Don't be scared of AI, says Troy Baker, because it's gonna push us toward 'the authentic' rather than 'the gruel that gets distilled to me through a black mirror'

AI! It's changing the world, you know. Pretty soon, there'll be no poverty, no hunger, no fear, and no doubt. The chiliasts were right: just over the horizon is a sweet eternity, brought about—somehow—by feeding a vast quantity of stolen art into a spellcheck machine and generating oceans of non-consensual deepfake pornography.

I'm sceptical. So too, kind of, is renowned videogame voice actor Troy Baker (Joel in The Last of Us, Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle), although he sounds a bit more optimistic than I am. In a chat with The Game Business (via Eurogamer), Baker said he's not scared of the tech, and suggested that when it all shakes out, a big impact of AI could be to renew people's interest in human-made art over machine-generated "content".

"AI can create content, but it cannot create art. And the reason why is because that invariably requires the human experience," said Baker. "What I see happening is that this birth of AI, and this burgeoning industry of it, is actually going to drive people to the authentic. And we're going to see opportunities of like, 'I want to go and watch this person sing this song live.' 'I want to see theater'. 'I want to read books'. 'I want to have this first-hand experience as opposed to the gruel that gets distilled to me through a black mirror'."

As for artists themselves? Baker doesn't see their role changing. "People go, 'look what AI can do'. It's like, 'yeah, okay. I see what it's capable of doing. It doesn't matter.' And we don't need to diminish it, we don't need to denigrate it, we don't need to demonize it. We need to just go, 'okay, it's there'. But it still doesn't remove the choice for me as a performer, as a producer, to go, 'but I choose to do this'."

If anyone's scared of AI, reckons Baker, it's "people that are dealing in the business of content," rather than capital-A art. "There is no doubt that AI can make content way better than humans. By far, it can crank it out no problem… It can create content, but it cannot create art. And the reason why is because that invariably requires the human experience."

Call me cynical, but this strikes me as a downright panglossian take on the potential impact of AI on human artists. He's not wrong: obviously, artists will still want to create art even if everyone has ArtBot 3000 on their phones, but the fact of the matter is that, under capitalism, there's not a clean delineation between the worlds of business and art. In fact, they're imbricated at practically every angle. Unless you possess pre-existing wealth, you need someone to pay you for the art you create in order to put food on your table.

Sure, Baker might be right that AI won't kill the human desire to produce art, or even the desire to experience human-made art, but if the people holding the purse-strings aren't paying for it to be made then those desires amount to precisely diddly-squat. If the suits are allowed to push us into the all-AI future they so desperately want, then the future will be incredibly bleak for artists.