Artificial Intelligence: How to distinguish truth from falsehood in music, theater, and film

Umberto Eco said that telling stories and listening to them was a biological human need. The multiplication of languages, aside from writing, did not shatter that trait. But in a scenario where generative AI can be tasked with creating scripts, monologues, animations, stories, and songs, it's worth scanning what's happening in theater, film, and music. Macarena García Lenzi , author of, among other works, La paciencia (fatídica teatral) (The Patience ( Fatidic Theatrical)—at El Camarín de las Musas on Saturdays—says: “For my work as a playwright, the queries I find useful are in research, in linguistic registers, idioms, forms of expression by period, region, social class, age range, and profession.”

When it comes to storytelling, the assessment changes. “In terms of storytelling, while I'm incredibly surprised by the level of sarcasm it reaches, at least at this still-precarious stage of AI, it keeps falling into predictable clichés, which is why it doesn't give me great results. The same goes for dialogue; too much cliché, but little uniqueness,” he says.

Of course, there have already been sustained theatrical experiments with AI. SH4DOW , which premiered in Madrid in 2023, is one of them, and the play's "protagonist" is a creation based on that technology. On a local level, Signos premiered in Rosario last year, whose dramaturgy was derived from a computer program.

130 years after the first cinematic performances, the proliferation of digital creations is a sign of the times. Ramiro San Honorio, audiovisual academic director and president of the Argentores New Technologies Advisory Committee , explains the most common uses of AI in the seventh art: “The most frequent uses are in video post-production, visual effects, and editing. And within post-production, AI is working its magic in the sound field: from erasing noise to modifying voices.”

In The Brutalist , the filmmakers used AI to retouch Hungarian dialogue from Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones . Director Brady Corbet acknowledged using the technology to generate the film's final scenes. Realistic locations can be created without the crew or actors ever having set foot in them.

“At the acting level, a lot is lost if the actor isn't in that environment; filming is a process where there are interactions and improvisations,” says San Honorio. He points out something increasingly common: it's confusing to understand what's made with AI and what isn't. As for series, there are some whose scripts were created using these technologies, to the delight of production company owners, who saved on screenwriter fees. Among them are Artificial and Next-Gen, as well as the short film SunSpring.

AI tools can allow you to "weed" out sounds from a song and transform them into another. Or generate new ones and combine them so that this alchemy results in a new song. They also make it possible to use an artist's voice to interpret a totally different genre... Daniel Melero is one of the first techno dynamos in Argentina. In fact, aside from his role in Los Encargados , one of his albums is even called that, Tecno (2000). However, he is far from fetishizing AI. "It's a tool. What scares people is that AI learns, and I think that's true. It learned to extract instruments and then resample them or use them as the basis for a new song. Then, these devices are so open that they are learning human mediocrity. They are moving toward a lowest common denominator. AI lacks the character to be an intelligence; it produces almost obvious answers. It's a database repeating itself," he says, in a telephone conversation.

If these products intervene in the musical process, they can also do so at the lyrical level. Today, it's easy to delegate the writing of lyrics to AI. In this regard, Melero emphasizes: " Chat Poetry is useful to me. I'm interested in doing the opposite, to find out what I wouldn't want to say."

One concern is whether shedding the ability to tell stories and relying on AI for it doesn't degrade that human attribute, just as the ability to navigate without GPS has been diluted. In fact, while the possible use includes serving as an aid to the human creator, on many occasions the real, and often unspoken, use is to generate the entire work.

Spanish psychoanalyst Lola López Mondéjar has written Without Story: Atrophy of Narrative Capacity and Loss of Subjectivity . “The use of AI and large language models produces a loss of cognitive capacities, the ability to synthesize, vocabulary, and the ability to think and narrate. By delegating the elaboration of texts or the creation of artistic products to AI, our own creative imagination and critical thinking are atrophied. AI can synthesize but not innovate, given that its sources are the texts and cultural artifacts that we have already created, hence it is subject to the biases and prejudices most common in those same texts, without the capacity to discern and discard,” she maintains.

For his part, Saint Honorius asserts: “AI will bring us enormous joy in medicine and other scientific fields, but I don't know if this tool was necessary in art, which goes hand in hand with the human soul.” This story is just beginning, and it seems that machines have something, or a lot, to say.