How much will AI succeed in the arts?

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, and let us start with what is likely to work well:

It almost goes without saying that the AI revolution currently underway is impressive. It is likely to have a huge impact in some parts of art world, such as the commercial sphere — consumers are generally not interested in who made any given ad or logo. It either works or it does not, and those conditions favor the machine. AI will also give the world quality (automated) personal assistants and autonomous vehicles, among many other advances.

But here is the problem:

Consider music. If Taylor Swift’s or Beyonce’s songs had been made by a software program, with no star at the microphone, would they be nearly as popular? It is no accident that Taylor Swift has more than 227 million Instagram followers — her fans want more than just the music, and that extra something (at least so far) has to be supplied by a living, breathing human being.

In the world of the visual arts, too, collectors are often buying the story as much as the artist. Even the experts have trouble distinguishing a real Kasimir Malevich painting from a fake (he painted abstract black squares on a white background, with a minimum of detail). The same image and physical item, when connected to the actual hand of the artist, is worth millions — but if shown to be a fake, it counts for zero.

Here is a qualification:

There will undoubtedly be many collaborations between AI and human creators, with the humans put forward as the public face of the joint effort. Periodic scandals about authorship will surface (“did he write any of that song?”), just as allegations of cheating with AI have risen to prominence in chess. AI-generated art will attract the most interest when the aesthetic of the creation and the personality of the human accompanist appear to be in sync.

And this:

Imagine that you took some souped-up future version of GPT-3 and fed it all the world’s texts through the year 1500. Would you expect it to be able to come up with something equally important and original as Shakespeare’s plays, or Newton’s Three Laws? How about Strawberry Fields Forever? Skepticism on this point has hardly been refuted by recent advances, however impressive they may be.

We watch Magnus Carlsen, not Stockfish vs. Alpha Zero, even though the latter match is of higher quality and likely more exciting too, at least in terms of moves over the board.