AI AND MUSIC.

So on one hand I'm glad that computer science has finally shown us that all music art is meaningless. That with a few general prompts you can have your own library of hit pop songs demonstrates how fundamentally fucked the idea of creating anything original with music was. Give up the idea that you'll strap on a guitar and do something no one has done before, because an algorithm has already done it all. Music is just like 8 notes that we smash against our instruments and bash against the current scope of our verbiage, it's basically nothing. Don't worry about copying anyone, because they just copied someone themselves, and so on. If you write a song these days you might as well just masturbate onto a CD disc and put it into a sleeve. I'm serious. There's no point to this stuff, which is also why you might as well do it. What do you like? Do that. What do you hate? Write about that.

They always used to say things like "Punk is dead" and that wasn't really true at the time. Punk as a originalist movement indicative of a burgeoning subculture, sure, that died in the early 80's, but punk hadn't really died at all. Because it still required human beings to create. In order to be a punk band you kinda had to have a band. But now you can just churn out the latest fab craze of shaggy haired emo jailbait with the click of a button. You can generate their songs, their band photos, their blogs, everything about them. They don't have to die at 25. They don't have to age at all. You can have an endless stream of catchy garbage that ages with whatever fanbase you manage to capture.

I still tune into the Amazing Atheist now and then. He's one of these guys. And I won't blame him for doing it because it's available and it brings him some joy, I guess, but still. He said he always wanted to be a music maker and a singer like Marilyn Manson, and blah, blah, blah. Point is he generates songs and makes albums of generated songs and considers that "making art". You can tell from my air quotes how I feel about that. But it might not go as deep as you think.

Steven Wilson says that he's not really a guitar player. This probably seems absurd given that he plays so well, but he explains that he only learned what he needed to know to write whatever song he wanted to write at the time. The guitar wasn't so much something he needed to master, it was only a tool through which his songs could see the light of day. I suppose an argument could be made that AI is just another tool, one that just doesn't require any working knowledge of theory or technique to wield.

It gets said that AI robs humans of their art, and I agree with the visually depicted form, but not so much with music. Again, music is just notes and tone and patterns and beats and, just come on, let's be honest with ourselves about what it is. Your WORDS and your THOUGHTS and EXPRESSION was what made music original at all. It wasn't the SOUNDS it was YOU. So if YOU plug your WORDS and THOUGHTS and EXPRESSION into a computer prompt and make it "do a sad song" is that really any different than if you picked up a guitar and did it yourself? In the flat circle of our reality, I'd say no, not really. Fucking Rush wrote about this: all this machinery making modern music can still be open hearted. It's really just a question of your honesty. They were talking about digital instruments at the time, but it still applies, I think, to AI. Is whatever piece of art you're trying to take ownership of an honest expression of who you are, what you stand for, and what you care about? Then cool. It's art. You can strap on a guitar, pattern something out in Mario Paint, or just have AI do it. It's all the same. It was always worthless.

It's funny that they managed to monetize music at all. I guess back then all you had was a radio, a player, and a store to buy music from. They could do whatever they wanted, I guess. They could make you think that they had something special on their hands, something that the rest of us needed to strive for, to aspire to. But really it was all just noise that could get generated with the click of a mouse. Should you try to make art "with your own hands" - yes. Only in the sense that one additional layer of YOU is being removed from the meaningless slop. It's all slop at the end of the day, but wouldn't you rather the world get just a little bit of YOUR slop?

All that being said, I'm too far into the real deal to ever go the AI route, also, I enjoy performing live, and I'm not going up there with a laptop and just pressing a button. I really hate music. Just keep that in mind at all times, thanks.