Is True Art Dead in the Era of Algorithms and AI? | Opinion

Pity the tortured soul of the artist! It was never easy for the creative class: Vincent Van Gogh cut off his own ear, the Impressionists were ignored by entrenched elites, and J.S. Bach was not recognized as a great composer until long after his death. Now algorithms, free distribution, and generative AI have made the artist’s life more complicated still.

Should we care? Is it important? Is it an issue of the day? I say yes. Look back at human history, consider what survives of the messy and complicated story, and you’ll find that beyond wars and scientific advancements there is mainly art—and art is what we turn to and take solace in and point out when we want to believe that we are worth more than the wildebeest, somehow.

I reflected on all this recently while watching The Playlist, the 2022 Swedish-language Netflix series that tracks the creation of the Sweden-based and universe-altering streaming music behemoth Spotify. I had expected a love letter to tech, which is by this point a genre: but the message of the series is that Spotify was a case of change that amounts to exploitation of the workers, meaning artists.

The argument had to do with the low amount of compensation attached to each individual stream, and how supposedly as a result, the vast majority of artists earn peanuts on the platform. Spotify’s founder and current CEO, Daniel Ek, is presented as intelligent but also coldly indifferent to the needs and opinions of others, and monomaniacal in his conviction that music must be free.

I loved the series, which was compelling and cerebral, but I wondered how fair was the portrayal. So, I turned to my friend Tristan Jehan, who was Spotify’s director of research until a few years ago. Tristan is a knowledgeable fellow who is measured, cultured and fair-minded. He is a tech bro, but something about him seems to attach to a less vulgar time, when one could find manners, and perhaps a dash of humor.

Tristan’s adventures since leaving Spotify also make him a reasonable authority on AI, which may be a bigger issue now than low revenues per stream on Spotify. Artists are wondering whether generative AI might replace them—and moreover whether it might do so to yawns from a TikTok-addled Gen Z.

Might AI soon generate scripts and songs that are deemed good enough by enough people to put artists out of business? Come to think of it, can something produced by algorithm be considered art? Will anyone care? And wait—are our own brains just algorithms, too proud to admit it?

Tristan thanked me for the “heavy questions” and drew a historical parallel.

“When photography came along people thought, well, this is the end of painting because reproduction has become so easy. But it started a whole new series of creative processes, new ways of representing visuals, going all the way to abstract, that didn’t exist,” he said. “

My feeling is that there’s going to be a period of confusion and some people will use these tools to make things the easy way. But artists are honest, and I feel they’re always going to find a different way to create music. The art is always around a certain persona and a message and what they’re trying to convey, and that’s something that you are not going to get out of AI on its own.”

As for streaming, data from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry shows that revenue from that now-dominant source has essentially replaced lost CD and album sales in nominal dollars—about $18 billion annually. But then the plot thickens.

Tristan noted that close to 70% of the streamers’ revenue is delivered to the record companies; the remainder covers tech costs and perhaps yields a profit (for Spotify this year, a quite reasonable one). But it is the record companies that pay the artists. And these record companies no longer have manufacturing and distribution costs. Tristan said they therefore should pay artists more than the paltry sums they always have—yet a renegotiation of the rather onerous contracts has not occurred.

It’s not a terrible argument. Blaming the record companies seems plausible enough—even a crowd-pleaser. Then again, the labels are the ones that tend to discover the new artists, which Spotify and other streamers like Apple Music do not do. So, it’s complicated.

Either way, 75 percent of revenues for artists come from concerts, with streams essentially serving as promotion for that—the same purpose once served by radio, where the music was also free, and from which songs were indeed recorded.

But what about artists who may have divine inspiration for writing a lyric or a melody but are not performers? This model seems not only unfair, I argued, but also connected to the accursed reality TV song contests that create the zeitgeist in which performance is the main thing, the lionized thing, the emulated thing, the dreamed-about thing.

This has troubled me; performance seems a lesser thing than creation. Show dogs perform. The focus on performance is not elegant.

“I don’t disagree,” Tristan allowed. “But I think it’s the focus on production that has lowered composition quality. People now seem to care more about production than they care about composition. But that could change.”

Which led me to a question I have been asking for some years, including of musicologists (they are a surly bunch): Is it true that music being made today has little chance of being heard in 50 years’ time, when they’ll still be listening to Pink Floyd and to the Beatles?

“Possibly,” Tristan said. “Possibly.”

These tech bros! So inaccurate in their speech. I am certain he meant “certainly.” Is there one person on earth who would disagree?

But I say this too can change and will. We are simply in a music trough of a sort that has always existed in various art forms.

Once there was the Renaissance period with its flourishing of artistic innovation, followed by a transitional period of relative restraint and conformity, in turn followed by the Baroque period with its rich ornamentation and expressive depth. So, too, it shall be with our era’s music. An electrifying new era comes, I’m sure.

We are not algorithms, after all: There absolutely is a thing called inspiration. It made me want to write this. For better or for worse.

Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.