Last weekend, we watched The Commitments. Remember that one? A hit film of 1991, based on Roddy Doyle’s novel from the decade before, it tells the story of youngsters in impoverished Dublin. Bored witless with the diversions available, which seem to be mainly smoking, saying “feck” and fantasising in the bath about being interviewed by Terry Wogan, a few of them start a soul band as a route to self-worth and relevance. Because soul, says their aspiring manager Jimmy Rabbitte, “takes you somewhere else. It grabs you by the balls and lifts you above the shite.”
I can’t pretend this was research. Actually, it was part of my ongoing project of forcing the culture of my youth on to my teenage kids, and it went down pretty well. They seem to have a fascination, that age group, with everything from the 1990s, and most of the early 2000s too. You want to see how often they’ve watched Friends. It’s hard to quite pin down why but I think it’s something to do with a sense of possibility. A sense of there being things you could do, back then, which hadn’t already been done a million times before. A sense that, even with a band covering the songs of 30 years before, you might still be doing something new.
We are not great, today, at the new. For a sense of how cannibalistic culture has become, and also of how infinitely more so it may soon get, perhaps you saw the reports this week about the latest roiling, existential panic in Hollywood after a clip of a punch-up between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt went viral.
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It looks exactly like a million expertly choreographed punch-ups you’ve seen before but this one wasn’t choreographed by anyone. Nor did it require any involvement by Cruise or Pitt. Rather, it was made by using Seedance 2.0, an AI tool from China. The Irish film-maker behind it said it only took a “two-line prompt”. According to Rhett Reese, who wrote the Deadpool films, it sent “a cold shiver” up his spine. “I could just see it costing jobs all over the place,” he said.
You have to be wary at my age, fulminating against new tech. I do see that. It was Douglas Adams, of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and so much else, who pointed out that anything that exists when you are born “is normal and ordinary”, and anything that comes while you are young is “exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it”. There’s a third stage, though, which is that “anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things” — and that’s now me.
The optimistic case for AI is fairly well established. In a film context, it holds that once you only need software to make a movie, once lights and cameras and stuntmen and even actors are all rendered unnecessary, then all of a sudden there’s no advantage whatsoever to being Disney or 20th Century Studios or any of the others, because you’ll be able to produce much the same content if you’re just some guy with a smartphone in a third world village. This obviously isn’t ideal if you, yourself, are currently making your living the old way but that’s your problem. This is democracy. This is freedom. Let a million ideas bloom.
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You can make the same argument with almost any area AI touches, and people do. It gives you architecture without architects, accountancy without accountants, interpretations of x-rays without radiologists, and so on. Indeed, the first person I heard make this argument was Jensen Huang, founder of the AI chipmaker Nvidia, who was excited about programming without programmers.
A lot of this is wonderful. I mean, of course it is. In every situation, though, I have the same nagging doubts. Because don’t you actually still need expert architects, somewhere, to know if the AI’s blueprints are any good? Don’t you still need expert radiologists for the same reason? Right now, sure, we still have them. Lucky us, to have timed this so well. But what about the next lot? How does anyone reach the peak of any profession once we’ve eradicated the foothills? How, and from where, do you create anything new?
With creative pursuits, it’s worse still. AI doesn’t just kill the new. It traduces the old too. As in, you see fake Cruise and fake Pitt trade blows, even once, and you begin to wonder why you would ever have had the remotest interest in the real ones doing the same thing. Maybe this has happened already. Think of how thrilled audiences were to see the chariot races of Ben Hur, for example, and compare that with the mundanity of whoever it was who chased whom in the latest Marvel film. Remember when Neo dodged that bullet in The Matrix? Remember how you gasped? I was 22. Find me a 22-year-old who’d gasp at that now.
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I am a child of a blessed age. We don’t say that often in Generation X, but we should. We knew childhoods without smartphones but still enjoyed all of their benefits in work. We were blessed with mass, cheap travel but got in and out before the Instagram hordes came along to render our experiences generic. We had the last great songs that everyone knew but also the last great songs that almost nobody knew, unless they were in our tribe.
Those who come after, though, face a paradox. They have greater tools for creativity at their fingertips than humanity has ever known and yet the space for actually using them seems to be shrinking rather than growing. They sense it, and they chafe against it, and my greatest, most tremulous hope for all of them is that they somehow find a way to defy it. But how? Think of what soul music did for Jimmy Rabbitte. What’s left to do that for them?
