As the creative world loses its s*** over AI “actress” Tilly Norwood, I relax and drink my morning coffee. There are a lot of impressive things artificial intelligence can do. Replacing the human experience is not one of them.

When I was a graduate student, I had “mellow mix” CD. I’d pop it in and listen while coding, analyzing, or writing. It would block out the noise and hustle in the lab. One of the songs on it was a live version of Stevie Nicks singing “Landslide.” In 2021, “Landslide” was listed at 163 in Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” And no doubts here. That song helped me through a PhD thesis.

Nicks wrote “Landslide” in the early 70s. At the time, she was at a crossroads in her life. She was in her mid twenties, and supporting both herself and future Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham as a waitress and cleaner. She was thinking about returning to school. But that would mean giving up on her music career, and her relationship with Buckingham. During a visit to Aspen, Colorado, she found her self looking out at the Rocky Mountains. As she put it, she was “pondering the avalanche of everything that had come crashing down on us… at that moment, my life truly felt like a landslide in many ways” (Crystal Visions insert 2007).

Fleetwood Mac achieved worldwide success with their self-titled album a few years later in 1975. But the initial reception of “Landslide” was mixed. One review reported that Nicks seemed “lost and out of place” (Rolling Stone, 1975).

In 1997, a live version was released as a single that was certified gold in 2009. That was the version that I had on my mix CD. There’s a line in that song that really seemed to resonate.

“And I’m getting older, too.”

Really, it’s quite the bold line. For a female singer-songwriter to write that she’s getting older goes entirely against a culture that idolizes youth. It took courage to sing that in 1975. It still would today.

When I listen to the 1975 version and then the 1997 version, there’s difference in that line. She sings the same words. But in 1975 Nicks was only 27 years old. In 1997 she was coming up on 50. In the intervening years there was a world-wide fame, money, drug abuse, numerous relationships, divorce…

In the 1997 version, that line carries a gravitas that just isn’t present in 1975.

That’s because of the lived experience behind it.

Everything we do, everything we say, carries with it a consequence. Sometimes it’s minor. Sometimes it’s life altering. To paraphrase Sam Harris, if I tell you that I honestly believe Elvis is still alive… there’s an immediate social consequence to our relationship. Life comes with an inevitable accumulation of social, physical and psychological consequences.

For better or worse, we drag this experience around with us like Jacob Marley’s ghostly chains.

When humans create art, it’s influence by our lived experience. That’s why art requires courage to put out into the world, particularly as one gets older.

When an artificial intelligence algorithm creates “art” it is, at best, generating a casserole from its training data. The algorithm is not influenced by the accumulation of social, physical, and psychological consequences it its personal history.

The songs that AI will produce 25 years from now might be different because the algorithms will be more advanced. Nuclear-powered server farms and quantum processors might incorporate pleasing patterns in the music yet-to-be discovered. But they won’t carry with them the human experience that makes art what it is.