I confess that every time I read about artists who are indignant for artificial intelligence, I have an ambiguous reaction, on the one hand I understand them: the idea that an algorithm can sample, reiterate and produce something that resembles a song, a voice or a “sensation”, has in itself a disturbing, especially if you grew up believing that art was an unrepeatable gesture. On the other hand, however, I am asking: do you really believe there can be a car that “steals” something that is not in the file but in the result or only in the effect it produces on those who listen or read? And that the effect is independent of what is behind (or in front, if on a stage or on a screen)?
I write this because yesterday, in the United Kingdom, the law called Use and Access Bill was definitively approved, which allows (among other things) to use texts, images, voices, artistic works to train artificial intelligence models, without having to even have to declare it, without asking for permission from those who created those works, and despite the protests of over four hundred artists (including Elton John, Paul McCartney, Dua Lipa, Kate Bush) The part of the provision that would have guaranteed transparency was canceled. Elton John (and singer company), goes without saying, went on all furies.
And here, I admit, I have a problem: if on the one hand I find the idea that anyone can sample Elton John to churn out a “fake rocket man” with a synthetic voice, on the other I keep asking me if the real art is truly replicable, or rather, if it can be damaged. Moreover, a copyright violation remains in any case, as in the case of Disney that brought Midjourney into question (I wrote about it here).
In short, guys, today the AI already use it already, and not to steal to Elton John, rather to produce tons of pseudo-art, people who cannot sing or compose and relieve the generators of texts and the self-powers, people who cannot write and ask a prompt of “creating poetry”, people who do not create anything and recombine what exists: it is a phenomenon that looks more like the universal karaoke that to the Apocalypse of talent. As on the galactic guide for self -supporting I would say: Don’t panic.
And the same applies to the videos generated with the AI, those hyper Smooth clips the more realistic the more fake the more absurd the more boh where a girl walks in slowing down in the fluorescent rain or a samurai smokes in front of a neon sunset, a new “revolutionary” demo comes out every week, every day there is someone who posts the “acronym of an anime that never existed” with thousands of comments in caps locks, everything the same. They seem full of imagination and in reality they do nothing but show the lack of imagination even of those who use the AI, because as far as they can be ultra defined, kinematic, dramatic, surreal (I apologize to André Breton), they are always the same two or three recycled atmospheres: more fog sunset more nostalgia from stocks plus hybridized animals more fantasy, they make me yawn, literally, literally, polished. Already seen and overwhelming, recombined with an aesthetic that makes only those who do not understand anything about art.
It is like whipped cream above the whipped cream over the whipped cream, as if each image was made to please a narrow retina to the visual sugar, unable to digest something more dense or disturbing. Among other things, since I have always been in advance on the times (I was already there to say that the NFTs were fuck well before the TG1 also realized, and above all well before the volume of trading of the “Art NFT” category was collapsed by 93%, by 2.9 billion dollars in 2021 to only 23.8 million in the first quarter of 2025) I am ready to bet that they will soon start yielding.
There is one thing that Bill Gates says and that I subscribe (I often subscribe to what Bill Gates says, I know): “We would not like to see robots playing tennis”, a way to remind us that there are still spheres where the human presence, the “not expected”, the non -standard becomes the only attraction. If art became a pushed standardization show tomorrow, a very baroque digital refuge without breaking and contrast, we would turn off its suggestion since it is not that flow that holds the meaning, it is the fracture.
Meanwhile, while the audience applauds the next video generated by Runway, the real directors play the opposite game: Nolan, already from Dunkirk, has reduced the CGI to a minimum, preferring practical effects, and in Oppenheimer, he even shot the sequence of nuclear explosion without computer graphics (even reconstructing Los Alamos, and Villeneuve, in dunes, has chosen real environments, bodies, True, Gerwig has preferred theater and miniatures, and more artistic series such as The Studio make ample use of sequence plans.
For heaven’s sake, I also understand Elton John, not because his voice must be protected as sacred, rather because it claims a precise function, that of being the origin, yet, I repeat, Disney teaches: Copi? Ai or not ai I suck you.
It is feared that the gates the art, which optimizes it to the point of emptying it, that in the meantime we get used to an idea of creativity that looks more like an algorithmic performance than to a research or a stroke of genius, more to a well -packaged imitation than to an authentic error, more to an optimized summary for the attention threshold of a social hamster than a necessary frustration?
I hope not, however, whether it will happen, it will not be the fault of the AI, it will be our fault. Or rather, it will simply be the natural evolution of a species that preferred to become deficient rather than intelligent.
Like those modern singers, rapper and trapper, who without Autoun suddenly find themselves silent on stage (I do not make names, also because they are too many), and only then can we find that behind the effect there was no voice or an artist, only the effect.