I think about the CEO of an AI song generator A LOT. He said, “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” he said. “It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>It's not enjoyable to learn or make things<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
This is profoundly anti-human. And it is bound to fail.
This is so dark. It's not new information that it takes time and practice to be good at music (and plenty of other things). It sounds like this person is a) not a musician and b) doesn't actually like music, which makes it even darker.
"It's not really enjoyable to make music now." ...Says who?
+1 to all this. Tangentially, there's an idea, which I heard from Cory Doctorow, of good human-tool relationships as being like a centaur. Using a tool can make us more capable in the way that being grafted onto a horse's body would make us faster and stronger. Trouble comes when automatizing tools turn us into reverse-centaurs, puppeteering us to accomplish their assigned tasks. To paraphrase him, someone who chooses to commute by bike is having a fundamentally different experience than an Uber Eats courier who's being driven to exhaustion and having their wages nipped by a pitiless algorithm.
Even conceding the AI boosters' argument that their tools can help make things - and despite my own visceral dislike of the LLMs and other content generators, I can see their point, in some ways - they can still be harmful. It's about power, and who's doing what to whom. They all still make me want to go full Luddite.
the reverse-centaur puppet is a good figure to help think through this
p.s. speaking of the luddites i keep meaning to read brian merchant's recent book about them..."Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech" https://bookshop.org/a/32497/9780316487740
A fascinating thread, with thanks for the heads up on Blood in the Machine - have downloaded on audible and will be listening to later tonight. As for the reverse centaurs, great analogy and I’d recommend visiting a former mill site if you have one locally.
I visited one in the Peak District of northern England, one of the birthplaces of the industrial revolution, and the guide took us round all the stages of producing cloth. It was amazing but obviously brutal looking and incredibly loud, no doubt appallingly low wages too based on what Dickens and Disraeli reported in England. It’s not called the rag trade for nothing, only now it’s a multinational racket and we need to vote with our $feet wherever we can.
I still make all of my cards, too (though sometimes they are embroidery pieces, needle felting, or other cathartic crafts that often involve stabbing something a million times to morph it into something beautiful). Found an incredible treasure trove of all of the birthday and father's day cards I made my dad when I was preparing to sell his house in 2024. He kept them in the same secret drawer in which he hid his valuables, which might have been the only thoughtful and kind thing he ever did. And if that doesn't emphasize how meaningful and impactful handmade cards can be, I don't know what could.
I once had a conversation with someone I met at a party about AI and children. We’re both parents, and when I told her I’d recently written an article about how kids’ movies seemed to be preparing children for the idea of AI companionship, she replied, “Oh, is that bad? I use AI with my kid all the time.” She said she’d use AI to tell her kid silly stories and make the kid feel reassured about starting a new school.
It took me a while to think through why that creeped me out so much, but it’s not too dissimilar from what you’re saying about making the birthday cards by hand. It’s the challenge and the hard moments of parenting, or anything else that involves our giving of ourselves — love, or grace, as you say — that make these difficult efforts worthwhile. Why assign the more rewarding efforts of being human to a machine?
(I should add, I get why some people might have to use these tools for childcare, because the childcare system in our country is ~messed up~, but the examples she gave were some of the aspects of raising a kid that, to me, at least, make the whole endeavor worth it.)
"why assign the more rewarding efforts of being human to a machine" really gets to the heart of it (even if "our fucked childcare system" offers one at least partially compelling answer)
Totally! And I can see the case for using AI as a tool, occasionally, even for creativity. (I used to be opposed to drum machines when I was a kid too, till I grew up and realized that, like any musical instrument, they can be used really creatively.) But it’s that whole optimize-at-all-costs attitude (even if it means eradicating what makes something special and imperfect and human) that you talk about that’s so off-putting about AI.
My family always gives very serious and sentimental pre-written cards for any occasion. As an adult, I started buying the blank ones and writing my thoughts out, as I realized these things were meaningless, yet I could never really fully express why. But you fully define how I've been feeling all these years: "To buy a card for somebody you cared about was, however well-intentioned, to put something inert, disenchanted and disposable in between you, your feelings, and the person you felt them for."
I like the frame of embodied human intelligence even though I fall on the opposite view on this one and see LLMs as an intelligence to transform one form of embodied intelligence to the other. May be this is in part due to the fact that English is not my first language but I mostly interact with people in English and hence do this translation continuously (language is embodied intelligence in a Ted Chiang/Sapir Whorf Hypotheisis way). An example I can think of is, I've been reading a lot of continental philosophy this year, something I've wanted to do for a long time but neither had the time or resources to do. Continental philosophers refer other ideas from the corpus in their books like you are just supposed to know them and so its impenetrable unless you read those previous works. So when I'm reading contemporary philosophers like Yuk Hui I use AI to translate the older ideas that he is referring to a form I can understand. Sometimes it does a mediocre job, sometimes it transcends the material and sometimes its sludge. Its not perfect but I dont have the money or interest to go to grad school for philosophy so its a messy way to go about it while acknowledging that most promoter perspectives of AI feel cursed and unorginal.
My favourite example of embodied human intelligence and CGI is "Terminator 2". Yes, the T-1000 sequences were amazing back then (and still are!!) but there are a lot of things in that movie that were practical effects such as the helicopter chase (a real and really dangerous stunt) or the use of twins. It looked real and it looks "real". Also love that pink dolphin in your card!!!
So much that’s interesting here. But something about the distinction between a “creative” and an “artist” needs one more beat. There’s a world of creatives for whom making things (however that happens) scratches an itch. For an artist - regardless of how hard something t is, or impossible- they do it because they can’t not. It’s the Fitzcarraldo effect. Some call it madness. But it is the only way to the sublime.
I’m not an artist, I don’t like to make things, because I’m bad at it and the things I could make wouldn’t be worth looking at.
Previously this never bothered me. Now it does though, I have seen too many really sloppy AI images. First I just felt sick of them but increasingly I feel a drive to make art with my own mind and body.
It’s frustrating because I am actually bad at it. On the other hand I feel optimistic that AI art won’t just take over all human expression, I think this is probably not a rare reaction.
I work at a marketing agency, and utterly hate that AI is taking on more and more functions. Amazon for instance makes it so easy and cheap to generate images that if you're a huge corporation, you don't see a problem with utterly cutting out the human element of craft.
The idea that AI is inevitable being posited by various c suite assholes has always deeply rankled me; a lot of my higher ups already use Chat GPT to drive strategy, analyze huge sets of data, and answer questions (that could be answered if they could be bothered to do some research...), with absolutely NO WAY to check their results. But more sites are offering it as a free way to save money on creative dev, and I just KNOW my bosses are going to start thinking about cutting out the creative department entirely
From no small amount of hands-on experience, my POV: it’s like Clapton sang, “It’s in the way that you use it.” AI is as mind and soul-deadening, or as creative and uplifting as your imagination can conjure, aided by skills honed with time.
Further, “"I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be." (Henry David Thoreau, Walden)
I love the sentiment here and honestly couldn't agree more, and am also wondering where something like Headache / Vegyn's new album comes into all of this? Thank You For Almost Everything is filled with gorgeous instrumentals lovingly created by a very talented human, and another human has put together a set of lyrics as intriguing as anything I've heard this year. The vocal is a robotic / AI voice, however, and it seems to have become even less human since the last record, giving it a deeply uncanny feel when touching the heart of what it means to be alive.
To me there's something beautiful and powerful about this, and combining these technologies with human creativity (with love and care ofc) opens up the potential to communicate something about this particular moment in time that little else could. Thoughts?
some people i know were talking about this album, with wildly divergent opinions - i haven't put it on yet but i'm curious to do so
it does make me think, in broad strokes, about the "vocaloid" software that laura from 100 gecs talked about in the spyplane interview .... vocoders, autotune, vocaloids... some powerful shit happens for sure when we mess around with / deconstruct the "humanness" of the human singing voice
Oh for sure it's a marmite record, as anything veering towards uncanny will always be. Would be fascinated to know what you make of it if you do get a chance to dig in!
As a ‘freelance creative’ I am in agreement with 95% of this but I have also had the joyful experience of pitching an idea for an art commission to try a code-informed process I hadn’t ever used before in my practice, then when I got the commission, through a slow process of trial and error and testing and working with genAI to write the various bits of code I needed, I was able to actually make a thing that I could never have made by myself otherwise.
(But ofc getting this exciting place of ‘making’ with genAI has also involved me spending time figuring out when incorporating it in my practice just produces really terrible formulaic work, usually when i let it do too much of the ‘hard’ conceptual work)
My family's equivalent of making birthday cards is requiring everyone to make christmas presents for one another. My mother started this tradition because we didn't have money growing up and then we kept it since we made vastly different salaries as adults. And besides, now it was tradition! When I look around my home I see that it's filled with gifts my family's made over the years: an apron made by my mother, a poem my dad printed out and framed, a sculpture by my sister, and a photo my brother took then framed. Literally priceless to me plus nobody can cop them.
As an inveterate birthday card maker, I especially appreciate this one! Consider pushing this line of commentary further, as I'd be curious to hear your thinking on the intersection of AI and fashion proper which is, unfortunately, a thing. (Also, do read the "Intellectual Situation" opener in the latest issue of N+1, which is a real AI banger.) Yrs, Soft Labor https://www.softlabor.biz/
have you come across any interesting AI + fashion usages ? the ones I've come across are on the consumer-facing "build your perfect wardrobe" / "figure out how to assemble a good outfit" end of things, which is hard for me to even begin to take an interest in...
The only designer that I know is very publicly on record about using AI in the design process is Norma Kamali. (Confessional: I do own a sleeping bag coat.) But I'm sure others are out there—the kind of thing BoF would cover. Wouldn't surprise me if Chaylan is dabbling in AI just for shits and giggles. For the record, I'm also totally uninterested in the "build your own" applications . . .
Damn, this is why I - a man who hasn't bought a new pair of trousers in a decade - am a subscriber. Thank you.
😂
please update us if / when you break this major pantsless streak ; 0
I think about the CEO of an AI song generator A LOT. He said, “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” he said. “It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>It's not enjoyable to learn or make things<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
This is profoundly anti-human. And it is bound to fail.
This is so dark. It's not new information that it takes time and practice to be good at music (and plenty of other things). It sounds like this person is a) not a musician and b) doesn't actually like music, which makes it even darker.
"It's not really enjoyable to make music now." ...Says who?
+1 to all this. Tangentially, there's an idea, which I heard from Cory Doctorow, of good human-tool relationships as being like a centaur. Using a tool can make us more capable in the way that being grafted onto a horse's body would make us faster and stronger. Trouble comes when automatizing tools turn us into reverse-centaurs, puppeteering us to accomplish their assigned tasks. To paraphrase him, someone who chooses to commute by bike is having a fundamentally different experience than an Uber Eats courier who's being driven to exhaustion and having their wages nipped by a pitiless algorithm.
Even conceding the AI boosters' argument that their tools can help make things - and despite my own visceral dislike of the LLMs and other content generators, I can see their point, in some ways - they can still be harmful. It's about power, and who's doing what to whom. They all still make me want to go full Luddite.
the reverse-centaur puppet is a good figure to help think through this
p.s. speaking of the luddites i keep meaning to read brian merchant's recent book about them..."Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech" https://bookshop.org/a/32497/9780316487740
A fascinating thread, with thanks for the heads up on Blood in the Machine - have downloaded on audible and will be listening to later tonight. As for the reverse centaurs, great analogy and I’d recommend visiting a former mill site if you have one locally.
I visited one in the Peak District of northern England, one of the birthplaces of the industrial revolution, and the guide took us round all the stages of producing cloth. It was amazing but obviously brutal looking and incredibly loud, no doubt appallingly low wages too based on what Dickens and Disraeli reported in England. It’s not called the rag trade for nothing, only now it’s a multinational racket and we need to vote with our $feet wherever we can.
Brilliant post Luke, the reference to the gig economy is spot on it’s all about the privilege of having choices isn’t it.
I still make all of my cards, too (though sometimes they are embroidery pieces, needle felting, or other cathartic crafts that often involve stabbing something a million times to morph it into something beautiful). Found an incredible treasure trove of all of the birthday and father's day cards I made my dad when I was preparing to sell his house in 2024. He kept them in the same secret drawer in which he hid his valuables, which might have been the only thoughtful and kind thing he ever did. And if that doesn't emphasize how meaningful and impactful handmade cards can be, I don't know what could.
Damn!
I once had a conversation with someone I met at a party about AI and children. We’re both parents, and when I told her I’d recently written an article about how kids’ movies seemed to be preparing children for the idea of AI companionship, she replied, “Oh, is that bad? I use AI with my kid all the time.” She said she’d use AI to tell her kid silly stories and make the kid feel reassured about starting a new school.
It took me a while to think through why that creeped me out so much, but it’s not too dissimilar from what you’re saying about making the birthday cards by hand. It’s the challenge and the hard moments of parenting, or anything else that involves our giving of ourselves — love, or grace, as you say — that make these difficult efforts worthwhile. Why assign the more rewarding efforts of being human to a machine?
(I should add, I get why some people might have to use these tools for childcare, because the childcare system in our country is ~messed up~, but the examples she gave were some of the aspects of raising a kid that, to me, at least, make the whole endeavor worth it.)
"why assign the more rewarding efforts of being human to a machine" really gets to the heart of it (even if "our fucked childcare system" offers one at least partially compelling answer)
Totally! And I can see the case for using AI as a tool, occasionally, even for creativity. (I used to be opposed to drum machines when I was a kid too, till I grew up and realized that, like any musical instrument, they can be used really creatively.) But it’s that whole optimize-at-all-costs attitude (even if it means eradicating what makes something special and imperfect and human) that you talk about that’s so off-putting about AI.
Yes! Making things is fun and it calms the nervous system.
My family always gives very serious and sentimental pre-written cards for any occasion. As an adult, I started buying the blank ones and writing my thoughts out, as I realized these things were meaningless, yet I could never really fully express why. But you fully define how I've been feeling all these years: "To buy a card for somebody you cared about was, however well-intentioned, to put something inert, disenchanted and disposable in between you, your feelings, and the person you felt them for."
Still love a good snoopy-themed card tho.
I like the frame of embodied human intelligence even though I fall on the opposite view on this one and see LLMs as an intelligence to transform one form of embodied intelligence to the other. May be this is in part due to the fact that English is not my first language but I mostly interact with people in English and hence do this translation continuously (language is embodied intelligence in a Ted Chiang/Sapir Whorf Hypotheisis way). An example I can think of is, I've been reading a lot of continental philosophy this year, something I've wanted to do for a long time but neither had the time or resources to do. Continental philosophers refer other ideas from the corpus in their books like you are just supposed to know them and so its impenetrable unless you read those previous works. So when I'm reading contemporary philosophers like Yuk Hui I use AI to translate the older ideas that he is referring to a form I can understand. Sometimes it does a mediocre job, sometimes it transcends the material and sometimes its sludge. Its not perfect but I dont have the money or interest to go to grad school for philosophy so its a messy way to go about it while acknowledging that most promoter perspectives of AI feel cursed and unorginal.
My favourite example of embodied human intelligence and CGI is "Terminator 2". Yes, the T-1000 sequences were amazing back then (and still are!!) but there are a lot of things in that movie that were practical effects such as the helicopter chase (a real and really dangerous stunt) or the use of twins. It looked real and it looks "real". Also love that pink dolphin in your card!!!
So much that’s interesting here. But something about the distinction between a “creative” and an “artist” needs one more beat. There’s a world of creatives for whom making things (however that happens) scratches an itch. For an artist - regardless of how hard something t is, or impossible- they do it because they can’t not. It’s the Fitzcarraldo effect. Some call it madness. But it is the only way to the sublime.
I’m not an artist, I don’t like to make things, because I’m bad at it and the things I could make wouldn’t be worth looking at.
Previously this never bothered me. Now it does though, I have seen too many really sloppy AI images. First I just felt sick of them but increasingly I feel a drive to make art with my own mind and body.
It’s frustrating because I am actually bad at it. On the other hand I feel optimistic that AI art won’t just take over all human expression, I think this is probably not a rare reaction.
I work at a marketing agency, and utterly hate that AI is taking on more and more functions. Amazon for instance makes it so easy and cheap to generate images that if you're a huge corporation, you don't see a problem with utterly cutting out the human element of craft.
The idea that AI is inevitable being posited by various c suite assholes has always deeply rankled me; a lot of my higher ups already use Chat GPT to drive strategy, analyze huge sets of data, and answer questions (that could be answered if they could be bothered to do some research...), with absolutely NO WAY to check their results. But more sites are offering it as a free way to save money on creative dev, and I just KNOW my bosses are going to start thinking about cutting out the creative department entirely
I have some hope that even your bosses will get sick of this in a relatively short period of time.
From no small amount of hands-on experience, my POV: it’s like Clapton sang, “It’s in the way that you use it.” AI is as mind and soul-deadening, or as creative and uplifting as your imagination can conjure, aided by skills honed with time.
Further, “"I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be." (Henry David Thoreau, Walden)
I love the sentiment here and honestly couldn't agree more, and am also wondering where something like Headache / Vegyn's new album comes into all of this? Thank You For Almost Everything is filled with gorgeous instrumentals lovingly created by a very talented human, and another human has put together a set of lyrics as intriguing as anything I've heard this year. The vocal is a robotic / AI voice, however, and it seems to have become even less human since the last record, giving it a deeply uncanny feel when touching the heart of what it means to be alive.
To me there's something beautiful and powerful about this, and combining these technologies with human creativity (with love and care ofc) opens up the potential to communicate something about this particular moment in time that little else could. Thoughts?
https://open.spotify.com/album/5bvnIPBtewSFLftfn7LONj?si=sPeRpb3_QduSlYIKC38IXA
some people i know were talking about this album, with wildly divergent opinions - i haven't put it on yet but i'm curious to do so
it does make me think, in broad strokes, about the "vocaloid" software that laura from 100 gecs talked about in the spyplane interview .... vocoders, autotune, vocaloids... some powerful shit happens for sure when we mess around with / deconstruct the "humanness" of the human singing voice
Oh for sure it's a marmite record, as anything veering towards uncanny will always be. Would be fascinated to know what you make of it if you do get a chance to dig in!
As a ‘freelance creative’ I am in agreement with 95% of this but I have also had the joyful experience of pitching an idea for an art commission to try a code-informed process I hadn’t ever used before in my practice, then when I got the commission, through a slow process of trial and error and testing and working with genAI to write the various bits of code I needed, I was able to actually make a thing that I could never have made by myself otherwise.
(But ofc getting this exciting place of ‘making’ with genAI has also involved me spending time figuring out when incorporating it in my practice just produces really terrible formulaic work, usually when i let it do too much of the ‘hard’ conceptual work)
huh! can you elaborate a little on the "code informed process" and how it manifested?
My family's equivalent of making birthday cards is requiring everyone to make christmas presents for one another. My mother started this tradition because we didn't have money growing up and then we kept it since we made vastly different salaries as adults. And besides, now it was tradition! When I look around my home I see that it's filled with gifts my family's made over the years: an apron made by my mother, a poem my dad printed out and framed, a sculpture by my sister, and a photo my brother took then framed. Literally priceless to me plus nobody can cop them.
wonderful
As an inveterate birthday card maker, I especially appreciate this one! Consider pushing this line of commentary further, as I'd be curious to hear your thinking on the intersection of AI and fashion proper which is, unfortunately, a thing. (Also, do read the "Intellectual Situation" opener in the latest issue of N+1, which is a real AI banger.) Yrs, Soft Labor https://www.softlabor.biz/
have you come across any interesting AI + fashion usages ? the ones I've come across are on the consumer-facing "build your perfect wardrobe" / "figure out how to assemble a good outfit" end of things, which is hard for me to even begin to take an interest in...
The only designer that I know is very publicly on record about using AI in the design process is Norma Kamali. (Confessional: I do own a sleeping bag coat.) But I'm sure others are out there—the kind of thing BoF would cover. Wouldn't surprise me if Chaylan is dabbling in AI just for shits and giggles. For the record, I'm also totally uninterested in the "build your own" applications . . .