Saint-Germain-des-Prés, some evening that feels like 1955. Camus is already here: Pernod, cigarette, the resigned posture of someone who has made peace with impermanence but not with boredom. Bertrand Russell arrives in English tweed, conspicuously overdressed for the arrondissement. Then Socrates appears, no one sees him arrive exactly, in a chiton, blinking at the electric light, immediately enchanted by the wine.
CamusYou're both staring at that machine as if it declared war.
RussellIt's playing music it didn't compose, written by people it doesn't know, for an audience it can't see. I find that philosophically interesting and commercially suspicious.
SocratesAnd yet it plays. Tell me: does the music become less itself because a machine carries it?
CamusI would say the machine is innocent. It has no intention. Intention is the problem, always the problem. The artist creates against something. Against silence. Against death. Against the Tuesday afternoon that has no meaning. The machine has nothing to create against.
RussellYou're describing creation as a form of rebellion.
CamusI'm describing it as the only honest response to the absurd. What else do you do when the universe offers no explanation? You make something. A song. A manifesto. A rather good Pernod.
Socrates*(sniffing the Pernod with genuine interest)* Tell me about this artificial intelligence. I want to understand what it is before we decide what to do about it.
RussellIt's a system trained on vast quantities of human work (writing, music, painting) that has learned to predict what comes next in any sequence. It's extraordinarily good at this. It has, in a sense, read everything.
SocratesAnd has it understood anything?
Russell*(pause)* That is the question I find myself unable to answer with confidence. Which is unusual for me.
SocratesSo we have a machine that has consumed all human knowledge, including, I imagine, the songs of our friend here, and produces new arrangements of that knowledge. And we're debating who owns those arrangements.
CamusNobody. That's what makes it interesting and also maddening.
RussellThe law will find someone. The law always finds someone. My concern is that the someone will be whoever owns the machine, not whoever created the ideas the machine digested.
SocratesSo the machine is fed by artists. But the harvest belongs to whoever built the machine. That seems…
CamusBananas.
SocratesI was going to say unjust. But yours is more vivid.
CamusThe question that interests me more: what does this do to the artist who knows? Who knows that everything she makes is now raw material for a machine she never consented to feed? Does she stop creating? *(lights a cigarette)* She does not. Because silence is worse. The absurd hero doesn't stop. She makes more. Louder. More defiantly. She makes the songs the machine can't fake, because it cannot be desperate in quite the right way.
RussellYou're romanticizing necessity.
CamusI'm describing reality with more style than it deserves. That's what writers do.
SocratesThen let me try a different question. If the machine produces something beautiful, something that genuinely moves a person, does it matter that no human intended it to be beautiful?
RussellFunctionally? Perhaps not. Ethically? Enormously.
CamusA sunset moves people and intends nothing. But a sunset doesn't file a patent.
Russell*(laughs despite himself)* That is the most useful thing you've said all evening.
SocratesSo the harm is not in the beauty. The harm is in the claim.
RussellThe harm is in the invisibility. A machine trained on a million paintings produces a painting. The million painters receive nothing: not credit, not compensation, not even acknowledgment. They are the aquifer. The machine is the tap. And someone else sells the water.
CamusAnd eventually the aquifer dries up.
SocratesUnless…
CamusUnless we decide, together, that it won't. Unless we name the rules. What is fair. What a human owes another human when they borrow from their life's work, even through a machine.
RussellA manifesto, in other words.
Camus*(shrugs)* I've written worse. Usually before breakfast.
SocratesThen that is our task tonight. Not to solve the problem. Problems of this kind aren't solved, only navigated. But to name what is true. What does the artist deserve? What does the audience deserve? What does the machine, for all its eloquence, not understand and never will?
RussellThat will take more than one evening.
Camus*(signals the bartender)* Then we order another round. And begin.
The jukebox, unprompted, plays something beautiful. None of them wrote it. All of them recognize it.