One of the excuses proponents of AI ‘art’ fall back on is that what their plagiarism is just a continuation of creators ‘stealing’ each other’s ideas. But that misrepresents the cycle of feedback which sees culture born and reborn, informed and enriched by each generation’s experiences and voices – something brilliantly illustrated by the new Gorillaz short film, The Mountain, The Moon Cave and The Sad God.
In my school days in rural England, there were quite a few things my teachers preached as fact, which were obviously bullshit. Most of it was too overtly backward to go mainstream (assertions that “kangaroo is actually the Aboriginal word for ‘good to eat’”, for example) – but one which continues to haunt me to this day is the assertion that every story told today “steals from the stories of yesterday”.
It’s a terrible thing to tell kids. In part, because for the sake of decent grades come exam season, the teachers were essentially telling us no story we could tell would have any ‘value’ without ripping off another voice. But also, because it is a damaging oversimplification of a creative cycle that has enriched countless billions of lives throughout human history – one which is biting us in the arse in the enforced age of AI.
It is true that everything we do now, in terms of creative communication, in some way draws on the history, the culture and the stories we have experienced in our lifetimes. The things which we choose to create and communicate may take on the form, the structure, or even the plot-beats of those archetypes. But that is not the same thing as simply copying. Because in the new artefact we build, we bring our own lived experiences to the mix; we take something old, and by telling or retelling it in our own voice, we make it new.
It is a constant cycle of feedback, in which we learn from and feed back into our surroundings – informing how we, and others still to come, will build on the stories that help us to make sense of a constantly changing, often dangerous and uncaring world. It is the birth, death and rebirth of ideas, which serves as the only true constant for our species. That is not the same thing as plagiarism. That’s just where you lift something directly from someone else’s work, put nothing new in, and claim “I did this.”
That is the fundamental misunderstanding of creativity that the proponents of AI are still peddling. You can hypothetically type prompts into a generator now to render an instant image of ‘Winnie the Pooh with gigantic tits’, and the machine will splice it together that monstrous image from the work of various uncredited, unpaid artists on the internet.
When this is obviously, rightly criticised as plagiaristic, a stock response here is to bleat that every piece of art is plagiaristic – because of that oversimplified understanding of the creative process instilled in so many of us through the conveyor-belt education we are subjected to. But that’s nonsense. This generative slop is nothing like a story which remixes and reimagines an archetypal story from a fresh perspective. Nothing has been imagined, nothing has been created, nothing has been informed by a human experience, and no modified meaning feeds back into the equation.
Perhaps it is fitting that the best examination of cultural regeneration and rebirth comes from the animated band Gorillaz. The collaborative project, helmed by illustrator Jamie Hewlett and musician Damon Albarn has long served as a venue for both to unlock their creativity beyond the confines of industry expectations. For example, music labels would expect Albarn to simply churn out Blur-style Britpop forever, masking his musical ambitions behind a fictional band allowed him space to explore a variety of genres, including hip-hop, electronica and post-punk.
In their latest album, The Mountain, Hewlett and Albarn take the band to India, on the kind of Beatles-era spiritual journey that for a time might have opened up criticisms of cultural appropriation, or of post-colonial commodification of the country’s culture. But as is the case with all the other genres and cultures which Gorillaz takes in stride, this is not about claiming ownership with something, but engaging with it – learning from it, highlighting the people who helped make it what it is, and feeding back into it with a new twist or perspective.
The eight-minute short film which Hewlett has overseen (alongside co-directors Max Taylor and Tim McCourt) to accompany the project – pieced together as a music video for three of its tracks – is a beautiful illustration of this process. And a timely intervention in the conversation around AI in art, to boot.
Featuring performances by a characteristically diverse array of musicians – from British sitar player Anoushka Shankar, Indian singer-songwriter Asha Puthli, and international flautist Ajay Prasanna, to the late singer Bobby Womack and De La Soul’s David Jolicoeur – the short is rendered with lovingly hand-drawn animation, on hand-painted backgrounds. The pointedly analogue mode of production sees the project step back from the stylised, digitally polished looks of recent outings – with Hewlett notably having made the point to note his desire to show just how wonderful something made by people can be – especially in an era where a grey-blue CG film had descended on many visuals even before the advent of AI.
The story follows the band on a journey of self-discovery which mirrors the treacherous ascent artists must take to reach their audience. Their path is beset by comedic renditions of Disney animals – including a snake, and a particularly gormless tiger – but not just for the sake of a cheap piece of reference humour: they are emblematic of a style of art abandoned by major studios for the sake of ultra-controlled identikit productions – the kind which AI is now being lined up to endlessly rehash. Along the side of the road, then, it is also worth noting that stalls and billboards appear literally flogging snake oil to the band – a promise of something for nothing, but which obviously comes with a hideous cost. As well as the environmental impact implied (one billboard essentially buries a flourishing forest of life behind it, while AI boils the ocean with every prompt), the cost is a halt to this journey – a stasis and stagnation, where what already has been is simply chewed over again and again, without fresh insight, experience and emotion.
As the band pick their way past these dangers, and reach what might be seen as the conclusion of their journey, however, they manage to forgo this, and maintain a cycle of fresh creation. Having engaged with a range of storytelling – from ancient myths and iconography, through golden age animation, to modern narratives on death and creation – they have taken in something new, succeeded by adding a new angle to it, and then, in the final moments of the short, been fed back into the universe, returning to and nourishing another cycle of rebirth and future creation.
Hewlett and Albarn have other reasons for wanting to meditate on these themes, of course. Both sadly saw their fathers die in the lead-up to making the album, and exploring death as something other than something final, punctuating an individual’s life, was clearly an important part of the healing process for both of them. But just as importantly, as business interests look to supplant human creativity with a digital facsimile, they have produced something which counters the narrative that culture has that same full-stop – which is central to the fallacy that new art is simply an exact recreation of what came before; the myth that aims to normalise Silicon Valley’s expensive plagiarism machine.