What Effect will AI Personalization have on Creative Culture and Collective Memory?
Will the future still have room for real artists? Or only apps that bring you "art"?
Recently, someone went viral on Threads for posting a photo of an old broken music CD that many of us were able to instantly identify from the disc’s pattern alone. It was NSYNC’s No Strings Attached album, which plenty of millennials owned. I still have a copy somewhere in a box in my parents’ basement, mostly due to the fact that I can’t bear to part with physical media in this digital age of impermanence. The point is, an entire generation of people were able to share collective memories based on a single CD from the past. But in this age of digital-only art and media, what elements of current culture will remain for future remembrance. And more worrying, with so much custom personalization and content creation, particularly through AI, will there even be a collective culture or artistic definition to any given era to be remembered at all? In other words, what happens to culture when we no longer experience it, or remember it, collectively?
I still miss the days of sharing CDs and discussing liner notes on dorm room floors, of arguing with classmates at Blockbuster over choosing a video from the new release rack, and of discussing the latest episode of Friends on Friday at school since we all watched it at the same time on Thursday night. There was a sort of collective experience to pop culture, even if you didn’t like or engage with all of it, you still had an opinion on whether Ross and Rachel were on a break. Less specifically, as physical media was passed around, I have vivid memories of listening to Radiohead for the first time. The Bends album will forever be tied to a certain group of people I lived with in college dorms. But I have to wonder, with curated playlists, movies on demand, and streaming services tailored by algorithms to what we already watch, how does this new way of consuming art change the way we remember it? And change the way we remember ourselves?
There’s been a bit of talk around AI being used to “write” children’s books on demand. Kids can now use an app to make up a personalized children’s story in the moment, just for them. The story can change on demand, and parents don’t even have to read it out loud. The tech does it all. However, most of us can recall our favourite childhood books. Maybe it was The Velveteen Rabbit, or Matilda, or something by Dr. Seuss. We kept copies and read them over and over again. We brought them to school and shared our thoughts with other classmates who inevitably read the same ones. Think about the impact of Harry Potter, the absolute cultural zeitgeist it created for people of a certain age. There is a whole community of adults walking around with Hogwarts house crests tattooed on their bodies because of a book they read when they were 12.
But personalized curation of art removes all this. There is no cultural phenomenon to participate in if no one else but you has ever experienced that AI book your mom’s phone made up when you were little. There’s no early exposure to developing artistic tastes, or discussion with peers, or participating in creative cultural community. Likewise, there’s no collective memory, no time stamp to share with a generation, and no real significance for something that was only a transient moment for one person. Would you remember an AI story from your youth that only you had experienced and that had been changed to something else a day later? It’s akin to a single game of solitaire, maybe with your name on the cards and the ability to guarantee you win, but it’s still nothing you’re going to take with you for life.
Moving away from AI, what’s the effect of personalized playlists, algorithmic suggestion and exposure, and of the elimination of time-sensitive releases? We can’t give our friend a book that we loved if we read it on kindle or listened through audible. We won’t share a CD if all we do if make playlists of individual songs on Spotify. We probably won’t really develop new musical tastes, either, since whole albums are rarely listened to or discussed with others. We don’t watch the same tv shows at the same time, or bother going to the cinema for the latest blockbuster because it’ll be on Netflix in a month. And we don’t try anything new or become exposed to new concepts since algorithms keep us locked in with comfortable content it thinks we’ll like. Maybe the reason we still spend so much time talking about the pandemic or ‘the felon’ or other gloom and doom current events is because they’re some of the only experiences were sharing collectively at the moment.
Funnily enough we’re seeing a return to the time-sensitive release as a marketing tool. Shows like The Pitt and Ted Lasso greatly benefitted from the collective discussion generated by a weekly release schedule (simulating how network television existed for decades). It also sparked discussion, speculation, and interest among viewers since binge watching for instant plot resolution wasn’t an option. Here we have regenerated the collective experience, created a shared memory stamped in time, through keeping streaming technology but using ‘old school’ tactics. Taylor Swift similarly does this through creating countdowns and limited releases around her music. Building a collective moment generates a lot of sales for her.
There is a link between brand and emotion. People will remember where they were, how they felt, who they were with — and associate that with a brand. Collective experience around the arts isn’t just crucial to develop the zeitgeist, the era, the memory, it’s also crucial to an artist’s longevity, identity, audience, and, to be blunt, it’s about making bank. When everything is personalized or custom curated, we’re no longer able to market artists, we can only market the apps that bring you “art”.
And maybe that’s what all this new tech is really about. Big tech and AI companies don’t make money from artists, they make money from tech. And they make a lot more money if they don’t have royalties or licensing fees to worry about when offering that art. Personalization and AI “art” eliminate the artist, instead bringing big profits and complete control to the tech corporations. Even curated and algorithmic curation of real art still limits and manipulates what’s available for consumption. Add to this the fact that we barely have any physical media anymore, and we’re in a very dangerous era of artistic cultural erasure, or even a retelling of the past.
I’m sure there’s a lot to be said about subcultures and counter-culture, but again these involved collective memory and shared experiences within a community. Artistic personalization and curation is about the dismantling of community as much as it is about technological control. And perhaps this should be seen as a signal of how powerful art can be, of the importance of community, and the absolute necessity of shared cultural experience. Art matters.
This topic may have started with an old NSYNC CD, but the discussion around it is a whole lot deeper, and much more important, than a broken piece of plastic.
Make art. Share Art. Experience art together. It matters much more than you think.
