This is a long one, sorry in advance!

I have been working to revisit some of my older works over the last several months, and as I further step into a new chapter focused on the creation of musical art, I continue to watch the development of ever novel applications of generative AI and all the attendant hype. We have been promised by the ‘tech bros’ a future where huge humming data centers full of super-cooled silicon churn out unimaginable reams of new digital texts, songs, images, and videos. We are assured that these are excellent, maybe even genuinely novel outputs from the continuous turning of mathematical knobs in algorithms that consume the available digitized corpus of human creativity. As a recovering technologist, I have been experimenting along the way with different AI platforms that create music, text, and images. I marvel at the fidelity that these improving capabilities can produce. Fast disappearing are the oddly fingered hands and clumsy gestures that characterized earlier iterations of these platforms. As I have, it has made me wonder what it all means for those of us who create such works. Maybe you have too.

As someone who has spent a lifetime acquiring and honing the craft of musical composition, I wonder if I, like so many other skilled professionals, am in danger of being rendered irrelevant to humanity’s creative future. Why pay creators when you can get visual or auditory stimulus from a machine at pennies on the dollar compared to human-crafted work? Surely, the relentless engine of efficiency will allow a small group of AI developers to replace the outmoded armies of musicians and artists who create work. Why waste all that money and time if all we desire is novel stimulus to fill the voids of a hectic day, or even more, to serve as a competing parallel background streams from phones, tablets, smartTVs, and speakers. Aren’t we really just looking to block the silence of existing with distraction anyway? Why not do that in the lowest cost way, especially since it has so little value already?

We face a future, actually a present, where we are overwhelmed by the production of new ‘content’ . This term, content, reduces many previously distinct domains of human expression into one generic flood of bytes to which advertising can easily be appended. It has no distinctness, no individual voice. It is part of a never-ending stream of ephemera buffering through our browsers and apps only to pass within seconds into oblivion. Until recently, it was humans who created this stream of material. The deflationary spiral of the ‘content’ machine powered by our interconnected digital fabric has already taken the surfeit of created work that artists new and old desperately produce and made it increasingly worthless, economically. The ability for vast computational resources to be marshaled to accelerate this decline with Generative AI is now underway.

Since the dawn of digital streaming starting with services like Napster and later iTunes, music became the harbinger of broader decline. As I tracked the changes in the music industry, it became clear to me by 2015 that people no longer expect to pay for music. Many felt it should be free, and it was made free by technology. All that mattered was accessing the recording of choice, and avoiding by all possible means having to pay to hear it. If this meant an ad-bloated ‘free streaming’ platform, then the price of interrupting an encounter with the music was preferable to the cost of paying the musicians for their work. And really, it doesn’t really matter if new work is being created because music becomes a soundtrack for nostalgia and self reflection. Why bother encountering new work when we can be so easily mollified by the work that was already paid for in the past? I can stream the reliving of my childhood and really that’s what art is for, isn’t it?

If art work has so little real value, then why not have machines remix and digest to produce copies of the past with slight tweaks if we need some variety. AI has initially been seeded (‘trained’) with the work of humans, but we are now seeing the insatiable needs of our AI machines drive the creation of synthetic input as the scientists have run out of web-available ‘content’ to ingest. It seems that AI-generated art works represent the consummation of the growth of information technology into every aspect of our lives.

Facing a future of machine generated ‘content’, I wonder what place my craft and voice will have. Setting aside my work as a creator of music, I wonder what it will mean to engage cheaply made art works in the future. Will they be visually dazzling, aurally compelling, hauntingly evocative? I don’t know. Further, what will it mean to be an artist when these tools are available to take an idea and, without any technical craft, be able to produce high-quality output. Will that be art? In an effort to explore the question myself, I used Substack’s ability to insert a ‘generated image’ at the top of this article. The caption was the prompt text I supplied.

What about forgeries? If an AI has consumed the entire digitized corpus of Beethoven’s work, and someone asks it for a 10th Symphony, would anyone know that it wasn’t a long-lost manuscript uncovered in a musty attic somewhere? Can it be said to be Beethoven’s music if it is a faithful mathematical interpolation of the next piece he might have written had he not died? What does it mean to be an artist in our brave new world? Is it merely moving from the carbon-based algorithms of human personality to faster, cheaper simulacra in data centers consuming cities worth of electrical power?

If what humans desire from ‘art’ is simply manifold expressions of ‘content’ then artists are going to quietly move from working in highly specialized techniques involving real world problems of physical matter and sound waves, to become AI prompt engineers with skill in manipulating and reforming the trained corpus of prior work. Maybe that is the future where all artists merge into a shapeless morass of people with intuition who learn to instruct machines to produce different modalities of output. We will have taken away one of the substantial barriers to art creation by making it pure concept. Is this the ultimate triumph of modernism?

As I have considered these questions, I have become convinced that the world of art making has been bifurcated since the start of the information age, and that AI is simply another accelerated step down one of the paths. So what is the other path?

The other path is the one of authenticity. This has multiple forms. It starts with the creative development of a new work. Humans who live, love, grieve, marvel, use their bodies and minds to take the act of living and memorialize it with their hands, their voice and their speech. I chose this picture, not generated but from the stock library, because it shows a human body engaged in touch with the creation of music. This player is physically in contact with the sound waves that result when his fingers push the keys down into the machine that is a piano. To stand in the moment when this photograph was taken would be to hear the tinny ring of an upright, perhaps smell the mustiness of the old wood draped in the dust of decades. That dust would include microscopic artifacts of the human bodies that had shared its space. It would be real, and impossible to digitize. The piece might not follow the most pleasing curves of melody demanded by a modern appetite trained with the ubiquitous commercial musical wallpaper of modern life. But it would be ever more rare, one human’s skill sharing life with another human. Live performance, living performers, real instruments in a shared, and irretrievable moment.

This second pathway involves risk for us all. It costs us something. It moves beyond ‘content’ and replaces it with connection. Real humans, together, sharing what it is to be human. The future of recorded music is ever dimmer because if a recording is merely a miniscule rivulet dripping into a gushing torrent of bits, then it dissolves into an increasingly alien and empty echo-chamber of ‘content’ that will only be a computational regurgitation of the digitized past.

I am setting out to create works that resist the first path. I will create recordings but I will share them differently. Streaming cheapens the work. I will focus on lived experiences, live presentations, in-person human connection. If you feel increasingly alienated and alone in the face of ever more digital experience, perhaps you will consider joining me in pursuing a life of lived art work. Connect with real human creators. Leave the comforts of your house to seek out live performances and exhibits. Change your understanding of what these encounters mean. They are not simply a less efficient way of plying content to the silence. They are the escape craft from the derelict monolith of digital culture plunging into darkness. They are life.