“Do androids dream of electric sheep?” asked science fiction author Philip K. Dick all the way back in 1968 in his eponymous novel, which would later become the literary model for the movie Blade Runner. Robots that develop emotions, that dream, that are barely distinguishable from human beings … back then, it still sounded utopian. Today, sixty years later, it’s still very much in the future but no longer seems quite so inconceivable. Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, has become an oft-heard buzzword in the media and in the arts—in equal measures a beacon of medical hope and an artistic nightmare. Among artists, no matter what art forms they practice, the fear of AI is intense. Holograms that perform arias, computers that can spit out a Van Gogh, programs that can compose songs in the styles of famous artists…
Are we becoming superfluous? And what will remain of art if it ceases to embody anything more than imitation? Will we, too, soon be dreaming of electric sheep because the next bestseller author is a machine? Probably not. After all, it’s still people who feed artificial intelligence with information. Art is more than an object, a pile of notes, or a flickering screen. It lives from the exchange of emotions. From the feelings that artists invest in their works and that, in turn, awaken new associations among members of their audiences. Art represents life. Works of art arise from distress, sadness, rage, lust, and memories—experiences that machines cannot reproduce. Well, not yet, some might prophetically quip. But a machine that dreams has yet to be invented—for as soon as a machine dreams, it ceases to be one. And on the currently rampant fear of AI, Nick Cave quite accurately said: “Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer.”
