I let myself get all twisted up a few days ago on Fedi about this cock and bull ‘AI music’ crap that’s making me want to puke up my own soul and is just about killing the vibe of creating music. Owing to these AI/Tech-Bro fuckheads, Art is on its deathbed. Pissed as I was, I yanked off that post, but it keeps ringing in my brain like a five alarm fire.
A mighty thanks to you beautiful chooms who spoke about not letting the grinder grind me down. I have no plans on hitting the eject button, but me-thinks it’s time for a different strategy.
To addfuel to the fire, some AI/Tech-Bro asswipe has been swiping all my tunes to churn out some random dataset… Well, fuck me sideways, it still sounds like a bad aftertaste even after brewing it in all that “intelligence”
Just seems like I’ve woken up in a B-grade conspiracy theory flick…
Here’s the rub, regardless of where I’m pumping out my tunes, there’ll always be some AI/Tech-Bro dickhead who can recycle it into a blinking dataset. If some freebooter wants to hoist my music as warez, I say fill your boots! There’s something amusingly poetic about it, given I was once the merry pirate, sharing my craft on torrent and filesharing platforms.
But as Lucifer is my witness, I won’t throttle the spirit out of my music with some bullshit “one-time payment” scheme… Ideas are thin on the ground right now, but blowing off some steam felt bloody great. Keep rocking out, you are the gold in this garbage heap of AI groupies and Tech-Bro tossers! Rest assured, the music ain’t stopping folks, just taking a moment to flip the bird at some AI BS.
Flip the bird with making music that AI can’t ever be as good at as you are!
Regurgitating what currently exists and making it “partially listenable” is what AI can do at the moment, but it will never sound as well produced as something that someone put their love into.
Time for more new wacky genre combinations and more noise!
Honestly, I see this as yet another “puttin’ the ‘punk’ back in ‘cyberpunk’” moment as the music goes back into the back alley clubs, the underground scene of trading mix tapes and such, and generally avoiding all the corpo-controlled radio airplay that the masses get used to.
The people hear the quality and they know that human music rocks and AI trash walks and anybody that doesn’t, well - their ears can bleed until they see the light, as far as I’m concerned. Good music is where you find it, and one thing that stolen and artificially remixed and duplicated crap is lacking is that human spirit that you mentioned.
The true fans know where to go to get the good stuff, and you make good stuff, so the people will figure out where to find you and come get it themselves. Just think of yourself as our own, personal, music ripperdoc, choom! You’ve got the prescription for what we need, and we’ll do what it takes to follow the clues and get the directions to the speakeasy where we can get our own copy.
Fuck the corpos, choomba! You’re goin’ OLD SKOOL punk! Cyberpunks unite!
100% agree! I listen to a lot of synth and electronic music, and there’s so much crap out there that’s so obviously AI, and some that’s arguably not as obvious. 404 Media did a good writeup about AI Christmas song garbage here, and covered a podcast where AI music CEO Mikey Shulman said that …people don’t like making music.
Someone needs to make a sticker like the old “Home Taping is killing music” logo…
I dunno, I think that the statement “Home taping is killing music” is not quite correct nor complete; the real complaint was “home taping is killing the music industry” (propaganda promoted heavily by that industry itself), which is perfectly acceptable because the industry had become so corrupted as to be worthy of being killed.
And I think there’s a difference between the masses having access to “professional-grade” tools to allow them to express themselves and get around the blockers and constrictions of a profit-driven industry, and AI could have been the next generation of those tools to enable that next stage of creativity, had they been seen as that and only that.
The fact that the tool has become a replacement for the creator solely by owing its very existence to unbridled and open plagiarism is not only abhorrent, but also quite sad. The “AI” grifters have over-sold and massively under-delivered, and so those potential-tools-cum-replacements aren’t anywhere close to the actual artists while at the same time killing off the creative spirit of actual humans.
