By Emily Pearce
Artificial intelligence has long been the subject of science-fiction media. From ‘replicant’ humanoids in Blade Runner (1982) and loyal droids in the Star Wars franchise to more recently, the sinister ‘Entity’ in Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025), fictional forms of AI have confounded, served, and fascinated humans for decades. However, what will happen now that AI, once reserved for fictitious visions of the future, has begun to bleed its way into our contemporary reality?
AI has become so ubiquitous over the past few years that anyone with access to the internet will have encountered it in some form. In today’s fast-paced, modern society, many students and workers have begun to rely on AI for tasks once entirely completed by humans. This can largely be attributed to the efficiency and accessibility of these generative models. Tools like ChatGPT are capable of performing tasks associated with human intelligence, such as problem solving and perception, within seconds.
Whilst the benefits of AI have been propounded by many, there are some eerily dystopian drawbacks to this futuristic technology. In terms of visual media, it has become increasingly difficult to sift through and demarcate what is ‘real’ (i.e. created by a human) and what is AI-generated. The convergence of visual art & media does not seem to be slowing down anytime soon, despite outcries and resistance from artists, writers, and filmmakers, who value the creative potentials and heart of humanity. Discussing films, traditional art (paintings/drawings etc), literature, and music, I plan to assess the pros and cons of the rise of artificial intelligence within the artistic sphere. I intend to interrogate a pressing question: in a robot-ridden world, can AI and art truly work together?
Paintings & drawings
AI generators are able to replicate any art style when given the correct prompts. Whether this be Van Gogh or Hayao Miyazaki, it has become easier than ever to “create” art at the click of a button. It is also much more accessible and cheaper to purchase; AI art can be found both online and in stores. On a trip to London a few months ago, I came across a selection of birthday cards in a shop that had blatantly AI-generated art on the covers. My first thought was: why are birthday card manufacturers taking jobs away from real people for the sake of these uninspiring, bland — and frankly rather ugly — designs? To play devil’s advocate, it could be argued that AI art is less costly and less time-consuming to produce than anything human-made. If a company needs a piece of art as quickly as possible, it’s no wonder they turn to artificial generators. People could also use AI models to come up with ideas for their own art, using generated images as a template to trace or imitate.
However, whilst it can be argued that artists could work with AI for creativity prompts, an overreliance on bots could pose problems for the future of art. A recent article from The Guardian by Eric Reinhart argued that the poor aesthetic quality and unoriginality of AI art isn’t the most pressing issue at stake here. Reinhart claims: ‘The essence of art inheres in its making: the belief that, in the act of creating art, one imbues an object with something ineffable from within one’s own being […] it is imagined to carry traces of an artist’s interiority, their unique feeling of being in the world.’ Essentially, he argues that AI generators, lacking the soul, idiosyncratic personality traits, and sentience of you and I, will never be able to create art in the same way as humans (even if the finished product looks the same). Using AI to create art diminishes the connection between artist and audience, which, as Reinhart outlines, could have dangerous consequences for the larger social and political fabric of the world. Machines like ChatGPT have the potential to promote homogenisation, alienation and discordance among society. Overall, Reinhart concludes that AI art lacks the soul and integrity of human art and it has the potential to kill the sense of unity between people if used excessively.
Literature
Literature has often been a vehicle for authors to cast a piece of themselves onto paper, whether this be their political opinions and visions for the future, an idealistic romance story they have imagined, or an incredible fantasy realm they wish to share with the world. George Orwell’s essay ‘Why I Write’ (1946) outlines the four motives for an author to produce literature. These are: sheer egoism (a desire for recognition/to seem clever), aesthetic impulse (the desire to make one’s writing sound and look good), historical impulse (to uncover truths and make sense of the world around them) & political purpose (as Orwell argues, “no book is genuinely free from political bias”). Do people who use AI to produce literature possess any of these motives?
As we have already discussed, AI does not have the soul and sentience of human authors, so they obviously lack the compulsions delineated by Orwell to write. Consequently, AI literature can feel soulless and empty, as if an integral component is missing. So why would anyone use a bot to write a novel for them if it would be undoubtedly subpar in comparison to a human-written one? The answer is simple: money. The production of literature has always been, though not exclusively, a monetary, capitalistic enterprise, at heart. AI generated novels allow for efficiency and thus more profit. It could also be used to generate ideas or better ways of phrasing sentences for syntax and clarity. If used in moderation, AI could prove a useful editor and aid for authors.
However, the problems surrounding artificial literature are impossible to ignore. The author Freida McFadden, renowned for mass producing psychological thriller novels, has recently been questioned by ‘BookTok’ for AI usage. Readers have noted several inconsistencies in different copies of her work and nonsensical metaphors and language that only a bot could come up with. Not only is AI-generated literature unoriginal and uncreative, it sets a dangerous precedent for future generations. AI-generated novels, poetry, and drama are on the brink of becoming normalised, which could potentially ruin the livelihoods of human authors. It could also destroy the uniqueness of different approaches to literature, leading to issues of homogenisation as discussed prior.
AI learns from the knowledge it acquires from human input, meaning the ideas that ChatGPT generates are often just regurgitation of human-written works. This means that features of well written texts, such as perfect grammar and extensive vocabulary, are now being flagged as AI-generated by online detectors. University students have been particularly affected by this; even my beloved em-dashes are now apparently a sign of AI! Unfortunately, this has forced students and authors alike to dumb down their writing to avoid being accused of plagiarism, unoriginality, and reliance on artificial generators. The future of literature — if AI remains as prevalent as it is now — looks bleak. Perhaps Orwell’s fictional language system ‘Newspeak’ from 1984 (1949) isn’t too far away from coming into fruition.
Music
I didn’t think AI would reach music yet…but here we are. A song titled ‘A Million Colours’ recently went viral on TikTok. It has the hazy, nostalgic feel of classic love songs from the ‘50s and ‘60s so, naturally, people have used it in the background of their videos. It isn’t immediately obvious that it is artificially generated, but when I really listened to it, I noticed the empty, soulless lyrics and its robotic production. The fact that so many people have no idea that this song is completely AI-generated is rather scary; it makes you question if there are other viral songs that have been produced by robots and have slipped past doomscrollers unnoticed.
Music producer and YouTuber Rick Beato recently made a video exploring a new band called ‘The Velvet Sundown.’ Their music and promotional images seem too polished to be real, suggesting that this ‘band’ is actually entirely nonexistent AI. He compared one of their songs to tracks by Led Zeppelin and Sabrina Carpenter to figure out if there are any distinguishing markers of AI-generated music. Using sound separator technology, Beato split The Velvet Sundown’s song ‘Dust on The Wind’, looking for ‘artefacts’. He refers to artefacts as ‘weird things that sound garbled’ when a song’s instrumentation and vocals are split apart. As he expected, Zeppelin and Carpenter’s songs had no noticeable artefacts, whereas The Velvet Sundown’s had many, implying their music is entirely artificial. Beato concludes the video expressing his fear for the future of the industry and questioning whether these ‘artists’ should be paid for their work. There is an argument to be made that Spotify overtly pushes music (using features such as autoplay) for monetary purposes so why should it matter if an AI artist profits from promoting a fake song? On the flip side, if AI were to overtake the music industry, thousands of jobs would be lost and musical ingenuity would cease to exist. Is money and time-saving really what music should be about?
Film & TV
Generative AI has begun to play a major role in the film & TV industry; the future is currently looking uncertain for this hugely lucrative and popular field. In terms of benefits, AI tools could be used for countless tasks, such as scriptwriting, plot development, tweaking the backdrop of scenes etc. Despite these perks of efficiency and affordability (as AI doesn’t need to be paid , thousands of Hollywood actors went on strike in 2023 to protect their industry and their jobs. I admired these strikes at the time, having no idea the grasp AI would have on Hollywood in years to follow. Now, with AI usage in film and TV production showing no signs of slowing, I wonder: were these protests all for nothing?
There are several examples of Hollywood toying with AI recently, such as producers using it to alter voices in the Oscar-winning films The Brutalist (2024) and Emilia Pérez (2024). It has also been used to de-age actors in prequel shows & films, as seen with Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian. Whilst these minor tweaks could be deemed harmless, excessive usage of AI could lead to a major slashing of jobs, not only for behind-the-scenes crew but for actors as well. Many assume that A-List actors have no need to fear the loss of their livelihoods because their star-quality makes them irreplaceable. However, at the rate AI is improving, I wouldn’t be surprised if even stars like Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise are substituted by artificial clones in years to come.
Arguably, AI and art can work together…to an extent. Whilst using AI for creativity prompts and ideas for your next artistic project could be acceptable and time-saving, society’s current obsession with tools like ChatGPT will inevitably have major implications. Enforced homogeneity, the death of creativity, and a regression in human intelligence are all latent consequences waiting to be unleashed, if AI usage should continue to be as rampant as it is now. I’ll leave you with this quote from Sylvia Plath: “What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination […] We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.”
Surround Sound 