David Hajdu Explores AI in Art in His New Book

In The Uncanny Muse,  Journalism Professor David Hajdu examines the history of automation in the arts from the Baroque period to the age of AI. He delves into one of the most controversial aspects of AI: artificial creativity. The adoption of technology and machinery has long transformed the world, but as the potential for artificial intelligence expands, Hajdu explores new, increasingly urgent questions about technology’s role in culture.

From a life-size, mechanical doll that made headlines in Victorian London, to the doll’s modern, AI-pop star counterpart, Hajdu traces the varied ways in which inventors and artists have sought to emulate mental processes and mechanize creative production. For decades, machines and artists have engaged in expressing the human condition—along with the condition of living with machines—through player pianos, broadcasting technology, electric organs, digital movie effects, synthesizers, and motion capture. By communicating and informing human knowledge, machines have exerted considerable influence on the history of art.

Hajdu discusses his new book with Columbia News, as well as what he’s read lately and recommends, what books he’s tackling next, and other projects he’s working on.

What was the genesis of this book?

The book that ended up as The Uncanny Muse began as a wholly different kind of project. It started as a journalistic volume, an account of the latest developments in artificial-intelligence research, reported on the ground as events occurred. I did quite a bit of reporting in real time, observing and interviewing innovators in AI science, and I was confronted with bold claims I found puzzling. I heard that machine learning was changing the very nature of creativity, and that machines could rival and perhaps even surpass human beings as producers of creative work. I also heard, by contrast, that machines had no business meddling into the making of art of any kind, because art was the sole province of humankind.

As I thought more and more about these questions, I came to see the questions themselves as more interesting than the latest goings-on in AI labs. So I abandoned the reporting project, and took on a challenge considerably more daunting—to examine the role that machines have played in the creative process throughout history, from the rise of the industrial age to the current moment of computational creativity. Among the things I considered was the possibility that machines have been more than mere tools for artists—often, more like creative collaborators. Before machine learning, machines were teaching us.

The book I wrote breaks a few of the cardinal rules I teach my students as a journalism professor. The Uncanny Muse isn't focused on one or a handful of interesting people. It's focused on machinery, which, I know, is something a lot of people may not be interested in reading about. But I came to find myself fascinated by the under-appreciated role machines have played in the creative arts, and I tried to convey that fascination in the book.

What are some examples from the book of how machines have enabled, not stifled, creativity?

The symphony orchestra has dozens of machines called instruments, including one, the piano, with 12,000 components. Before electricity, the pump organ was a machine for musical synthesis, and later, electronic synthesizers made possible the production of a virtually limitless variety of musical and extra-musical sounds, including those emulating other kinds of machines. The microphone was a machine of transformative impact in popular music, and so was the machinery of recording and broadcast technology. In some spheres of music, the work has employed mechanical means to exult in the aesthetic of the mechanical. Think of house music and techno. And I haven't even mentioned the visual arts, where machines we call cameras have done more than a little to enable creativity. 

What have you read lately that you recommend, and why?

I just finished Darryl Pinckney's gorgeous memoir of his early career, Come Back in September. It's candid and humble at the same time, and it shows how little he has to be humble about as a writer. I also recently dove back into the collection of Elizabeth Bishop's writing outside of poetry, Prose, which has some of the most keenly observed nonfiction I've ever read. Her close reading of the architecture in Brasília, Brazil’s capital, is wonderfully vivid and refined arts criticism.

What's next on your reading list?

The pile of books on my bedside table is literally taller than my lamp. The book on the top—next for me—is Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto. I eat up everything Whitehead produces: I’m taken in by the masterly storytelling, and his writing always sticks with me. The ideas under the surface bubble up. Next on the pile is something of a different sort, a ruminative study of mourning and celebration through music, Jazz and Death, by Walter van de Leur, a brilliant musicologist based in the Netherlands.

What's the best book you ever received as a gift?

About six months ago, an old friend of mine from college, Bob Denmark, sent me a copy of Richard Zenith's biography of the Portuguese poet and writer, Fernando Pessoa. Bob had started the book, and thought we could read it at the same time and talk about it. It's fabulous, rich in details and insights, and Bob and I have had fun discussing it. But it’s also over 1,000 pages long, so I'm starting to wonder if we'll ever get to talk about anything else.

What are you working on now?

I'm wrapping up work on a musical project, a song cycle I've written the libretto for. It's a collection of non-fiction songs about figures from history I admire, titled Lives of the Saints. The subjects of the songs range from Ada Lovelace and Leonora Carrington to my late sister, Barbara. It's a bit unusual, but not as strange as The Uncanny Muse.

What are you teaching this semester?

The core seminar in arts and culture in the MA Program at the Journalism School. I dedicated The Uncanny Muse to three of my own teachers at New York University, and the students I've been privileged to teach at Columbia. My current class is sharp. I expect them to give me quite a hard time for breaking the rules I break in the new book.