feel like i've seen AI discourse veer into dangerous waters lately. losing the threads that techies raised alarm bells about, like:
- AI is trained on unethically acquired data
- AI allows for laundering of bias and responsibility
and changing, among people with good intentions but little understanding, into
- AI makes generative art, therefore generative art is bad and soulless
- AI makes low-effort art, therefore work that appears low-effort is bad
- AI violates copyright, therefore sampling and derivative works are bad
these aren't one-offs, but throughlines i've observed (admittedly anecdotal. i have no data). it's frustrating on many levels, but one that gets me: it accidentally buys into the AI hype cycle, giving AI credit for things that existed long beforehand
- mozart rolled dice to splice together songs
- consider the hatred for rothko and duchamp and the myth of the lazy modern artist
- and i need not remind you of musical sampling, fanart culture, doujinshi culture
right now i'm using software that performs an evolutionary search to make a software synth's params loosely replicate a sample. before the AI bubble, this would be an experimental workflow, but now, it might set people off
i'm really hoping they're outliers