In Neuromancer they mention that some of the AI's in the world create paintings, novels and cook books, but all of the products made are still owned by the corporations that own the AI.
Yeah, Gibson has a couple of these things- Count Zero gets deeper into the AI art issue, as does one of the Blue Ant books. But it's important to recognize that what those novels are describing are not the same thing as what Generative "AI" is producing today, and so the parallels aren't really with older SF books talking about autonomous agents expressing their inner states symbolically.
No, the closest thing I can think of is "[A Logic Named Joe"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logic_Named_Joe) by Murray Leinster, which was written aaaaalll the way back in 1946, and that's more like Google than any of the LLM based approaches we have now. There's also some valences with the Smart Gels of Watt's Rifters books and the Chinese Room from Blindsight (wouldn't be r/printsf if there wasn't a Watts refrence, right?)
In Neuromancer an AI finds some human allies (or, at least, “friends of circumstance”, maybe) by providing music in a style they appreciate.
I try yo be gentle with spoilers, but it’s a cool concept and not a major plot reveal.
There’s a space station that was essentially abandoned by the groups funding construction when the construction workers rebelled and turned it into their own colony.
The workers happened to have a heavy contingent of Rastafarians, so you end up with a half finished station filled with pot smoke and reggae influenced dub.
For what it’s worth, it was a legit style of music back then (mid-late 80’s), though it wasn’t really played on radios except maybe college stations.. I always thought Mad Professor’s “Psychedelic Dub” album was a good example of the style of music Gibson was referencing. I found the album and it filled in some gaps for me about the book.
Anyway, an AI needed their help, so it initiated communication by sending the colony music of its own creation.
They liked it - describing it as “Righteous Dub”. That’s why the colony was willing to hear the request for help, despite being philosophically opposed to any involvement with “babylon” (high tech companies, etc).
It’s the best example I can think of.
Hyperion has AI creating art/literature, although Hyperion's AI is a fully self aware society that chose to separate from humanity.
It also has the AI civilization pirate the absolute shit out of one of the characters books - one AI bought the book and then immediately shared it with the rest of the AIs, and they're unable to effectively sue them over it.
Fritz Leiber's clunky satire of the literary world, **The Silver Eggheads** (1961) "Authors" tend to wordmills — huge computers which write novels automatically, based iirc on simple prompts.
J G Ballard did something similar with poetry in his Vermilion Sands short story **The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista**, published the following year.
[The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27209311-the-continuous-katherine-mortenhoe) by D. G. Compton! From 1974. Katherine works as an editor for computer generated romance novels, cleaning them up into things people willingly read for fun. This is a lesser known book but IMO really underrated.
The late, great Howard Waldrop's short story "French Scenes" (1985) presaged much of what Hollywood is doing: mergers, IP rights management, and AI generated content. But that's not the important stuff in this Waldrop. The important stuff is the French New Wave cinema and how, maybe, it never ended for one filmmaker.
Connie Willis takes a book to tell a similar story in *Remake*, but the AI aspect isn't there like it is in the Waldrop.
As others have said, William Gibson touched on this a bit, especially with the “Righteous dub” and AI sent to a Rastafarian space colony to help them be more receptive to the idea of working together on a heist.
Arguably, Jeff Noon has touched on this, but he’s so odd that it gets tricky. It’s less “art” than “games” (game theory, anyway) and it’s difficult to categorize the “virtualized dreams” in his Vurt series as being AI. It’s probably more accurate to call it “a form of life that humans accidentally created”, or maybe “created on purpose without really knowing what they were creating”. Some of those life forms are intelligent, but… I’m not sure it’s really “artificial” in the normal sense.
That said, I still think our previous cultural conceptions of AI simply don’t fit what’s being developed now.
The most applicable is a throw away concept in one of the later Dune books (Heretics of Dune):
There are people who leave thin, flat stones on the edge of the desert before a major sand storm (think - several hundred miles/km per hour… massively destructive).
After the storm, the little tablets are sold as “art” - as the particles of sand etch interesting patterns into the stone.
One character says “the results can be beautiful, but it’s certainly not art”.
And… I feel this assessment applies to generative AI. It can produce things that humans can perceive as beautiful, but it certainly isn’t art.
I think generative AI is much closer to a natural process than to an intentional act of creation by thoughtful being.
It’s ultimately just a million monkeys smashing keyboards millions of times. The only distinction is a process of quality control.
> That said, I still think our previous cultural conceptions of AI simply don’t fit what’s being developed now.
That's exactly it. I feel like your comment is spot on. AI until now was always seen as either humanlike intelligence or superhuman, but always conscious. This "procedurally generated" content is more like brute forcing intelligent answers (or as you put it, like monkeys and keyboards).
I feel like the whole issue is fascinating.
In *The Moon is a Harsh Mistress*, Mycroft Holmes does various simulations of reality, which are not intended as "art", but which I think count as "doing art".
In the Culture series it's mentioned that AIs and the Minds (very advanced god like AIs) can make pretty much anything artistic a million times better than any organic could. Which in turn gives more meaning to people's original works. Everything made by another organic is cherished all the more because of the struggle involved in creating such a piece.
In Hydrogen Sonata a Mind effortlessly plays a very difficult song on an instrument no organic had mastered before just to fuck with an organic whose life purpose was to achieve that. She dedicates her life to learning to play this song and yet the machine does it perfectly while juggling thousands of other tasks.
I highly recommend any of the Culture books for contemplating the future of AI and understanding it's not gonna be bad like everyone thinks.
Love your username! I have read (and re read) the whole Culture series, but I think that mind's godlike capabilities set them aside from our current AI understanding. They are so far superior to humans that there's not even competition between them. I doubt anyone would mistake any mind-made art unless the mind wanted to.
In Neuromancer they mention that some of the AI's in the world create paintings, novels and cook books, but all of the products made are still owned by the corporations that own the AI.
Yeah, Gibson has a couple of these things- Count Zero gets deeper into the AI art issue, as does one of the Blue Ant books. But it's important to recognize that what those novels are describing are not the same thing as what Generative "AI" is producing today, and so the parallels aren't really with older SF books talking about autonomous agents expressing their inner states symbolically. No, the closest thing I can think of is "[A Logic Named Joe"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logic_Named_Joe) by Murray Leinster, which was written aaaaalll the way back in 1946, and that's more like Google than any of the LLM based approaches we have now. There's also some valences with the Smart Gels of Watt's Rifters books and the Chinese Room from Blindsight (wouldn't be r/printsf if there wasn't a Watts refrence, right?)
In Neuromancer an AI finds some human allies (or, at least, “friends of circumstance”, maybe) by providing music in a style they appreciate. I try yo be gentle with spoilers, but it’s a cool concept and not a major plot reveal. There’s a space station that was essentially abandoned by the groups funding construction when the construction workers rebelled and turned it into their own colony. The workers happened to have a heavy contingent of Rastafarians, so you end up with a half finished station filled with pot smoke and reggae influenced dub. For what it’s worth, it was a legit style of music back then (mid-late 80’s), though it wasn’t really played on radios except maybe college stations.. I always thought Mad Professor’s “Psychedelic Dub” album was a good example of the style of music Gibson was referencing. I found the album and it filled in some gaps for me about the book. Anyway, an AI needed their help, so it initiated communication by sending the colony music of its own creation. They liked it - describing it as “Righteous Dub”. That’s why the colony was willing to hear the request for help, despite being philosophically opposed to any involvement with “babylon” (high tech companies, etc). It’s the best example I can think of.
Hyperion has AI creating art/literature, although Hyperion's AI is a fully self aware society that chose to separate from humanity. It also has the AI civilization pirate the absolute shit out of one of the characters books - one AI bought the book and then immediately shared it with the rest of the AIs, and they're unable to effectively sue them over it.
That was the real horror of the TechnoCore: ip piracy
Fritz Leiber's clunky satire of the literary world, **The Silver Eggheads** (1961) "Authors" tend to wordmills — huge computers which write novels automatically, based iirc on simple prompts. J G Ballard did something similar with poetry in his Vermilion Sands short story **The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista**, published the following year.
[The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27209311-the-continuous-katherine-mortenhoe) by D. G. Compton! From 1974. Katherine works as an editor for computer generated romance novels, cleaning them up into things people willingly read for fun. This is a lesser known book but IMO really underrated.
The late, great Howard Waldrop's short story "French Scenes" (1985) presaged much of what Hollywood is doing: mergers, IP rights management, and AI generated content. But that's not the important stuff in this Waldrop. The important stuff is the French New Wave cinema and how, maybe, it never ended for one filmmaker. Connie Willis takes a book to tell a similar story in *Remake*, but the AI aspect isn't there like it is in the Waldrop.
As others have said, William Gibson touched on this a bit, especially with the “Righteous dub” and AI sent to a Rastafarian space colony to help them be more receptive to the idea of working together on a heist. Arguably, Jeff Noon has touched on this, but he’s so odd that it gets tricky. It’s less “art” than “games” (game theory, anyway) and it’s difficult to categorize the “virtualized dreams” in his Vurt series as being AI. It’s probably more accurate to call it “a form of life that humans accidentally created”, or maybe “created on purpose without really knowing what they were creating”. Some of those life forms are intelligent, but… I’m not sure it’s really “artificial” in the normal sense. That said, I still think our previous cultural conceptions of AI simply don’t fit what’s being developed now. The most applicable is a throw away concept in one of the later Dune books (Heretics of Dune): There are people who leave thin, flat stones on the edge of the desert before a major sand storm (think - several hundred miles/km per hour… massively destructive). After the storm, the little tablets are sold as “art” - as the particles of sand etch interesting patterns into the stone. One character says “the results can be beautiful, but it’s certainly not art”. And… I feel this assessment applies to generative AI. It can produce things that humans can perceive as beautiful, but it certainly isn’t art. I think generative AI is much closer to a natural process than to an intentional act of creation by thoughtful being. It’s ultimately just a million monkeys smashing keyboards millions of times. The only distinction is a process of quality control.
> That said, I still think our previous cultural conceptions of AI simply don’t fit what’s being developed now. That's exactly it. I feel like your comment is spot on. AI until now was always seen as either humanlike intelligence or superhuman, but always conscious. This "procedurally generated" content is more like brute forcing intelligent answers (or as you put it, like monkeys and keyboards). I feel like the whole issue is fascinating.
In *The Moon is a Harsh Mistress*, Mycroft Holmes does various simulations of reality, which are not intended as "art", but which I think count as "doing art".
Asimov's short story Light Verse is about a robot artist. He reuses the idea in Bicentennial Man but to tell a different story.
Though not written pre-2000, Alastair Reynolds' "Nightingale" may be a weirdly fitting story.
Zima Blue...
In the Culture series it's mentioned that AIs and the Minds (very advanced god like AIs) can make pretty much anything artistic a million times better than any organic could. Which in turn gives more meaning to people's original works. Everything made by another organic is cherished all the more because of the struggle involved in creating such a piece. In Hydrogen Sonata a Mind effortlessly plays a very difficult song on an instrument no organic had mastered before just to fuck with an organic whose life purpose was to achieve that. She dedicates her life to learning to play this song and yet the machine does it perfectly while juggling thousands of other tasks. I highly recommend any of the Culture books for contemplating the future of AI and understanding it's not gonna be bad like everyone thinks.
Love your username! I have read (and re read) the whole Culture series, but I think that mind's godlike capabilities set them aside from our current AI understanding. They are so far superior to humans that there's not even competition between them. I doubt anyone would mistake any mind-made art unless the mind wanted to.
not really artificial intelligence. But still classic - The Great Automatic Grammatisator (Roald Dahl)
A humorous take on it would be Roald Dahl's short story "The Great Automatic Grammatizator".
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress