The Banality Machine

I had a session today with two of my favorite people. She’s an esteemed writer, and he’s a renowned musician. They’re aging now. And way back when, he helped created electronic music, which is a thing that I love, and do myself. Most music today, whether you know it or not, is electronic, made with synthesizers, in computers. 

His compositions were striking, radical, unimagined. He travelled the world and played them in Asia, Europe, America. And in those days, what he did was revolutionary. To lay the groundwork, to form the syntax and grammar, for the music that would sweep the world—no small thing. He was one of the first people to play synthesizers like real musical instruments, explore and push their boundaries, and those of music itself.

Now. It’s a joy to speak with people this accomplished. Two artists that I admire and respect so much. I often say that I’m humbled by you, and I am.

And today’s session, like so many do, made me stop and think.

People often ask for my opinions on AI. And I sort of…go blank. It’s not that I don’t have an opinion. It’s that…I don’t care very much. I know how that sounds, so bear with me.

Welcome to the Banality Machine.

If we think about what AI really is, and what it’ll do—a question that obsesses Americans in particular, and especially the kinds of Americans who are themselves obsessed with money and power—then my answer goes like this. 

AI is a Banality Machine. 

Everything that’s been created with AI—how does it strike you? The first thing we can observe is that nobody actually likes it. They’re sort of repelled by it. This is true in everything, from ads, to video games, to literature, to music. People are “grossed out,” or “creeped out,” or whatever pop vernacular you want to employ.

What they’re not is moved. They don’t feel anything. Nothing. Now, one thing I observe when I make music is this: a singer can hit the right notes. Lots do. But only a really good one can move people. When we’re writing songs, we are trying to express emotion. Stories, books, plays, articles—doesn’t matter.

Every form of human expression that comes from AI is banal.

I searched for the right word for some time, when people would ask me about AI. I now think the correct word is: “banal.” Make something with AI, and the results are guaranteed to be banal.

Now. That’s OK, in a way, to begin with, at least, because a lot of what we do is banal. Need some kind of legal agreement drafted? Banal. Want to compare stock funds? Banal. I read an article this morning about AI insurance agents beginning to threaten real ones. Insurance, what a nightmare. We all dread dealing with it. Banal.

So AI can handle the banal stuff of human existence, to a degree. Is that OK? Sort of, but not really. Even in these mundane encounters, I suppose, we should want more than the banal. Not everything has to be a transcendent experience, but surely we as a society can do better than what you might call omnibanality.

AI is going to destroy what’s left of the American economy. America famously won’t regulate much, from guns to concentration camps. So AI will indeed just ravage entire fields, professions, sectors, and domains. It won’t be like this in other places. See how much of the world is already banning social media for kids? It’ll do the same with AI, eventually, and that’s because, for example, unions exist, nor are corporations or economies structured in nearly such a purely capitalist way. People have much, much more power. In America, only billionaires do.

AI is a means of production. That much is true. But of what? It’s a means of replication. It takes stuff it’s been trained on, remixes it, and spits it back out. AI couldn’t write the first book, song, or even legal contract. 

So AI is a universal means of digital replication. That means: it can replicate pretty much anything that already exists digitally. What it can’t do, and we all know this, is really create something new. This isn’t a theoretical or abstract point. All those dumb AI videos that are “original” are actually in the style of serious artists, usually, even if it’s just Miyazaki, right down to Van Gogh, and that’s true of writing. Lawyers aren’t great artists, nor are insurance agents, but the same logic is true.

AI is a universal means of digital replication, and in that way, every profession that depends on digital production will be decimated by it. Now, you can spit out an infinite number of everythings.

An infinite number of everythings. Songs. Videos. Books. Articles. Legal contracts. Insurance agreements. Stock funds. But will any of them be any good?

AI in this way will force us to rethink what “productivity” is. If I can create an infinite number of everythings with the press of button, then is my productivity infinite? 

A lot of economists already fail this test. They’ll say: yes. But productivity, in fact, is only defined by what something is worth. If my million everythings are worthless, in that nobody will pay for them, then in fact, my productivity is zero.

And what about if nobody can pay for them? What if AI’s taken all the jobs, and sure, everybody’s become a welder, or whatnot, but guess what, there are only ten billionaires left in the economy…what are all the welders going to weld? Don’t kid yourself that America, at least, will ever have a Universal Basic Income, LOL, this is the same society that turns down universal healthcare, education, and childcare, and has done for a century now. 

So if nobody can pay for the infinite everythings I can make with the press of a button, then again, my productivity is exactly zero. 

And in this sense, we are headed for the scrapheap. Not just as human beings, but in the sense that whatever AI is “creating” is mostly a “deadweight loss.”

Now comes the tricky part. Bear with me.

We humans are very, very bad at seeing the invisible. It doesn’t come easily to us—how could it? And so when things have hidden costs, we aren’t often very good at assessing, calculating, or even understanding them.

Among hidden costs, the largest is often what’s known as “opportunity cost,” which is basically what you could have done otherwise. With that same amount of money. Or time. Or energy. Or human possibility.

Now imagine that the man I talked about earlier, who helped invent electronic music as we know it, had sat down with AI, instead of the early synthesizers, and tried to push their boundaries to the limits. What would he have created?

Nothing. AI would have helped him write a million songs like, I don’t know, the Beatles. And so what? We already had a Beatles. We didn’t need a million more of their songs, and worse ones, too, knockoffs, without Lennon’s genius. He would have just made copies of copies of copies. Not anything revolutionary, groundbreaking, that genuinely transformed the world a few decades later.

So the opportunity cost would have been immense. Incalculable. Maybe electronic music as we know it today wouldn’t exist. Maybe it would have taken on a totally different form. Doesn’t matter, the point is: we’re terrible at assessing hidden costs.

So let me make the socioeconomics now clear.

Every time that we use AI, we are making something banal. We can even make an infinite number of everythings, because AI is, yes, a universal means of replication. So what? All we are doing is adding banality to the world, the economy, and to our lives.

And nobody will pay much for that. You can already see that that’s true. In every field of the arts, what’s created with AI…people don’t want to pay for it. That’ll soon be true in mundane business spheres, too. If AI’s your insurance agent, do you care about it? Do you think to yourself, well, that guy needs a house and to feed his kids, too? Of course not. The marginal cost you are willing to pay is zero.

That is because the marginal cost of making what AI can make—an infinite number of everthings is also zero. In fact, not really, because we all know that AI costs vast amounts of planetary resources.

So now the economics are negative: we consume real resources, to create worthless things, which are banal.

But those economics aren’t just negative because of the planetary suck of datacenter. They’re negative for a far, far more pernicious reason. The cost to human creativity itself. Every time that we use AI to make endless banal everythings is time, energy, human potential, that we aren’t using to create things which aren’t banal.

Only things which aren’t banal have value. If you doubt me, visit, I don’t know, Cartier sometime, or Ferrari. These “luxuries,” as they’re called, command immense premiums, precisely because they aren’t banal. If they were? How fast would those differentials shrink? And wouldn’t they end up at zero?

So: the differential will shrink to zero. It already is. Nobody is willing to pay a penny more for anything made with AI, and they never will be. They are only willing to pay less, and that’s true from everyday consumers, to titans of business, who are busy dismantling entire globe-spanning corporations, because AI can “do it cheaper.” But cheaper is not always better, if what you end up making as a result is worth less. Or maybe even worthless.

AI is a Banality Machine, in these ways. Not just creatively—that much is obvious. In my own little musical hobby, sure, AI vocalists already exist. Why would I bother? I’m trying to have fun. And it’s no fun. When I find a singer—a real human singer—that I like, I happily pay them quite a bit, because we’re making art, it’s intense, and it’s fun. What would I pay for an AI vocalist? Ever? Maybe…a hundredth of the price.

Is that good enough? Maybe to make whomever codes the app a few bucks. But the opportunity cost is far, far greater. Multiply that times a billion, and you get to an economy that’s nothing at all. 

People drown in the banal, and everything is banal, and worse, because that’s all that’s left, and that’s all people are chasing, true creativity, innovation, revolution, isn’t even dreamed of anymore. That already sounds a lot like social media. We’ve been on that road for a while. Social media’s also a banality machine. What, did you think MrBeast was this age’s Charles Dickens or George Orwell?

All the above will be quite OK with “tech bros.” But the rest of us should think twice. Handing the power to conflate creativity and universal digital replication to guys who think hoodies are the height of style and Ovid is a thing on a Taco Bell menu is a mistake. These are people who have no taste or judgment, and that’s obvious, but what’s worse is that they reject the idea that taste or judgment or education or choices or aesthetics or art or science matter. Everything is just a universal process of replication, and everything exists in the same moral vacuum.

Do you know what banality really is? A moral vacuum. When we look at Munch’s Scream, we see the tension and agony of the modern world shrieking back at us. It is not a moral vacuum. When the man I admire made this revolutionary music, it was about energy, freedom, power, love. It wasn’t a moral vacuum. When Picasso painted Guernica, or Van Gogh painted Starry night, there was no moral vacuum. 

All these things are lit with the luminous intensity of the human cry. The cry is the primal expression. It is the cry of wounding, of what it is to be alive, which is terror, pain, suffering. Tragedy. From that tragedy comes the need for beauty, for love, for grace. Only in those do we find redemption. Which we express, with our fragile, broken human arms, every time that we lift a pen, write a word, utter a whisper, or embrace someone we care for. All we are ever doing is expression our revolution of love against time and dust. Camus taught us this. Some of us live it.

The Banality Machine takes all that away from us.

And in that sense, it is something degrading. This is why we respond to AI with feelings not just of dread, or even of revulsion, but of futility. Life is already futile. It is already a death sentence. Our job is to make it beautiful, luminous, alive, lit with love and truth and nobility and honor. To kneel in dignity, and kiss the soil. 

Our job isn’t to make life more banal. 

Is it?

To accept that is to be degraded. It is to lay down the arms of revolution, which are just the arms of love, and step into the void. But nothing lives in the void. 

Human history is littered with banality. None of it has ever mattered. We don’t remember it, except to shudder when it crosses into Arendt’s famous evil. So then does a machine that can make everything banal, and make banality everything, matter, in the end, either?

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

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