As AI marches into art, humanity is a selling point

"There's a feeling of existential dread in the air in Los Angeles," says Charlie Fink, a longtime Hollywood producer and professor at Chapman University in Orange County, California.

• "AI is coming, and nobody knows how. It makes you anxious if you're looking at something AI made and thinking: 'Well, that’s a movie.'"

Case in point: "The Brutalist" — nominated for 10 Oscars in January and winner of Best Actor for Adrien Brody — used generative AI to make actors' Hungarian accents sound more authentic.

• Other nominated films, including "Emilia Pérez" and "Dune: Part Two," also used AI, The New York Times notes.
• The most-downloaded country song in America is written and sung by AI alone.
• AI is being used to generate paintings and sculptures, some of which are selling for thousands of dollars, BBC reports.

Reality check: New technologies have always been used to make art, from cameras launching photography to CGI (computer-generated imagery) bringing monsters and superheroes to life.

• Many artists see AI as another such tool they can use to express themselves.
• AI could even "lead to a new golden age of independent cinema" by giving smaller filmmakers the tech to compete with big production houses, Fink says.

"The promise of what generative AI brings is alluring, especially to executives," says Karla Ortiz, a visual artist in San Francisco who's worked on concept illustrations for movies and video games. "You don't have to deal with this whole group of artists. You can just hit a button, and there you go."

• "But that comes at the cost of human creatives, and people who rely on these jobs to make a living out of their art."

Resistance is building:

• "Breaking Bad" creator Vince Gilligan has a note in the credits of his new show, "Pluribus," which debuted this month: "This show was made by humans." Gilligan told Variety recently: "Who wants to live in a world where creativity is given over to machines?"

• "Thee Stork Club," a live music venue in Oakland, California, recently banned artists from using AI-generated fliers to promote shows, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
• More than 200 musicians — including heavy hitters Billie Eilish, Katy Perry and Smokey Robinson — signed an open letter to AI developers last year to "cease the use of artificial intelligence to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists," Axios' Sara Fischer reports.

The intrigue: Even if people want to avoid AI art, they might be fooled anyway.

• In a recent survey by Ipsos and the French streaming service Deezer, 97% of respondents couldn't distinguish between human-made and AI-generated songs — and 52% said they felt uneasy that they couldn't tell the difference.

"When you know something was created by a human, we crave that connection," says Ortiz. "It's that desire to hear stories from each other. That's very, very primal."