Humans are difficult to work with - you start out polishing a set of near identical white teenage boys from an early age, and before you know it they die from an overdose or - even worse - start producing music they enjoy without heeding the advice of market analysts. It's better not to take any chances.
I admire Nick Cave a lot and value his opinion as a songwriter. He's absolutely right in calling it the "boundless machine of artistic demoralisation." What's more demoralizing than know ChatGBT could churn out a facsimile of your work, making a mockery of your artistic struggles and obsessions? All you have to do is listen to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (my fave album is Tender Prey) to see that he was exorcising something deeply personal and a little perverse, and that's one of the things that makes his music art and not just a digital token.
“The apocalypse is well on its way,” Cave wrote. “This song sucks.”
so, he’s pissed off because an AI-generated song… sucks?
good artists will keep creating good art; lazy ones will create more and more worthless artificial art; smart ones will be able to offload some of their work to these helpers. The world will carry on.
Good artists will keep creating good art; record labels will keep pushing increasingly cheap and braindead bullshit strangling any hope of actual innovation made by anyone who needs to make a living to survive.
Human culture gradually grows into an easily consumed, regenerative cheeseburger-like mess. A billion near identical five second snippets of unprovocative entertainment that satisfies nobody but the shareholders, but feeds endless masses of consumerist dopamine slaves until they slowly die of boredom without ever having thought an independent thought in their life.
the worst part is that by this description AI is not really changing things. It seems to me the industry was always headed that way and AI is maybe speeding it up if anything at all.
This is true - at the end of the day it's just the age old struggle of maintaining humanity in face of modernism. Apollonian versus Dionysian, John Henry versus the steam drill.
What's worrying me is that humanity appears to be losing ground fast, and that AI not only speeds up the process but makes fighting back even harder.
Yes, the mainstream is quick to use AI as a scapegoat because their frogs have been thoroughly boiled by corporate profiteering, which is the real problem.
I’m not nearly as passionate in my attitude toward generative AI, because I think it CAN in theory be used in productive ways, but I ultimately agree with him more than I disagree.
I think if we were not living under such comodified circumstances, it wouldn’t be much of a problem, But since we do, I think he’s completely correct that it’s a corrosive development in a world in which art has always been in a tug of war between people who enjoy making and consuming it and people who see it purely as a means of enriching themselves.
I look at it from the perspective of a vocalist who can write every facet of a song except the lyrics. Is it really that different from hiring a ghostwriter? I love the idea of an AI (or LLM) that I can infodump my emotions into and it can help arrange those feelings into lines. I feel that has more personal gravity than just having someone else do it. Just my perspective tho.
I’ve tried using “AI” based plugins for mixing/mastering audio and songs. It can be really hit or miss with the quality of its results, so it’s nothing to lean on too heavily, but it’s great for using as a jumping off point or for giving you something to replicate yourself (mix wise) with other plugins and improve on with your own knowledge.
It’s got a ways to go in the mixing/mastering area, but it’s already leaps and bounds better than just 3-4 years ago.
Add comment