There’s already a lot of creative work that is somewhat superficial and unoriginal but serves its purpose, for better or worse. There are pop songs I like, for

There’s already a lot of creative work that is somewhat superficial and unoriginal but serves its purpose, for better or worse. There are pop songs I like, for example, where the lyrics could have been written by an AI (but the production and vibe of the music make up for it). The lyrics were actually written by a producer or two in an afternoon while they were having a good time and not taking it too seriously, just writing what sounded good (in constrast to the suffering-to-put-words-to-one’s-pain described in the letter). I think it’s possible to underappreciate how art can carry a message, and creative works can touch people in a way that an AI working by itself won’t because it has no reason to; it has nothing to say. GPT-3 is basically a fancy autocomplete. That said, will AI-generated works probably touch people deeply and make them feel things? Sure. It’s not hard to make humans feel things. And AI that is good at summarizing and reflecting things back to us will make us feel seen. It’s easy to underestimate AI and overestimate the genius of the poor artist who is trying to generate new ideas and produce work based on them at the limits of his human capacity for generating novelty and synthesizing output. It’s already easy to generate mediocre work, and humans decide what gets popular, whether it’s the audience or the people choosing what gets made or distributed. Movie scripts have been getting more superficial and less original, so if an AI writes a Spider-man movie and no one can tell, it will be because we’ve met in the middle.