My first response to this announcement was “Yes. We need at least one place on the internet for art and music that is not going to be overrun by computer generated slop.” and then I read a few rebuttal pieces by people who have embraced AI as a tool in their work and I had a change of heart.

Now I think we need MULTIPLE places on the internet that take an active stance against AI-generated slop masquerading as art. Because, here’s the thing: a person using synthetic media generation tools, even if they are using those tools in good faith to augment or bring to life their own creative vision from inside their own heads, can simply produce thousands of times more output than mere humans working through their artistic struggles the old fashioned, slow, tedious, and thoughtful way. It is simply far easier to have a half-polished brain fart and turn it into something that looks shiny and polished via prompting than it is to do the actual work.

And let’s face it, we don’t all need to be exposed to every single thought that ever crosses through the minds of every other person at all times. We don’t need any more avalanches of half-baked, poorly considered, derivative, media flooding our finite minds and attention spans than we already have.

People in the 21st century are lonely. And scared. And angry. And harassed 24/7/365 by propaganda and advertising and tracking and all of the other manifestations of the sociopathic dreams of billionaires and the self-appointed elite of the world.

Art?

Music?

These simplest and truest and most precious forms of personal expression and direct soul-to-soul connection? These are the human technologies that have the power to heal us, to unite us, to make us feel good on a bad day, to allow us to see each other’s perspectives. If we can’t even find real human voices any more, if everything that everybody writes is “polished” by a computer, if all of the images they “create” are generated by machines, if everybody becomes so goddamned scared of being who they really are, of making crappy art because it’s the best they can do, and the handful of genuine voices that remain are all drown out by the cacophony of machine-generated synthetic media…. That might be the greatest cultural loss in the history of our species.

I find myself at an interesting personal crossroads on this topic because I’ve had a long and productive and still quite active career in software engineering. I have been using large language models (or “LLMs”, the underlying technology that is marketed as “AI”) for years. I use them as tools to accomplish multiple tasks. I have implemented my own “AI” agents, built and run my own systems based on LLMs, and I do not fundamentally reject the technology because, at it’s core, it’s just a new way to store, manipulate, and retrieve information. There is nothing inherently good or bad about databases filled with matrices of numbers or the software that navigates those datasets in response to input prompts. It’s a powerful new technique that produces astounding new pattern recognition and generation functionality that older techniques couldn’t accomplish.

I absolutely rely on this technology in my every day life to make me more productive in certain domains. I use this technology to accomplish technical tasks faster because I have a life and my time on this planet is limited. So, yes, I use AI to make things.

But not art.

Not writing.

Not music.

I do not allow this technology to get involved when I am trying to express myself. The whole point of expressing myself is that I have to do it.

Me.

I don’t remember where I read it but I once encountered the phrase “If Jack Kerouac had a Gameboy he never would have written ‘On the Road’.”

And it’s true.

Electronic distractions, smartphones, social media, fuckin’ SORA (TikTok without the humans, yay…), and all of the other bullshit that we use to pacify our troubled minds while sitting on the toilet are bad enough. Now we can’t even create a safe place for actual humanity to exist?

Every once and a while a person decides to set all of that aside and sit and write how they feel. They lift their skinny fists like antennas to heaven and create teenage symphonies to god, and I want that person to be heard. They grew as a person in creating that thing they created. They learned some more about themselves in wrestling with the process of translating their raw thoughts and feelings into a creative structure. They wrote lines and crossed them out. They played back their recordings and criticized the sound of their own voice and said “fuck it, it stays, that’s what I sound like”. They added their voices to the long tradition that goes back to drilling holes in the bones of mammoths to make flutes and painting megafauna on cave walls.

And that beautiful, divine, difficult, personal, human process took time.

Should that work be lost in an algorithmically generated playlist with 10,000 songs made by prompts fed into machines?

Fuck. No.

If Spotify and their ilk want to double down on robot music made my lazy people lacking human soul, let ‘em. Clearly most people seem fine with that.

Let at least one site say “No, humans only.” and let the slop-slingers infest the other platforms.