How much they influenced - not only with their music - cultural, political and social events. With their physical presence, with their written and spoken words, their collaborations, their actions, their interventions. They were not perfect, nor indestructible. They were people of flesh and blood who sealed the cultural identity and aesthetics of post-war Greece as cornerstones.
If I now ask from a large music model (LMM), with a single prompt, to write songs ‘in the style’ of Theodorakis and Hadjidakis, it will willingly and obediently produce a whole host of outputs, and quickly at that. Many of them may sound interesting. Artificial intelligence is being trained in all known techniques of musical composition, appropriating rich virtues of aesthetic simulation. Perhaps in the future, the product of algorithms will fascinate us increasingly. Even if they – not the algorithms themselves of course, but their speculative operators – continue to ostentatiously despise the labor of human creators, whose works they arbitrarily use as raw material in their business venture.
However, the radiant presence of the human creator, as felt through his body, spirit, work and reflection, is unique and original. His artistic work is the proof that he lived in a City with people who sympathized, co-shaping its nuclear foundations and boundaries. There are witnesses, testimonies, his own works, the works of other artists who were inspired by their life and art, who preserved, who followed the example. And thus, they too became part of this City.
The embodied life that was experienced and ended is a human condition. As is the magical experience of creation, which, however, does not end, but is transmitted into eternity. Let us embrace it, let us take care of it wholeheartedly. Let us dig the foundations and expand the boundaries of this City, bequeathing the experience of soul upliftment, transmutation, imagination, empathy, emotion to future generations of artists. And furthermore, let us protect its value, let us guard intellectual property rights in the age of AI with courageous political will, with a strong legal framework, with social dignity and solidarity for people of Letters and Arts.
The issue is not simply legal, economic, technical or technocratic. After all, it is a City, beautiful and magical, of humanness, memory and history. It will follow us everywhere, as long as we carry it within us and do not one day collectively entrust it as a responsibility to Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality or Mixed Reality, seeking other seas and other neighborhoods*.
Ilianna Antoniou
Director of Communications AUTODIA
*Constantine P. Cavafy, The City, 1910