Taylor Swift Will Always Be Bigger Than AI

When it comes to art, music and culture, fans seem to want a little bit of human celebrity along with the work itself.

Artificial intelligence will soon have a formidable presence in the arts. DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion have demonstrated their ability to generate complex and interesting visual images. There is already AI-generated music, and it will get better. There is even talk of dictating a story into a computer and the software generating a short digital movie.

The question is whether or to what extent such art will catch on, given the diminished role of human creativity. Despite the power of the underlying technologies, these works will have less impact on culture than their advocates believe. Consumers and fans want celebrity packaged with their art — and AI, for all its cleverness, has not yet managed that trick.

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