Of course, the creative types are absolutely right. The big entertainment conglomerates are certainly looking at artificial intelligence and thinking how much money it could save them on writers, musicians, actors, and so forth. If we can just tell the bot to make a movie, what do we need with creatives?
That, at least is what the short-term thinkers in the entertainment business are thinking. If there are any long-term thinkers among the executives, which is unlikely, they are also considering which second career in manual labor they would like to adopt. If the ordinary viewer at home can just tell the AI bot, “Entertain me,” then what do we need with big entertainment conglomerates?
But what will entertainment by artificial intelligence be like? Dr. Boli was listening to some old French records the other day, and it suddenly occurred to him that we already know what AI entertainment will be like, because there is one branch of the entertainment business in which the robots have already taken over. Every popular singer is brought to us through pitch-correction software that adjusts the voice to what the robot thinks we want to hear, rather than what the singer actually sang. This is true even in so-called live performances.
Now, think for a moment what we would lose if we had had pitch correction decades ago. You can think of any singer you like, but Dr. Boli had these thoughts specifically when he was listening to Edith Piaf.
What made Edith Piaf such a legend? What made her stand apart from the hundreds of chanteuses who were popular in their day but have long since been forgotten? It would be very hard to answer that question, but Dr. Boli could easily give the wrongest possible answer. The wrongest possible answer would be something like this: “Edith Piaf was better than the rest because she was always exactly on pitch.” Surely Edith Piaf is at her most characteristic, her very Piafiest, precisely when she is deviating from the correct pitch. It is not that she is incapable of hitting the note right on: it is that she understands how to bend the pitches to her will. She was a legend because she could convey every shade of Gallic emotion, from cynical ecstasy to cynical melancholy.
You could think the same thoughts about any legendary singer of the past. What about Billie Holiday? Some day Dr. Boli will write an essay proving that it is heresy to say that there is such a thing as a “note” in jazz. Or what about Enrico Caruso? Surely the great Caruso was always on pitch! But listen to any Caruso record and you will hear that he was not on pitch: that the very thing that made Caruso stand out from the ordinary tenors of his time was his perfect instinct for twisting and bending the pitches away from the chromatic scale.
It is possible to use pitch-correction software to bend notes and deviate from the chromatic scale, but the very fact that we are discussing that possibility shows how many layers of artificiality have been stacked between us and the increasingly irrelevant human singer.
This is a preview of entertainment by artificial intelligence. We know what it will be like, because we have already seen what artificial music is like. Our AI entertainment will be perfect, in the same way that singing with pitch correction is ear-numbingly, mind-emptyingly perfect. It will be soulless, dull, and intolerably vapid. And the masses will love it, and they will want nothing else.