Reject AI "Art"
Resist the ceding of your soul
AI music is here, and it feels like it entered in the night. The record at the top of the Christian music chart is entirely AI, with a fake AI “musician” persona listed as the artist. A song generated by an AI creation recently topped the country charts. Another artificial bot was signed for $3 million, or its creator was, and it’s produced Gospel and R&B charting singles. One AI song went viral on social media before people realized what they were listening to. When people and platforms realized it was AI, the song was banned.
Even a month ago all of this would’ve been unfathomable, to me. But, suddenly, this new era is upon us. Like so many other people, I heard that viral AI song on TikTok, and I had no idea it was AI. The tech has advanced so rapidly that in a recent study 97% of us can’t tell the difference between music made by AI and tracks made by humans. But, in that same study, more than half of the people were uncomfortable with not being able to tell the difference.
This discomfort with not knowing if music has been made by a human being or a bot has flared into anger on social media. An influencer recently made a sappy post, attempting to use her own childhood love of music to promote AI music company Suno. Heralded as the “ChatGPT” for music, Suno lets users to make music with AI. Warner Music recently dropped a copyright infringement suit against the startup, and opted to partner with another AI music rival to sell out and cash in.
The backlash against this influencer and “entrepreneur” promoting Suno was beautiful. She framed her work with the company as helping kids and people without means make music, and the response was a flood of people, literally thousands, talking about making music in their basements, making music using nothing but an instrument and a smartphone, making music by devoting themselves to the craft despite the hurdles and the difficulties.
One person after another talked about a true love of music, a passion for the art form, a joy that led them to seek out playing and making music despite obstacles and inconveniences. The sentiment that jumped out to me the most, that struck me, was that making art and music inherently involves struggle. Entering a prompt into an AI app is not making art not only because it involves no learning, no practice, no skill, but because it involves no struggle, no difficulty, no overcoming.
I, for example, can’t make music. And that’s okay. I’d love to have the skill, the ability, the artistry to create music and play an instrument. Maybe one day I’ll learn the guitar, or another instrument. Maybe one day I’ll put in the hours, but I haven’t done that work yet. At the same time I’ve never used any sort of AI music creator, and I never will. For one, I don’t think that’s making art. I think it’s making soulless slop. I think music having soul isn’t just some metaphor the value of art and music comes from the emotion, the feeling, the soul poured into it by the artist, by the human making the music. I have no interest in art and music stripped of its soul.
And if that argument is too immaterial for you, there’s the very real and concrete ramifications of generating and monetizing AI music. It’s already hard enough to make it as an artist. The financial equation already favors the big music companies, and a handful of artists. But thousands and thousands of excellent musicians, beautiful artists, can’t make it. And now tech oligarchs want to flood the market with AI slop that will compete with human beings and make it even more difficult to survive as an artist. Like the entire AI industry, a few people will profit from killing jobs, and killing art, while thousands of others get screwed and lose work.
We’ve been sold an odd idea; not only are we all supposed to think we can be anything and do anything, we’re also supposed to take as a given that everything should be easy. In this way of thinking anyone can make art, anyone can make music, and it ought to be easy for all of us to do so. Convenience and ease have become the highest ideal, the highest good. These are the axioms of the new tech world, ideas we’re supposed to accept without question. But they’re remarkably weak values, and they have trouble holding up under even the slightest scrutiny.
Convenience and ease are values that have arisen largely because the oligarchs have nothing better to sell us. Good health care, good housing, better transportation: selling us actual improvements to society has been deemed too expensive, and providing us with improvements on these core components of a decent life would require a real redistribution of wealth. They may even require a reordering of society, so they’re off the table. In their place we get apps that save us 5 minutes in the planning of our week, or chatbots that save us two seconds of Googling, or AI music apps that save us hours of learning to really make art.
The thing is, a society where everyone actually had the time to make art, to learn a craft, to practice their passion, that would be a vastly different and vastly better society. And the people selling us on AI music are pretending that’s their product. They’re pretending that a world where we all have time to make art is what’s on offer. But the truth is we’re being sold tools to squeeze the rushed creation AI of slop into our busy lives. The AI hype is another fantasy of false luxury. We’re told that one of the world’s great leisures, the pursuit of the arts, is being democratized and made available to us, when instead a hollow and destabilizing imitation is being shoved down our throats, one that cheapens art, and worsens life rather than improving it.
If the march of generative AI continues we’ll save a little time. We’ll “write” a little faster and “make music” more quickly. In exchange we’ll receive fake art, slop, and the accelerated degradation of society. Graphic designers lose their jobs, musicians can’t make a living, middle managers are cut by the thousands, computer scientists are replaced by AI. The list goes on. The economy will be hollowed out in exchange for AI slop and oligarch profits.
We have to stand up and see this future clearly, and we have to do it now. We’re entering a cycle of automating not just work, but the human experience. Oligarchs moved to automate work a long time ago, from assembly lines to coal mines to fast food. They decided that the human experience of working a job didn’t matter, that the ability of individuals to make decisions on the job should be ironed out of the process in favor of growing their wallets. And we’ve tolerated that for far too long, we’ve been far too accommodating to that idea that workers should be automatons. Now they’re coming for art, and for the soul of the human experience.
Earlier this year the CEO of Suno, our AI ‘music’ company from the top of the piece, said: “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now...I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of time they spend making music.” And his proposed solution is, of course, his app. He’s the latest tech CEO trying to convince us of a fake problem. Making music is enjoyable to people who love making music, just as it’s always been. But this CEO is trying to sell us on the ultimate extension of the convenience philosophy, namely that nothing should involve struggle, not even art.
All of us are, in this way of thinking, entitled to the creation of art. In our era of hyper-individualistic thinking this outcome isn’t too surprising. The idea that each of us can be anything we want to be has evolved into the notion that each of us can be everything. And there is no realistic way to live this delusion without stealing the labor of other people, as oligarchs do. Elon Musk claims that he runs six companies, and for a while had his DOGE government job, when of course other people were doing and do much of the work of running his corporations.
Now, AI has given people another way to live out the fantasy that each of us can be everything. And it too involves trampling on the lives of others. Today everyone can claim to be a writer, and everyone can claim to be a musician, and everyone can make little movies. All it takes is adopting generative AI, which destabilizes creative fields, pollutes the planet, and takes the soul out of art.
By now we should all understand how stepping on others, trampling the rights and the work of others in pursuit of our own success, comes around to bite us in the ass. The ruling class dangles an illusion of wealth, dangles a lottery ticket in front of us, and tells us that we’re the exception rather than the rule. They want a teaming hoard of crabs in a bucket, each aiming to escape by walking on the others, and each reaching ahead to pull back whoever is in front. They want the working class to be a mob fighting itself, instead of learning solidarity and working together to fight the head of the snake.
Pursuing convenience, pursuing ease at the expense of struggle is among the most insidious forms of this crab in a bucket phenomenon. Millions of people have come to think that their middle class existence relies on others making deliveries to their home, have come to confuse a good life with a life where we save a couple of minutes here and there, and now are coming to think that AI should spit out whatever product they want in seconds. This devotion to convenience curbs our soul, curbs the human experience, and makes us invested in a technology that is coming back around to worsen our own lives.
We have to be very clear, right now, that AI art shouldn’t be allowed to replace human creativity. AI music shouldn’t be allowed to replace human musicians. Generative AI shouldn’t be allowed to replace photographers and film makers and graphic designers. But we’ll never wipe this scourge from society unless we see clear that it’s part of a much larger picture, part of the ruling class desire to automate workers, to mechanize the working class and crush our humanity — replacing us with robots, yes, but also with an unthinking, unfeeling class of laborers who exist only as cogs in a machine. In each of these ways, and in countless others, capitalism has evolved to squeeze the humanity out of us, just as it squeezes each and every dollar it can from us.
I’ll leave you with this. I was watching the documentary Harlan County USA the other day with my family, about coal miners and their families fighting a giant coal and power company down in Eastern Kentucky around 1973. They went on strike for over a year, and fought like hell for a union contract. One man was even killed by a scab. The film is raw, and human. Not just because of the people in it, and the people behind the camera, but because of the struggle they embarked on.
The coal company treated these people like replaceable machines, hell they seemed to value the machines more than the human beings. But the miners, their families, and the entire community stood up and fought back. As George Jackson said, they discovered their humanity and love in the struggle. Because it is in and through struggle, whether it be art or political struggle or the many interpersonal struggles that dot our lives, that we find our humanity. Don’t give that up to an unfeeling machine, either at work or at home. We’re in the middle of a long fight to define our lives, to define what it means to be human. Don’t preemptively cede your soul, and the soul of our species, to AI, and to the oligarchs behind the curtain. - JP
P.S. Which side are you on, from Harlan County:
"We’ve been sold an odd idea; not only are we all supposed to think we can be anything and do anything, we’re also supposed to take as a given that everything should be easy. In this way of thinking anyone can make art, anyone can make music, and it ought to be easy for all of us to do so." This is interesting - I immediately thought of my days in band, growing up around folks who genuinely loved music. Those were the folks you went to and interacted with when you wanted to learn/experience music on a deeper level. "Making" music by using a few AI prompts takes collaboration and mentorship off the table. Part of doing the hard stuff of actually learning isn't just the craft itself, it's also the community that we build around the craft as well
Removing art from human generation does make sense, if the goal is to create an unthinking, easily manipulatable population. Art, like the song you posted at the end, fuels the human struggle. We struggle to make art, to churn our feelings into something other people can experience and connect to, and that in turn inspires people to independent thinking and pushing back against what feels wrong. A complacent society making brainrot on their phone and trying to be the next big thing? Those folks aren't going to form strong community and push back. The crabs in a bucket metaphor is aptly used. Thanks for this essay, I'll be sharing it with the folks in my life who aren't grasping the consequences of all this gen AI nonsense.