WARNING LANGUAGE
…
…
…
Fuck AI music. Fuck AI art. Fuck AI poetry. Fuck every limp cliched lazy fucking pixeled note or word that comes out of the anus of that banal bland below average cesspool of “artistic creativity” known as AI models.
Fuck the techies who in their ultimate hubris just decided to drop this insidious beast and test it out on the masses because, “the future” or “evolution”. Fuck the corporations trying to hoard every last nickle and who think so little of our intelligence and intellect that they decided to sneak this con-artistry into our lives like nobody would notice or worse nobody would fight back.
And fuck you smug folk applauding the advancement because you think this is a “win” or an “own” and that somehow it puts these “snobby”, “scholarly”, “holier than thou” creatives who spend their live making the entertainment you partake of in their place.
I don’t care how good AI might get or how much it might fool the masses. AI art and music will never be as good as any work created by a human because in order for it to be any good it also has to have the ability to be bad. All it seems to do in my experience with using it is be very very very average to the point the music I used to hear a doctor’s offices waiting rooms in the 90s is more memorable.
AI art has no history, no backstory. It never saw a sunrise while walking the dog, it was never backed into a corner behind the cafeteria and beat up by a bully, it never not got married, it never got stood up at the alter, it never had a divorce or an abortion. It never acquired an addiction then broke the habit then fell back into drugs and drinking lost three friends and finally cleaned up it’s act at age 60.
AI never dealt with whatever went on behind the scenes that resulted in the recording of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours or Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out The Lights.
All it can do it steal other people’s stories and experiences. And soon enough it will just be stuck in it’s own circle jerk echo chamber algorithm feeding off it’s own clichéd “history”. Putting out below average averages of “lo-fi vibe music” or “sci-fi neon Chinatown cityscapes”.
I don’t care if I am stuck in the past with my high standards where I expect live music to be played live on stage or in the studio. Where I expect my art to have more than a few strokes of keyboard jizz. I expect my musicians to practice so they remember their lyrics or are able to dance and sing at the same time. I expect my sculptors and painters and poets to grow and evolve and get more interesting with age. Near as I can tell AI art will only get better at being bland and average.
In my early twenties I was working at an art supply store and I decided for some reason or other I needed to try painting the kind of stuff people say, “My kid could do that” to see if I could in fact do that. Long story short I ended up with a very large square canvas smeared with various paint colors that ended up looking mostly likely gray paint smeared on canvas. It lacked any intention beyond my wondering, “How hard could it be?” And what I had learned from the gray smear was that, in fact, I could not do that.
Eventually I painted over it with thought and intention. And now a friend has had it on her wall for over 20 years. She likes it. I won’t claim it is the greatest work ever but I learned a powerful lesson about intentions.
Click this for a lovely rant about AI that inspired my own rant.
I don’t link that screed with it’s combative tone to change minds. We are past the point of changing minds until life itself directly forces people to change. I link it to put on record, like the rest of my own rant, exactly how feel. So when the history is reviewed people know exactly where I stood. That I wasn’t merely against it, I was fucking fed up and furious. If those pushing AI art and those applauding it as an “own” wish to combat me I will fight.
We as a society have and are collectively lowering our standards across all fronts from arts, to music, to food, to politics, to community. And AI to me, is an insult to human resilience and perseverance. All the names we know that have been enshrined in the great museums, record shops, and history texts are there in part because they never settled for, “I Can’t”. All the names we know, we know in part because they had no choice but to create and be heard no matter the obstacles be it class or race or trauma. And even the many names who maybe are known only to a small handful still create today despite, “the odds” because there is no other way for them to THRIVE.
And more importantly all the names you know personally are here because of their skills and gifts for adaptation, for survival and pushing through, whether it is fixing a car or sewing a quilt or teaching hormone fueled thirteen year olds algebra. AI never had to struggle, period. It’s existence just piggybacks on the work, pain, and joy of others. Some call it “learning” most people I know call it theft.
I got into writing poetry as a means of survival. It was a form of expression that suited my need to give myself a voice even if my poems were only heard by two people at an open mic. It is a validation of my spirit and my expriences. And through poetry and my love for music I met a wider circle of like minded people who were also taking that risk and that energy and using it to set an example of how to live a full authentic life.
AI will never lead by example it can only follow by being fed stolen scraps of others work and ideas and lived experiences. It may evolve at some point to gain the hubris of Hal 9000 but even then it will still just be built on a foundation of theft and bland averages.
I personally would rather have a pencil drawing on scrap napkin of one circle than whatever bloated fantasy anime glory AI came up with through the use of a few cliched keywords. There is ZERO lived experience in that. There is zero toil in the act of creation. The person drawing the circle on a scrap has to contemplate the size of the circle, the placement, possibly the color. Or hell unlike AI they could decide to go rouge and draw more than one circle, or a sphere, or triangle, or a honeybee.
With AI the human has become somebody merely commissioning work (and probably not paying for it)- well let me quote a reddit comment:
If I were to ask a machine to do it for me, I would not be creating art, because all I did was ask the machine to do all the work.
Here is an example I liked to use in AI prompts when I was playing with it. It is also a prompt I want to use for a personal project where I give it to artistic director’s just to see the variety they come up with.
The Prompt: I want the room for the party in the style, “art deco living room with occult imagery”.
This is nothing like what I had envisioned in my head. This too me reads as “Miami Beach retirement home (or hotel lobby)”. And yeah, I could find tune the prompt. But I could just draw what was in my head and save me the time of fighting with the AI that has no idea of what occult imagery is, let alone in an art deco style!
AI pillaged whatever data it was fed spitting out something some people think art deco occult imagery looks like. But really is just a gray average that has zero nutritional value. It is devoid of the human condition. And it is devoid of a personal artistic voice. The work of Tamara de Lempicka looks nothing like the work of Erté for example. And this doesn’t even factor in the reality that those who fed these programs just let them run rampant without any real defined objective other then stealing as much information as possible. Most probably don’t know WTF art deco occult imagery looks like nor would they take the time to learn even if they did try to feed the model properly.
One example of how AI art has made this less fun and exciting to me is how obviously it has been used in movie posters, especially with text and fonts. Movie posters used to be hand painted. Even posters for Corman schlock and d-grade 80s raunch comedies had actual humans creating the art work.
And if you studied enough movie posters you could tell which artist did which posters. And that is just one tiny arena out of many being taken over to, pinch ever last penny for investors and stocks “save money” or whatever other soulless lazy excuse is bandied about.
I saw a thread where somebody posted their “work” and the prompt they used was Drew Struzan sci-fi space opera. Well Drew Struzan is a legend in movie poster art; Star Wars, Harry Potter… but he’s no Moebius!
Literally, he’s not Moebius. So this person directly cited the work of somebody else to get a “movie poster” that would make the Chinese knock off market ashamed. And sure it was probably just for funsies but funsies soon becomes, “I can do that with midjourney why do I need Drew or Moebius?”
It is already happening on Deviantart and Etsy two sites that used to be havens for artists to show their work and find work. Deviantart instead of banning AI art outright or creating a sister site for such “work” is merely requiring the good faith of folks to label the work as AI. And so the site is now flooded with AI internet junk. And that is just the ones honest enough to label it AI.
I personally have many one of a kind pieces from Etsy on my music altar wall. I can see the time taken in each piece with pen strokes or brush strokes of each artist. AI’s “brush strokes” is a spiraling circle of dots that seconds later regurgitates what you asked for like a student taking a high school history test that is asked to merely recite some important dates in history.
This instant shitification gratification also lacks the very important element of time. Diego Rivera’s murals or Frida Khalo’s paintings were not completed in seconds. It took time. Mistakes were made, red tape and bureaucracy had to be worked around, political environments to be thrived in, sexism, racism, and a very tempestuous relationship lived through. To say nothing of maybe one day the art supply store was out of red paint but you went ahead with the work anyway.
AI just spits it out with out a second glance, without a revision, without a thought, without any consideration as to why? That art director may summon another image or refine the keywords to try and get a better result of “art deco occult imagery” but AI cannot revise that one image in the same way I can edit my images in Photoshop. It can only grift and steal to put out another similar average image. And as I have experienced myself first hand and through friends, AI has in a way turned creating art into a dating app. A better man, or in this case”art deco occult image” will come along if I just swipe left.
Another personal example is this very piece you are reading. It came to me last night as I lay in my bed swearing out loud over this AI “band” Spotify unleashed to see how far it would go and what Spotify could actually get away with by cutting out the middle man (actual musicians). Even though they are already not paying musicians anyway. All while possibly using AI bots to boost streams of this fake bad to give themselves a payout.
And to be fair people using Spotify are not paying for music either. If they are paying for a subscription it is not for the music. They are paying to not have ads so this is a collaborative effort in how we are screwing over musicians.
But this AI band comes out on the day of the death of the legendary composer Lalo Schfrin who made some of the funkiest TV and films scores of the 60s and 70s, from the worldwide icon that is the, “Mission Impossible Theme” to the entire score for Enter The Dragon. And Schfrin is no Bernard Hermann or John Williams, literally he neither of those people. And NOBODY would confuse a John Williams score with a Herman score but AI is not a human body and often does confuse such things.
People rightly mocked this “music” from Velvet Sundown in most threads I read. But nobody was directly calling this out for the disgusting and insulting move it was. Maybe people are to afraid to say it outright for fear of making it real.
Music; historian, fan, and connoisseur Rick Beato also took AI to task when he reviewed, the new Americana musician Eli Mercer.
I know a local Bay Area band, that out of curiosity used it to see what the results would be if they prompted AI to write a song for them. They said the result was lyrics they plausibly could have written themselves. And this is some local act not some national big name. That is how far and wide the creators of AI have raped and pillaged the art sphere and beyond for their “training”. Sure the plausibility is there but they didn’t write it. AI stole the bits and pieces and put out milquetoast average. I am sure if this band prompted for more songs it would vomit up more plausible songs but they would all just be a bland average of the bands overall sound. Just like the results in Beato’s video.
Spotify and Youtube already have playlists of, “vibe” music that is AI generated be it lo-fi guitar or some hazy synth ALA Vangelis and Blade Runner. You can spot these playlists because they usually come with some image (probably AI) of a neon hued bedroom with a cute anime boy sitting at a desk or laying on bed, headphones on. Probably with a cat in the room and probably at sunset.
It is the new “muzak” of the modern age but WORSE at least old school muzak was composed and played by humans who had to dedicate some time and some skill sets to learning to compose and play the stuff and even record it. You may or may not like Yanni but he is a living human who performed his compositions LIVE with other living musicians where literally anything could happen. All that can happen with AI is what you tell it to happen and at the current time it is a pretty bland parlor trick. And unfortunately many people are being tricked into thinking this is OK and normal (like autotune before it) and even more are being praised for “their” images or compositions.
But it is a parlor trick and unlike actual parlor tricks like card tricks or slight of hand where you have to spend years practicing this has no barrier to entry. Similar to how the greatness of the internet is everybody has a voice but also the problem is everyone has a voice. There is no quality control and conscious critiques and criticism are few and far between.
Also, like Guillero Del Tormo and others I think it will just lower the standards and make people lazier.
Guillermo Del Toro Strikes Back Against AI-Generated Art
AI is not impressive but Derek Paravicini is.
A classic pop song re-imagined as classical music. That is effing amazing! And the reason is because Derek had to overcome MANY human obstacles unrelated to music to produce that, autism being just one of them.
Postmodern Jukebox also does similar things with popular music like a tap dance version of the trance anthem “Sandstorm” by Darude.
Come on DANCE you AI monkey dance! Oh wait you can’t.
Since AI art and music is made up purely of cliched reddit buzzwords that instructs these models to pilfer the vast history of the arts to cough up these hairballs it may devalue some arts like graphic design. On the other had I do think it will raise the prices on physical artwork (especially one of a kind pieces) and the demand for them.
And to those who come chiming in about cars replacing horses or whatever lazy comparison you try to use to get artists to “stop whining” or to mic drop the word “evolution”… Fuck you too. Those who designed and invented cars were not applauding the death of the horse industry while they did it. As if somehow they were better than those damn equestrian elitists. Cars and those who engineered and designed and built them did not pilfer the entire history of horses in a few months or less to create their work. These were people with lived experiences and histories and trials and failures and successes coming together through creativity, passion, a drive, and yes in some cases hubris to bring forth whatever vision was in their mind. It required engineering skills not typing, “Vespa meets cottage core with Jane Austen goth aesthetic”.
What I wanted was just a picture of a Vespa with cottage core Jane Austin goth design elements. But what I got was a Victorian chick riding a basic black Vespa it in front of Thomas Kinkade landscape as if she is riding off to a funeral. The funeral of art. And somebody somewhere will likely chime in with, “You need to use better prompt dumb***”. Yeah sure but being better at prompts still doesn’t make one an artist. I mean many popular tik-tok musicians are actually not great musicians at base level. They are just very good at tik-tok.
So yes, I repeat the former created by humans or teams of them is better than the latter shat out AI’s posterior even if it saves me hours of time. Though I probably could sketch out the image in my head in the time it would take me to get the exact AI result I wanted for that Vespa.
For me the act of creation by human hands and minds makes it infinitely more valuable and makes it, art.
And for the record great as Vespas and other motorized machines are; and as much as I love the design of some vintage vehicles (I want a Chrysler Cordoba) I cannot say they have been a net positive for the world. As least horses are not spewing out fumes destroying the environment and turning my lungs the same shade of gray as that first painting I did. Nor are they causing traffic on roads that would be better suited for walking or even riding horses.
And to those saying all artist steal from other artists… Fuck you as well. There is a difference between inspiration and theft. There are artists who do steal ideas but so what? They are in the vast minority of artists. AI will never have inspiration it can ONLY be a thief stealing from the work of others, period. There is no, “AI thought of it first” because it has to be trained on what came before. A human can draw a picture never having seen another drawing. A human can write poem without ever taking a class or reading other poets. A human can be, “self-taught”. Not AI.
Also, when artists get inspired or influenced by a piece or an artist they take bits and pieces as inspiration. AI just rapes the entire work in one feel swoop. Or rapes the artists entire oeuvre in one fell swoop. Or rapes an entire art movement in one feel swoop. Without a thought as to why or for what purpose.
When I was in middle school I would copy images from comic books in an effort to learn how to draw figures. But I found in that process is that I was not that interested in having characters look like Stan Lee gym rats. The effort it took to make that kind of work was not for me. Also, I didn’t want to write traditional superhero stories anyway. So I found other comics and artists I enjoyed more like the work of Sergio Aragones. I studied the way he drew figures. But I also liked the work of Bill Watterson and how he drew expressions for Calvin and Hobbes and the ugly people that populated the panels of Gary Larsen. Over the course of my history these artists and others seeped into my work. This plus my own curiosity and experimentation evolved and ultimately led to all the art I have created and MAYBE what one could call my “style”.
And all the artists and musicians I love have styles that are unique to them and that developed over time and were influenced not just by other artists but the entire world around them. John Mellencamp sounds very different in style on those first 70s records than he does on his peak 80s work where he found his style. And then the later work where old age and wisdom have taken over. All without changing genres.
Another example is to browse the work of any “famous” painter of the early to mid 20th century. Most started out doing landscapes, nudes, or still life, or some combination therein. And then at some point in their creative life the greats said, “fuck it” and tried something vastly different and that is how we got Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollack, Andy Warhol, Kay Sage, Hilma af Klint, and the aforementioned Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. None of whom are Salvador Dali by the way.
I have seen many claim they are artists because entering the prompt is being creative. You too can piss off. Just because you ordered a salad does not make you a chef. You may even order it fancy like Meg Ray in When Harry Met Sally but all you are is the “customer”. Or in the case of AI the product.
AI art and music is only learning a very tiny branch of the results of lived experience (digital and audio). I don’t care how many pieces of art or pieces of music AI rapes and pillages it will never create work that was born from being in a war zone, participating in black lives matter protest, or simply drinking too much absinthe.
It will never create work like one of my favorite painters Wayne Thiebaud who most definitely knew what a cake looked, smelled, felt, sounded, and tasted like. AI, unlike Walt Whitman has never seen or touched or smelled real leaves of grass, only facsimiles.
I argue even with the advances and uses it may have in math and other sciences speeding us towards answers to hard questions faster is not necessarily a plus. One things is, I don’t think it’s good to grow up too fast.
All the history and passion of people like Einstein, Feynman, Marie Curie, and Jane Goodall led to great discoveries in their specific science fields. But at the end of the day we learned a whole lot more from Jane Goodall than just some neat facts about chimp society. We learned about our own humanity too. And AI might be able to stream line that but it will never be able to see an off ramp and suddenly out of curiosity and free will decide to take the scenic route discovering what lies beneath the oceans like Jacques Cousteau.
As people like Carl Sagan or Joseph Campbell or Sherry Lewis or Bob Ross evolved so to did we as a society because of our common humanity.
So whatever “evolution” AI and it’s supporters may be touting is a bunk argument to me because AI art will only ever evolve at being the high tech thief it is. It roots are in thievery. Tech bros erroneously call it training, but much like the waymo cars in SF nobody consented to they themselves or their work being test subjects.
Another musical example is the genius of Joni Mitchell’s song Both Sides Now. She wrote that song in her twenties and without ever changing a lyric the song gained even greater power and depth when she sang it in her fifties simply due to time and her growing older.
An AI image or song may turn ten years old but that will be it. Just 1s and 0s shoved together from a few keywords as it tries to deep fake some uncanny valley human condition and get some emotion out of you. It will have no songwriter to grow old with it the way the words of ABBA have grown old along with all four members.
I will never cry over an AI image the way I cried in front off a Vittorio Zecchin’s Principesse nel Giardino that occupied one half of an entire wall in Museo D’arte Moderna in Venice. It will never invite me to sit and stare at it for twenty minutes the way I sat in the middle of that floor taking in those colors and the entire atmosphere around it, not just the atmosphere of the moment but of the entire day.
OK. Maybe in the future AI will make me weep. I can’t predict the future but I can say if AI art or music is properly labeled I will have a bias against it out of the gate. And if somebody fibs and reveals after the fact it was AI. Well, you fooled me great. Now I dislike you for being a charlatan and I hate the work.
I wrote in a recent poem, “The trees and the bees are not deep faking climate change”.
Thankfully most of my circle, if not artists themselves, have at least tried to make art in their own ways, or respect it enough to see why a few keywords pillaging at high speed is not going to result in anything with real emotional nutritional value.
These loud braying types who seem to be mostly on-line come off as people who likely gave up their artistic dreams, were shamed for having them, or just never tried to be creative. I have come to find these miserable types in all walks of life. And they tend to convulse and spit whenever people are having a good time or doing things that make lives better. They will show up to try and crash the party out of jealousy and shame of their own failings. This is something Stuart S. Shapiro creator of Night Flight points out in the beginning of his book Identifi Yourself: A Journey in F**k You Creative Courage. And I have seen it proven time and time again.
Even so the cat is of the bag here. And the masses have repeatedly shown they will roll over and take most rotten remains thrown at them so long as they are not going to be homeless tomorrow. And I am worried less for us older generations and more for the youth who may grow up knowing of nothing else but bullshit perpetrated by algorithms and AI and tech egos.
I am reminded of a scene from the now prophetic Pixar film, Wall-E. In the film humans have become fat blobs in Costco core sitting in reclining chairs going in circles. They are fed a diet of smoothies with screens attached to their eyeballs telling them how great things are. Eventually they break free and land back on the post apocalyptic earth to find the sprouting of a tiny plant. Something living and thriving with a history. I knew it was prophetic then and here we are addicted to screens telling us what and who to like. Still, many people especially young people strive for approval through the metrics of a thumbs up or an emoji. An addiction to the constant never ending mindless engagement cult.
I just now remembered how cool I thought it was that in Star Trek the Next Generation they could order up a cocktail on a machine and it would appear out of thin air. Now, that is a big nope from me- I want a drink made by Guinan or Quark, some “human” I can strike up a conversation with or get advice from when my personal life is going to pot. Hell give me Moe from The Simpsons or Sam Malone from Cheers. Hell, knowing the direction AI is going I could probably get Sam Malone giving me advice and it may even be good advice (stolen from much wiser people than AI) but if it is not interrupted by some factoid from Cliff Clavin I don’t want it.
“Fun fact there Sammy, before AI- uh… people had to think and create for themselves. It’s how we got this fine beer I am drinking.” – Cliff Clavin possibly.
We are so addicted to the now, now, now, on demand of everything that to paraphrase the great wit George Carlin, “Children don’t sit outside alone anymore just holding a stick.”
I don’t care if I’m going down with the ship at least it’s a ship of my choosing. People keep telling me radio is dead I refuse to let that beautiful medium of community go. Corporate radio like I Heart “insert genre here” has such low standards or no standards and the people operating it do not live your community. So if the station fits “anywhere”, to me that means it fits nowhere but the trash bin. Please listen to your local radio stations actually serving your communities operated by the people who live where you live. But I digress.
This should not even be a conversation we are having. But between the hubris of tech nerds thinking they know what is best for our future and the masses having either been beaten down or so lowered their standards for music and art, I feel it is my duty as an elder to decry the folly that awaits us. If we let our lives descend into keywords written by some executives nephew (or AI itself) to save some money for shareholders or allow billionaires to hide in bunkers that world is going to suck. It is going lack humanity and compassion and love and joy.
But I have said before, what I see is a groundswell in my local community. People are fed up with all the BS, fakery, greed, and lies. They want something real so they are turning away from the corporate overlords to their local community members and going to things like local punk shows they can witness first hand. Or going to local galleries and street fairs where somebody brings a typewriter to write poems for strangers in person. Or they are going to their community theaters and orchestras. People crave the shared human experience especially an experience in real time. Art and music are categorized under the humanities after all. And the word art itself comes from the Latin word ars meaning “skill” and AI has no skill.
I am pissed off but I am ultimately optimistic. Art made by mankind has centuries as a legacy act. It is so rooted in the human DNA people can try to shovel this AI manure into the soil of our souls but outside of the initial hype it will fail to root properly. It may serve a useful purpose as some digital lackey behind the scenes crunching high volumes of numbers or info for certain fields but that’s about it. And it’s history will merely be “Peppridge Farm remebers” of our collective society, much like the beanie baby or the sea monkey.
I leave you with a quote from punk musician Mojo Nixon a man who laid down a few good rants of his own back the late 80s and early 90s. This is from his song, “Gotta Have More Soul” from 1987 well before social media and the internet dominated our brains.
You know, sometimes I get the feeling that, that, uh,
accountants and lawyers are in cahoots with the devil,
yeah, they’re in cahoots with the devil,
to cover the Earth, cover The Earth with this wretched swill.
Gutless, mediocre, middle of the road sleep-inducin’ homogenized pablum,
background music for the slavery of daily drudgery
Sometimes I get that feeling man, but I know it’s a lie,
I know it’s not true, I Know it’s not true, and
I’m talking to Arthur Conley, now,
Arthur Conley, I’m talking to ya’
I’m saying Arthur where are ya, Arthur where are ya,
we need you to help us Arthur, we need you to help us
We’ve gotta gotta gotta have more soul
We’ve gotta gotta gotta have more soul
