Delivering the 2025 Keith Murdoch Oration in Melbourne last night, composer Sir Jonathan Mills drew attention to the threat posed to artists by generative AI in a speech titled Defending the Human Imagination.

Speaking at the event hosted by State Library Victoria on Wednesday 24 September, Mills challenged the assumption underpinning machine learning: that intelligence can be divorced from feeling, and that creativity can be mimicked by machines trained on statistical probabilities. 

“We are faced with a choice,” Mills said. “ … not between technology and tradition, rather between efficiency and meaning. Between disembodied systems that simulate understanding, and the embodied human acts that create it.”

The shift from memory to machine, Mills warned, will render us “less attuned to our senses, less grounded in place, and less fluent in feeling.” In such an environment, the arts, he said “become not just relevant but essential. They are not decorative, they define. They remind us that intelligence is not merely the solving of problems — it is the making of meaning.”

Jonathan Mills delivers the 2025 Keith Murdoch Oration.Photo © Jarrod Barnes

Calling for a renewed commitment to the arts, Mills went on...