Thoughts on AI Art

Recently I was listening to a podcast between Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. Hearing Musk talk about AI and his upcoming Neuralink technology is subtly terrifying. At what point do people augmented with machine parts stop being human? It reminds me of something Ben Kenobi says about Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi: "He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."

I've heard a counter to the argument (which I find more convincing than not) that AI will replace humans in terms of arts and humanities--composing music, writing poems and novels, etc--and it's usually something akin to "People will still want to create those things." I'm not entirely sure if that will be the case in the next century or even the next half-century. When other advancements in industry and quality of life came along, people no longer wanted to do the tasks required of their predecessors because they didn't have to anymore. The machine would do it better, quicker, and more efficiently.

What's to stop that from happening to works of art? In fifty years, if AI art has gotten to the point where it perfectly mimics human creations to the point of being indistinct from them, what reason will people have to still make works of art themselves? Just let the machine do it, since it can paint a landscape without having to study for years and years to get its technique right.

I don't know if pure human volition--the desire, the want to create art--will be able to withstand the ruthless onslaught of AI creations.

I see two possible results of this path, should the human species continue down it. Either we completely forget about the arts and how to create pieces of art, or we re-learn art from the ground-up in such a way as to outdo the AI artists. This latter option seems more optimistic, and I foresee it as future man returning to, or following in the footsteps of, his primitive self, the cavemen who painted on the walls of their homes at Lascaux and other places.

I foresee a return to nature, a return to agrarianism and pastoralism as a means of escaping the overly-mechanized, overly-industrialized world which we created around ourselves. It can be summed up in the final verse from William Blake's "Jerusalem":

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In Englands green & pleasant Land.