When even art is artificial

Not long ago, the great fear about Artificial Intelligence was that it would grow so much smarter than mere humans that it would seize control of the world. Maybe it still will, someday. But now that AI is out of the box and generating a tsunami of "content," we're confronting a more immediate danger: It is polluting the internet and dumbing down our culture with synthetic, soulless, error-filled, imitative junk. A backlash has begun. In the right context, AI can be an invaluable tool for sorting through vast archives of data, connecting the dots,  and helping scientists, doctors, engineers, and financial institutions do their work. But when harnessed to cheaply and quickly crank out articles, images, music, and art, AI replaces human creativity and self-expression with sterile imitation. "Great art, or even not-great art, springs out of an individual's personality/history," the author Joyce Carol Oates recently posted on X. "AI is a machine that can mimic, but has no emotional history." 

None of that matters to corporations seeking cheap content — that execrable word — to fill the vast maw of the internet and popular culture. With nothing unique or personal to express, AI churns out uncanny mashups of writing and images in its data set — often laced with "hallucinations," or falsehoods. AI-generated writing and art are to real writing and art what Hot Pockets and McDonald's are to food. It is Tang in the place of orange juice.  Every creative occupation — including screenwriters, photographers, illustrators, artists, and authors — fears replacement and intellectual theft by AI. Google is already paying newspapers to publish AI-generated "journalism," and AI summaries of real books are polluting Amazon. Before long, movie studios will feed successful scripts into AI and ask it to write a blockbuster. Instead of killing humanity off with Terminators, AI is numbing us with swarms of countless chatbots. It may diminish its creators by simply making us dumber.

This is the editor's letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

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