Mike Doughty (the former lead singer/songwriter of the band Soul Coughing), someone whose work I greatly admire, shared what I thought was an interesting and compelling writeup on how he uses AI and where he thinks it’s all going.
He wrote about his fascination with the truly bizarre things an AI spits out now & over the past 2 years or so, and how thing of the current time that will go away quickly and become boring as AIs get “more accurate”. I’ve noticed similarly.
But the biggest standout point made by Mike is this which I think is the thing nobody wants to talk about, and it’s similar to the “taste matters most now” argument I’m seeing in tech:
“Hacks are in trouble. If somebody is making work that is uninspired, and unindividual, then they can indeed be replaced by a machine that just spits up boring chunks of mid-ness. (But for those of us who at least consider ourselves artists with a style, a viewpoint, and an identity, a thinning of the field is, by some, being quietly welcomed as good news)”
I don’t use AI much outside of work (& frankly am not as impressed as others with it in practice), never in songwriting, but I did use an old Stable Diffusion model to make the artwork for my 1st album THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY. It was uncanny and bizarre and fit the tone of the album, and I didn’t have the words I felt i could convey what I was looking for to an artist. I wouldn’t do this often (usually I use my wife’s photography), but it worked for me at the time.
Was this a bad thing? Should I have just hired an artist? Maybe. But I had no idea where to start, no words to even describe what I wanted, and a simple interface to iterate on those words & see the result was powerful. I can’t deny it.
Could I have taken that idea, handed it to an artist and said “ok now make this more human”? Sure, but I don’t know the value of that other than to pay an artist. At some point I could just divest $ to an artist I like (which I do regularly, I have receipts).
That all said, I (today) do not use AI in contexts where I can bring my skill & craft: songwriting, music production, prose writing, product sense, analysis. I consider those to be the strongest ways for me to convey a viewpoint, a conviction, a taste. The humanity in what we make as humans is important to me.
I generally think the more we can apply nuance to debates about AI the better off we’ll all be. It’s not productive to blanket state that AI is all good or all evil (or even net good / net evil). It’s better at search than Google. It does help do some things faster. It’s also worse for the overall quality of media, incentivizes disinformation & disincentivizes critical thinking. Ethics matter a lot. There are conflicting reports about its environmental impact. It’s moving fast, and arguing in absolutes doesn’t feel productive.
