On Democratizing and Learning

With the massive introduction of LLMs into our daily lives, we increasingly witness a curious phenomenon: the idea that certain fields of knowledge once exercised a kind of annoying and unfair repulsion toward newcomers. As if the learning process between novice and expert were nothing more than an unnecessary struggle.

In truth, this phenomenon was not first introduced by the oracle of the 21st century, the "LLM", but is a constant, one could say, of technical research itself: tools, objects, machines, inventions, and concepts are often developed specifically for this purpose. For example, the introduction of home printers allowed, starting in the early 2000s, a technology that was once exclusive to specialized artisans with specific machinery to become accessible to ordinary men and women. However, this phenomenon is not exclusive to machines and objects: consider the spread first of printed paper and later of various digital formats, which allowed anyone who could read to access virtually every field of knowledge. Today, anyone can find excellent sources on the web freely accessible at any level of mastery.

Certainly, these means have helped democratize knowledge, enabling many to acquire the practical and mental tools necessary to create new objects in the countless forms human creativity can take.

Facilitators

I like to think of these practical and mental tools as facilitators of the creative process. These facilitators function primarily to automate many steps that the creator or maker previously needed technical and specialized mastery to perform. For this reason, the creator was often assisted by highly trained technical personnel. In music, for example, early electroacoustic experiments at the RAI Studio di Fonologia saw composers like Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, or Luciano Berio operate laboratory instruments with the help of specialized technicians such as Marino Zuccheri. Today, the electroacoustic composer or performer no longer needs a middle figure or specialized spaces because of:

1. The affordability and wide availability of technical equipment.
2. The migration from analog to digital software.
3. The availability of methods and know-how online.

The same applies, of course, to many creative activities.

Towards Self-Realization

Artistic practice is always accompanied by a significant degree of craftsmanship or technical skill. This can be (1) practical, such as the right mixture to create a specific color, or (2) more managerial or strategic, such as methods to develop a theme in fugue form. We can think of craftsmanship as the accumulated knowledge necessary for doing, passed down from generation to generation; a type of knowledge that can be memorized and applied as routine.¹ I am convinced that the introduction of the facilitators mentioned earlier is phenomenal for solving practical steps in the creative process.

Unlike raw creativity, craftsmanship must be nurtured through proper education and is, in my view, necessarily challenging. Just ten years ago, no one would have believed that by 2025 we would have tools capable of developing thematic material like Notagen or generating complete music like Suno or Udio. I am completely fascinated by these tools, and although the quality of the results is rarely remarkable, there is no reason to doubt that in a short time it will be virtually impossible to distinguish AI-generated music from human-made music, much to the chagrin of those who claim humans will always have an edge.

This is not merely a "technical advancement" but a complete shift in the role of art within society. I believe we must start accepting that artistic creation will first and foremost become a private endeavor. Like amateur sports: most people do not run marathons to win. Studying the artisanal component of the creative process will no longer be because it is necessary to complete the process, but because it is entirely spontaneous and genuine. In other words, there will be no need to study the most technical aspects of a field to produce an object; it will be solely the creator's desire to experience the joy of pure doing.

Doing for the Sake of Doing

If we expand this concept beyond art to the broader idea of "doing," these reflections align with the critique of work.
In his 1935 essay collection In Praise Of Idleness, Bertrand Russell wrote:

[...] what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. [...] Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. There are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle [...].²

But the state of idleness enjoyed by the rentiers could potentially have been reached even by those engaged in productive work: Russell noted that World War I had demonstrated that technological progress allowed much labor, previously considered essential for national production, to be reallocated to non-essential activities like propaganda or ammunition production; from this perspective, the West could maintain labor participation while: "[...] a large proportion of the total produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no work at all.".³ Even without economic constraints, he argued: "[...] men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. [...] The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.".⁴ I believe this "something else" ultimately reduces to the image we want others to have of us. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi put it:

The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment. If a person learns to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself, the burden of social controls automatically falls from one’s shoulders. Power returns to the person when rewards are no longer relegated to outside forces.⁵

AI forces us to confront our upcoming substantial "productive" uselessness, as machines will replace us in generating output. In Andrej Platonov's novel Čevengur, the Čevengur commune transitions from socialism to communism, abolishing labor and silencing machines. Karl Marx knew that automation would be a cornerstone of communism, as it would liberate humans from the oppressive, alienating labor⁶ of bourgeois capitalism. Today, more than a century later, I am struck by the miserable lives of Platonov's characters: "The wind doesn't blow without something to start it, but we are living here without a reason."⁷ Is there anything more terrifying than realizing one has lived a pointless, empty life?

We observe, semester by semester, increasingly advanced language models automating ever more complex steps in our work and creative activities. These technologies can perform tasks we spent years mastering, forcing us to confront the real reasons we do them. I do not believe we will stop working soon. The transition from our current conception of work to whatever AI brings will take time. But when we can find joy in learning to do something new, in practicing creativity for its own sake, we will finally have the chance to do what we love purely for the joy of doing it.

Footnotes

1. This conception of craftsmanship owes much to the chapter "Path of Liberation" in Flow. The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. ↩

2. Bertrand Russell, In Praise Of Idleness (George Allen & Unwin ltd, 1915), 12-13. ↩

3. Russell, In Praise Of Idleness, 21. ↩

4. Russell, In Praise Of Idleness, 24. ↩

5. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow. The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial, 1991), 19. ↩

6. In our discussion, read: for the sake of something else. ↩

7. Andrej Platonov, Chevengur (Ardis Publishers, 1978), 129. ↩