big fish, little fish, middle fish

on ecosystems

i don’t think these fish are okay

Because I was recently working on something about AI,¹ I was in a phase where I was talking to everybody about AI. I find that, among people who are generally skeptical of AI-generated material, a common sentiment is something like this: AI can’t kill anything good. This belief is one that I share, actually! But I think it also misses something important. To use an example from one of these conversations: suppose your local dentist office starts playing algorithmically generated muzak instead of Maroon 5. As you sit in that tooth-shaped chair, will you really feel any worse because you are not listening to human-composed plastic air filler? I think the answer is “no.” But the catch is that you’ll probably be living in a worse world for music.

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A few years ago I saw the 1946 movie Humoresque. It is not what I’d call a “good movie,” but it focuses on the tribulations of a young violinist (played by John Garfield) from an immigrant family who wants to make it big. At a certain point he gets a job at an orchestra at a radio station, but he quits because he hates playing abridged and dumbed-down versions of classics. He does not have time for this kind of bastardization of art for the masses and so on. I don’t know how this part of the movie would have registered in 1946 but my instant reaction, which is in fact the only thing I retain from the movie, was shock at realizing there was a whole genre of job for classically trained musicians that doesn’t exist anymore.²

And (moving beyond the broadcast orchestra) the collapse of local orchestras that are not “the top of the top” means that if you want to play the violin professionally you have almost no shot. I think it should be clear that this is bad for the violin. If you have to be at the very top of the top to do anything, most people won’t even try, and the risks the people who do have a place at the top can tolerate will shrink. You need a world in which people can be just okay at something without being doomed for the whole ecosystem to be healthy.³

So my basic contention here is that for greatness to happen, mediocrity has to happen. If AI-generated material cuts out the middle completely, leaving only the bottom and the very top, you are probably screwed when it comes to building a financial stable life even if you’re a genius.⁴

To take it back to a world I know something about (writing), it’s certainly true that the Saturday Evening Post published a lot of mediocre stories, but you can see the effect of its disappearance as a place to publish stories everywhere, just as you can see the effect of diminishing places to publish illustrations for reasonable wages (a purpose that the Saturday Evening Post also served). If you co-existed with its heyday, you might have really despised the magazine and the work it put out. You might have viewed it as the place talent goes to die. And you might have been right to think all this as you worked on much more niche and much less commercial work and perhaps died in poverty.⁵ However, the disappearance of such an outlet is nevertheless bad for everybody, even if it never publishes anything good. I think that it’s weird that this is true. But I’ve come to believe it’s true.