"Entertainment" and modern AI-fandom interactions
There's a 1985* sci-fi short story I once read by M.A. Foster called “Entertainment” that predicts what will happen in an increasingly AI-generated art world. I can't find any excerpts or summaries of it online, but what I recall is:
In the future, humans can prompt machines to create any art -- e.g., "What would a collaboration between early-era Peter Gabriel and late-era Beethoven look like, with a music video directed by Werner Herzog?" (That's a made up example, but someone originally gave me the story because Peter Gabriel and early Genesis are actually referred to in the text, and I was at the height of my fandom. XD ) An AI then comes up with a bunch of different examples, and the human who gave the prompt chooses the one(s) they like best. They then release the creation to the broader world, and people make micropayments to stream it. Everyone competes for attention, hoping to go viral or at least make a decent living.
(There's a dystopian aspect, where if you don't make enough money and your balance drops below zero, you disappear back into the human factory to get remade. Also, people don't have sex in person -- they pay each other for the rights to their likeness, and they have sex with simulated versions of one another. All of which is rather interesting, but not as directly relevant to the point I'm making here.)
M.A. Foster did an impressive job foreseeing a bunch of aspects of modern AI and online culture (especially keeping in mind that there was no Web or social media or digital streaming or online micropayments at the time this was written). And it’s becoming easy to imagine that we may reach a point where many of the story’s predictions about art come true, as well.
