AI And The Inevitable Triumph Of “Good Enough”
At least three or four times a week I will share something I’ve written with ChatGPT and forget to specify that I am just asking it to comment on the overall premise of the piece, at which point it will inevitably respond by offering its own unasked for rewrite of the email or article.
This is frustrating on a number of levels, though to be fair, the edits are rarely dramatic. Chat tightens up phrases, eliminates colloquialisms, fixes overly short or overly long sentences and more or less homogenizes the whole piece, removing any semblance of charm or personality.
And therein lies the problem.
I was thinking about this while listening to a podcast (Derek Thompson’s most excellent “Plain English") that briefly mentioned Mr.Beast and his manifesto about how to create the sort of video content that attracts millions of subscribers.
One of the things MrBeast’s manifesto was missing, Thompson lamented, was any notion of artistic mission. The goal was not to tell a story that needed to be told or to create something the author was proud of. Rather, the goal was to satiate the algorithm in a way that would draw in ever more and more followers, subjective qualities like resonance and uniqueness be damned.
And the question I could not let go of was, does anybody care?
It’s long been a given that there is rarely much intersection between art (writing, film, painting, music) that is popular and art that is considered “good” and that “good” is a subjective criteria to be found in the eyes of the beholder.
Not a diktat issued by some Hannah Horvathesque Oberlin graduate at the New York Times.
In the first stage of the digital revolution we saw the tools of production put into the hands of the masses. Hence the proliferation of creator-centric platforms like YouTube and TikTok which promised that literally anyone could become a creator.
Millions did, but what’s on those platforms is largely ephemeral—there’s nothing that actually resonates or is rewatched again and again, new meanings being discovered with each successive viewing.
Only now AI promises to do something even more overwhelming, the equivalent of what’s become known as “vibe coding”—tell the AI you want a video that makes affectionate fun of Chicago Bears fans. Or a “cool game show where people eat gross things.” Or even “snarky movie reviews.”
And then boom there it is.
The question though is whether the “good enough” things AI creates will be good enough to attract Mr.Beast-sized audiences? Or will they soon tire of it and want something more?
I suspect the answer will not make many readers happy, and that is that good enough is more than enough for most audiences. That they won’t notice the nuances that AI-created content leaves out, that in fact, the more that AI-created content resembles other existing content, the more the algorithm will favor it.
Which, of course, then leaves a giant opening for the sort of content that does resonate and push boundaries and get people to think about the world in new and different ways.
The sort of content—be it stories, music, movies, art—that people return to again and again, and start to consider part of their identity.
That this type of art is unique and cannot be created on demand by AI will make it that much more valuable. And the line between art for passion and art for commerce will grow at once both more and less blurry.
The follow-up question is then will AI ever catch up, will it too be able to make that sort of resonant content that changes the way we see the world?
My answer is that I sort of doubt it. Because, to quote the always quotable Evan Shapiro, “AI doesn’t lie awake at night thinking about its dysfunctional relationship with its parents.”
And that, my friends, is where great art comes from.
