by PB Wombat
With all the folderol regarding fears that artificial intelligence (AI) will destroy creativity and the livelihoods of artists and writers, we lose sight of one important and longstanding problem: the tyranny of originality.
Long gone were the days when anonymous priests and monks copied down scripture and lore unencumbered by the “need” to be creative or original. The expectations of Renaissance writers, painters, sculptors, composers, and the like killed off this noble and self-effacing expression of pious humility, replaced by the grandstanding peremptory assertions of the individualistic and the unique.
In Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun, the college-age daughter in the family, Beneatha, has the temerity to tell her God-fearing, hard-working, and right-minded mother that the point of her expensive guitar practice and liberal arts education was, ultimately to express “me,” meaning herself and nothing other. Needless to say, this baffles her mother, who can countenance neither the expense nor the impracticality of such foolishness. However, Beneatha’s desire to express herself points to the absurd lengths to which the tyranny of originality had gone by the middle of the 20th Century. From the Renaissance until the end of the (neo)Classical period, artists and writers at least bothered to create representative works: paintings of, at first, properly liturgical scenes; then, later, the tragedies of kings and the comedies of the (let us face it) laughable middle and lower classes.
The point at which the tyranny of originality began to become truly dangerous was the late18th and early 19th Centuries with the rise of Romanticism, which projected the artist’s own concerns onto even heretofore epic subject matter. Works such as Wordsworth’s Prelude, Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings (the presumptuous Wanderer comes to mind) present individual experiences as worthy of the same treatment as those of kings and queens, gods and saviors.
The outcome of all of this has been devastating. From Romanticism, after all, where but the literal vision of the artist could the tyranny of originality have slid? And so it did, first with Impressionism and Monet’s sloppy blurriness, Renoir’s elevation of dancers and the parties of everyday people to the level of the great deeds of the heroes and the demigods of the ancient past.
Likewise, literature descended into the scourge that was Realism, for who could possibly care about the sex lives of gamekeepers, the selfishness of flighty Danish housewives in light of their husbands’ rather serious concerns? Yet, literature and art both staggered on; like any other empire, the tyranny of originality burned through regions of lower and lower value, eventually landing on the dross of dreams themselves as Surrealism bubbled up from the depths, swamping the rational and undermining representation.
Its fall was inevitable.
Indeed, various forms of abstraction became the 20th century’ stock-in-trade. In a desperate attempt to remain original, artists began to scavenge form itself, deconstructing shape, color, texture. The nadir of this movement was reached with Jackson Pollock literally splattering his paint like some kind of excreta all over the canvas and, by extension, the viewer. Literal excreta, in the form of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, was still some decades to come, but it was all but inevitable given where Pollock was going.
Writers such as William Faulkner, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf likewise let their brains vomit out whatever was in them. This so-called “stream of consciousness” style took originality to its logical literary end, leaving only the babbling of childlike expression that was minimalism and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry by the century’s ignoble end.
Originality, then, had, by the 1970s, essentially collapsed in on itself, with a handful of artists cleaning up nicely by, for example, cutting up sharks and floating them in formaldehyde for the stimulation, if not the edification, of the viewing public.
Clearly, the problem was embracing originality from the start. Individual expression leads inevitably to solipsism, which leads inevitably to nonsense, which leads inevitably to doom. That this took centuries to enact is a testament to the innate sense and sensibility of the human species.
We should celebrate that.
And, perhaps, we now have a chance to finally right this foundering ship.
Generative artificial intelligence models such at the large language models (LLMs) that power ChatGPT and the visual models that enable Midjourney, Dall-E and other platforms promise to do away with the tyranny of originality once and for all.
Relying only on what has come before, generative AI has both automated the process of honoring artistic traditions, which is natural and proper to human flourishing, it has made such traditions, as the kids say, “cool.” Unfettered from overbearing pressure to be original, individual, or new, generative AI allows users, viewers, and readers to freely replicate the past, continually remixed, in a way that celebrates both the stability of stasis and the security of the status quo. With the tyranny of originality already reaching its logical end, generative AI tools such as LLMs may finally help restore Western Culture to its proper place: rooted squarely in its timeless past, forever and ever.
Amen.
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