I’ve found that AI has done literally nothing to improve my life in any way and has really just caused endless frustrations. From the enshitification of journalism to ruining pretty much all tech support and customer service, what is the point of this shit?
I work on the Salesforce platform and now I have their dumbass account managers harassing my team to buy into their stupid AI customer service agents. Really, the only AI highlight that I have seen is the guy that made the tool to spam job applications to combat worthless AI job recruiters and HR tools.
Most things produced by AI and assisted by AI are still human creation, as it requires a human to guide it to what it’s making. Human innovation is also very much based on mixing materials it’s seen before in new creative manners. Almost no material is truly innovative. Ask any honest artists about their inspirations and they can tell you what parts of their creations were inspired by what. Our world has explored the depths of most art forms so there is more than a lifetime’s worth of art to mix and match. Often the real reason things feel fresh and new is because they are fresh and new to us, but already existed in some form out there before it came to our attention.
That AI can match this is easily proven by fact AI can create material that no human would realistically make (like AI generated QR codes, or ‘cursed’ AI), very proficient style mixing that would take a human extensive study of both styles to pull off (eg. Pokemon and real life), or real looking images that could not realistically, financially, conscionably, be made using normal methods (eg. A bus full of greek marble statues).
Nobody is saying you have to like AI art, and depending on your perspective, some or most of it will still be really low effort and not worth paying attention to, but that was already the state of art before AI. Lifetimes of art are being uploaded every day, but nobody has the time to view it all. So I would really keep an open mind that good AI art and AI assisted art exists out there, and you might one day come to like it but not realize you’re seeing it, because good AI usage is indistinguishable from normal art.
Here’s a little story for you. I’m a composer and college music teacher. Just last week, I was meeting with a potential client for music pieces and sfx for an app. I gave him my prices, which I consider to have been really low since the project was very simple, and he ended up telling me that it was really too expensive, and asking me why I didn’t have the tracks done by AI. I told him he wasn’t looking for a composer, but rather a programmer or something. I’ve been learning to play and compose and perfecting my artistic practice for 30 years. I’ve managed to make my passion my job because creating music is the thing that gives me the most satisfaction in the world. I have no interest in replacing this practice by entering prompts into an algorithm, even if I could make easy money from it. I’m a composer, that’s what I wanna do. In recent years, I’ve seen some of my students in their early twenties, often with absolutely no understanding of musical parameters, and who have already released two or three albums. At this point, someone who has never touched an instrument or produced a single piece of music on it’s own could be releasing an album a week. I’m not saying that this music is necessarily bad, I’m just saying that it doesn’t interest me, since there’s no artistic intention or approach behind it. I could also tell you about the works written by
I could also tell you about the written assignments that students hand in, and for which I can identify in less than 30 seconds which ones have been produced by AI (students overreact to their writing skills, it’s often laughable). I don’t even read these papers, I just mark them as average, since trying to prove anything would be a waste of time. As I tell them, those who have used chatgpt have “learned” to use AI, those who have done the work have learned to carry out research, to synthesize their ideas and to structure, articulate and present them.
One last thing. As far as innovation is concerned, AI can endlessly produce pieces that sound like Bach, but it took Bach to exist in the first place, and Glenn Gould to revolutionize the interpretation of his scores for this to be possible.
First of all, I understand your point of view. And I’ve been looking at artists being undervalued like your potential client for decades, before AI was even a thing. So I definitely feel you on that point, and I wish it would be different. That said, here’s my response. (It’s a bit long, so I put it in spoiler tags)
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Yes, but maybe also no. Do you use computer software to compose or assist you in composing? Like FL Studio, Audacity? Or maybe you use a microphone to record the played version of your composition?
I know maybe one or two composers, and they wouldn’t go without that while I worked with them. But I’m sure you can agree using those things does not make you a programmer. It just takes a composer with a more technical mindset and experience with those tools. I don’t deny there are composers that do without it, and maybe you are one of them. If so, rock on, but I’m sure you can see using computer tools does not stop you from being a composer, it just enhances it. Now if you were to never learn anything about composing and just use AI blindly, then I would agree with you.
But AI in that manner is no different, and like those other pieces of software it still requires expertise to make something actually good. However, judging from the manner your client spoke to you, I think the issue wasn’t that you weren’t making good music, it’s that you were making too expensive music for the value he wanted to derive from it. That’s sadly how the free market goes, and I agree that it has disproportionately screwed over artists because their work gets systematically undervalued. However, AI is not the cause of that, it merely made it more apparent, and it will not stop with the next thing after AI, unless we tackle it at the root cause by giving artists better protections that don’t end up empowering the same people that undervalue them, which is really quite nuanced to get right and the current system we have already makes it worse than it is. This is what I fight for instead.
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Students are probably the worst example of this though. Because that’s basically what students are known for before AI was even a thing. The average student has no conception or feeling yet of what has artistic value or not, and most will not go into creative fields. Students used to hand in fully plagiarized works they just downloaded or took from other students, and it is indeed laughable for anyone that actually wants to make it somewhere in their field. So yes, if that’s the majority of AI produced works you’ve encountered I can totally understand your point of view, but I implore you to broaden your horizon to people that actually work in the field. Those that already have built up the artistic mindset.
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But these people have not learned how to proficiently use AI, just very shallowly. They have learned how to be lazy. Which mind you, is the same laziness that you learn from plagiarizing directly. This has literally been the reality of people growing up for the entirety of human existence. You’re right that the ones that did go through the effort learned more, but that does not mean they could not also value from enhancing that process with other tools. And you wouldn’t even know the ones that did. Because they will not hand in something that looks like it came directly out of ChatGPT. They might have only used it for brainstorming, or proof reading, or to make a boring passage more entertaining. Someone who understands why their own effort and sense of ownership matters would never just hand in something they had zero say in, that’s what lazy people do. And we have no shortage of those.
A small subset of your students will go the extra mile, and realize that they need to get better themselves to produce things with more artistic value. They too will see what AI can help them with, and what it can’t. Some students that are lazy now will eventually see the light too, and realize that they’re lacking behind. That’s life - maturity takes time to develop.
But just because lazy people can play the guitar by randomly stroking the strings, doesn’t mean a competent guitar player can’t create an incredibly intricate banger with the same guitar. AI is no different.
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You’re right that AI requires existing material. But you said it yourself. Glenn Gould would not be able to make his work without Bach. And just like that Bach has inspirations that would mean Bach as we know him would not exist without those. And if paper did not exist, Bach could not write down his pieces for us to remember now and learn from. In the same way, an artists of any kind in the future will not exist without their influences and tools, of which AI could be one.
AI can indeed produce endless pieces that sound like Bach, but only a human could use AI to produce a piece that has evokes feelings, passion, thoughts - anything to be considered to be real art. A machine cannot produce the true definition of art on it’s own, but it can be invoked by an artists to do work in furtherance of their art. Because it takes a creative mind to be able to spot, transform, extend, and also know when to discard, what an AI has produced. Just like we discard sources we perceive as low in value, and sources that are high in value we take as inspiration.
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EDIT: Just want to add to this:
That’s not something anyone should do. Because that’s not using it as a tool. That’s making it the entire process. That’s not the kind of AI usage I’m advocating for either. And you’re free to forego AI completely. Just like there are probably some instruments you never use, or some genre you never visit. I don’t like taking the easy way either, that’s why I make creative stuff as a living too. If I just wanted money I would go elsewhere too.