In Game of Thrones, Night King is a character who represents an existential threat to all of humanity. Jon Snow is a human king who recognises the threat and tries to unite the warring human factions to oppose the greater enemy. This is where we currently are in reality with regards to AI Slop.
Henry Fox Talbot was so inept at tracing the outlines of a landscape projected onto a sheet of paper through a camera obscura that he wondered if he might be able to fix the projected image somehow without the need for drawing skill. We’re at the same place with AI creating artworks — a wannabe K-Pop star wonders, can I write a song without having to learn any music?
There is a crucial difference in this analogy however: theft.
Photography captures what is available in the commons. If AI were to do the same it would reproduce natural sounds only (that someone still had to go out and record and upload). To reproduce human made music it has to steal the structures and conventions of its many forms that goes back centuries. This is akin to the Enclosures of common land but on a global scale. The theft is so big and outrageous that many people I know can’t comprehend the enormity of it and dismiss the objection as unrelated to the issue. Think back to the draconian DRM enforcement by Big Tech and the hypocrisy is staggering.
I’m a user of Logic Pro software and I find the drumming facility incredibly useful. I don’t need to hire a rehearsal room and find a first-class drummer to sit in it and jam with my bass riffs. The software is irresistibly convenient. Now, I’m guessing Apple paid the relevant drummers for their contributions to the software so I don’t have a problem using it. AI song creation however…
As an experiment I tried one of the free applications. My prompts included the lyric, ‘burned alive in a Tesla’. What it came up with shocked me. One of its versions was so reminiscent of a song I’d created years ago and uploaded to an online media platform that I suspected it had ‘researched’ my online presence and ‘borrowed’ some of my ideas to please me with its results. Maybe I’m being paranoid (or boringly derivative in my music making) but I did wonder why the site asks if you’re a musician from the outset.
The other thing that shocked me was how irresistible it is; within a minute it generated four versions of brilliantly produced AI slop for me to consider. I could tweak the results further with more involved options if I paid a subscription fee. What might take me weeks with traditional methods is executed in minutes, the instant high is what makes this drug so addictive.
I’ve been an artist all my life but a part of me now thinks, what’s the point? Just use the tools that are available — artistic gratification at the touch of a button.
AI is a curse and we’re living in interesting times. Where is our Jon Snow equivalent who will unite all the bickering political factions into a cohesive force to oppose the existential threat of Billionaire King and his army of creative death?
