Art is not being replaced by AI

We're about to enter weird times. AI is going to disrupt the workforce and people are going to lose their jobs. The internet is going to be flooded by millions of pages nobody wrote and become even more dead. The good news is that human arts are not going anywhere. Fully artificial artworks and performances will not be of interest to anyone. Specifically, anything that did not take any human effort to create will not be valuable. Art is the result of a human's accumulated experience. People will always gravitate towards human art because the point of the art is that it's made by a human.

In the past three months, there have been significant breakthroughs in AI that now make it possible to automate intellectual tasks. Yes, not all of them will be automated. Yes, editing spreadsheets or coding was never the main part of the job anyway. And yet, people's jobs are certainly going to change enough that the workforce is going to be disrupted. My job as a software engineer has already changed drastically from what it was a year ago. I barely write any code by hand. I expect I'll write even less code over the next few months. Most people with white-collar jobs are going to be caught by surprise and will need to adapt quickly to the new reality.

Most importantly, people who have a white-collar day job and only find meaning in life through that are going to have an existential crisis pretty soon because of AI. Fortunately, anyone who doesn't live to work but rather works to live doesn't need to worry. But ever since I moved to America I found so many people who value their career over everything else. And by the way, I think it's okay to prioritize your career. If you want to have an impact in the world, it's just easier to do it if you have a successful career. But if you're only chasing money and status your life will lose all of its meaning– and AI will only speed up that process.

Consuming art is a great experience and experiences are what makes life worth living. Art is a form of communication. It's how someone transforms their life experiences into something that other people can see, touch, hear, taste or smell. The artist is transferring you their knowledge, triggering a feeling in you and telling you about the experiences they lived in their life. Evolutionarily speaking, art makes sense because it's a compressed form of knowledge that gets transferred to the next generations so they can prosper. By opening yourself to other people's artworks in addition to experiencing things yourself, you will make your life more fulfilling.

Artificial art won't be appealing in the long-term for this exact reason. AIs are trained on the corpus of human art and knowledge. They are great at mixing things and coming up with novel combinations. But they are not grounded in our physical reality. Even if they were– by taking the physical form of a robot, for example– they are not biological beings. They didn't evolve like we do, so they will never see the world like we do. If what we create comes directly from how we see the world, how would an AI ever make something that has meaning to us? If anything, whatever they make would only be interesting to other AIs. Hence why if a human wasn't involved in the making of an artpiece, it will essentially be worthless.

For me, I've been finding a lot of joy in dancing and making music and will continue to explore more forms of art like literature and cuisine. So if you ever feel anxious about what AI is going to do to you, consider giving art a shot.