Everything old is new again, again. The concern about mechanical/technical innovation replacing, or threatening to replace the human hand is something we as a species have faced repeatedly. It could be argued that’s due in part to us too often ignoring the past, or at least lessons learned from it. Especially if those were learned before we were born. But turns out, there’s some wisdom to pick up along the way. Before we thoughtfully discuss what’s going on right now, we should take a moment to remember what’s happened before.
Johannes Trithemius was a 15th century Benedictine abbot who, among other things, is credited as being a founder of modern cryptography. (The “other things” include being a renowned occultist and rumored necromancer, but that’s an entirely other rabbit to pull out of the hat.) He was very interested in words, language, books, and archives, and was very disinterested in the printing press. In the 1492 book ‘In Praise of Scribes’ he asserted that “printed books will never be the equivalent of handwritten codices, especially since printed books are often deficient in spelling and appearance.” He wasn’t wrong about appearances, I think we’d all agree that some of those illustrated pages with graphical lettering were and still are breathtaking in ways that Times New Roman could never. And while Trithemius’ warning was blunt, if a bit bland, leave it to his contemporary Filippo de Strata, a Dominican monk, to express the same sentiment in much more vivid prose by stating “The pen is a virgin, but the printing press is a whore.” Slut-shaming aside, it’s clear here that this new mechanical invention was seen as a poor substitute for the skilled human hand. This was a moment when a few people still genuinely believed that a well written page could stop technological advancement if they could just craft the right verbal imagery.
(L. Unknown French painted portrait, R. Unknown Daguerreotype portrait. Both c 1850)
Speaking of imagery, a few hundred years later the Daguerreotype would garner a more violent reaction from critics. In the 1830’s Louis Daguerre would invent this first publicly available photographic process and almost immediately heads exploded around the world. French painter Paul Delaroche saw one in an exhibition in 1840 and immediately declared “From today, painting is dead.” The declaration of death of an entire practice may have been a bit premature, but he wasn’t the only one who recognized that something monumentally big had changed. Painting didn’t die, and photography gained widespread adoption pretty quickly – but popularity didn’t change how many people still felt about it. Decades later poet and cultural commentator Charles Baudelaire penned a powerful and scathing essay decrying mediocrity in the artworld and pulled no punches when it came to photography. In ‘Salon de 1859,’ he stated “The photographic industry was the refuge of all the painters who couldn’t make it, either because they had no talent or because they were too lazy to finish their studies.” Baudelaire wasn’t just some random critic, he was one of the most respected French voices in art and literature at the time, and his criticism was taken very seriously. To state the obvious, the notion of an off the shelf mechanical process sharing space with the learned craft of the human hand was not something immediately welcomed as a “good thing.”
It took less than 100 years for the next wave of innovation upset. When The Jazz Singer, the first audio synced film (aka “talkies”) premiered in 1927, reactions were split. Gossip columnist Louella Parsons dismissed it stating “I have no fear that the screeching sound film will ever disturb our theaters.” Head of production at MGM, Irving Thalberg agreed saying the film was “A good gimmick, but that’s all it was.” Of course it’s possible they both saw a future they didn’t like and hoped they could will it out of existence with firm denial, but others were not so skeptical. Frances Howard Goldwyn, actress and wife of producer Samuel Goldwyn, had an opposite take. According to Scott Eyman, as told in his book “The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution,” while looking around at Hollywood celebrities in the audience at the premier she saw “terror in all their faces,” as if they knew “the game they had been playing for years was finally over.” It would take less than 2 years for Parsons and Thalberg to be proven spectacularly wrong.
It wasn’t always a big bad commercial industry adopting new tech at the expense of the individual artists, though that’s certainly a theme we see again and again. The record industry, themselves no stranger to profiting at the expense of artists, authored one of the best examples of technophobia in recent memory when the British Phonographic Industry launched the “Home Taping Is Killing Music” campaign in the 1980’s in hopes of dissuading the general public from recording songs off the radio onto their own cassettes. The fear was that ordinary people having the ability to record anything they want, something previously reserved for the professionals, would stop buying records and that would put the labels out of business. Though it was positioned as stealing money directly from musicians because that’s a more compelling story. Musicians mostly saw through this campaign, immediately recognizing that their fans wanting to listen to their music more often was a good thing, and a number of bands parodied the campaign by leaving one side of their cassette releases blank for people to record whatever they chose. One amusing example is the Dead Kennedys who printed “Home taping is killing record industry profits! We left this side blank so you can help.” on the cassette B-Side of their “In God We Trust, Inc” ep. The public mockery of the campaign didn’t stop the music industry from essentially running it back and trying to argue the exact same thing 2 decades later in an attempt to combat MP3s and file sharing.
If you’ve been following the discourse around AI and Art then it’s possible you’ve seen some of these examples discussed already, but most often that’s done in a dismissive manner meant to silence criticism or concern. “Look at these silly baseless fears, everything worked out fine.” That’s not my intention here, and the truth is everything didn’t work out fine in any of those examples. What is “fine” depends on where you sit in the equation, and while some things worked out well for some people, those same things were disastrous for others. Good or bad, these were all earth shaking technological progressions which had concrete and measurable impacts on entire industries, and culture by and large. An important similarity across all of these examples is there is no opt out option. The world we have today is full of, arguably exists because of, printed books, photos, films and digital music.
(Sougwen Chung and D.O.U.Gs, live performance for Entangled Origins at Asia House in London. Presented by Gillian Jason Gallery)
There is however a very important difference this time. In all those examples the human hand was removed to some extent, but not entirely. Someone needed to operate the printing presses, to film the movies, to hit record on a tape player. AI has the potential to do things without human involvement. It can function autonomously, it can make its own decisions. It can also be a deeply interactive and collaborative tool, and that’s where the conversation should be focused. All AI usage isn’t created equal, and how it was used becomes a far more important question than if it was used. Take the artist Sougwen Chung for example, she has spent years developing custom robotic systems that draw collaboratively with her represent something categorically different from typing a single prompt and downloading the result. This is a crucially important distinction we almost never see in the current discourse about AI and art. It’s something we will spend more time on in a future essay but it’s important to call out here as well – especially when talking about what we should be focusing on which brings us back to the previous examples. What happened next?
Scribes and manuscript illustrators essentially disappeared, at least as any kind of professional industry and that happened within a generation. The irony worth noting is that many of those sounding the alarm about how printing presses were going to change things, needed to use printing presses to spread their messages to an audience they wouldn’t have been able to reach if they’d had to rely on hand copied editions. We can imagine what the world might look like if that never happened, but looking back over the last 500 years I think it’s fairly safe to say a literate public and widely accessible literature has been a net positive.
Speaking of looking at the world, that got easier with the widespread adoption of photography and lower prices of later photographic processes. It also destroyed the market for mid-tier portrait painters who primarily lived off selling paintings to middle class families looking to document a moment in time. That entire customer base switched to buying portrait photographs as soon as someone in their town got a camera. Sure the occasional family might commission a portrait, but that was no longer a reliable business model. Conversely fine art painting survived, and it could even be argued this shift created the opening for fine artists to really explore the medium in ways they hadn’t been able to before. It’s not a coincidence that Impressionism emerged in the wake of the camera, or that a photographer was the first to champion the genre. 1874 saw the first Impressionist exhibition, hosted without charge in Nadar’s Paris studio.
(L. Photographer Nadar’s Paris Studio, R. First Impressionist Exhibition catalog. Both c 1874)
Speaking of being out of work… Vaudeville suffered a similar fate, and that happened almost overnight. Before ‘The Jazz Singer’ RKO had already started installing screens in its Orpheum Theater circuit and had begun mixing variety newsreel and silent film clips with live performances. This infrastructure allowed them to convert them into talking cinemas immediately. “Talkie Terror” was a real thing and many of the stars of Vaudeville suddenly found themselves without work. Previously these performers could tour for years doing the same bit for new audiences. They quickly realized that once recorded to film, everyone saw their act and had no need to see it again. Others who were more innovative embraced the medium as a way to try things out quickly, test them with large audiences, and refine their skills, pacing and delivery, for each new film. Capturing the perfect performance put some people out of work, and gave others a lifetime goal to keep working towards. Entire industries were born from it, but they absolutely grew from the ashes of industries they burned to get there.
And speaking of burning things down… the music industry was right to be worried that their business models were not sustainable but trying to frame that as theft from their customers was obviously misdirected. The assertion that every downloaded MP3 would have otherwise been a full price sale was so laughably wrong it almost killed the whole industry. (Related, Peter Sunde’s Kopimashin is one of my favorite artistic commentaries of that era) But the unexpected outcome was that people got comfortable listening to digital files, and that paved the way for streaming. Streaming has of course been massively profitable for the platforms and has almost universally harmed musicians below a certain popularity level. When hundreds of thousands of streams only nets the band double digit royalties, it’s a real problem. And while “piracy” actually proved to help sell records, streaming is what convinced the labels they no longer needed to worry about making records in the first place. So while the disruption was very real, the wrong people were worried about the wrong thing.
The story across all of these examples (and certainly others I didn’t touch on) is that technological innovation did impact creative mediums, sometimes painfully and always permanently. Once the change happened, there was no going back. But across the board the actual change was rarely what was prophesied, and the thing people were worried would be destroyed didn’t disappear, it simply changed as well. Artists adapted, transformed, and often found that the new tool expanded their opportunities rather than making them obsolete. But change is difficult, and comes with a price that everyone involved pays one way or another. There’s no reason to think AI will be any different, and how artists use it in their own practice will likely follow a similar path. There will be fears, there will be panic, things will change, people will adapt. Artists like Refik Anadol are already navigating this in public, showing work and inviting conversations that will help define what the medium becomes. The lesson we should learn from the past isn’t to stop worrying, it’s to make sure we’re worried about the right things, and direct concerns and action towards the appropriate target (the “how” not the “if”) rather than focusing on the technology itself.
[header image: WATENBACH, Johann Gottfried (scribe & artist). Illustrated book. [Germany or Austria], 1748.]
This essay is part two of a series, part one can be found here.