A new Arts policy has been released to help raise the creative standard just as a balding redhead called Ed Sheeran lowers it by performing to record crowds at the MCG. Both of them can’t be right.

As counterpoint to the Sheeran ordinariness and doubling down on the cultural disconnect, a flamboyant Harry Styles in gender-bending yellow flares and elevator boots is finding his inner Daniel Ricciardo by doing shoeys at his concerts to Gen Z chants of ‘shoey, shoey, shoey’ which sounds an awful lot like the ‘Aussie, Aussie Aussie, oi, oi, oi’ of previous generations the Z-ers now seem to despise (or envy – it’s never clear which) because of their property portfolios.

But the real threat to the Arts isn’t this intersectionality of F1 gasoline, generational resentment and muzak or whether the dancers in Sam Smith’s lamely demonic fire dance Grammy performance of his hit dirge ‘Unholy’ were suitably protected in red fireproof jumpsuits and crucifixes like a deeply Catholic and over-sexed Ferrari pit crew. No, it’s Artificial Intelligence, as it will soon make dummies of all us self-declared creative types.

AI is the future of the culture we are told, by software experts who couldn’t care less about culture unless it’s providing the narrative for a new online game.  An ever-advancing technology that if you believe the IT talking heads replicates human intelligence and at a touch of a button can generate great art, music and writing.

I’ve just been reading that iconic rock magazine Rolling Stone intends to use AI to help write its faux-stoner rock exposes and other media are about to follow. It’ll be the novels and poems that nobody ever reads next unless they create a new AI app that generates sufficiently bored Friends of the ABC looking for a nice day out. This was the most disappointing news of the summer, even more disappointing than hearing music legend Molly dropped his designer jeans at Elton John’s concert and then had to waddle off with them around his ankles escorted by security like an ageing Elvis at the end of one of his Vegas shows. How far Aussie rock culture has fallen since Barnesy used to bellow about depressed Vietnam Vets from the top of a speaker stack.

And really, that is the point. AI may be great at creating something out of nothing other than an online database, but how is it going to physically throw television sets out of hotel windows like in the exciting Seventies or for that matter loosen the belt on Molly’s trousers like in 2023? You need real journalists or Richard Wilkins to do that rock ‘n roll heavy lifting and since his ashes got shot out of a cannon and they put ‘nicotine kills’ warnings on the side of cigarette packaging they don’t have Hunter S. Thompson to do the mescaline-addled dirty work anymore.

Examples of our own AI, hologramed virtual reality of Australian culture abound. Is there anything more ‘artificial intelligence’, culturally sausage-machined, phoned-in and not really what it claims to be than the Adelaide Writers Festival with its groupthink speakers all sharing the same political views and agreeing with each other that it’s all Israel’s fault, so Netanyahu can f–k off? Just hit the button marked ‘agitprop’, then buy the t-shirt. Meanwhile, festival organisers gaslight the community, claiming this is riveting and dangerous debate when all I could see was a lot of miked-up former journalists née novelists discussing in unison the rise and fall of ScoMo without a dissenting opinion. Surely, this is all computer generated by some spotty Silicon Valley IT nerd.

Even sadder and derivative is how great art is being appropriated and its real meaning denuded in the beige cause of political protest by ex-teacher climate protesters lost in their retirement miasma and Googling ‘how to protest safely’ guides all in the name of Greta. With their thinning hair and wearing ‘I’m with stupid’ t-shirts at the NGV while saving the planet by gluing themselves to the nearest Picasso but then ruining the revolutionary vibe by insisting no harm was done to the Picasso after all, as it was behind protective glass. Radical zimmer frame not radical chic.

Some will see this as an over-reaction to a new technology that will save the culture and recently gave us the new ABBA comeback album and 1970s hot Agnetha hologram. But while they might claim AI is just keeping it ‘real and modern’, it really isn’t. It’s just another of those contemporary cultural tropes like my gardener/mechanic/child could have painted that for one-tenth of the price. It misses the point that the price is often the most creative part of the artistic experience.

Arts Minister Tony Burke made an interesting observation when launching his new policy at the once rock and roll mosh pit, now gentrified Esplanade Hotel where the wagyu beef goes for $68 and the staff all look like they’re dating AFL footballers, when he said he misses the sticky floorboards from his pub-rock-going youth.

I often feel this way too when it comes to culture – it’s the fog of nostalgia, and something we all need to get over if we want to grow up and read sensible novels about our personal value system and architecture. I used to go to ‘The Espy’, as all the marketing materials now emphatically call it and my sticky floorboards memories are not as romantic as they usually involve being dumped by an emo girlfriend midway through a Blue Ruin gig because I thought Banarama’s version of ‘Venus’ was better.

Rather than uplifting us, soon AI will have everyone thinking they can do what the guy with the acoustic guitar in your local pub’s front bar can do but with less whining about putting something in the tip jar – a sort of virtual Ed Sheeran. Then the whole artifice will start falling down.

We’ve seen this movie all before. Usually directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Like the Americans in Vietnam, AI must destroy the inner suburban art collective village in order to save it.