Stop blaming creators for the AI boom. You’re to blame too. (an AI rant)

There has been a lot of rightful critique of artificial intellegence in art. Whether it is the writer who uses AI to edit their words or the Musician who creates 100% AI generated music there are opinions.

Sidenotes: for this post I will be using the word create regardless of how deeply an artist uses AI. If I begin hedging and using different vocabulary for different grades of AI use this conversation will become very muddy. Also, the thoughts expressed here do not include the issues of IP theft or the environment. The subject of artificial intellegence is a broad one that too many of us try to eat whole.

A few days ago as a scrolled my Threads feed (which is easily the closest thing we have to pre-Elon Twitter)and someone posted “AI has made artists lazy”. This is a point that can’t be argued. AI has simplified the process of making, regardless of how we feel about what was made. The friction point of all art is translating the thoughts and ideas in our mind into something that can be experienced by others.

The idea is nothing without the skill to bring that idea into fruition. The same can be said in reverse. One of the problems with AI is that we now find ourselves in a state where an artist doesn’t need an idea because AI can provide one. We also don’t need the practical skill to create, AI will make the thing for you. Some will say I am oversimplyfing the issue, but if I am it is not by much.

What isn’t discussed enough however is how much the audiences depend on AI.

Before AI, and before algortithms, the audience had one responsiblility in regard to the creative process. Discovery. It was the job of the audience to find the movies, books, music, art that deserved attention and purchase it. It was also the audiences job to share their discoveries with others. Everyone was a tastemaker. Everyone had a hand in the culture of their particular interest. There is still no better feeling than hearing your friend play the album you put them onto last month.

But we don’t do that anymore. Not really.

Now, if we share anything we share what the AI overloard believes we like. We open Netflix, Hulu, or HBO and watch one of the dozen or so movies or shows they put in front of us. We listen to an AI generated DJ play a mix of the hundred or so songs we have been listening to all year with sprinklings of the songs we listened to the year before.

We order a book off of Amazon based on a suggestion from your last read and the read before that. We didn’t order. We accepted. And based on all of this, all the repetition, the volunteering of agency of our tastes, we declare that the art has become superficial. “Where is the GOOD music. Why is every movie a remake of some other thirty year old movie?” We ask this as if we have searched beneath the dried, crusty surface of an art market built soley for capital interst of billion dollar corporations and dig into the rich organic material that is the art that does not serve that purpose.

Art has become soylent green.

In truth it is the audience that is more complicit in building the platforms that gutted the creativity we claim to love. (Many) Artists just capitualted to the landscape that lay before them.

While I have feelings about artificial intellegence, which I will adress another time, it is a failure to not acknowledge that its existence and use is the direct result of an audience that propped up the mechanisms and means to make its existence inevitable.