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Why Artist Residencies May Be Culture’s Best Defense Against Automation

As A.I. automates creative labor and public arts funding shrinks, MacDowell executive director Chiwoniso Kaitano sees residencies as protectors of the slow, human work of making something new.

A.I. is remaking our social, political and cultural fabrics, and even if we are at the beginning of what this new age will mean for humanity, it is already clear that few things will be the same—not for us or our children. More specifically, what does this new world portend for those of us who have made a home in literature, painting, film, scholarship or any of the other creative disciplines so often grouped together as the “arts and humanities”? If we understand these separate pursuits as comprising a shared and collective attempt to understand our world, our ideas and our humanness, what is lost when we relinquish even a small part of the act of creation to non-human intelligence? If images, conceptualizing or crafting a story or reporting an event can all be produced by the machinery of A.I., will we soon start to forget about the works of art that were created not by optimizing inputs, but through deep human introspection and rigorous iterative creativity fed by emotion, empathy and human intelligence?

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