“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.”

So said Robert Frost. Yet today, under the scorching heat of what could be an eternal AI summer, even a pinnacle of the human condition – imagination – is being dictated by machines. 

The AI-written murder mystery novella, “Death of an Author”, has already been touted by the New York Times as halfway readable. AiDa is the world’s first AI artist. Anna Indiana, the first AI singer-songwriter. A multitude of applications now available online for people to take a crack at creating in unimaginable, even ethically questionable ways – and not just the masses, but even the elite themselves. Recently, Oscar-winning music composer A.R. Rahman used AI to recreate the voices of two singers who no longer grace the living world, his regular collaborators while they lived.

Is automated simulacra true art? 

Javed Akhtar – veteran poet, screenwriter, lyricist, activist, and a bona fide modern-day maverick – believes not. That it is only our human-ness, the tragedies and comedies of a life lived, that ultimately birth art. Something a machine can only learn, assess, analyse, simulate. Not experience in flesh and bones. Unlike the enigma of being alive. 

And Akhtar, born in 1945, has lived a full palette of pain and joy. The loss of his mother at a tender age. A troubled relationship with his father, who fed him passages from the Communist Manifesto instead of Azaan when he was born. A tryst with alcoholism. No doubt fount for the Bollywood blockbusters he churned out in the 1970s as part of the writing duo Salim-Javed – Sholay, Deewar, Zanjeer, Don. Cult classics that redefined the industry, and created the ‘angry young man’ trope that made Amitab Bachchan. 

Divorce. A professional split with his screenwriting partner in the 1980s. More writing and more hit movies – Mr India, Sagar, Lakshya. Distinct, dramatic – and bringing out the truths of times, in hilarious and heartbreaking ways. Despite wanting to disown his lineage, poetry found its way back into the life of this seventh-generation poet. To great acclaim – Akhtar has been awarded the National Film Award for Best Lyrics five times, three of them in an unprecedented row. A persisting strain of secularism, critical thinking, justice. Which have translated into his prose and poetry, and have bagged him among India’s highest civilian honours, a seat in the Rajya Sabha, and even the Richard Dawkins award for uncompromised free thinking, the first Indian to do so. 

Akhtar claims that “it’s not the experiences but what we learn from them, that shapes us.” At SYNAPSE, Javed Akhtar will share why he believes life learnings translate into art. Why his work resonate with audiences. What makes a maker. The roads already taken by generative AI – and the ones best not to tread.