The Death of the Artist?

When hip-hop producer Timbaland introduced TaTa, the first AI “artist” signed to his label, it raised standard questions about creativity and the role of machines in art. But TaTa isn’t just a tool or a bot—she’s simultaneously the art and the artist, a recursive synthesis of past and present art/artists trained on archives of human expression. While hip-hop was born from sampling and remixing, sharing and (occasionally) stealing, artificial pop—or “A-pop,” as Timbaland is calling it—pushes this tradition to an extreme where intent, originality and authorship become difficult to identify.

This is just the kind of situation French literary theorist Roland Barthes seemed to anticipate in 1967 when he announced “The Death of the Author.” Barthes argued that the artist should not be viewed as the sole creator of a work’s meaning; rather, some control is relinquished to the reader, listener or viewer to co-create meaning. But how does this relationship apply if the artist isn’t human? Perhaps the art of listening must include considering the artist as an essential part of the art, and since we, as the listeners, are the only human component of the equation, we must declare that AI-generated slop does not count as part of the human conception of art. The founder of the AI tool Suno (TaTa’s digital parent), however, insists that artists of tomorrow “won’t just be human, they’ll be [fully autonomous] IP, code, and robotics.” Either we give in to this redefinition, excluding ourselves from our own creations and allowing art to become a posthuman construct—or we redefine what it means to make art, taking care to make ourselves indispensable.

Defining Art

The more we remove ourselves from the process of art, the closer art comes to extinction. While art has been pronounced dead many times throughout history, each time philosophers have conducted a postmortem analysis, dissecting its constituent parts such as intentionality, perception, medium, form, content, emotion and symbolism. This time we might stitch these parts of art together using tools like TaTa to generate every permutation possible, but I suspect we’ll find that what gives art life is the human assertion that it is art.

John Dewey, a pallbearer for art’s recurring funeral, conceded in his 1934 work “Art as Experience” that machines might do a better job of “mere perfection in execution,” but that human emotion is the “moving and cementing force” in art. Human emotion “selects what is congruous and dyes what is selected with its color,” binding artists and their experience into something that conveys meaning to both the artist and the observer. Dewey breaks down all the components of art, concluding that what makes art is not its components or its structure, but its lived-ness.