The nightmare has been realised. An AI actor, Tilly Norwood, has been unveiled at the Zurich Film Festival. Particle6, her designers, described her as possessing the “girl-next-door vibes” and being “Bafta-optimised.” She can act. She can walk the red carpet. She can even cry on Graham Norton.
These developments further worry artists already fearing AI’s consequences, a fear which fuelled the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strikes in the USA. Creative jobs are at stake – as is creativity. How are we to absorb art, at its core human expression, if it is manufactured by programmes?
But in truth, the contemporary arts have been beaten into formulae and familiarity for some time. AI will only exacerbate this trend.
Cultural theorist Mark Fisher contended that we are experiencing the “slow cancellation of the future”, whereby today’s socio-economic consensus – embodied by Thatcher’s claim that there is no alternative to unfettered, doggish capitalism – has fostered stagnation by which cultural innovation is constricted, leaving only an endless present. Such constriction dogs the contemporary cultural scene.
Music plays host to “the major symptoms of cultural malaise,” according to Fisher. We have Kneecap’s DJ Próvai performing in a balaclava in the colours of the Irish tricolour – not a thoughtful deconstruction of civil war’s legacy, but revivalism of the confrontational imagery of the 1980s and 1990s. Manic Street Preachers appeared on Top of the Pops wearing balaclavas back in 1994. Kneecap’s sartorial choices do little to further such a shock tactic.
Elsewhere, Raye’s musical and stylistic resemblance to Amy Winehouse is often commented upon. We now experience the bizarre spectacle of an artist reviving the look of another from twenty years ago, who herself took her style from fashion already fifty years out-of-date by the 2000s. Namely, the Ronettes’ beehive, the “retro silhouettes”, to quote Vogue. Meanwhile, Winehouse’s sound, referential to mid-20th-century jazz (Fitzgerald, Baker, Sinatra), echoes more than fleetingly in Raye’s. That’s seven decades of the same music. In her recent biopic, Marisa Abela’s Winehouse calls herself an “anachronism.” We live after the death of the new. All that’s left is now.
It’s not that artists like Winehouse or Raye aren’t good. But they aren’t original. Bereft of innovation, we cast ourselves into the past and come out with a cultured retro aesthetic, wholly performative, all because there’s nothing else to cling to. The ‘90s are revived: Blur, Oasis, and Pulp are touring. Kim Kardashian wears Marilyn Monroe’s dress to the Met Gala. Brat recalls the messy 2000s. No longer are contemporary pop culture events born of the contemporary.
If Fisher’s culprit – capitalism, unrestrained – is guilty, then AI’s destruction of the arts is not a new problem, but the endpoint of existing ones. When the computers overthrow the artists, it will not constitute art’s sudden death, but its quiet passing; its value has been undermined for some time. AI will simply reify a cultural malaise that has dogged artistic innovation for decades. Tomorrow’s art may be AI-generated, but today’s might as well be. It’s a shame. But I hear there’s no alternative.
Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash
