by Joe Miller
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century.
Lily Sloane: No money? You mean you don’t get paid?
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.
This exchange – which occurs about midway through the film Star Trek: First Contact – sums up why I prefer Star Trek to Star Wars. (Trek vs Wars is, of course, the nerd equivalent of Beatles vs Stones or Nirvana vs Pearl Jam.)
Star Trek is ‘60s hippie utopianism triumphant. The bridge of the Enterprise is a melting pot of species, races, genders and ideologies all coming together to engage in peaceful exploration. Each member of the crew is motivated by their own passions, both on and off the bridge. Crew members’ hobbies include learning musical instruments, painting, garden- ing, cooking and reading classical poetry and literature.
They’re able to pursue a life of exploration and the arts because much of life’s drudgery is performed by machines.
Replicators provide food and freshly laundered uniforms. Robots build starships. Nanobots repair dam- aged cells and deliver bespoke cures for diseases.
Freed from material wants, the people of the Federation spend their time exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations and boldly going where no one has gone before.
While I doubt that the actual world will move past scarcity – and thus the need for money – in the next 300 years, it’s absolutely the state we should be trying to bring about.
That’s why I find the use of machines – specifically the new generation of artificial intelligence, or AI – to make art so puzzling.
Sam Altman – founder of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT – says that AI is “democratizing” art, by allowing people of “differential abilities” to create it.
AI has certainly enabled more people to create stuff.
Social media is overrun with AI-generated images and memes. An Amazon search for books authored by ChatGPT turned up 400 pages of results. That’s just from people honest enough to list AI as a co-author!
The hype for AI-generated art is so intense – particularly on Twitter (aka, X) – that its boosters have their own nickname – AI art bros.
Involving AI in art is a step in the wrong direction. As one novelist quipped, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”
Full disclosure: that same author has self-published nine novels and five nonfiction books since the start of 2021. That’s a book roughly every 104 days. I’ve read only a few excerpts, but I respectfully suggest that the author spend more of that free time editing.
And yet, she has the right idea.
The act of creating is what gives art its value.
If only the output mattered, then a print of Vincent Van Gogh’s Orchard with Cypresses should sell for roughly the same amount as the original painting. They are, after all, identical images. And yet I can pick up the print for $32 on art.com. The original last sold at auction for $117 million.
And, yes, prints are a different medium from paintings. Nevertheless, a great forgery of Orchard would also sell for a lot less than $117 million.
This is not to say that an artist’s output is completely irrelevant. Van Gogh’s work sells for lots of money because he is an important artist. His innovations with color and his distinctive brushwork inspired multiple movements in modern art. The act of creative genius and the output itself are inextricably bound.
But you don’t get that value without the creative act. The struggle to express an artistic vision is what makes art worth pursuing. It’s the reason actors rehearse, musicians practice and painters sketch.
When Star Trek’s Commander Riker performs with a jazz ensemble, the point is not that his trombone playing is perfect. Indeed, in one episode, Riker’s inability to hit a particular note despite years of practice is an important plot point. Trying to master the song is the point. If the goal were merely to produce great jazz trombone sounds, then Riker could simply play a recording of Tommy Dorsey or Glenn Miller.
The best-case scenario for AI – the Star Trek utopian vision – is that it moves us toward a post-scarcity world – one in which humans are freed from material wants and can dedicate themselves to making art.
A world in which machines make art while humans do drudgery? That’s way too Star Wars for my taste.
