AI and Our Collapsing Creative Horizons

E verybody is panicking about AI right now, even as I’m left with uncertainty on whether this is an organic boomlet or driven by a handful of AI investors attempting to boost their own products and manipulate markets. One way or another, the think pieces are breaking the dam, spilling forth from all sides: Ross Douthat, Nate Silver, The Atlantic, a superfluity of Substackers — America’s Big Brains are currently asking hard questions about what the future of the American economy will look like in an AI-driven world, and only some of these have been written with the assistance of AI themselves. (That’s why I love the purely canine ability of the New York Post to catch the scent of the zeitgeist and chase after it with a wacky New York story: The latest innovation in Brooklyn nightlife is apparently a bar where you can bring your AI boyfriend or girlfriend.)

So it’s time to offer my own thoughts. Here at National Review, of course, we have a diversity of views. Phil Klein took a serious look at one potential “worst-case scenario” of AI: huge job losses in the white-collar sector as AI takes over entry-level jobs. What sort of political shift might follow? Meanwhile Noah Rothman argues in the opposition, returning to that same question I haven’t been able to suppress, either: Are we just getting spun by self-interested investor hype?

Both arguments are strong in their own way. I lean toward even darker scenarios myself, primarily because my study of history tells me that revolutions are always made by disaffected, self-designated “elites” during times of great instability. Idle hands are the devil’s plaything, and in a world of mass unemployment, the devil will be roaming loose throughout the land, UBI or not. Phil warns of a permanent political shift to the left and against free markets. I’m thinking “that, plus 1968.” (Let’s hope I’m just a silly Panican.)

But neither Phil nor Noah addressed the real danger that, as I see it, AI poses to America — perhaps because it poses the same risk to all of humanity and seems less quantifiable, less politically immediate. Will AI shrink our souls and foreshorten our intellectual horizons? This goes beyond my long-stated fear that AI is destined to make entire generations of humans stupider and more dependent on their Pocket God. (That, alas, has already happened — just ask your college-age children.)

I’m addressing the threat to our creative spirit as well. America is already fast descending to the lowest cultural and intellectual common denominator. By denying entire generations the incentive or reason to struggle at their work — and learn their artistic craft — AI will only hasten that descent.

Every adult who grew up in an era of widespread casual reading only to land in our modern wasteland of functional youth illiteracy has already noticed such corrosion in our modern culture, a trend long predating AI (but perhaps not the iPhone): We’ve seen a downward slide in every field of intellectual and creative endeavor — including politics. Are its origins generational? Educational? Technological? Spiritual?

My answer is “All four, and more besides.” It is not my purpose today to trace the root causes of America’s civic and cultural decline. (This is not a mere question of the “fracturing” of our once-shared culture; if you disagree, name a book or movie or musical work of the last ten years you expect to enter the “canon.”) My point is that whatever you think caused this, AI is going to make it all so much worse. In fact, this is more than a prediction; it’s happening already.

I fear that a “Great Flattening” approaches. Look around at the increasing wreckage of what used to be America’s reliable engines of cultural production: Hollywood, popular music, even the fine arts. All have succumbed to a creative malaise as their audiences shrink and tastes become more demotic. And now comes AI to accelerate the devolution. People in Hollywood sometimes tell you that AI can be a time- and money-saving tool — usually these are computer-graphics artists and studio executives, which is telling. But our current uses of AI are precisely those that dampen future creativity. A staggering amount of lower-level scripts are rumored — with good reason — to now be written with the assistance of AI, which offers its own ready-made solutions for those too lazy to work on plotting or characterization themselves.

Look at the world of popular music, where the charts — already suffused with electronic beats and autotuned trash — are slowly being overtaken by AI-generated slop, created by people with no more musical talent than the ability to tell an algorithm who they want to imitate. Look at the world of fine arts and literature — what’s left of it, that is. AI doesn’t have to conquer a mode of expression when it can simply extinguish mass interest in it. Nobody reads books anymore — we have handy AI executive summaries now. The Cliff’s Notesification of cultural life, all there at the touch of your fingertips to replace the actual thing itself.

Whether this mechanism is working through the market (because it’s cheaper to use AI) or through lowered barriers to entry (because it’s easier for the unskilled and impatient to use AI), the outcome is the same: AI is already having a subtle and terrible leveling effect on our concept of what art even is, reducing it to the narrowed horizons of its previous inputs, recursively receding into cliché. To take the screenwriting example, when you ask AI to write you a script about a “private eye hunting for a missing dame,” you will get something that combines your specific prompts with its preexisting catalogue of detective-movie themes and acceptable plot beats. (If you’re lucky, it might even include a few tough-guy wisecracks.)

That might look clever enough, but it’s not a serious creative act; it’s purely recombination based entirely on pattern recognition. And relying on it — as an ever-increasing number of professionals do, to say nothing of the young students of the craft coming up in the modern era — is the absolute death of original thought. AI art — whatever form it takes — is not personalized art; the LLM is regurgitating only what it already knows. AI is about repetition and reiteration, and using it to fill out one’s ideas is both the easiest and most dangerous thing that a creative person can do, because it encourages laziness: channeling unformed artistic thoughts into the machine’s preestablished “ways of knowing.”

I fear that these tools will become the dominant mode of artistic creation for entire generations trained under them, that they’ll prefer to farm out their thinking to electronic factotum. AI will no doubt sand away the rough edges of these people’s product, making it nice and regular and factory-size. And in doing so it will dull their edge and sensibility. That’s how the Great Flattening will probably work: AI will give a new generation of creative thinkers what they think they want so easily that they won’t know what they can have or what they really need. AI will not create your own style for you; it won’t even help you refine it. It will merely make it more inauthentic. And in giving you what you think you want without requiring you to labor for it, it forces its machine-learned preconceptions on you.

I’ll end with the words of Sam Adler-Bell, who summarized this lament concisely: “The fact is that the things that I really care about, the things that enrich my life, make it worth living — art, books, movies, human relationships — are, thus far, being made worse, cheaper, uglier, by this (incredible! truly!) technology.” I don’t see how things turn around, given the gravitational pull of mass preference and the irreducible realities of market economics. I see AI squeezing the vibrancy out of American creative life — a contraction of independent human artistic creativity that should alarm us all.