GenAI Art Is the Least Imaginative Use of AI Imaginable

This sort of thing keeps getting written. You will still be able to art, even if AI art becomes better. I can still, to this day, still go for a walk even though cars exist. Not because I need to get somewhere, necessarily, but for the love of walking.

This is only being litigated in this way I think because art people never thought automation would come their way, and they're thinking about this stuff for the first time. A silly comment from some GenAI exec is not much justification for such an article. People know that writing and making music is fun. Said exec is just paid to say the opposite.

>when we work at our favorite activities — cooking, gaming, hiking, music-making, writing (to name a few) — the process is often not easy or pleasant or smooth.

This gets to the heart of what bothers me about using LLM to emulate Art. This is the justification people make for using it, but no Artists I know finds making Art consistently unpleasant. Sure, there are times you're blocked or tired but generally in the end you are satisfied or have leaned something helpful from the experience. This is all of life. This is why there is Art. If you just want a pleasant time, you're looking for entertainment, not creative endeavor. Just put on a VR headset and leave making Art to the real Artists.

Art is like anything. If you want to get good at it you need to discover how to get dopamine from it and exploit that to habit and mastery. This is how you get in shape, it's how you improve your golf game, how you develop software, raise kids. Yet for some reason humanity wants a cheat code for all of this. Pills to make you skinny, video golf to give you an advantage at the links, top-tier schools to make your kids awesome. We're hellbent on dumping the baby out with the bathwater because we think the point is putting the tub away.

AI songs present as a refined end-product but you don't have to treat them as anything more than killing time or B-grade inspiration for something else. Instrument skills will surely be preserved somewhere due to nostalgia, it's the industry gatekeeping that is coming to an unharmonious end along with all the silly status games if AI songs ever take off.

For instance, why does an indy band need an AI-free backstory but a popstar can outsource all their imagination to the producer who may or may not use autotune or AI riffs?

I have been a musician at this point for 35+ years. The quote from the Suno CEO is beyond absurd.

I have spent quite a number of hours with MusicLM in AI test kitchen. To me, that is actually a new form of music synthesis. Synthesis in the context of FM, subtractive, etc.

I suspect MusicLM had some tracks removed from the training data because it use to make absolutely wildly creative psytrance clips and now it just doesn't.

Suno on the other hand to me has basically been a complete joke. The training data is just not wide enough to do anything interesting and new.

I think the only way to really use these tools creatively would be to produce your own trained model with AudioLM. The creative use then is in the musical output and not selling the model as yet another SaaS for $x.99 a month.

Of course, you could use Suno to create loops and sample material. The way midjourney is the greatest thing possible for digital collage in Krita/Photoshop.

GenAI art though on its own be it midjourney, stable diffusion, Suno, MusicLM, whatever already jumped the shark for me a year ago. The problem ultimately is the output is just so very limited.

I really enjoyed the perspective of this author and the article's contemplative tone. I think an important perspective is that these are tools for consumers, not creators. While we are all obviously both to a degree, the current economic model makes a clear distinction.

When it comes to monetary exchange, we are either artists or consumers. AI art has the potential to create a massive imbalance between these two fields, reducing the friction of being a consumer, and greatly reducing the number of people who are able to support themselves as artists. If you view yourself chiefly as a consumer this might (very narrowly) be viewed as a positive.

The social cost however is creating a society that favors consumption over creation, and weights incentives accordingly

It's nice to see someone that gets it, and can explain why all of these generative-AI tools are completely pointless so well.

A gigging musician I know, who is involved in many projects, including leading an on again, off again BiG BanD, recently had another aquaintence, play a recording to him of the soul song that this person had "written" with ai help. I am struggling with comming to terms with the idea of artificial music. Some people like it, so it will stay around, and I cant begrudge them, at least for now, as ai will probably end up spawning new generas ,that would likely not come into bieng without it, which I suspect, the whole point will be inflicting there "art" on anyone they can. This artificial art, has no back story, no sweat, no triumph, and will never have a voice or style it's own, it's only and explisitly derivitive, but there are those who are in some strange way comforted by that, a bieger shade of ecru, free from angst and any possibility of it showing anybody up. Though all in all, I think it's, orrible, right nasty, and I imagine that it will end up banned like a lot of other artificial things, that prove to be bad, for everybody they touch.

edit:synthetic creativity

> AI music company Suno’s CEO was quoted as saying “I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music” in what sounds like yet another justification of Suno’s prompt-based (and very popular) generative AI music service...

> Such systems offer the promise of skipping the labor by bypassing the creative process and, yes, the difficulties, confusion, and frustration inherent in such endeavors, but…

The true purpose of AI is to free humans from creative and engaging work, so we can spend more time doing drudgery (like monitoring AI output).

> Statements like Suno’s perfectly captures the prevailing public mindset about AI: that Artificial Intelligence is little more than a labor-saving optimization tool. This mindset tends to be good for #Capitalism, but betrays not only a lack of understanding of why people make music, but also a profound lack of imagination regarding how we could, or would want to live with our technologies in our lives.

The true goal of Capitalism is the elimination of anything that isn't Capitalism, so it can be replaced with more Capitalism, until everything is Capitalism and nothing else remains.

Amusing to see a Stanford student complain about capitalism. Attending Stanford costs $70,000 a year. The bastardized John Adams quote: "I must study war so my sons can study business. My sons must study business so their sons can complain about capitalism."