The train is modernizing, gobbles up distances at a higher speed, but keeps its cultural repertoire intact in our imagination. On a trip to Madrid, it makes me think that the Lleida plateau is the landscape that the architect of Extraños contemplates on a train. As in Highsmith's novel, it seems that behind the glass the fields move like an immense sheet shaken by someone. Here I stop rambling, lest a stranger sit in the seat in front of me and propose to take care of some shady matter.
At a time when much of the global conversation revolves around the scope of artificial intelligence (AI), we are especially intrigued by its negative implications. Every invention carries with it its own disaster, which is often revealed over time: nuclear power/Chernobyl disaster; Airbnb/real estate gentrification; social networks / privacy monetization.
Now, while we're still debating the psychological impact of online digital consumption on teens, another colossal wave is rolling in with the power to sweep everything away. For now, we know that AI opens a new front for democracies. Although artificial intelligence already has undeniably valuable uses, tech luminaries tend to put the positives ahead of its darker underside.
While ChatGPT generates coherent answers based on algorithms, data and the reliability of statistics about which word is most likely to follow another, the internal monologue of the passengers in my car is built from their accumulated memories, emotions, experiences and perceptions. according to another kind of algorithm, which is unique and indecipherable. By letting the gaze wander over the undulating landscape, the ideas acquire another texture and depth.
I listen to the jazz recommendations of an acquaintance and explore the similarities between the nature of that genre, in which improvisation prevails, with our mental processes: the layers of sound remind me of our ruminative loops. In his mind, each passenger composes his own songs, with a great variety of chords and arrangements, some with more swing and harmonic progression, but far from the order of a symphony.
The musicologist and translator Luis Gago was waiting for me at the March Foundation to talk about Shostakovich as part of a cycle of his works. While talking to this great popularizer of classical music, I thought about the abyss between listening to an expert of his stature, who imparts knowledge with passion and character, and reading one of those bland texts generated by ChatGPT about music, which lack juicy anecdotes, humor or unexpected connections. Then we went together to the Teatro Real to see the opera The Nose by the Russian composer, based on Gogol's story of the same name.
I feel sorry for those who suffer from amusia, the inability to appreciate music. Nabokov admitted to being tone deaf, so even if he admired Gogol, he would not have gone to the show. The protagonist of one of his stories says that music resembles chatter in a foreign language, an indistinguishable noise in which everything slides and intermingles. The AI's incontinence in producing text, music and images heralds, I fear, an age of chronic tone deafness.
One of the co-authors of the libretto for The Nose was Yevgueni Zamyatin, a trained engineer who, in his dystopia Us, imagined a society that continues to amaze a century later due to its visionary nature. In that world, mathematics and control over private life reign. There is even a device that produces several sonatas per hour, without the need for what the ancients called inspiration: "an unknown form of epilepsy."
Will the new technological tools at the service of composition be able to move us like Shostakovich in The Leningrad Symphony? Will a machine translate the experience of war as it is lived in its own flesh? Perhaps the most relevant thing about AI is that it forces us to rethink what art is, creation, and that “epilepsy” to which Zamyatin referred. But also to recognize that, to function in the future, the humanities continue to be the best framework for critical thinking and analytical skills. The drama today, as in Gogol's tale, is losing one's nose. Without a good sense of smell, without keen intuition, how would we distinguish that the image of the Pope clad in a Balenciaga feather is a deepfake? The need to deceive is a shadow that has followed us since we walked upright.
