angry, I mean partly humorous, but also annoyed and angry response from a variety of people in the industry, including the actress Betty Gilpin, who wrote an open letter to Tilly. Again, quite comical, but also pretty serious in a lot of ways in the Hollywood reporter addressing this newcomer
ALEX:
To Hollywood. One thing she talks about that I think is kind of pertinent to what rubs me, so the wrong way about Tilly Norwood,
VINSON:
About Tilly herself,
ALEX:
About Tilly herself is Betty goin talks about being a young, beautiful woman in Hollywood. And I appreciate that she just comes out and says this. She was basically like, I was super hot when I was younger, I was super hot and people treated me like I was super hot. And I saw some of the advantages that could come with that. And then I also saw some of the disadvantages about getting pushed around, about getting treated like someone else's commodity. I mean, I'm paraphrasing here, I'm not quoting her directly, but she's talking about that. And what freaks me out about Tilley Norwood. And also what freaks me out about T Tumi is that these are really young women being created for the purpose of just
Being the, this is what I mean about infiltrating ai, infiltrating the human experience. These things aren't weird or difficult or unusual or using AI to try to give us a view of the human condition that we haven't seen from humans yet. Tilley Norwood reminds me of someone who had been on the WB whenever that still existed, circa, circa it's Sophia thousand. It's a very, very generic image of what makes a young woman appealing. So the thing about Tilly is that, as Naomi mentioned, she's created by this company, but the company itself is created by a 39-year-old woman, which I find fascinating.
NAOMI:
It's very the substance.
ALEX:
It's very the substance. And what this woman has to say is also on tilley's Instagram to those who have expressed anger over the creation of our AI character, Tilley Norwood. She is not a replacement for a human being, but a creative work, a piece of art, like many forms of art before her. She sparks conversation. And that in itself shows the power of creativity. So the first thing I want to say is no, it doesn't like anything else, there are different kinds of conversations and different quality of conversations.
VINSON:
That's right.
ALEX:
Alina goes on. I see AI not as a replacement for people, but is a new tool, new paintbrush. And that is actually, The place where this generative AI interests me is when different artists of different professions start to see this is inevitable. I think there are two camps, basically, people who feel that they need to fight the machine and people who feel that they need to join the machine and make the machine better. And I do think some of those people are using generative AI in a really interesting way. I don't think till Norwood is one of those ways.
VINSON:
And also I would say to the idea that, oh, Tilly is just art like anything else, I would say, who the fuck do you think you're talking to? Everybody knows that the companies want to use this so that they don't have to pay real human beings. Nobody thinks that it's just, you're going to put her on the wall like a Picasso or something. Everybody knows what the end game is. So why are you talking to me like I'm stupid?
NAOMI:
Who are you fooling?
VINSON:
Who do you think you're fooling with this slick browed Broad.
ALEX:
The slick brow. Broad. So here's what I want to ask you guys to close out this segment. Has there been any generative AI that you have liked in the art world? Are there any that you don't feel like slop?
VINSON:
I don't know. Maybe there are, but there have been artists for many years now who have sort of engaged with the visuality of the digital world and the many falsities of that world. One of them is Jacoby Satterwhite. I like his work a lot. He makes these very video game almost screensaver looking surfaces into which you can see intrusions of the real world. They're like sort of candy color. They're purple and these deep algae greens. And I could see someone like that who is dedicated to the human maybe engaging AI in a way that wouldn't make sense to me. But I've never seen somebody put forward a work that was like, see, it's just like a movie except it's ai that I didn't look at it and made me want to do harm to its creator. So I don't know.
ALEX:
There's someone who I find very interesting whose work I don't know very well, but having been looking into this topic and having come across her, I want to keep learning more. And her name is Holly Herndon. She's an artist and a musician. And actually our colleague Anna Wiener profiled her two years ago in the New Yorker. And the thing about Holly Herndon that's really interesting is she is kind of using herself as a test case for what AI can or will eventually do. She's a singer and she has made recordings of her voice that can be used to sing anything. It can come out of multiple different languages. It can do vocal techniques that she can't do. So I think in the case of someone like Holly Herndon who's very interested in art and in what technology will do, I think there's an acceptance. Technology is changing art and there's no point for everyone to dig in their heels and say, this can't be, this won't be, let's stop it. It's going to happen. So what can I do with it? And what she's done with it is kind of made this persona who can travel far beyond her and participate in all kinds of collaborations and projects that she herself will not participate in and may not even know about. It's very brave new world, but I find it fascinating.


Artificial intelligence has long been the stuff of  sci-fi. How do those fictional depictions compare to our current reality? That's in a minute on critics at large from the New Yorker


:: MIDROLL :: 
ALEX:
we've been talking about some current examples of figures created with generative ai. So what I want to do next is the inverse AI is quite literally the stuff of science fiction dreams. What kind of text stick out to you guys when you think of what we, and by we of course, I mean humankind imagined AI to be,
NAOMI:
I think about Stanley Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey, the science fiction masterpiece from 1968. Of course, famously there is the supercomputer, how that is supposed to be the help me to the astronauts when they go on their mission. And it seems at first that how the computer, the artificial intelligence that is supposed to do no wrong, either morally or practically speaking, is actually maybe not as subservient to the astronauts. And that emerges when Hal tries to kill and then kills some of the astronauts. And there's a scene where it's revealed that Hal is in fact not going to be playing nice. 


CLIP - 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
ALEX:
Yeah, I mean this is a huge classic and for many reasons, and one of them, one, the tropes you hear here that's just fantastic is the human becomes emotional. The human has feelings, the human is terrified, and the thing without emotions can win. The cool clinical calmness of the computer talking back and gaining control is absolutely sinister. And it still feels that way now for sure.
NAOMI:
It feels sinister and it's one of the most bone chilling early-ish texts about AI as an evil entity. And the tension here is that the voice is human. The ability to converse is human or human-like at least. But the slip out of the human control of something that the human thought would be simply a tool to make life better is what is so scary here.
VINSON:
And that's the key, something that would make life better, right?
NAOMI:
Because
VINSON:
The AI
NAOMI:
Progress,
VINSON:
Right, for good or evil, the promise of this kind of thing is connected to a kind of technocratic dream, which is there is a way to arrive at a right answer, a right thing to do that has nothing to do with human passion as you mentioned, Or
Emotion or sentiment, that there is some celestial platonic course of action that actually a computer will one day apprehend and say, no, no, no human being. I have witnessed the fickleness and mercurial nature of my creators, and I see how it sends us in the wrong direction and I will take over. And it's so funny to hear that because it now almost seems that we have unsheathed, our kind of unvarnished longing for precisely this, A
Machine to tell us what is the way through all this human muck. It's kind of chilling to hear in the context of our enthusiasm for this stuff today.
NAOMI:
Yeah, it's the classic cautionary tale of don't get too big for your britches with all of this progress stuff.
VINSON:
That's right. Yeah.
ALEX:
Vincent, what AI text has spoken to you recent from the past? Doesn't matter. Hit us with one.
VINSON:
Well, right now, the current season of the morning show, season four
Has running through it, some ai, technological anxiety. It opens on a screen of Jen Aniston's character, this sort of in control now part executive part news, anchor character, Alex talking directly to camera, delivering an advertisement for the upcoming Olympics, which her company UBN is now sort of the host of. And then it doubles the screen and it's her speaking in, I can't remember which language, the next one is maybe Spanish. And it's like, okay, Jennifer Einstein learn how to speak Spanish for this. That's great. And then it multiplies language after language and the screen becomes a screen of a hundred screens her speaking in a bunch of different languages. And it turns out that we are in the middle of a presentation at a meeting and one of the executives is showing off their new AI capacities that this is going to whatever, quadruple quintuple, whatever the potential reach of their audience, this new AI tool. Another bit is that in the course of events, one of the sort of puff pieces that Alex was supposed to deliver, a little interview with a world-class fencer, turns out that this young woman and her father want to defect from their country. And Alex sort of improvisationally makes that happen. I don't want to spoil too much.
NAOMI:
The drama
VINSON:
Helps them out. And then in the fullness of time, she's in a meeting where someone shows her the security video from that encounter. And it turns out, and it, it's her saying things as if the meeting, this whole thing that happened, improvisationally was premeditated by her, and it shows her saying words that she did not say. In other words, the security footage has been deep faked. And so there's a whole episode where she's trying to disprove the deep fake, I won't tell you what happened, but in two directions, corporate, but also in this dimension of espionage or sort of geopolitical doings. There is a new character on the show, which is these capabilities. And the morning show is so lurid and silly and soapy pulled from the headlines that it's really interesting that they've used this as a kind of under painting for the season. I am a big morning show fan. I continue to be a morning show fan. Wow. So it's really interesting. Reese with a spoon, different character. She's just dealing in every scene in this thing. She's good. Boom,
ALEX:
She's a good actress. But what if you found out that she was an ai,
VINSON:
Then I'd be heartbroken.
ALEX:
Exactly. But why
VINSON:
Till all over again.
ALEX:
But this is my question, why if she's moving you, if she's getting you to feel that way, if Reese Witherspoon turned out to be just an elaborate figment, but you loved her work and it made you feel something,
VINSON:
Would you feel, the only reason acting makes me feel something is because I know that a real human being is pulling on the deposit of their emotions and past experiences and producing from all of that biography a new thing that is unprecedented in the world. If a fucking robot doesn't, I don't care. I don't care what it is. The fact that no human being had any part of it is disqualifying. For me, the only reason I like art is because people make it.
ALEX:
So you're saying if you and I am going somewhere with this, but you're saying if you found out if you loved a performance and were moved by the performance and found out after the fact that it was not actually human performance,
VINSON:
I would give myself the men in black and forget that shit forever. Fuck that thing that's nourished me my whole life. Fuck it. Because it was made by
ALEX:
Demons. Interesting that you turned to sci-fi to answer sci-fi. I know.
VINSON:
Wow.
ALEX:
See, it's sci-fi all the way down, my friends. It's
VINSON:
All the way down. How about you though, Alex,
ALEX:
This is why I'm going there. This is why I'm bringing this up. This is why I'm challenging you because there are many, many, I mean, there's no way we could touch even a fraction of the number of works in the AI cannon. And going back to, honestly, I would say Frankenstein, however, I want to bring up a bit of a niche one that I happen to see. There was a great phase in my life when I was an early teen, maybe 14, and was finally able to move around the city on my own and just went to a lot of movies often by myself or maybe with a couple of other weird Friends.
And one movie that I saw in the theaters is Simone, from 2002 starring Al Pacino, starring Al Pacino and also weirdly Catherine Keener. I realized when I was rewatching some clips of this directed by Andrew Nickel.
NAOMI:
Okay.
ALEX:
Simone is about a film director played by Al Pacino Victor, who is having trouble in his career. An actress has pulled out of the movie he's in, he can't use her image, all this stuff he needs to reshoot. And so he creates an actress called Simone, and it's styled, of course, with a one and a zero instead of the I and the O.
NAOMI:
Right? A bit technological.
ALEX:
It's a bit technological, if you will. She's a computer generated woman. She's blonde, she's beautiful, and she starts to have mass appeal. She works too well. And what happens in this movie is that of course, there's some classic issues. 


CLIP - S1M0NE


The Al Pacino character has to pretend that she's a recluse because people want to meet her and interview her, and everyone's loving her and they're going wild. 


And Al Pacino is sitting in his trailer putting on red lipstick to kiss pictures, her autograph pictures. Oh no. Yes. And then what happens is that, of course, this thing is too successful. Al Pacino needs to shut it down. This goes so far that he has to kill her off and he's accused of murder and all this stuff, but people literally won't let her die. And in that way, a lot of this AI stuff, of course, these are all metaphors for things that humans go through.
In some ways, this idea, even going back to Hal from 2001 is Space Odyssey. If you're a parent, you're creating a being that you hope will change the world for the better, and you imagine all kinds of things. It will love me, I will love it, and it will love me. The evidence shows that that's very often not the case, that these things are not as easy as that, that there's a lot of counter programming that goes on in culture and biology. So I feel like a lot of these ais are about our relationship with human beings, but in a world in which we can imagine that we have more control over the way that other people are, it's a metaphor that is very tempting for the unpredictability of human behavior made more predictable. Of course. Then   I feel like there's a whole other category we haven't even touched where a blade runner, an exm, a kind of thing where the AI is sympathetic?
NAOMI:
Well, it's a classic Pinocchio situation, and it's dependent on the idea that something is created artificially through artificial means, and then it doesn't turn evil, for instance, like hell, it's robotic nature gives way to human sentiment. And so the trick with Blade Runner where you know it's a love story between Harrison Ford and Sean Young, who is a robot who is a fembot. So I think those kinds of texts are dependent on the breaking of the barrier between AI and humanity and ameliorating or a soothing vision in a sense, because it comes back to the human. It'll be like, oh, the robot is actually a fallible human that can make mistake. What's more of a mistake than falling in love? What I mean, what's more fallible than
ALEX:
A great tagline for your future project about it?
NAOMI:
Yeah, robots, they're just like us. It's like that is kind of the angle at which this kind of text comes at the AI issue from, I
ALEX:
Think. Yeah, I think that's one, and I think another, I am a big fan of the Alex Golan movie xm. I like that
VINSON:
Movie too.
ALEX:
It's really good. 
NAOMI:
I have to say I've never watched it. I think I like it.
VINSON:
The dance scene with Oscar Isaac Worth the price of Admission, which at this point is probably free.
ALEX:
Basically for those who haven't seen it, the movie is about a CEO of a tech company, reclusive, played by Oscar Isaac. He lives in a magnificent forest environment in a very impressive modernist home, and he invites in a programmer played by Donald Gleason to administer the Turing test to this female humanoid robot played by Alicia Vi Candor. And guess what? It all goes wrong. And the movie is all about, of course, the feelings that Donald Gleason ends up having about this robot and the feelings that we have, because our own programming as human beings, we love personification right now, he doesn't have to be a robot. I have with my young son at home, he's very into his stuffed animals and he knows they're not real. I know they're not real, I think, but if either one of us does a little voice for them, even if he does the little voice for Monkey or whatever, he'll talk to them. He'll
Answer them. He'll be polite to them because there's something about our feeling for other creatures, even if they're clearly fictional. I mean, this is what art is all about in a way, and that's what I think the promise and the premise of some of this AI art is, again, fiction in general. We feel real things for fake people. And Vincent, one thing you're saying, which I totally agree with, Is
That you want to feel the real humanity behind the creation of that thing. That's what makes it worthwhile. But at the same time, it is all a shell game. It's an emotional shell game that I happen to believe in very, very much as someone who loves films and who loves Narrat. Six
NAOMI:
Characters.
ALEX:
Yeah. Yeah. So that's where my own question and the rub for me is if I have felt something, I don't know if I can go back and reprogram to unfeel the thing.
VINSON:
Well, yeah, and a representation of someone creating a thing and that relationship, Frankenstein, Pinocchio, ex Macina, even put in Toy Story. To your point, Ben, this is a way for us to contemplate things like master slave relationships. Creator created relationships. The metaphor creates an open zone of contemplation from which we can draw all kinds of conclusions. That's very different than putting some fake person in front of us and saying, oh, this could do the same thing as a human being. The layer of deception that you're talking about. Like, oh, well, I felt it and now I know it's fake and dah, dah, dah. The way that it is faking at being the kind of art that might be created by human being deprives us of that freedom of contemplation, that something like a film about AI offers us
ALEX:
In a minute. If the art moves you or brings you somewhere, does it matter who's created it? This is critics at large from the New Yorker. Stick with us. 


:: MIDROLL :: 
So we've been talking about ai. We've been talking about just a little exploration into how AI has appeared in human made art of the past. I think AI has been a source of fascination, of terror, of appeal. It's the human ID in virtual form, at least in human made art. And now it is time for us to talk about our own encounters with the beast. I have not used generative AI very much.But someone here, and I feel that it's going to be me, has maybe got to argue on behalf of the actual artists and interesting people who do think that there is a future, not just a future in this, but that they can be in a kind of dialogue with it. I think  You know, if we want to give an example of the kind of pro AI argument that's made and that I think ultimately should be reckoned with, it's something like AI is allowing more access to the making of art. That some, you know, making a film very hard to do,And I think the, like, movie making argument for AI would be something like, okay, if you allow people to create all kinds of scenarios, character sets, without having to go through the process of paying for it all, you might get more art.
These are at least, or what I see, various writers, filmmakers, I see 'em talking about this. There's a whole buzz of AI optimist people out there. So this is just to say that I attempted a little chat, GP ting over the weekend, very basic. The first thing I did was I have a new piece that's out as we're recording this, and I asked, it wasn't out yet, so it was not able to be fed into the machine. It's a great piece.
VINSON:
And the most recent New Yorker, search it out.
ALEX:
Thank you, Vincent. I asked chat, GBT to write the first section of this piece, which is about an apartment stager in New York City in the style of me. And of course, it came up with some things that are common, new Yorker tropes. The piece begins not long ago, a classic way for a New Yorker article to start. There is sometimes a bit of a formula, and there it is on a gray Tuesday with the sky threatening sleet. All of a sudden it had a scene. It had a place.
NAOMI:
Wow.
ALEX:
And it used my subject, a very real person named Jason saft, and it gave him all these quotes that weren't things he had said, but intriguingly were things that someone in his position maybe could be imagined to have said. And the thing that I found uncanny about this experience was that it got at some of the ideas in my piece, which didn't exist yet, and I found that a bit unnerving Because
Here's a line from chat, GPT. My subject's name is Jason Saft. If Safs job is to make strangers feel at home in places they've never seen, his true talent lies in decoding the aesthetic subconscious of a city constantly in flux. New York apartments are always in the process of becoming. someone's first foothold. Someone else's graceful exit. Saf knows the choreography of those transitions. Okay. Do I think this is good writing? I do not think this is good. Writing
VINSON:
It also upon inspection doesn't mean a goddamn thing.
ALEX:
Well, it means sort of something, which is this idea of, I was like, oh, an aesthetic subconscious of a city constantly in flux. For a second, I was like, is that an idea? I should have used chat. GPT made me wonder for a second there, it made me wonder, I guess I just had an unsettling experience with it where it doesn't sound like the article I wrote, and I am happier with the one I wrote than this one. But it was interesting to me that it was starting to put out these ideas that I'd not fit into it.   
NAOMI:
It's sort of like near something real, but not totally something real. It has sort of glimmers certain turns of phrase, certain moments of thought that can find their way into a real essay written by an actual human. But  I think part of me not engaging with it until now has to do with a kind of almost like taking offense in a weird way, because it's like, you're coming for me, bitch. I'm not going to give you the satisfaction. I can do this on my own. I've been doing this on my own for many years. I did a couple things. I asked Chadwick, GPT to write a biography of Garfield, a cat,
VINSON:
Not the president,
NAOMI:
And the style of myself. The results were mixed. Let's put it this way. There were certain things that emerged in this text that I was like, okay, I could have said a lasagna loving tabby. I mean, there were certain things.
ALEX:
I can hear you saying that.
NAOMI:
I mean, yes, pretty good. Totally fine.
VINSON:
The crucial difference right? Being, and I know you did more things, I'm sorry, but the crucial difference being it's the parts that were okay are literally stolen from you. Well, it's not like it's okay and it's almost as good as me. No, no, no. It starts on an act of theft. It is just giving you back things that you might've said from reading you. I'm sorry, I am not even trying to get this mad.
ALEX:
No, no. Nom happy. You're this mad, because
VINSON:
I too, also, it just forces us into these frameworks that are
ALEX:
I know
VINSON:
Fallacies. No, no, no. It's not okay. It's okay at stealing you from you Anyway.
ALEX:
Yeah. Again, I don't want to be like a moral finger shaking, concerned person. The part that really gets me is just the brain being kind of floating on a pool of slop and just getting so used to seeing these images or these kinds of textual spins on something, not to mention the amount of energy that it takes to create any one of these, But what this is making me think of, I want to go back for a second into the past because of course, Vincent, and I think you were just saying this, a lot of what this AI is is a take on the human past and presented as the future. It's taking things that already exist and trying to give them a bit of a spit shine and meld them into a little ball and put them into the future. And specifically, the more we talk about this, the more that two works come to mind. One is the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction by Walter Beamin. And this essay is from 1935, and one is the essay by the French critic, Roland Bart called The Death of the Author
In the Work of Art in the Age of mechanical Reproduction by bein. The thrust of this argument is that mechanical reproduction, the fact that you can print a postcard with the Mona Lisa on it, you don't have to go to the Louvre anymore to see. It takes something away from a work of art. It takes away its aura, aura, its uniqueness. It takes away the kind of totemic, ritualistic human aspect of art. So we are living in that world for sure. We are living in a world where you can hear any work of music coming through terrible speakers at any time, and now worse, you can feed the Mona Lisa into a generative AI and have it create something that's essentially like a shit post or
So we're living in it. And I don't exactly know what to make of that, except to say that I think Benin was right in a lot of ways, and also wrong in some ways too. Think we still very much value art and value the work of art, but it's under some degree of assault. And this is what I was trying to challenge you, I guess with Vincent a bit, is going to the death of the author, this Roland Bart essay where Bart is basically arguing that in criticism too much is made of the biography or the intention of the writer or the artist, that it's too easy and it's in fact not that useful. And maybe even a misuse to try to take the humanness that created something and use that as a kind of input into your critical output. kill the author, take it away. And to me, AI is the ultimate death of the author and not in a good way.
VINSON:
And even the idea of the death of the author, my reading of Bart is that I think you can't accomplish the death of the author without a little bit of psychoanalytic theory, which is that unintended meanings make it into the work of art. Things that are not intended by the person, and it cannot be explained by their biography, but because we share a world with the author, the reader can pull things that may not be intended by the work out of the work that we sort of share a world and therefore share frameworks of meaning. But I think, again, only possible because we have this whole deposit of life and shared experience behind us that has to make its way onto the page. And so again, I think it's almost a category error because AI in its sort of plagiaristic way, can replicate the form of things, but cannot pull on the experience of being in the world. It can take indications of that from what other people have said, but the magic of that transmission that I think the idea of the death of the author rests on shared whatever psychic furniture and AI can't do that the prompter can. What I liked about hearing what you guys did with ai, the best things about it, where your human ideas about what to put into the thing. These are ideas that I would want to see you execute, but not only intention, but simply the weird thing of having a brain that does give off unintended things that I am in the world in a way that I don't totally intend every day till can't do that.
ALEX:
I agree with you. I mean,  I want to be as definitive and categorical as you are. And certainly I think I feel that way most of the time. And then I think things like, well look at an artist like Jeff Koons, for instance, who's been using his own ideas and inputting them into being fabricated by other people. Artists have been doing this for a very long Time
Where the actual artist's hand is not involved in the making of something, but is using what is essentially a prompt To
Create a work which is declared and viewed as art. In some ways, AI does not seem like a break from those things. To me, it seems like a continuum with the Marcel Duchamp saying that a urinal is art to Jeff Koons saying, okay, I'm going to fabricate a ton of objects, But
I'm not going to make any one of them. And part of what is human about AI to me is how bad so much of it's the very badness of it. Look at the stuff that, all the images of Trump that he's putting out in his social networks, where he is dressed in a toga or whatever. I mean, it's kitch. It's kitch. That's exactly right. Jeff Koons is someone who plays with kitch.
NAOMI:
Exactly. That's part of the point he's making. In fact.
ALEX:
Yeah. And even if you hate it, I think he's one to some degree. That's one reason why Jeff Koons is very frustrating, because he drinks your tears or whatever and just gets stronger. But I do think there's a kind of generic kitch that is being churned out by this stuff again and again and again. That's good for a bit of a laugh and is absolutely dulling the brain. And that's the part that I'm concerned about. But I am waiting for the moment when I love the thing and I am deeply moved by the thing. And then it turns out that Tilly was behind it. And when that happens, we're going to come right back on here and we're going to talk all about it. 
ALEX:
This has been Critics at Large. This week's episode was produced by Michelle O'Brien. Alex Barrish is our consulting editor. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Conde Nast's head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon. Alexis Quadra composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from James Yost with Mixing by Mike Kuman. You can find every episode of Critics at Large at New yorker.com/critics.