Player Pianos

 The great William Gaddis devoted a whole book (his last, Agapē Agape) to the theory that the development of the player piano marked the beginning of the end of the arts. 

(Long before this final novel was published, Gaddis had already displayed an interest in the theme. As far back as The Recognitions, characters in Gaddis novels are forever announcing their intention to write a masterwork called Agapē Agape one day and ranting about player pianos as the root of all evil.)

Gaddis's thesis, roughly, was that the player piano marked the beginning of the divorce between the artist and their medium. It was the first time that music could be played without the intervention of human hands. The age of "mechanical reproduction" in the arts—as Walter Benjamin called it—had begun. 

For H.L. Mencken, though, this lack of a human intermediary was a point in its favor. In one of his essays in the Book of Calumny, he describes human musicians as merely an unfortunate but temporary necessity—a byproduct of primitive conditions in the arts destined to be superseded by technological change. 

For Mencken, human hands could only interfere with the divine music of the spheres—and any mechanical invention that reduced their role to a minimum could only be a blessing. 

All first-rate music suffers by the fact that it has to be performed by human beings, he writes—that is, that nature must be permitted to corrupt it. Some day the natural clumsiness and imperfection of fingers, lips and larynxes will be overcome by mechanical devices [...] Mechanical pianos are already here.

Of course, human musicians at the time insisted that they brought a special touch to the craft—that human artistry was something ineffable that could never be duplicated by a machine. 

But Mencken dismissed this with a sneer. Piano-players, he wrote [...] affect to laugh at all such contrivances, but that is no more than a pale phosphorescence of an outraged wille zur macht. Setting aside half a dozen [...] great masters of a moribund craft, who will say that the average mechanical piano is not as competent[?]

Of course, Mencken was still envisioning the human composer as a great artist—a Beethoven, a Mozart. Part of his objection to the intervention of human hands in the playing of music was that it could only butcher the composer's vision. 

I wonder what Mencken would say if he had lived to see the age when machines could duplicate the role of human composer and author as well—churning out passable combinations of notes and words that are to many people indistinguishable from the product of a human creative intelligence. 

We live now in precisely such a world. Ours in an era when an AI-generated band can trend in Spotify for weeks without anyone noticing; when an AI-generated podcast can go viral; when an award-winning novel endures controversy because critics begin to suspect it was made using AI. 

There was a Boston Globe column the other week that hit close to home for me. The journalist was describing his frightening realization that an AI chatbot could even imitate his distinct personal style. He asked one of the major LLMs to write a column in his voice, and the result was eerily convincing. 

He's a braver man than I. I have not yet dared to plug "write a blog in the style of Six Foot Turkey" into any language model—lest the result be more apt than I want to believe possible. 

Of course, with respect to all these works of AI-generated art, people still say the same things. They declare: something has been lost. Some "human touch" is missing in the result. In some scarcely definable way, the AI-produced content remains mere boilerplate; mere statistically-generated "slop." Only a human artist can do it for real. 

But is this true? Or is it merely the protest of an "outraged wille zur macht," as Mencken would put it? Are we just kidding ourselves that we are so irreplaceable—because we want it to be true? 

Those who believe in some Platonic ideal of art will have to follow Mencken's argument to its logical conclusion. They will have to say that the human instrument—the author, the creator, the composer, the player—is a kind of fleshy receiver of the heavenly music—a tube through which the message must pass, but in which it becomes distorted. 

On this theory, human artists are indeed only a stage of primitive technology destined to be surpassed. We have been forced to rely on them so far in order to gain contact with the higher realms at all—but as soon as we can invent a mechanical replacement for their brains, the more direct access we will gain. 

But those who—like me—do not subscribe to any Platonic theories need not go so far. I don't actually believe that art is beautiful because it is gradually approximating to some preexisting ideal form. All that "truth is beauty, beauty truth" stuff never meant much to me. 

I think art is beautiful because we want to see another human intelligence at work—and identify ourselves with its successes and struggles. We want to gain insight into living from one who has done it before. We want to recognize patterns and draw connections to our own lives and feel the gratification of seeing our own minds at work. 

This may, in fact, be mere wille zur macht, as Mencken puts it. But without the will to power, what is art indeed? Let us recall Hazlitt on "the pleasures of painting": 

To do anything, to dig a hole in the ground, to plant a cabbage, to hit a mark, to move a shuttle, to work a pattern,—in a word, to attempt to produce any effect, and to succeed, has something in it that gratifies the love of power, and carries off the restless activity of the mind of man. 

This describes better than any more ideal Platonic account what is actually satisfying at the subjective level about creating something—whether a song or a Boston Globe column or a blog post. And that's perhaps the only reason I do not outsource this blog to a chatbot. 

It's not actually because I am so certain that I can do it better than a machine. It's because I want to do it myself. 

I want to feel the gratification of shaping an idea into words; the jolt of pleasure the moment my brain draws a connection that even I did not at first expect ("oh, this reminds me of what Hazlitt said about painting, let me find that passage again") and thereby to "carry off the restless activity" of my mind.