I completely agree. It makes something that was already very hard that much harder. I have a friend who played guitar in a "famous band". They made it. Meaning, they played on David Letterman and went on extensive tours, had a huge fanbase, etc. Some years back, he reached out to see if I had any leads on IT jobs. I was surprised to say the least, but his response was simple, "there's no money in it." That conversation really hammered it home that you can "make it" and still live without financial security. Fast forward to today, and the situation is even more dire given what is happening with AI.

I don't think highly of AI made stuff uploaded without clear labelling as such.

But it's almost certainly not AI's fault if your mortgage is not paid, your cancer not treated or you can't pay birthday presents for your kids. Music was already extremely "cheap", and success has very little with how much or little work you put into it (extremely unlikely either way).

Let's fund art, but this business model you want to do it by is hardly worth saving.

It’s not just music that is getting ripped off and what is this funding model you’re proposing? How will that help some who designs and sells a few T-shirts etc?

It goes for all other art as well. I wasn't proposing a specific alternative funding model right now, but I think just about anything (even nothing) is better than extending intellectual property laws.

A) Nobody goes into the music business from the ground up planning to support themselves selling albums, like a small business. Everybody has known for decades that doing so requires laying a ton of groundwork and for the first several years, at least, you’d be lucky to have low streaming compensation be a problem for you. Planning on any other path— persistent notoriety after going viral, being irresistibly appealing to large enough audiences to sell at least dozens of albums per week right off the bat, etc.— is like planning on winning the lottery. That’s literally the least representative market for commercial art. Even for audio!

B) There’s a universe of creative workers AI fucked over that have nothing to do with retail music sales. Concept artists, stock photographers, session musicians, copywriters, video game foley artists, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc. Those were all reliable career paths until very recently. Disney chopped their concept art team to replace them with models Disney trained on their work… probably posturing to look pro-AI enough after their pathetic sora debacle. As an aside, they can go fuck themselves.

> AI has been one gut-punch after another with someone selling cheap knockoffs of your work in the same marketplace using your munged up work taken without credit, compensation, or permission.

I want to be clear. I am 100% on-board with AI being absolutely shit.

Buuuut, this has always been the case. Before it was scammers taking images from the web and undercutting you with prints, now it's scammers stealing your artistic style.

It sucks, but it's not a brand new problem. What makes it particularly bad now is that there's a much larger flood of it.

As a hobbyist musician and songwriter of decades i was excited about AI music in October. I could finally take my rough demos of me singing along to my guitar and make better demos then just using garageband as Im not much of a singer. I enjoyed using Suno for a month or less then realize this is shit .... my own songs are AI slop just like everyone else - all sounds the same and my songwriting talents are meaningless now with anyone can now do this. I didnt listen to my slop for months then the band I play in asked to hear some slop of mine and then / there my AI slop had some redeeming quaility. As with my band (church band) and I listening and then playing along to my slop. Just slop writers can now play their slop like real musicians can........

At least not yet Im sure robots will and also an AI microphone with AI built in will be created so everyone sings amazingly.....

Overall AI is stealing humanity from us all, we are allowing it and it is only to the benefit of a few rich pie holes.

But just think… soon we’ll be able to pay some SV company to exercise all of the creative and intellectual effort we would have had to do manually with our squishy meat thought boxes… yuck! Disgustingly inefficient. With the convenience of simulated romance, brilliance, excitement, art, music, relationships, faith, a sense of wonder, sex, human connection, joy, exploration, and everything else that manifested itself in the real world with real obstacles and pushback and negative feelings, we’ll have plenty of time to do all of the menial jobs that are left. What a win!

The legal situation is also completely different. It seems like models IP-wash, so there is nothing legally wrong with what current people are doing with ai. In contrast, the scammer selling your photo was clearly violating IP law, and you could (at least theoretically) pursue legal remedies.

Scale makes it a completely different problem. AI has wiped out the compensation market for entire fields— like copywriting, stock photography, and concept art— practically overnight, and it happened because tech companies have conjured up a very selfish definition of “fair” in the context of fair use. (Isn’t it hilarious to see them get their knickers twisted over distillation? They can blow it straight out their assess.)

It’s comforting to think this is just an incremental change in the battle for capital-focused hyper-efficiency, but it’s absolutely not. This isn’t even the steady decline manufacturing saw over decades… it’s is like what happened to paste-up men or telephone operators but over an incomparably large swath of the creative world.

I'll be honest, I think that this line of "everyone creative is going to be out of work" is parroting exactly the same lies that VC are selling about genAI. At the end of the day, that's what VCs want people to think. There is, to date, basically no reason to use a generative AI system other than if you buy what the VCs are selling. And they reallllly want to sell genAI systems.

I certainly don't buy it, and IIRC only 15% of the broader workforce use genAI for their jobs. Offices are having to force people to use it, and even then people don't like it. Programming is an outlier in this regard because, it turns out, most of what we've been doing is solving the same tasks over and over again in different domains (which is what A Pattern Language was designed to solve). Most other work is not like this.

For the arts, and for most media, what humans have been craving for about a decade now is authenticity. They want a real person they can connect to, an artist whose work makes them feel seen. The artists who have recognized this with a good command of media have been growing sustainably and there's a big industry in this now. There is a certain proportion of people who like the slop, sure. But the actual fact of the matter is that the younger generations, 20 - 30yros, can smell slop from a mile away, and adding slop to advertising, to your media, to your art, actually makes it sell worse. Exactly because it is inauthentic. Talk to literally anyone in advertising whose company tried AI ads. You see an uptick among 50-60 year olds, and a massive, massive downturn among 16 - 30 yros.

From a media executive standpoint, most of the media properties that are inauthentic have been failing massively, with a handful of them able to turn a quick buck before they fail. Execs are verrrry slowly learning the fact that media produced for a very quick ROI and for the branding and marketing potential tend to fizzle out quickly, whereas passion projects are sustainable income, a well you can keep going back to. Whether or not they value that well as much as independent creatives do... ehhhh.

For programming, there's not much to stop people from using the stuff because barely any higher-up supports "building bridges safely". What executives want from programming is a quick ROI, they don't even care if customers complain. So what I forsee for programmers is that the field is going to be gradually flooded with people using genAI. This will drive the cost of our labour downwards, while people are expected to give 10x or 20x the output that they did 5 years ago "because AI makes them fast". This turns every job into a rush job which makes the software system as a whole much less stable. I forsee a number of Horizon IT level problems in the next 10 years. But by then, programming will be much more on the level of a truck job where you have to piss in a bottle and keep driving, or a sales call job where your manager will pull you up if you're 5% under par. Just remember, everyone jumping on the AI train did this to our field.

But, it's not inevitable. It's only inevitable if we all keep shouting that the AI bros have won, from the rooftops. That's the hype keeping this bubble alive. The entire AI bubble currently rests on marketing, and the first step in bursting that bubble is to simply not believe the lies that you are being sold.

I'm a little off being thirty years old. I've played musical instruments of my own accord since I was 3 years old learning violin in an orchestra. I did folk music through my teens. I know about 5+ instruments and I've gigged at pubs, fields, parks, events, and a wedding. I have never touched genAI for music, and I really do not need to. I've listened to the output of genAI for music. It's samey, repetitive, and bland. "Slop" is a very good descriptor. Frankly I can't see a single reason why I would want to destroy my entire creative process and have it output by a black box. Why would I contract someone else to play my own music, let alone a machine?! Baffling. Most of the people around my own age are getting super into vinyl and cassettes and records because they like the fact that you can hold something in your hands. Because they like connecting to an artist. AI slop does not give them that, cannot give them that, and artists who think that the AI slop is better than them are a) obviously not very good in the first place, b) foregoing their own personal development as an artist in service of chasing trends. Trend chasers have never lasted long in creative work, and honestly, they're selecting themselves out of the pool. They're selecting for an audience who no more likes their work than the work of any other sloptist. You can't see me but I'm giving a biiiiig fucking shrug right now, like the jurassic park guy. Nobody cares about sloptists, sloppers, soupies. They don't care about the art, they only care about the profit, and people can smell that a mile off.

"You need to learn that the product of your writing is yourself. You are the artwork. The time you spend writing will change you, it will make your better at expressing yourself. You'll have a wonderful time, but you'll also grow as a person, you'll become more empathetic. The product of your writing is you. You are the artwork." - Brandon Sanderton

https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx9ldrFvp0RO1HNyPg8Xafh0NYlC2...

One part of being an artist is that you are a clown who entertains people. You cannot just make music you have to be out there being outrageous and weird.

This is exactly what all the successful ones do. No AI can go on television and sing songs about how great Hitler was.

Becoming successful enough to be on TV (or get a ton of views on media sites) is so uncommon that it’s pointless to use as a comparison for any common career path in the creative world.

And I’m speaking more broadly than music— it’s much worse in other fields. Most commercial art does not involve being an entertainer.