AI is catching up with artists. So, are we really irreplaceable?

Imagine waking up at 4.30 am after a long weekend to a text that says, in broken English: “Hello, today you have day off.” Joy! Elation! What would you do with your newfound freedom from the harsh grind, just as the unforgiving winter mist sets against your window? Perhaps you’ll get a train down to the coast? Or set up shop for the afternoon in the National Gallery? Now imagine that you are a gig worker, living on the outskirts of the North Circular, on a zero-hours contract. More time doesn’t mean more freedom. Less work doesn’t mean time for yourself if you can’t afford to live.

This text features within a new work by Jeremy Deller, the evergreen storyteller of the absurd British class system, which is made using the same printing techniques as the flags flown by the British trade union movement on their parades and marches. Fluttering above the ivy-covered entrance to the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, where a provocative exhibition, ‘The Irreplaceable Human: Conditions of Creativity in the Age of AI’ opened last week, Deller’s piece reminds us that the fault lines between work and leisure, respect and ridicule, dignity and disgrace, are wholly dependent on who you are and where you’re standing.

The exhibition is transhistorical (Picasso is here, sketching with his children) and wildly ambitious (different rooms address ‘Childhood’, ‘Work’, and ‘Time’ –the small stuff) — so much so that the effect was always going to be a strong feeling of curation, rather than spontaneity. In Mathias Ussing Seeberg’s animated hands, though, it is hard to see what ground the exhibition doesn’t cover. For him, the future of human creativity, probably even humanity itself, could be at stake if we fail to ask what we are giving up in this new age of AI. Looking to the artists, the dreamers, and the poets–those of the species who, for Anne Boyer in her catalogue essay, “might do something less grim and destructive than what we are up to now”–is a good place to start.

The title itself defends the intrinsic creativity of the human, with all its vulnerability and madness, from one of our deepest held anxieties: that we will be replaced. This is not a new idea, of course. Since at least the first days of the Industrial Revolution when the Luddites sabotaged new threshers in the fields, the real possibility that machines will replace skilled labour and drive down wages has made us afraid that forms of AI will make us poorer and less free. But works like Deller’s, or Huang Po-Chih’s heart-wrenching portrait of a weeping mother whose legs swell “like an elephant” through overusing a sewing machine in a Chinese sweatshop, speak to a very contemporary form of this anxiety.

It is only in our time that there has come the conviction, even if still only whispered by nerds in Silicon Valley, that AI might make better art than artists. Machines may have taken the Luddite’s job, or the supermarket cashier’s, but at least the creative industries are safe. This exhibition asks: for how long? In Yuri Pattison’s AI-generated video work Open Stacks (2023), light rains down through broken skylights on a library marked by empty shelves and small piles of upturned books on the ground, all of it humming with ambient decay. It’s a work that asks us what knowledge really is – whether our increasing ability to have the extent of human knowledge at our fingertips, rendered at our convenience by the likes of ChatGPT, makes us collectively wiser or, like the slow tide of public library closures, risks enclosing our collective intelligence in the hands of those who can afford to own it.

Based on what is on show in Denmark, however, dystopia is some way off. Andrea Büttner translates the  ‘gestures’ and ‘expressions’ of manual phone screen swiping into huge abstract wonderworks of childlike play. The Finnish performance artist Pilvi Takala plays havoc as a trainee at Deloitte through wonderfully simple and rebellious acts of transgression, like putting her feet on the desk, probing her colleagues on the meaning of life, and doing sweet fuck all.

At its core, this exhibition is a snapshot of the human carnival, which has found ways to keep on keeping on, despite the machines, neoliberalism, war or whatever other bogeyman, and has done so, for the most part, with creativity and grace. Nowhere is this more powerful and timely than in Jumana Manna’s video piece, A Magical Substance Flows Into Me (2016), which traces the footsteps of Dr. Robert Lachmann, an enigmatic Jewish-German ethnomusicologist who emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine in the 1930s, through visits to Kurdish, Moroccan and Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, members of urban and rural Levantine communities, Bedouins and Coptic Christians, in Palestine before October 7th. The work is joyous and sad and populated entirely by the most charismatic musicians. Across the exhibition, but seemingly in conversation with this work, hangs a small plaque by Jenny Holzer, dating to the mid-1980s: ‘IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY.’ We might still be dreaming, but we are still here. For now.