‘Open Intelligence’: An eye-opening account of the future of creative arts in the age of AI

In one of the early chapters of his latest book, Open Intelligence: Education Between Art and Artificial, Saikat Majumdar establishes his thesis argument: Art and artifice shape each other, and hence, in the end, remain inseparable. He further responds to the age-old debatable question of whether creative arts can be taught with distinguished clarity. Majumdar elucidates that “all art has a dimension that is more like science…art forms with more visible scientific patterns have more teachable components…It has been easy for AI to pick up the scientific, learnable patterns and technical foundations of all art forms.”

This structured argument clarifies that creative arts indeed can be taught to some extent, and contradictorily, it is this teachable component that has been easily and effectively acquired by AI. This, however, leads us back to square one – what is the worth of “teaching” creative writing to humans if those teachable components can be learned by AI? What is the unique distinction, then, between the human student of creative arts and the AI student of creative arts?

The human and the AI

While speaking about what distinguishes the human artist and the AI creator, Majumdar highlights a remarkable perspective. He talks about how creative arts can capture the unique singularity of a momentary occurrence – a power that at the moment remains uniquely human in its capacity. He points out, “[A story] is also about one person, a specific family or families, a particular day or a fading argument, a single moment, one shade of a mood, one smile or teardrop, a single pang of fear – something that is unique, something that happens only once.”

This is beautifully reminiscent of Rabindranath Tagore’s verse lyric, “I have spent a fortune travelling to distant shores and looked at lofty mountains and boundless oceans, and yet I haven't found time to take a few steps from my house to look at a single dew drop on a single blade of grass.” While Majumdar reiterates that the strength of humanity in terms of creative arts lies in its subjective consciousness, he remains realistic about the possible ramifications of technology, as he points to the future risk of “the more unsettling prospect of machine-crafted personal consciousness”. At the same time, he remains hopeful when he says, “We can inhabit and survive an AI-driven world if we are able to heighten our idiosyncratic humanity and shape our own unique narratives.”

Audience consciousness

In one of the closing chapters, Majumdar throws light on what will help us endure as human artists and how that is situated in the creation of eclectically experimental art – for such art is more elusive to machine intelligence. Such art’s “messy heterogeneity and wilful violation of compositional rules…remain, for now, beyond the purview of AI, which is far more efficient with artwork that has recognisable styles and structures, elements which AI is particularly good at learning.”

In the above argument, he brings an important dimension – which is that of audience reception and audience consciousness. This dimension is of notable significance considering the counterproductive trend of relying too much on audience reception when it comes to the market trends of the publishing industry. The publishing industry is heavily driven towards publishing works of strong commercial value and shies away from experimental forms of high art – a trend that can be counter-regressive in the age of AI. If popular audience reception is the key criterion, AI is capable of producing art with quicker and larger commercial returns than many human works.

As Majumdar points out, “The economies of cost and return are far likelier to work out in the favour of AI-generated art, if only because the vast majority of people can’t distinguish between high-level human and artificial performance.” Thus, the inevitable question of commercial common sense in the literary market is fraught with new contradictions. The question of whether publishers should prioritise short-term commercial gain over the replacement of the human writer by AI is certainly something that only time will tell. To conclude, as Majumdar says in his book Open Intelligence, “Large and unexpected reconfigurations of human roles in imaginative labour will be inevitable.”

Manjima Misra is an educator and an author whose work explores the intersections of literature, education, ethics, feminism, and artificial intelligence.

Open Intelligence: Education between Art and Artificial, Saikat Majumdar, Penguin Random House India.