I find myself frustrated with the amount of time that it takes me to realize that something is in fact AI , once I realize that I have been duped I mentally kick myself. This is a dangerous time. The current administration wants us to be confused, frightened, overwhelmed, hopeless and helpless. That’s why we have to create. We have to stay authentic and true to ourselves.
Not interested in AI sludge, and increasingly suspicious of the motivation to push AI down our throats. See Ted Gioia's excellent piece: The Force-Feeding of AI on an Unwilling Public https://substack.com/home/post/p-167457869.
I’ll add something from another angle, as a music critic/journalist of 40 years.
The bar has fallen so low within pop music created by ‘real’ artists that the AI content doesn’t put much into contrast.
I listen to a couple of hours of new music releases every Friday on Spotify and the majority of it is horrible. No melodies, maybe a chorus here and there and I can’t recall the last time I heard a song incorporate a bridge.
There aren’t very many well trained musicians out there today — just programmers, Garage Band enthusiasts, influencers that look attractive, and a handful of songwriters that churn out the same shit regardless of whatever artist they are writing for. One listen to someone like, say, Benson Boone and you’ll be lunging for a hari-kari knife.
It’s quite the void, which makes AI’s aim of filling it up much easier.
I had this conversation with someone the other day as we were listening to classic rocks that are 40/50 years old. How much of our music will last that long?
Will people listen to Sabrina Carpenter and Taylor Swift in 50 years time? Absolutely not.
To think a new generation might listen to The Velvet Sundown and not know about The Velvet Underground, that's depressing.
All this is very scary. I feel exhausted and frustrated with any new thing I hear about AI. I feel the best we can do is to not give money or data to these companies, as far as we can, because that's all they care about.
That's true. But what I meant is maybe to stop using their products, if we can. I think people should at least wonder if they can live without having an Instagram or Twitter account, for example. I meant that maybe it would be wise to stop to willingly continue giving them new data, new content, new traffic, you know?
Humbly, I think railing against Big Tech is misguided. Effort is not necessarily a proxy for care or quality. The two easy examples that come to mind are shoes and books. Shoes used to be laboriously hand-stitched and manually made by cobblers. Now they're mass-assembled. To be clear, there are still human elements to shoe production (the WSJ has a great podcast episode about how Nike tried to automate the *entire* process but totally failed in Mexico) but there's no denying that cobblers are largely gone now. Books are an even better example. They used to be laboriously typeset and bound by hand. That said, there are still costlier quality books (any made by Stripe Press) and cheaper mass market commercial paperbacks.
Yes, there's a ton of AI slop sloshing about. We are still in AI's early days. I don't personally listen to Velvet Sundown, not bc it's bad, but just because it's not the type of genre I'm into. But I definitely listen to Spotify Discover every Monday and can totally see myself listening to AI-generated music in the future as it improves. (Especially since much of the stuff I listen to is EDM or epic-core music which follows well-defined patterns-- I largely listen to music a lot when coding or working on something.)
Platforms are largely a mirror. Yes, they all in various degrees have their thumbs on the scale (Elon and X the most egregious example) but the success of Stormtrooper Vlogs is not some grave injustice to the art community. People have been able to draw fan art and remix/reuse under the "fair use" doctrine for decades now. There is an interesting question on how the courts will rule but from what I've been following, the courts have largely sided with the AI companies that "training is legal" (https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/anthropic-wins-key-ruling-ai-authors-copyright-lawsuit-2025-06-24/).
You write that algorithms are "narrowing" our tastes. ie: "Narrower tastes mean it's easier to sell to us, to learn about us, to put us into marketing profiles, to create content that keeps us engaged." But IME, it's been the opposite. I've had to curate and train my algorithms-- I aggressively block and mute material I dislike and deliberately follow specific, sometimes smaller accounts. The algorithms cluster us. It's the exact opposite of what you're describing-- this is the whole "long tail" thing: with algorithms, if you curate your personalized algo correctly, you'll actually have more of a chance now to discover *more niche content* than ever before.
Anyway, just my 2c. IMHO, instead of railing against capitalism or Big Tech, I strongly suggest learning how to use the new AI tools and also tweak your platform algos to serve you. eg. I've always wanted to be a comic book artist, but could never draw. Earlier this year though, with MidJourney I was able to make two comic strips that I really enjoyed (https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:5wlpm2j3d6can6quf5hotdcc/post/3lofh757vm22f and https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:5wlpm2j3d6can6quf5hotdcc/post/3lomt42u2ok2m). The AI art tools are still early so they still took me a good bit of work, still. But without MJ, it would've been outright impossible for me to tell these two specific mini-stories that I was interested in. With AI, people who have stories they want to tell but historically lacked artistic skills, can now make things. Not for commercial purposes, but simply to satisfy our own creative needs and urges. I think this is worth celebrating.
Proliferation of algorithmically generated content through algorithmically determined channels direct to our gullets was the logical end state of the commodification of absolutely everything down to our own personal expression. What a perfect distillation of everything wrong with the world - we have ground down the sum total of the human experience into artificially flavored nutrient paste and packaged it into convenient tubes delivered straight to your doorstep. The machines frighten me less than how many people I see seem to *desire* this outcome - to never be challenged, to never exert effort, to never have to remember other human beings exist. The insane number of people scoffing at actually caring about anything because we’ll be “left behind”. Left behind where, exactly? Being alive feels like fighting a losing battle. I’m truly tired of the industrial production of “thought provoking” pieces about the nature of art that seems to be distracting even well meaning people from the fact that the creators of this technology don’t care about art, they care about once and for all solving the problem of wages at the cost of the goddamn planet. I’ll continue to be an old man yelling at clouds with you. Thank you for the article.
I find myself frustrated with the amount of time that it takes me to realize that something is in fact AI , once I realize that I have been duped I mentally kick myself. This is a dangerous time. The current administration wants us to be confused, frightened, overwhelmed, hopeless and helpless. That’s why we have to create. We have to stay authentic and true to ourselves.
I wouldn’t be so hard on yourself — it’s super hard to tell, and this will eventually become impossible to tell.
And now I am suspicious of everything!!!!
Not interested in AI sludge, and increasingly suspicious of the motivation to push AI down our throats. See Ted Gioia's excellent piece: The Force-Feeding of AI on an Unwilling Public https://substack.com/home/post/p-167457869.
Having that suspicion will serve you well
I’ll add something from another angle, as a music critic/journalist of 40 years.
The bar has fallen so low within pop music created by ‘real’ artists that the AI content doesn’t put much into contrast.
I listen to a couple of hours of new music releases every Friday on Spotify and the majority of it is horrible. No melodies, maybe a chorus here and there and I can’t recall the last time I heard a song incorporate a bridge.
There aren’t very many well trained musicians out there today — just programmers, Garage Band enthusiasts, influencers that look attractive, and a handful of songwriters that churn out the same shit regardless of whatever artist they are writing for. One listen to someone like, say, Benson Boone and you’ll be lunging for a hari-kari knife.
It’s quite the void, which makes AI’s aim of filling it up much easier.
I had this conversation with someone the other day as we were listening to classic rocks that are 40/50 years old. How much of our music will last that long?
Will people listen to Sabrina Carpenter and Taylor Swift in 50 years time? Absolutely not.
A bit overblown and unwieldy but some well observed denouements…
https://open.substack.com/pub/antiart/p/taylor-swift-finally-lost?
Yeah I went a little crazy with this one but thank you
I reveled in it.
To think a new generation might listen to The Velvet Sundown and not know about The Velvet Underground, that's depressing.
All this is very scary. I feel exhausted and frustrated with any new thing I hear about AI. I feel the best we can do is to not give money or data to these companies, as far as we can, because that's all they care about.
Money, yes. Data? Almost impossible. They’ve stolen most of it already, and made deals with many businesses/media companies etc to get the rest.
That's true. But what I meant is maybe to stop using their products, if we can. I think people should at least wonder if they can live without having an Instagram or Twitter account, for example. I meant that maybe it would be wise to stop to willingly continue giving them new data, new content, new traffic, you know?
Humbly, I think railing against Big Tech is misguided. Effort is not necessarily a proxy for care or quality. The two easy examples that come to mind are shoes and books. Shoes used to be laboriously hand-stitched and manually made by cobblers. Now they're mass-assembled. To be clear, there are still human elements to shoe production (the WSJ has a great podcast episode about how Nike tried to automate the *entire* process but totally failed in Mexico) but there's no denying that cobblers are largely gone now. Books are an even better example. They used to be laboriously typeset and bound by hand. That said, there are still costlier quality books (any made by Stripe Press) and cheaper mass market commercial paperbacks.
Yes, there's a ton of AI slop sloshing about. We are still in AI's early days. I don't personally listen to Velvet Sundown, not bc it's bad, but just because it's not the type of genre I'm into. But I definitely listen to Spotify Discover every Monday and can totally see myself listening to AI-generated music in the future as it improves. (Especially since much of the stuff I listen to is EDM or epic-core music which follows well-defined patterns-- I largely listen to music a lot when coding or working on something.)
Platforms are largely a mirror. Yes, they all in various degrees have their thumbs on the scale (Elon and X the most egregious example) but the success of Stormtrooper Vlogs is not some grave injustice to the art community. People have been able to draw fan art and remix/reuse under the "fair use" doctrine for decades now. There is an interesting question on how the courts will rule but from what I've been following, the courts have largely sided with the AI companies that "training is legal" (https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/anthropic-wins-key-ruling-ai-authors-copyright-lawsuit-2025-06-24/).
You write that algorithms are "narrowing" our tastes. ie: "Narrower tastes mean it's easier to sell to us, to learn about us, to put us into marketing profiles, to create content that keeps us engaged." But IME, it's been the opposite. I've had to curate and train my algorithms-- I aggressively block and mute material I dislike and deliberately follow specific, sometimes smaller accounts. The algorithms cluster us. It's the exact opposite of what you're describing-- this is the whole "long tail" thing: with algorithms, if you curate your personalized algo correctly, you'll actually have more of a chance now to discover *more niche content* than ever before.
Anyway, just my 2c. IMHO, instead of railing against capitalism or Big Tech, I strongly suggest learning how to use the new AI tools and also tweak your platform algos to serve you. eg. I've always wanted to be a comic book artist, but could never draw. Earlier this year though, with MidJourney I was able to make two comic strips that I really enjoyed (https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:5wlpm2j3d6can6quf5hotdcc/post/3lofh757vm22f and https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:5wlpm2j3d6can6quf5hotdcc/post/3lomt42u2ok2m). The AI art tools are still early so they still took me a good bit of work, still. But without MJ, it would've been outright impossible for me to tell these two specific mini-stories that I was interested in. With AI, people who have stories they want to tell but historically lacked artistic skills, can now make things. Not for commercial purposes, but simply to satisfy our own creative needs and urges. I think this is worth celebrating.
Proliferation of algorithmically generated content through algorithmically determined channels direct to our gullets was the logical end state of the commodification of absolutely everything down to our own personal expression. What a perfect distillation of everything wrong with the world - we have ground down the sum total of the human experience into artificially flavored nutrient paste and packaged it into convenient tubes delivered straight to your doorstep. The machines frighten me less than how many people I see seem to *desire* this outcome - to never be challenged, to never exert effort, to never have to remember other human beings exist. The insane number of people scoffing at actually caring about anything because we’ll be “left behind”. Left behind where, exactly? Being alive feels like fighting a losing battle. I’m truly tired of the industrial production of “thought provoking” pieces about the nature of art that seems to be distracting even well meaning people from the fact that the creators of this technology don’t care about art, they care about once and for all solving the problem of wages at the cost of the goddamn planet. I’ll continue to be an old man yelling at clouds with you. Thank you for the article.