AI might put artists out of business. It will not, however, replace them. It will not—cannot—make good art, great art: true art. Which is to say, original art. This is, I know, a dangerous prediction (“dangerous prediction”: a redundancy). But unlike the techies and pundits, in their glorious ignorant smugness, I have some sense of what art is and how it is created.
AI operates by making high-probability choices: the most likely next word, in the case of written texts. Artists—painters and sculptors, novelists and poets, filmmakers, composers, choreographers—do the opposite. They make low-probability choices. They make choices that are unexpected, strange, that look like mistakes. Sometimes they are mistakes, recognized, in retrospect, as happy accidents. That is what originality is, by definition: a low-probability choice, a choice that has never been made.
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