Most food you can get is mass-produced in factories, or constructed on assembly lines. But people will still pay more to cook from scratch with good ingredients, or pay someone to do so for them.
Most furniture these days is factory-made or flat-pack. But if you pay enough, you can get something of lasting quality, made by a craftsman either now or centuries past.
Most clothes are fast fashion, made in Asian sweatshops, and fall apart or fade after a few washes. But for enough money, you can get tailored clothes which will last decades.
And if it doesn’t murder us all or melt the planet, this is possibly where AI is taking us. To a future where most words, most images, most music, most entertainment will be algorithm-generated.
But if you’re prepared to pay, humans will still be around to make you a quality product.
Walter Pater famously said that all art aspires to the condition of music. In his Jerry Cornelius series of novels, Michael Moorcock subverted this to the mass media age, suggesting that all art aspires instead to the condition of muzak.
We now know of course that it is not ALL art which thus aspires. But certainly all algorithmically-generated content does, by definition.
Capitalism is using algorithms to enforce industrialisation upon creativity, that having been resisted by humanity until now, despite the concerns of generations before us, from the Luddites to William Morris.
But at the fringes, where the poor and the hyperrich almost meet in a kind of horseshoe of behavioural patterns, human-created art, without any AI involvement, will be the art of choice for those who cannot afford the mass-produced option, as well as those who can afford to pay extra for its status symbolism, quality and the longevity.
