The Work of Art in the Age of AI

Some sentences get repeated so often they become boring clichés, you know? Well, in the world of developers, there was “generative AI is an accelerator” or “It’s a multiplier, if the value is zero, the result is zero.”

Well, this seemingly indestructible truth has lasted like a cat on a highway. There are already enthusiasts claiming to have canceled their Spotify subscriptions in favor of Suno, an AI platform that generates the music you want, however you want, on demand; and they imagine a future in which, in addition to software, even cinema, literature, and art will all be produced by AI exclusively for a specific user at a specific time. An incredible revolution, far from being Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. We are coming back to the irreproducible, to the extemporaneous individual desire that becomes art (art, whatever). The debate about how much authorship survives if the machine participates in the creative process, not just the execution, is already obsolete: the author is not even needed because they coincide with the consumer. Even the question of value is now obsolete, because there is no value without a shared system of values.

As we make great strides toward a society in which each individual is self-sufficient to the point of being able to do without the products of others' ingenuity, I see a counter-movement emerging, a bit immature, very naive, overly defeatist, and totally disorganized, that wants to strengthen human interactions, the only true “value multiplier” possible.