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Imitative AI, Art, and Hockey [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-01-21

The best period of hockey I have ever seen was the overtime of Game 5 between the Blackhawks and Kings in 2014. Hockey coaches tend to be conservative — there is a lot of truth to the old joke that your average NHL coach would rather lose 1-0 than win 6-5. Coaches want controlled, conservative play where the players restrain their speed and risk-taking in service of limiting the chances going against them.

But these two teams had several likely Hall of Fame players on them at their respective peaks, and at the start of the overtime it seemed as if they looked across at their counterparts, gripped their sticks and asked, “So, you want to go?” And then they went.

It was glorious. The period, twenty minutes of game time, took only twenty-six minutes of real time to play. They teams were a blur on the ice, throwing their bodies at the opposite team, racing through the ice, making perfect, razor sharp paces that setup chance after chance that the two goalies had no business stopping but somehow did. Watching it, you weren’t sure it would ever end and were damn sure that you never wanted it to end. I don’t think I have ever seen a period, or a series for that matter, with so much skill and effort and amazing plays.

What, you are probably asking, has that to do with AI? Recently the CEO of Suno AI said that making music was too hard:

“And so that is first and foremost giving everybody the joys of creating music and this is a huge departure from how it is now. It’s not really enjoyable to make music now […] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.

That mentality is common, apparently, among imitative AI leadership. It is the antithesis of the game I just described. The effort, the will, the amazement that you could have so much beauty and so much physicality come out of human players is what made that game, that series, incredible. It would have had none of the drama or amazement, the sense of awe at human beings doing things human beings shouldn’t be able to do, are what made that game fun and what has kept the memory alive these last ten years if it had been played by robots.

One of my sons has taught himself how to play the guitar. It was hard work, frustrating often, rewarding occasionally. He is quite good now, and the sense of pride he felt and feels as he improves is a joy to behold as a parent. He worked hard, and the hard work is what made him as a musician. The effort, the continuation in the face of difficult and failure, inform his playing in the same way it informed the players on the Hawks and Kings. Effort is what makes art art, what makes sports worth watching. I know this is a cliche but is true. The blood, sweat, and tears a person puts into their art, into anything that requires striving, is what makes it good. We do it because it’s hard, because the hard makes it real.

If you are trying to create something that takes the hard out of creation, then you are not working for artists. You are working for the person who merely wants something they can point at and claim to have made, the runner who takes a taxi to the end of the marathon just to cross the finish line. The world doesn’t need more of those kind of people — it needs more people who understand that beauty, that joy, comes from the hard, not the easy. We need real artists, whether they work on ice or on a canvas or in an orchestra. We don’t need shortcut takers and pretenders.

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