Why There Are No AI Masterpieces

So much for having scoured the entire web

I.

Nando de Freitas, ex-Google DeepMind, now at Microsoft, asks an important question:

AI has generated tons of text, billions of images, video and songs. I feel however it has never generated a song worth listening, a book worth reading or a movie worth watching. Why?

This is the artistic analogue to the scientific conundrum that keeps podcaster Dwarkesh Patel awake at night (asking Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei here):

What do you make of the fact that these things have basically the entire corpus of human knowledge memorized and they haven’t been able to make a single new connection that has led to a discovery?

Both deserve deep inquiry (Google DeepMind may have solved the latter; will publish a write-up on AlphaEvolve soon), but I will restrain myself to the artistic version here, for I tend to be a bit of a dilettante. Alberto, remember: one idea at a time!

I believe the answer has a lot to do with the fact that few things created by humans with artsy aspirations are worth anything in isolation. Their worth comes from what surrounds them, from the human context that birthed them and the human lives that were impacted by them. That’s how masterpieces are judged as such.

Scientist and blogger Adam Mastroianni talks about this fundamental element of art in his “28 slightly rude notes on writing” (in points 14…