Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll be aware of the controversy surrounding the new Pestilence and Deicide albums. The public outcry has come from the fact that the covers have been made with AI, centering all arguments around this and not the music itself, disregarding if the music is actually good or not. Hilarious situation.
I thought I’d post a simple meme, the cover of Iron Maiden – Dance Of The Death from 2003. Absolutely iconic cover for being so hideous, with proto digital artwort made with 3D design software that were on baby steps at the time. Yes, we know that Steve Harris decided to use an unfinished sketch and that the artist dropped out of the project, but it is patent proof that technology does evolve, but it needs the human factor to execute and nurture it.
The meme has ended up generating controversy and comments, some of them insulting and violent, are against AI-generated art in general. I will not deny that I have enjoyed reading each and every one of your comments and moderating them by trying to create a rational debate with arguments, so I thought I would write this plea in defence of AI art.
I have been thinking about how to do it and which points I am for and which points I am against, because friends, there are many shades of grey here in a Pantone that is not all black and white. It occurred to me that I could actually expand a bit and write about the Lernaean Hydra and the many snakes that lurk in AI technology, I’ve been focused on reading about economics and geopolitics for too many months, and I’m going to try to provide some context to the dystopian reality that is coming, while trying not to look like I’m wearing a tinfoil ha
Is a brave new world.
I’ve read these words from several high profile musicians and artists and I keep thinking, if you believe it’s Brave New World in 2024, you’re late to the party and you haven’t paid attention to the world around you. God, even the internet is dead and a large portion of the traffic and interactions are done by bots and their AI without us realizing. (1)
Everything, and I mean absolutely everything, is connected in seemingly unrelated issues, but all of them have things in common; driven by a very sibylline and subtle vehicle of crude propaganda that has been trying to shape our social behaviour for decades. The goal for the period 2024 to 2030 is to reduce the world’s population.
They will argue it in a thousand possible ways, with a thousand imaginable lies, some of them truly absurd, such as there is no food to feed the world’s population [2], that we have to reduce our consumption, eat less meat because cow farts cause climate change [3]. You have to consume less because human activity causes climate change [4], said by people who meet in a luxury resorts in Switzerland or Dubai, travelling in private jets and a fleet of luxury cars [5]. How ironic is this? ironic and insulting, that’s what it is. By the way, one of the activities of the Davos Forum is to take invited journalists and assorted guests to the airport to see the impressive car park full of planes. I could go on and on with hilarious examples, on how they have been pushing non reproductive sexuality on our young generations increasing gender dysphoria (6) or predictions of the end of the world that have failed time and time again, but I think that’s enough to get my point across.
But is all this narrative, constantly regurgitated by media as a synchronized opinion team serving power and its interests, real and true? Personally, I believe that it is all pure theatre and that the real intentions are sinister.
Right now we are at a tipping point between two worlds, before and after AI is implemented, standardised and accepted on a daily basis. Personally, I believe that the definitive AI is ready and safely locked away in some military silo. In fact, at the recent World Defence Show 2024 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the Chinese brought a whole bunch of AI-powered drones. Crazy stuff like mother dronelettes that can carry 8 mini anti-personnel drones or 4 anti-vehicle drones, small drones that behave like a flock of birds and so on, all AI-controlled (7). As we first saw in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, drone warfare was decisive, and now we can see it being used extensively in the Ukrainian-Russian war.
We see them slowly bringing out the advances in AI technology and implementing it in small doses. The motive is clear to me, we are going to change our society, our way of life and most jobs. A new paradigm shift. If this were to happen overnight, it would mean social unrest and that needs to be avoided.
Is this theory too crazy? Because this is not the first time in recent history that we have seen paradigm shifts. For example, the industrial revolution and the shift of labour from the rural to the industrial world, with migration flows from the countryside to the city to be near the factories. Another change within the industrial process itself, the mechanisation and robotization of industrial processes, which led to a surplus of labour. This in turn led to processes of economic crisis with periods of high unemployment, social unrest, etc. Now, for example, we are in a period in which some countries, mainly in Europe, are in a process of de-industrialisation and are reorienting their economies towards tourism and the service sector. Process as well linked to globalization that moved industry overseas, mainly third world countries to save on costs. In itself, it is difficult and costly to recover and reconvert the labour force that is suddenly a surplus; imagine what would happen if AI is introduced all at once and a large part of the labour force finds that their jobs are no longer necessary. What would happen?
We are the frog that has been slowly boiling in the pot as they slowly transform our world. What is the downside of centralising everything and using AI to manage all these encircling tentacles? I For example, living in a small country where digital money has been successfully implemented. Theres not a single kroner that stays away from the all-seeing eye of the tax department. Even waiters tips are in the system and taxed. There is cash money, of course; but it is marginal.
I don’t know if I should call it CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currencies) yet, but the fact is that the government, through the banks, can know and control all your movements if you were to become unpleasant. If you dare to take to the streets to protest against draconian or unethical laws they, they can very well freeze your bank accounts, as the Canadian government did when people protested against Trudeau, using facial recognition technology to identify who took to streets (8). This biometric facial recognition technology has recently been added to the UK’s largest database (9).
We know that nowadays any political argument or ideology that challenges the status quo, its policies and the ideas promoted by the official media is branded as far-right or fascist in an attempt to discredit and cancel; in Germany a law has been proposed to freeze bank accounts of any far-right person or group (10) and as far-right is anyone who opposes the government we are standing at the gates of a totalitarian situation. I could go on with examples of other seemingly unrelated laws, but they all seek the same thing: Control of the working class through a series of technological advances controlled by AI.
I am sure that AI will offer equally positive advances in many areas, but seeing that we live worse than we did 20 or 30 years ago, I can only focus on the less beautiful aspect, and that is when AI-generated art debate becomes an insignificant problem in comparison, unless, of course, you are an artist and this is your way of earning a living. But for now, all media narrative efforts are over decreasing because when AI is fully implemented there will be a large surplus of workforce, meaning lot
the world you grew up in no longer exists
So after all this doom and gloom, why do I still support AI-generated artwork? It is a question of coherence.
First of all, I believe in both personal and artistic freedom; I am not in a position to tell a musician what kind of cover artwork to use, and neither you are. But as consumers, you and I have the power to choose not to purchase a product made using AI as a form of protest, and poor sales could change musicians’ attitude towards the use of AI artwork.
Having said this, I am still perplexed by the massive blowback and criticism of AI artwork in the music industry, because I think it is one of the biggest acts of hypocrisy I have witnessed in a long time.
IFPI’s global study says that 73% of people are listening music through streaming services (11), and knowing how Spotify holds a dominant monopolistic position in the streaming market (12), this means that 7 out of 10 of you who are crying about the death of art in Facebook and Instagram comments only interact with music either on a phone, a computer or a new generation TV. What do you care about art if it becomes an irrelevant part on your screen? Ironically, Mr Ek, Spotify’s owner, has invested a lot of money in a company that develops military-grade AI (13).
That’s right, not only you are choosing to interact with music via a medium that pays the artists poorly, your money is going to develop military grade AI, that’s the reason i added the seemengly unrelated chinese drone tech comment. Let that sink.
These streaming platforms don’t help either by creating a turbo-consumerism behaviour among music listeners. If there is a musician or label worker reading this text, who knows how much time it takes to create songs, record them, produce a phisical copy with all its processes, only to be released and forgotten in 3 to 7 days. This is the average attention a new record gets before it becomes old news and is forgotten by avid Spotify playlist seekers. A good question to ask in this context would be: why invest a good part of the budget in an aspect that is unfortunately becoming less relevant? Go figure, Spotify has become so dominant in daily music consumer habits that now bands are relevant based on their monthly spotify listener numbers. This is simply a clown world.
The human factor in art and the clash with AI generated images has been widely discussed. From my point of view, and this is the reason for using the Dance of Death cover for the post, I see no difference between using a 3D modelling software, Photoshop, Illustrator or AI generators to create images. First, a real person must use imagination and visualise what to create. Technological resources are just tools to reach a goal as it would be Artistic Creations with Cranial Stumps. If we wanted to be coherent, we would also have to cancel concert photography that is heavily edited into monochrome or artistic final results, because let’s face it, we photographers use technology to create final images that do not exist to the naked eye or what the camera sensor registers.
Is AI taking the humanity out of art? probably, but at the same time we have thousands of man made metal artworks that look lifeless and boring, because lets be honest, not all art is meant to be transcendent or deep or communicate anything at all. This is the reason why I stay away from most modern Death Metal bands, the music is so over processed with digital plug-ins, sounding so perfect that it takes the human feeling out of it. And yet a large percentage of metal fans see no problem with this use of technology and the hundreds of generic, lifeless, perfect and yet empty sound deprived of any emotion or feeling.
It is only a matter of time before this debate is over, just like the youtuber or twitcher phenomenon is killing traditional TV, you cannot gatekeep progress, but I think you can actively choose not to participate to a certain extent, but by rationalising how you spend your hard earned wageslave money or daily consumer habits. Just like YouTube, Instagram or Spotify, AI will kill many jobs but create a whole new ecosystem of work, so it’s not just artists who should fear the paradigm shift and think about how to implement AI in their workflow or directly reinvent themselves. Is also a question of time for the tech to leap forward, and that’s why i used Iron Maiden’s cover, back in the day tech sucked and now is amazingly good.
So, do I like AI-generated artwork? No, I don’t like it. As a collector i love a nicely done artwork hanging on my wall. But I will defend the right of musicians to do what they please with their creative projects, and then I will decide who I want to support by spending my money, either by commissioning artwork from artists I like, as I have done over the years, or by buying physical releases directly from the bands, and always avoiding streaming platforms. And remember friends, if you want to make a change support artists directly and cash is king.
TFTF, Oslo – february 2024
further readings if you don’t suffer from brain rot thanks to excesive social media consumption and the derivative short attention span:
(2): https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/10/1048452
(3): https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/war-cow-farts-is-stinky-necessary-job-2023-03-24/
(4): https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/12/16/buying-stuff-drives-climate-change/
(5): https://glarity.app/youtube-summary/news-politics/the-opening-of-the-davos-meeting-11674803_373175
(10): https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68285305
(11): https://www.ifpi.org/ifpis-global-study-finds-were-listening-to-more-music-in-more-ways-than-ever/
(12): https://medium.com/@mhasou/the-monopoly-of-spotify-98ca8ebac0c9
(13): https://inthesetimes.com/article/spotify-military-industrial-complex-daniel-ek-prima-materia-helsing
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