On hacks, arts education, and the bizarre nature of current AI
I greatly admire Mike Doughty as a songwriter. He shared what I thought was an interesting and compelling writeup on how he uses AI and where he thinks it’s all going. You can read that here.
There is something fascinating about the truly bizarre things an AI can spit out now & in the last 2 years or so, and I agree this is a thing of the current time that will go away quickly and become boring as AIs get “more accurate”.
But the biggest standout point made by Mike is this which I think is the thing nobody wants to talk about, and it’s similar to the “taste matters most now” argument I’m seeing in tech:
— Hacks are in trouble. If somebody is making work that is uninspired, and unindividual, then they can indeed be replaced by a machine that just spits up boring chunks of mid-ness. (But for those of us who at least consider ourselves artists with a style, a viewpoint, and an identity, a thinning of the field is, by some, being quietly welcomed as good news)
I don’t use AI much outside of work (& frankly some of the use cases aren’t compelling yet), never in songwriting, but I did use an old Stable Diffusion model to make the artwork for my 1st album THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY. It was uncanny and bizarre and fit the tone of the album, and I didn’t have the words I felt i could convey what I was looking for to an artist. I wouldn’t do this often (usually I use my wife’s photography), but it worked for me at the time.
This is the artwork:
Was this a bad thing? Should I have just hired an artist? Maybe. But I had no idea where to start, no words to even describe what I wanted, and a simple interface to iterate on those words & see the result was powerful. I can’t deny it.
Could I have taken that idea, handed it to an artist and said “ok now make this more human”? Sure, but I don’t know the value of that other than to pay an artist. At some point I could just divest $ to an artist I like (which I do regularly, I have receipts).
That all said, I refuse (today) to use AI in contexts where I can bring my skill & craft: songwriting, music production, prose writing, analysis. I consider those to be the strongest ways for me to convey a style, a viewpoint, an identity that is greater than myself. I also aim to work with other artists beyond what I can do myself, to leverage their styles and viewpoints. The humanity in arts & craft are important to me.
I think education & exposure around these things are so vital to our humanity. I do struggle to communicate visual things, and I suspect many do as well, likely due to our education system continually defunding the arts if we’re honest.
I generally think the more we can apply nuance to debates about AI the better off we’ll all be. It’s not productive to blanket state that all AI is evil. It’s better at search than Google. It does help do some things faster. It’s also worse for the overall quality of media, incentivizes disinformation & disincentivizes critical thinking. Ethics matter a lot. There are conflicting reports about its environmental impact relative to other problems in the world. It’s moving fast, and arguing in absolutes doesn’t feel productive.
