Here Dr. Boli’s long memory gives him a different point of view from that of the average Internet blitherer. Dr. Boli’s own blithering is informed by a better acquaintance with the past two centuries or so, and in this case he remembers that we have faced exactly this question before. It took us more than a century to answer it, and it was never answered definitively. But the consensus of opinion has been that, yes, a machine can produce art, when that machine is a camera.
To anyone who has lived through both revolutions, the resemblance is hard to miss.
Previously, making a picture had been a skill learned with long and laborious practice. Then along came the machine, and the skill was irrelevant. Why learn to draw when the machine can make perfect images for you? There was much grumbling about whether such laziness ought even to be allowed, and much hand-wringing about the future of Art.
With no alteration at all, the paragraph above can be made to apply to the coming of photography in the early nineteenth century or the coming of artificial intelligence two centuries later.
Some historical perspective concerning machines and literature:
The future of fiction, according to Roald Dahl in 1953:
… off he went in his big car to seek his next client. This one was a female, famous and popular, whose fat romantic books sold by the million across the country. She received Knipe graciously, gave him tea, and listened attentively to his story.
“It all sounds very fascinating,” she said. “But of course I find it a little hard to believe.”
“Madam,” Knipe answered. “Come with me and see it with your own eyes. My car awaits you.”
So off they went, and in due course, the astonished lady was ushered into the machine house where the wonder was kept. Eagerly, Knipe explained its workings, and after a while he even permitted her to sit in the driver’s seat and practise with the buttons.
“All right,” he said suddenly, “you want to do a book now?”
“Oh yes!” she cried. “Please!”
She was very competent and seemed to know exactly what she wanted. She made her own pre-selections, then ran off a long, romantic, passion-filled novel. She read through the first chapter and became so enthusiastic that she signed up on the spot.
“That’s one of them out of the way,” Knipe said to Mr Bohlen afterwards. “A pretty big one too.”
“Nice work, my boy.”
“And you know why she signed?”
“Why?”
“It wasn’t the money. She’s got plenty of that.”
“Then why?”
Knipe grinned, lifting his lip and baring a long pale upper gum. “Simply because she saw the machine-made stuff was better than her own.”
The future of academic prose, as envisioned by R.A. Lafferty in 1965:
A thoughtful man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox, feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions.
“I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting,” said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could
doubt it was a work of philosophy.
It is our peculiar fortune to live in at a time in which one traditional science fiction notion is being realized, that of artificial brains. I suppose it will soon lead to the establishment of the panopticon state, and ultimately to machine rule, when mankind’s only hope is another Carrington event. In the meantime, we have some nifty toys to play with.