The Cultural Experience Machine: will we accept an "inferior substitute" for art, music, musicians,... ?

"...Right now, we talk about, Is A.I. good or bad for content creators?," the Silicon Valley pioneer Jaron Lanier told me. (Lanier helped invent virtual reality and now works at Microsoft.) "But it's possible that the very notion of 'content' will go away, and that content will be replaced with live synthesis that's designed to have an effect on the recipient." Today, there are A.I.-generated songs on Spotify, but at least the songs are credited to (fake) bands. "There could come a point where it'll just be 'music,'" Lanier said. In this future scenario, when you sign in to an A.I. version of Spotify, "the first thing you hear will be 'Hey, babe, I'm your Spotify girlfriend. I made a playlist for you. It's kind of sexy, so don't listen to it around other people.'" This "playlist" would consist of songs that have never been heard before, and might never be heard again. They will have been created, in the moment, just for you, perhaps based on facts about you that the A.I. has observed.

In the longer term, Lanier thought, all sorts of cultural experiences—music, video, reading, gaming, conversation—might flow from a single "A.I. hub." There would be no artists to pay, and the owners of the hubs would be able to exercise extraordinary influence over their audiences; for these reasons, even people who don't want to experience culture this way could find the apps they use moving in an A.I.-enabled direction.

Culture is communal. We like being part of a community of appreciators. But "there's an option here, if computation is cheap enough, for the creation of an illusion of society," Lanier said. "You would be getting a tailored experience, but your perception would be that it's shared with a bunch of other people—some of whom might be real biological people, some of whom might be fake." (I imagined this would be like Joi introducing Gosling's character to her friends.) To inhabit this "dissociated society cut off from real life," he went on, "people would have to change. But people do change. We've already gotten people used to fake friendships and fake lovers. It's simple: it's based on things we want." If people yearn for something strongly enough, some of them will be willing to accept an inferior substitute. "I don't want this to occur, and I'm not predicting that it will occur," Lanier said, grimly. "I think naming all this is a way of increasing the chances that it doesn't happen."

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Joshua Rothman, New Yorker 8.25.25