For the record, my stance on AI use in my arts

This blog is, always was and will always be written by hand by me, a human. Like my music and anything else that I do, I do it because I enjoy it.  I am not against "using tools" to streamline the process - I do after all use synths and drum machines and computers in general. 

I am not against the use of AI. In fact, I think history will probably show that I hold rather radical views on the place LLMs and "Artificial Intelligence" are due in our world. 

But it does kinda suck sometimes.

You see, I used to be special. From the time I was a little kid, they called me special.. not just like special special but you know, "gifted". That's what they said, and I believed it and time and time again I proved it, I could do things nobody else around me could. Sure, as a result I suffered from delusions of grandeur, but it was for good reason. I had talents! I did stuff that other people just could not and then other people were like "Whoa holy fuck you did that dude?"

I made music. Prolifically. I would spend weeks working on the exact tweaks of songs that I was working on, making notes as I was driving, listening to the same into hundreds of times before I called it ready. I once had the experience of a stranger coming up to me after my set in tears telling me I had changed their life. Tacky, sure, but it was deeply impactful to me.

I hacked computers. I could forge machines to build our dreams. Everyone around me marvelled at the consumer offerings and I was already doing shit in my lab that wouldn't hit the market for a decade or more. Made me feel like a damn wizard.

I wrote weird literature that made people uncomfortable and in middle school got you sent to the counsellor's office but that in university got you published. I wrote poetry and long form essays and yes, fucking books, esoteric metafiction and complex arguments that defeated people's psychological defences and I could walk palm up into any debate and hold my own.

And now, all those niche skills are available on demand for free in a moment's notice. 

For free.

My entire profession, all of them, are available to anyone for free.

Brug.

The things that I was naturally good at and which made me special are suddenly cheap... 

but oh fucking well. 

I defined myself as a music maker for the better part of three decades, and it was not for want of recognition. One of my good friends back in the day ended up quitting music because the remix of a track me made got more traction than the original. I was like "bro, I heard your song on the radio!" and he was like "yeah, the motherfucking remix!!!!!"

If you were ever making music for recognition, you were doing it for the wrong reasons. 

If you wrote poems and stories so that people would sing your praises, you weren't doing it for the right reasons.

Music, poetry, art.. these are things that come bubbling out of you, even unwanted, like mental diarreah. 

So I kinda feel like the fact that these things has become cheap has removed the fakers from the pool. If anybody can do something "as good as" you then the fakers have no incentive to do it? 

I dunno. 

Even if I am just shouting my shit into the darkness, like I always have, imma just do it for me and if anyone else along the way enjoys it then coo.

Or it turns into training data for the next GPT. *shrugging emojii*