Poptimism Wasn’t Built for the Age of AI
It may have started with good intentions, but in a world with AI art, poptimism might do more harm than good.
Poptimism, everyone seems to agree, began with the best of intentions.
The professional discourse had been too dominated, it seemed, by critics who held certain kinds of music in too high esteem. To be great, you had to make rock music, you had to play it on real instruments, you had to sing about serious subjects. Until a couple decades ago, you could certainly make popular, commercially successful music without following those guidelines, but it would not be good music. It certainly wouldn’t warrant critical discussion.
Whether or not that truly was the state of music criticism before the mid-2000s is beside the point. It seemed true, and it seemed like the discourse around music needed a countermovement.
And so, yes, poptimism began with the best of intentions. When it took hold in the mid-2000s, amid a wave of critical reassessment of music, it asked only that pop music be taken seriously as a genre, that listeners approach popular genres with an open mind, that those who set the discourse don’t dismiss music simply because it is commercially successful.
Since then, the ideas of poptimism have spread far beyond music, reaching into every crevice of art and culture. The equivalents of pop music in other art forms—blockbuster films, reality TV, big-budget musicals, beach reads, etc.—have undergone their own critical reassessments. The entire binary, poptimists say, between ‘High Art’ and ‘Low Art’ is dead. May it rest in peace.
The trouble is, the critical ship may have course-corrected too far. As W. David Marx writes in “Status and Culture”—which came out last year and posits the theory that desire for status is what creates cultural change—poptimism seems to have reached a point where it is no longer about simply approaching popular styles and works of art with an open mind.
Now, poptimism suggests that the popularity of a work of art is itself a value judgment. “Well, it wouldn’t be popular if it wasn’t good,” a poptimist might say. The sentiment behind that argument is seemingly noble—it rejects the pretentiousness of people who view themselves as “cultured,” it rejects the notion of a “guilty pleasure,” and perhaps most importantly, it rejects many of the ingrained power structures that have historically placed art by and for rich white men above the art by and for the rest of society.
It’s important, though, to distinguish between what gives a work of art mass appeal and what makes it interesting. Marx simplifies that dichotomy into aesthetic value vs. artistic value. To oversimplify: aesthetic value is a measure of how effective a work of art is as a piece of consumable entertainment (“did I enjoy this?”) while artistic value measures how original and complex a work of art is (“did this do or say something new and interesting?”).
Most works of art have some combination of both aesthetic and artistic value. Your average Marvel movie usually has high aesthetic value but low artistic value, while that one film you’ve never heard of that was on some random critic’s top-10-of-the-year-list probably has high artistic value but low aesthetic value.
It’s important that society creates works of art that contain a wide variety of both kinds of value. We need both blockbuster films and the films you’ve never heard of before, because the former provides art for the masses and the latter provides artistic and thematic innovations that can then trickle down and “refresh” the blockbusters. The most popular works, after all, often rely on the innovations of others for inspiration.
That brings us back to poptimism, which began, to put it simply, with the notion that popular music could have artistic value—which is true—but has since transformed into the notion that aesthetic value is more important than artistic value, or at the very least that they are one and the same. In doing so, poptimism inadvertently disincentivizes artistic innovation.
There are plenty of writers and critics who have said for years that this version of poptimism will destroy artistic innovation as we know it, that the course-correction will inadvertently disincentivize change among artists. I’ve held the view that poptimism has course-corrected too far for a while, but I’ve never been that much of a doomsayer until now.
What changed? AI.1
The rapid rise of artificial intelligence in popular culture has raised a lot more questions than answers about the future of artistry. Perhaps one conclusion is clear, though: AI will, eventually, be able to create art with aesthetic value.
Not right now, of course, even if some say otherwise. So far, the most “successful” AI-created works—that fake Drake and the Weeknd collab, for instance—have involved a lot of human help. But it seems almost certain that AI will improve enough to, say, pen a gripping mystery novel, produce a contemporary art piece, or write—perhaps even animate part of—a Marvel movie.
AI, however, isn’t capable, and likely never will be capable, of truly original thought. The systems that AI tools are built on simply gain information from what has already been created and then repackage it.
As Sigal Samuel wrote for Vox about AI chatbots like ChatGPT: “Derivativeness is at the core of how they work, relying as they do on past data to predict which words plausibly come next in whatever you’re writing. They use the past to construct the future.”
That’s why AI will be able to create work with aesthetic value but not artistic value. Art created by AI could be entertaining one day, but it won’t be innovative.
Poptimism, then, makes for a toxic combination with the age of AI. If a computer can create art with mass appeal, then poptimism, in its current form, would reward that. Already, people have wholeheartedly suggested that the fake, AI-assisted Drake and the Weeknd collab was just as good as any other hit by those artists.
What this means is not that we need to go back to the days of dismissing popular works, of celebrating only art by and for rich white men, of getting into online arguments about whether the Beatles are better than whatever pop star is hot right now. It doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t enjoy things meant for mass consumption.
It does mean that we all should be vigilant in recognizing the difference between aesthetic and artistic value, and that we should make sure we hold originality, complexity, and innovation in high esteem in the art we consume going forward. If AI really is going to be writing every Marvel movie starting in 2050, it should at least still have some new human-made avant-garde films to pull inspiration from.
That’s all for this edition of Cansler Culture.
Before anyone asks: No, I probably won’t be writing about Barbenheimer or the Jason Aldean song. Both seem like wells-run-dry.
I do, however, take nicely-worded requests, so let me know if there’s anything culture-related and/or politics-related you want to hear about in the next Cansler Culture.
Specifically generative AI.