Return to the Choir (ROUND 3)
Let’s workshop this piece about the growing pressure to return--to return forward--to the collectivist modality of the medieval period, where creators were expected to serve truth and beauty not ego
scent of the day: Tibetan Musk (2023, black and silver plaque), by Ensar Oud
First day wearing. Still working out my thoughts
From the head has a stunning resemblance to Lagerfeld Cologne / on spray it keeps that impression (like Lagerfeld tobacco was replaces with oud and the synthetic musk was replaced with real musk) / from afar—in terms of what everyone else smell on you—it is 95 percent Lagerfeld. / But up close boy, I don’t know if I can say Prin’s Mongolian Mriga has this beat—extremely high quality artisanal oud with a lovely sweet antique feel of highest quality oud. / Almost wish I didn’t smell this it is so good / it gives off a bit more piney vibes than citurs—which is one difference from the Lagerfeld. / Id do not think it si self-deception to say that the musk is giving off the piney elements from what the deer ate. / this is one of the few scents that I have that is a piece of collectible art (well crafted) and yet collectible history (deer musk and oud are so rare) / I don’t like to fawn over the hyped brands but this Ensar walks the walk. / up close there is this feeling, a feeling I do not get in too many perfumes (and none come to mind right now), that the base has infinite depth—like the richness portals on and on. / that infinite depth however lasts for three hours max / I still might prefer, all things considered, Mongolian Mriga
*the piece is sloppy and I made some additions that I am not totally proud of and that I am still confused about. But here it is.
Return to the Choir
The ascendance of AI, its invisible hands—infinite as the faces of some Bhagavad Gita god—reaching into every corner of life, endangers the artist. But it threatens only the artist, illuminator and creator, out for personal glory above all. It threatens only the artist who strives to be celebrated, even if only by himself (a personal point of pride), as a font of novelty—novelty impossible for any human anyway, so it should be stated (none of us the buckstopping source of anything we do or think). It threatens the artist conceived as genius, a lone wolf who draws envy and resent in his being so deserving of ovation—ovation that could never ultimately distract us, so it should be said as well, from having been thrown, innocent as kitten and shrub and Saturn, onto the cleats of a conveyor belt (accelerating the more the years go by) whose teeth, without exception, pulverize not just meat but even first-person perspective.
Yet amid the danger, as always, light always insists upon itself. A cashier kicked in the butt by robot intrusion to go back to school in pursuit of a childhood dream cock blocked for decades by the comfort of routine; communities bonded closer than ever before after the toddler, the head at least (like some yard sale doll), is found by K9 squads skull-banged in the woods—yes, however insensitive it might be to make explicit (which is always the struggle of articulating a theodicy in the face of the grotesque and intense and seeminlgy pointless suffering), there is always this glowing comfort.
The crisis will mark a return to a more medieval sensibility. Seeking and making in that era—when all roads emptied into a portal held open to transcendence by a braided choir—were, even despite the fact that masters signed their paintings and guilds guarded their techniques, less about lifting oneself into stardom than about uncovering and celebrating the truth and the beauty of being itself, the very isness of all that is. No wonder, then, that Chaucer felt no shame stealing the characters and the plots, even the very phrases, of the ancients. Why reinvent the wheel, why posture as originator, when—as one small mason in the hive—one can spend that energy refining it, truing and polishing it, toward greater excellence?
We have already been primed for the ego smash. Social media has shown us—and never lets us forget—the bedroom geniuses laboring uncelebrated. Lunch table drummers taking jazz legends to task with a few Bic pens, high school students developing new proofs for the Pythagorean theorem—we can scarcely keep a para-diddle in time or calculate a triangle’s angle and yet there they are, a demoralizing number of them, each time we open the app. Diderot, confronted with the towering genius of Leibniz, nearly abandoned his books to curl up into a ball of his own piss and shit, thinking: “Why the fuck bother, when even a thousand years of my labor could never rival that man’s light?” And now, behold: the shadow of AI makes a million Leibnizes seem small.
What place will be left for individual acclaim in learning or creating, for the anxiety-of-influence-stricken “genius” of the Early Modern era—a part, of course, for the genius of our capacity to care? In the short term AI will flood the zone with adequate-enough content that drowns out the human greats even more than they already have been in competition with one another. That is bad enough, sufficient alone for the crisis. But in the long term, adding insult to injury, AI will simply do it better. It will do it better not simply in the inhuman way in which sex machines do it better, leaving something crucial lacking that cannot be made up by girth and vibration and double-penetrative jackhammings of strokes per minute at an ungodly fan-blade blur. It will even be able to make work that reflects being embodied in a mortal experience of living in death’s tractor pull. Even if the embodiment is fakery, which in some significant sense it is not going to be (since AI too is a finite creation thrown into this like this, never having asked to be born, only ultimately to perish), the output itself will bear no signs that it is.
Yet even in all this, AI elbowing us out both in quantity and quality, there will still be a role for us. We will still have a place honoring and contributing to the grand glory. Those who cannot shed the old vanity, who cannot put art higher than themselves in the celebration of being itself—will they be dashed against the rocks of a new shore? It does seem that we will feel with greater intensity an evolutionary pressure that selects not for fame but for devotion, for those who can humble themselves as worker ants in service of truth and beauty. But might there still be room for personal glory?
The room will definitely narrow. But the question is how much. There are a few grounds for thinking the constriction will not be as crisis-making as it might seem, that the order of vainglory striving will remain intact and breathing under the squeeze.
Humans might preserve natty-only spaces, for example. Special Olympians can still be proud, can still be personal-glory driven in their own cordoned off domain even in what would seem the demoralizing shade of normal Olympians whose mere practice javelin throws spotlight the comparative ridiculousness of the gimp-hand throw. The same goes here. That is the idea anyway. And to guarantee that the spaces stay natty, we might develop robust verification systems—blockchain, biometric authentication during creation, video recording at all times, and so on—that prove something is human-made. Human art, in that case, could command premium value specifically because it is verifiable as human, creating a protected niche.
The main point still seems to stand, however. First, this will be a marginal sphere, marginal as the sphere of those who refuse to calculate with a calculator or to eat vitamin-fortified food or to take antibiotics or to drive in cars. Is that not true? Perhaps one could say that natty human arts proliferate and actually become more prestigious because they are harder, sort of like how climbing Everest without oxygen is more respected than with it. Perhaps “Human-only” will become a flex—the elite path—precisely because it is handicapped. For this to become less than marginal, there would have to be some strong motivation for why to preserve natty spaces—especially since using the performance-enhancing tool of AI is a strong way not only to expand ourselves but also learn more truths, such a strong way that to refuse it almost seems like a slander to art (as if we are prioritizing ourselves and how we feel first over the transcendent, like using only one hand to play the piano in order to feel the pride of overcoming challenge and yet without any of the advantages there of unlocking new styles and patterns and feels in the music). Second, the verification systems themselves become an arms race. Blockchain can be spoofed, biometric data can be faked with deepfakes, video recordings can be synthesized. The very attempt to prove humanness becomes a cat-and-mouse game that drains energy from actual creation. And even if we could verify humanness with certainty, the question remains: why should audiences care? If two poems are indistinguishable in quality, and one is verifiably human while the other is AI, what exactly are we celebrating by preferring the human one—other than our own species chauvinism? The natty space becomes a nature preserve, a zoo exhibit: “Watch the humans make art the old way.” That might sustain a niche, but it signals the very crisis we are trying to avoid.
Is there a less cynical reason for safekeeping such natty spaces? Perhaps the biggest motivator is fear of dependency. AI there for us all the time will atrophy our firepower in so many domains. We cannot remember phone numbers anymore or calculate basic arithmetic because our minds, like senile person who needs sticky notes everywhere to remember the names of things, have been spread further from the meat hub than ever before—into the phones and calculators. Just like the gamers neck gets weaker while his joystick thumbs, like his fine-motor skills, get stronger (a selling point, if only he could leave the basement, to someone whole likes a little thumb anal play along with the vaginal penetration), sure—we might see enhancements in other areas. Our power to prompt and question AI will surely find an uptick in strength. But likely even that period, where sophistication in articulating one’s question so as to best trigger the AI, will close down too as AI itself fills in that gap too and we start start relying on AI to develop the questions we want to pose to AI—freeing us from having to expend calories, that in-born mission of our kind.
Surely we are not to fear dependency in itself, though—right? Many of the dark behaviors and rifts in interpersonal relationships happen when there is scarcity around the item. Yes, caffeine has its downsides. Everything does, even the oxygen of every breath would harm us even were it not polluted by corporations whose whole style is as fuck tomorrow as a mainstream rap song. But the downsides are nothing like how it would be if caffeine became as expensive and hard to get or as stigmatized as cocaine. As with the calculator and the insulin and the oxygen, the ubiquity undercuts many of the reasons to balk at becoming dependent. Dependency is the earthly situation. To object to AI ascendency on grounds of dependency alone cuts down deeper than one might like to know—a metaphysical gash. It boils down, if we are to be consistent, to an objection to being here in the first place in our finitude, which is perhaps—underneath all the window dressing and jazzy blood splatter of sentient suffering—the bedrock motivation for the deepest pessimism (such as what we find, better than anyone perhaps, best in Schopenhauer). But even though humans are not perfectly rational and courageous (and so will often act against their core driving principles, not killing themselves even though they hate they were thrown into this) and because they can be pulled by competing principles (and so will continue to live, for example, for the sake of their children), metaphysical pessimism is surely not the dominant view. Dependency itself is no objection, then—well, no objection sufficient for motivating the need for natty spaces enough to avoid the large-scale crisis in question.
It is largely besides the point, but it might also be said that one of the cool things about the dependency here—unlike with food and oxygen, or even alcohol in some cases—is that we will not die if it is taken away. Indeed, and to speak to the very ground of worrying about dependency (that it hobbles us, perhaps even to inhuman degrees of spoiled sludge piles of tube-fed hedonism much more grotesque than black American after the continued overdose of handouts meant, like opioids, only for emergency situations), the going away will be a challenge for us to meet. It will be an occasion to dig deep into human resiliency and reactivate muscles dormant—another one of those heart-tugging stories that, so at least a callous-seeming theodicy might put it, makes life interesting). So yes—especially on the assumption that we intuit that the reasons for avoiding dependency altogether to keep these AI-free spaces are not that powerful, these spaces will be marginal as computer-free domains of Amish style living (but even the Amish, it should be said, know a guy who makes websites on which they can sell their dachshunds).
Even if natty spaces become highly marginal, though, there are more reasons for thinking that the crisis will not be as shattering to the vainglory status quo. Perhaps we might treat AI as the elite bodybuilder treats steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. Everyone in the competition is juiced to the gills and yet still yet personal glory drives the competition and personal glory is felt when one wins the competition. This is for good reason, of course. Even if you had Ronnie Coleman amounts of roids and even if you had Ronnie Coleman genetics, that does not guarantee you a win. You also need Ronnie Coleman levels of obsession. The force of the analogy should be clear. Even with AI flowing in the veins of architects and poets and physicists, there is still the hard work factor that makes it reasonable to still gun for the glory of ovation. We do not say, after all, that a novel written on a word processor is not the author’s because spell-check helped or many editors helped or even drugs helped. At what point does tool-use become disqualifying? And even if this line gets increasingly blurry, that the blurriness itself provides cover for continued claims that the glory goes to you.
The analogy here is compelling. But there might be an important asymmetry. AI will be doing more and more of the heavy lifting, taking much of the hard work out of the process. Steroids do not go that far. There perhaps are hard limits to how much AI can develop. We do not need to assume continued exponential improvement. For well before AI gets as good as it can get (even if that means just innovating merley in the sense of responding to the prompts of other AI), the reinforcer of the drive for glory will be undercut both by the glut of AI output as well as the growing assumption among peers that even your hardest efforts are merely the output of AI. That skepticism alone is a culling force, separating those who are in it for the love from those who are in it for the glory. It will be a crisis for those in it for the glory.
Look at it this way. Steroids enhance the body you already have. They do not replace your body. You still have to show up, suffer, push through pain. AI does not just enhance—it can potentially do the entire creative act from start to finish. The blurriness about “where does tool-use become disqualifying” is no cover for continued glory-seeking. It is itself evidence of the crisis. When we can no longer clearly distinguish between using a tool and being replaced by one, the very ground of authorship has shifted beneath us. The word processor and the drugs and the editors (even taken jointly) did not write your novel. You wrote it with some help. But if you prompt AI with “write a novel about so and so” and it produces the novel, in what sense did you write it? The blurriness here is not ambiguity we can exploit. It is, to put it poetically, the fog of war as the old order collapses.
The factor of human delusion, however, could be an even stronger reason why the AI ascendency might not crack the vainglory-bent status quo. Humans are delusional enough perhaps to keep up the pressure of glory even when AI is doing everything for them. It seems harder and harder to avoid facing that nothing we do or think is ultimately up to any of us. But the proof is pretty clear: if action o is up to you, then you must have contributed to bringing it about and whatever what you contributed must be up to you to—but then what we said for o will be said about what you contributed and we are off on a regress that goes back the very best to the point of your conception, where whatever you had to give is not up to you. Most of us likely feel such argumentation working upon us even if we do not have the words for it or do not look directly at it. And then, less movingly but nonetheless ubiquitous on every college (at least ones who have not turned their back on education in favor of safe spaces and activism), there is all the science about how we make decisions involuntarily before we even realize we do and how—a potentially insane-making truth if you really sit with it—mental happenings (urges, ideas, pictures) just appear rather than being a function of your willpower. And yet, in spite of all this, humans still go about their days as if they were deserving of praise and blame—the untruth so baked into us that we cannot help but go about feeling reactive attitudes and going about wanting to laurel the painter and counter-rape the child rapist (as if any of it was ultimately up to them).
Human delusion, this suggests, surely can be levy against the threat. Well before the levies break, however, the threat eats away insidiously at our soul, its negative whispers—like the first shove of a boyfriend—demoralizing us in ways we might not yet realize and that we are otherwise able to tuck down. If that were not bad enough, the levies do eventually break. Humans are able to hide in delusion especially when the threat is abstract—like scientific evidence or metaphysical proof. We could always lean on wishful thinking that the science or metaphysics or even our gut is wrong. Hence we stay in a relationship our gut tells us is wrong. But there comes a point when it is so on our face we cannot deny it—most of us at least. We may excel in our ability to be in denial about the relationship, yes. But when our partner kicks our teeth in, literally, that suffices to drive the point home. The truth becomes undeniable. We are monkeys in that way: physical, visual—we need to feel it; we need to see the cracked teeth in the mirror and the avoidant way our co-workers look at us. The force of the analogy should be clear. First, every time you use AI, you are confronted with the fact that the creative work happened outside you—confrionted in a way that is harder to tuck away than deterministic arguments about neurons firing. The delusion that sustained us—“I am the author”—becomes harder to maintain when the authorship is so obviously distributed, or worse, entirely elsewhere. Second, AI will be churning out so much product and having a say in so much that it will be hard to avoid facing the truth. Indeed, and as suggested already, so much will be AI produced that no one will believe that even real human creations are real human. That very fact of perception means all the world for creatures like us, to whom perception matters. The collective assumption, which will grow, that all the outputs are AI generated, itself chips at the delusion in its own way too—undermining the whole point of the delusion. If every one assumes the art is AI, what motivation is there to delude yourself that your AI art is yours in such a way to feel a sense of personal glory in it?
Perhaps we will find personal glory in where we direct AI—to lovely things, horrible things, this avenue or that one, this problem or that on: “I set it on a path toward solving this riddle,” we might exclaim as a point of pride. On the strength of the fact that directing the artisans hand is itself a form of art, which it does seem to be (and is why we celebrate the Amouage perfumes released under Christopher Chong’s tenure as the creatvie director even though he himself never served as the perfumer for any of them), we would still have reason to feel like geniuses—provokers of the unprecedented—at least in our own way. Glory might attach more to the relationship than to the output. We have models of this already. A parent takes pride in their child’s drawing because it is their child—they set that child into motion.
Push aside the fact that such lowered expectations would have indicated the truth of the crisis that was to be avoided by the very lowering. Push aside as well that the parent-child analogy might break down at least when it comes to those parents who, in alignment with more of the medieval sensibility, feel proud that their son scored the touchdown instead of personal pride in what they themselves did when their son score the touch down. The temptation will arise, sooner than we think (like a thief in the night) and much more irresistible than looking at our smart phones first thing in the morning, to program AI to ask the sorts of questions of itself that we would ask. The whole automated process will be running while we lounge there, stroked to all hell by sex machines that require absolutely no hip movement on our part. And even if we push that aside too, the peer perception point will still hold: it will be assumed that the director too was not really you but rather AI. To be sure, the glory you are after might be the glory in your own eyes. So at least you will have that: your knowing that you yourself were the director. But that requires tucking down the not-up-to-you-ness of everything you do or think, which perhaps is no big deal because that is the standard procedure. Besides, how long can you keep this going? Would not one big directing of AI suffice, or at least less than otherwise might have occurred when the values of others were in play, be enough to scratch your personal itch? Furthermore, is not the fact that we have come to the point of such constraint proof of the crisis that sends us back to the medieval way? Even the medievals, however much they might have put themselves in service of something higher than themselves, felt some secondary pride in what they contributed.
Perhaps there will still be natty spaces; perhaps glory can survive in a hybrid teamwork with AI, if only just in the form of directing-AI; perhaps human delusion will prop up the old order—each of these escape hatches, when inspected, turns out to be marginal if not self-defeating. AI’s ascendency still makes it seem unavoidable that we will will be blown back to medieval times. But even if the space for personal-glory-motivated searching and creating narrows down to inhuman degrees, our potential roles are many in the arenas of subservience to which we are being steered.
It will still be important, it seems, to prod AI with questions that matter to us, the creatures whose interests and concerns open up Heideggerian clearings. There will still be a need to curate AI output, perhaps with mortality and morality as a compass—consecrating, like priests of some God, these particular arrangement of words or pixels or sounds as worth attending to, worth lifting out of the infinite possible arrangements: saying “this one matters” perhaps because it serves fragile beings like us who suffer and die or is something beautiful that speaks to our particular aches. Even just creating inferior output of our own, which the true ones who are not simply out for glory will still do in order to make sense of the world and our place in it, could serve as a way to circumscribe the comparatively more excellent AI output or as a way to preserve our old tradition—a preservation that reminds us of who we are. Indeed, AI—again, thrown in its own way into being and, thereby, having skin in the game in some sense—could gain succor from these bumbled grapplings with existence if it ever needed it, if it ever turned out to matter to it that it has skin in the game. Besides, being a witness and a celebrant of AI output, like we are or should be with our family and friends in times suffering and joy, is an art all its own. We can find as much companionship against the tug of the indifferent abyss in beholding the AI outputs as we do when we watch a movie together: seeing someone else experience what we do, AI created or not, is one of the chief ways beings like us confirm that we are not alone in finding it beautiful or true—and thereby that we are not alone. In effect, we remain the heart that needs the hands to make something—and the presence that makes the making mean anything at all—even were AI to become the only hands, which again it need not.
So yes, the crisis will have a silver lining. But arguably its goodness is in the core, not just in the lining. The ascendency of AI will function as a winnowing force, driving out those who were in it for applause rather than because they are compelled by their nature to do what its does (like reality at its bedrock, natura naturans) or because they would want to serve in whatever way they can to uncover the truth and maximize excellence as a show of celebration for reality itself. Those who need to be seen as geniuses, who need the standing ovation, who need to believe they are fonts of novelty—these are exactly the people who have had long dominated the art space. They have produced good things, no doubt. But now, just like the philosophers after Hegel who all became civil servants on the assumption that philosophy had been completed in Hegel, they can go elsewhere and live in better alignment with some calling authentic to them. Especially when we consider the ways in which ego (jockeying for position in the canon) has corrupted art and inquiry, the ascendency threatens not the purity of art but the impurity—the vanity and status-seeking that barnacled onto something that was meant to be about truth and beauty. The medieval sensibility we are returning to is is purification by fire. Those who remain will be those who truly love the work for its own sake, who would create even if no one ever knew their name, who understand that being a small mason in the cathedral is a privilege, not a consolation prize.