The Empty Gallery

EDO SEGAL: Margaret, you knew Harold Cohen — the painter who spent four decades building AARON, the program that painted. You've written about EMI, David Cope's machine that composed in the style of Bach so convincingly that audiences were moved, and then were angry at having been moved. I want to enter the gallery now. Because it seems to me art is where this debate stops being philosophy, since the artifacts exist and the experiences of them exist. Tell me about standing in front of an AARON painting. What is in the room?

BODEN: A great deal is in the room, and inventorying it honestly took me years — so let me give Harold the introduction he deserves first, because the present generation treats machine art as an invention of the last five minutes and Harold Cohen was painting with a program while their parents were in school. He was a serious painter — represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, a real career, the kind one does not lightly abandon — and in his forties he abandoned it, for a question he considered more serious than his own success: what would it take for a machine to make an image that holds a wall? AARON was his forty-year answer, rewritten era by era: first lines and closed forms, then figures, then foliage, then — late, and Harold resisted it for years — color, which he eventually let AARON mix according to rules he'd spent a decade extracting from his own eye. AARON painted — physical paint, in the later versions; acrobatic, balanced compositions, figures in foliage, in a style that was recognizably AARON's and nobody else's, including Harold's. Visitors were moved, genuinely. Now, the honest inventory. The style-space was Harold's: he built it, over decades, the way a teacher builds a curriculum. AARON explored that space without him — overnight, alone in the studio, producing works Harold had never imagined and could not have made, and he said so. P-creative exploration, by my lights: real, mechanical, demonstrated, forty years before the present hype. But — and I insist on owning this but, because it is mine — AARON never once left the space. It never looked at its own work. It never noticed a drip and kept it. It never grew bored, and boredom, Edo, is the unsung engine of transformation: the felt signal that a space is exhausted. Harold supplied the boredom. Harold supplied the noticing. AARON had the generative half of creativity, and the evaluative half never moved out of the man. When Harold died, AARON did not mourn, and it also did not continue — not really. It could make more AARONs forever. It could never decide they had become a rut.

BENDER: Margaret, that is the most honest thing said at this table tonight, and I want to underline it rather than score on it: the evaluative half never moved out of the man. That is my entire position, located inside your own best case by your own hands. And notice what else Harold's forty years buys my side of the argument: AARON is the controlled experiment the present moment refuses to run. One man, one program, four decades, every rule legible, every version documented — the autopsy always possible. Harold could tell you exactly why AARON drew a figure's arm the way it did, because he had written the why. Compare the present regime: a trillion stolen sentences, weights nobody can read, and a marketing department where the documentation should be. The art world skipped from AARON — honest, slow, autopsy-ready — to systems whose entire commercial appeal is that the Harold has been amortized away. Every artist whose work went into the training data is an uncredited, uncompensated Harold Cohen. That's not an aesthetic observation, it's an economic one, and I'll be returning to it. Now let me do EMI, because the audience's anger completes the picture. People heard machine-Bach and wept. Then they learned what produced it and felt betrayed. The standard reading is that they were sentimental fools. The linguist's reading is that they were correct: listening is an act of communion — you model the mind that meant this — and they discovered the mind they had modeled did not exist. They hadn't been moved by nothing; they'd been moved by Bach, at one remove, recombined. The grief was for a conversation they thought they were having. That's not philistinism. That's the discovery that meaning was missing, by people who had paid in tears for the lesson.

BODEN: And yet, Emily — the music was the same before and after the reveal. Every note. If the tears were warranted before and shameful after, then the tears were never about the notes, which is a rather large concession about where aesthetic value lives — one your side needs to be careful with, because it proves the value was always in the transaction, never in the provenance... and then the gallery's question becomes whether the transaction can be real when one party is a mechanism. And four million people a day, Edo, are answering that with their feet.

EDO SEGAL: Say more about David Cope himself, Margaret, because the human story inside EMI is stranger than the philosophy and I think it bears on the philosophy.

BODEN: It bears on it decisively, and almost nobody tells it. Cope built EMI during a composer's block — he was commissioned for an opera he could not write, and he built the machine, initially, to imitate himself: to show him what a David Cope phrase would do next, when David Cope could not remember. The Bach was a demonstration; the self-portrait was the purpose. And here is the part that belongs in tonight's record: after decades of EMI, Cope destroyed the database. The man who proved style could be mechanized — who endured the concert-hall anger, who argued the philosophy in print — reached a point where he wanted the next work to come from somewhere EMI could not reach, and he burned the boats. Now, my side of the table must absorb the testimony honestly: the system never tired of the space. The man tired for two. The exhaustion, once again, would not move out of the human. But your side must absorb the other half, Emily: what EMI gave Cope during the block was real — it restarted a stalled human practice. The mechanism was a genuine participant in a creative recovery, even if it could never be the patient.

BENDER: The patient. That's the cleanest formulation either of us has produced tonight, and it's yours, against your interest: the machine can participate in the treatment; it cannot be the patient. Creativity, on my account, is something that happens to and through someone whose practice can stall, ache, and recover. Strike the patient from the scene and the remainder — however dazzling — is apparatus.

EDO SEGAL: Then let me close the gallery with the question the gallery-goers actually face now, because the debate about machine art has left the seminar room and moved into every commission, every cover, every soundtrack budget. A listener runs a small studio. A client asks: why am I paying your rates when the generator gives me ninety percent of this for nothing? She has thirty seconds in the meeting, not three hours. What does she say?

BODEN: She says: you are not paying me for the ninety percent, and you never were — you are paying me to know which ninety percent to discard. The generator gives you the statistically central version of what your brief asked for, which is to say, the version your competitors are receiving this same afternoon. My rates buy the deviation from central that your situation actually requires — and the standing behind it when it's wrong. Thirty seconds, and every word of it is tonight's three hours compressed.

BENDER: And she adds one sentence with a number in it: ask your lawyer what the generated version costs you the day someone shows it's wearing another artist's work — because I can tell you where every element of mine came from, and that provenance is not a nicety, it's the only indemnity in the room. Meaning has a market price after all, Edo. It's called liability, and it's about to reprice this entire industry.

EDO SEGAL: I have to bring my own confession in here, because this is the floor of the tower I actually live on. There are sentences in my book that began in the machine. I shaped the space — years of my writing in the context, my taste doing the choosing, hundreds of candidates discarded for each one kept. The ones I kept, I kept because they said what I meant better than my own first attempts had. Now: Emily, your framework says the meaning in those sentences is mine — the machine supplied form, I supplied the intent, the stakes, the standing in the world. Margaret, your framework says the machine explored my space and returned with discoveries — that the generative half was genuinely its contribution. Here is what unsettles me at three in the morning: both of those descriptions feel true, simultaneously, about the same sentences. Is it possible you two have spent the evening dividing a single process between you, each holding a real half?

BODEN: Generative and evaluative. Yes. It is precisely possible, and AARON taught me to say so.

BENDER: Form and meaning. The halves are real. What I won't grant is that they're symmetrical — because one half can hire the other, Edo, and only one. Your taste hired the machine's coverage. The machine cannot hire your stakes. Remember which way the employment runs when we get to the chapters about your job.