The Digital Elephant in the Room: AI, Isolation, and the Return of Human Connection
There's a significant, undeniable presence affecting industries everywhere right now – the digital elephant in the room, Artificial Intelligence. While you might think of it primarily impacting technical fields, its effects are spreading rapidly. Surprisingly, the creative arts – like music – seem to be among the very first sectors feeling the pressure, a shift from the initial expectation that computational areas like accounting, engineering, law, and education would be the primary targets. The truth is, AI is impacting almost every career sector now.
Pinpointing the exact reasons for recent declines in the Arts sector have become incredibly complex. In the years since the COVID-19 pandemic began, it's been hard to isolate factors. Could it be the cost of living? A kind of 'slap back' effect from the pandemic lockdowns? The sudden availability of powerful AI tools? Or perhaps ongoing global unrest?
What makes finding answers even harder is that long-term statistics recorded before COVID are now largely irrelevant. Predictable patterns and trends seem to have evaporated, leaving us without clear clues. Compounding this, there's a natural human tendency to avoid confronting issues of this magnitude directly. Look at climate change for example.
AI’s Impact
For creative professionals, like myself as a music composer and producer, this new AI landscape means needing to explain why working with a human being is beneficial compared to using AI. Simply getting a piece of music generated from a text prompt isn't a true substitute for human creativity. There is undoubtedly thrill and novelty to be found, but It feels profoundly "unearned" when someone who merely enters a sentence into an AI tool like Udio claims authorship of a song. This seems similar to the concerning trend of college students submitting essays generated by Chat GPT as their own work.
But there’s hope….
Amidst these challenges, there's a noticeable, positive shift emerging: a growing acknowledgement of the vital importance of human connection. This comes after nearly a century of increasing isolation, particularly in Western countries, a trend dramatically accelerated by smartphones and social media. While these technologies proved invaluable during lockdowns, it's now evident they are contributing to unexpected social, political, and psychological issues.
Interestingly, this 'awakening' to the value of connecting with others appears to be happening even among the youngest generations, those who grew up entirely immersed in the digital world. There are stories of high school graduates choosing weekends focused on digital detox with friends instead of traditional parties. At our theatre bar, we've observed a decline in drinkers, especially among millennials. These examples hint at a significant movement towards self-care and a conscious effort to revise behaviours that are no longer serving us well.
Ultimately, there's a hope that humanity can rise above our innate tendencies towards comfort, greed, and convenience. The hope is that we will realise that some of the older, human-involved methods served us far better. It's anticipated that the value of human touch and collaboration in music creation – the process itself and the final result – will soon be widely recognised and preferred again.
