Ian Penman in the London Review of Books:
Eno spoke about generative music in San Francisco in 1996 at something called the Imagination Conference, a ‘progressive interactive event featuring original multimedia presentations’. It’s an idea that has ‘obsessed’ him, he says, and which he keeps pushing even though it never meets with the admiring gasps he obviously expects. It’s an odd thing to be evangelical about, somehow both cutting-edge and old hat. He’s so stoked by the idea of having ‘no one definitive version’, he even asks whether our current habit of listening to favourite pieces of music over and over again will one day seem ludicrous. Again, Eno is extrapolating from his own interests – or self-interest – into a vast generalisation. Some music is eternally unfinished: you can play it for decades and it can still make you dizzy. (It just happened to me with the Rolling Stones’ ‘Street Fighting Man’.) The paradox of generative music is that you would have to play it over and over again in order to notice any of the gazillion tiny differences. An infinite wibble. The eternal return of the vaguely familiar.
It’s the crux of the matter with large language models and generative technologies. Not only do they parrot us, but they parrot themselves. They’ll never be able to produce something akin to art1, because art is anything but parroting. They’re nothing more but simulacra, and you can go far in life with simulacra2, but simulacra nonetheless.
You need a frame of reference to appreciate art, you need to know where you stand to be swept off your feet. More often than not, this frame of reference is an actual frame – the covers of a book, the canvas of a painting, the beginning and end of a song, the setting of a sculpture, the opening and closing credits of a movie… “Generative art” negates space and time, which means it negates what makes human experiences human. And experiences.
(By the way, “no one definitive version” is pretty much the same thing as “you’ll own nothing”. You can’t buy a copy of the Eno generative documentary, for example, you can only rent a screening. Brian Eno might think of himself as one of the most progressive people ever to grace our pale blue dot, but this is the most late-stage capitalism bullshit ever.)
- The use of the term ‘AI art’ might be my only gripe with Mathew Inman’s superb piece on the subject. ↩︎
- Ask any politician. Or Anish Kapoor. ↩︎