AI's Impact on Art and Culture: The Real Costs of Being Real

In a recent essay on ArtsJournal, Doug McLennan reflects on the growing difficulty of distinguishing real from artificial in the age of AI, based on 127 stories collected that week. He recounts a PR pitch that was suspiciously well-calibrated, and notes similar incidents involving book critic Ron Charles and authors solicited by fake Terry Gross and Reese Witherspoon personas. The essay highlights the rise of AI-generated news: Runtime Wire has published nearly 2,000 stories by crawling databases and social feeds, competing with traditional journalism. Traffic to top US news sites has fallen by a third, and 53% of online traffic is now machine-generated. An MIT study shows that removing any single image from a large language model's training data doesn't change output, and 97% of listeners couldn't distinguish AI from human music. The essay discusses the erosion of attribution and authorship, the problem of fake audiences, and the shift toward live, un-fakeable experiences, citing examples like Hadestown's filmed run grossing $20.7 million and Nate Bargatze selling two million tickets. It also covers the National Symphony's season without the Kennedy Center, legal battles involving ABC and Paramount, and the broader implications for artists and institutions in a machine-mediated marketplace.