Remember, when an artist in another artform uses generative AI to make images, what they’re saying is not only do they not value the art of others, they don’t value the art they make themselves. Not only are the Waterboys participating in the AI puke cycle, they’re defending it on their Instagram:
[Mike Scott is now releasing music with AI slop cover artwork. You know where this is going next don’t you?]
“Mike writes: Yes it is true, the traditional hand-drawing artist is bypassed. But if I hadn’t used chatgpt, these artworks simply wouldn’t have got made. There isn’t an artist who was going to do them who I then bypassed. They came about because I discovered I could do them, and they arose then from my imagination. And if I had given direction to an artist, they wouldn’t have come out as closely in accordance with my imagination. If we extend the analogy to music, it’s no different from using orchestral samples or a mellotron which theoretically does orchestra members out of jobs. Or a drum machine instead of a real drummer. We could extend the anology [sic] further to singers. I’m a real singer. I sing live the same as I do on records. I never need to use autotune. But the charts are loaded – and have been increasingly so since around 1981 when the technology began – with singers who can’t actually sing in tune or with style and whose producers make them sound good with autotune. By this anology it should be me and other real singers in the charts not them; they are doing real singers like me out of opportunities. So this stuff goes round and round and you can spend all day thinking about it. Ultimately I come to a point of thinking that it is simply evolution, and while the change shakes up existing circumstances – the traditional hand-drawing artists, the orchestral members, drummers, the real singers etc – the circumstances and the people involved adjust over time to meet the new reality, just like they did when the printing press was invented and all those scribes were suddenly left empty-handed.”
To which I replied:
“so because some people use autotune, which you clearly disagree with, it’s ok to use generative AI that was trained on stolen images from someone else’s work? It’s not magic, the LLMs are trained on intellectual property of artists who gave no consent. You’re okaying that process by participating. Literally a human artist (or thousands of human artists) is at the core of what’s reproduced here, you’ve just employed a wasteful energy guzzling probability machine to puke out a version of their work. It says much about your own artistic integrity you can be so dismissive.”
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Before finding your page, I asked him on social media to stop doing this. If he continues to insist, I’m telling him I plan on recording an album made exclusively of Waterboys samples and giving him no credit. THAT, not his explanation, is closer to the truth of what AI artwork is like. Thank you for also sharing with him that this pathway is not cool at all.
@Sea El “I have to piss in the pool otherwise I’d have to hire a plumber to install a toilet.”
‘a former member of a band very dear to me last year released music by a fake AI woman of colour.’ Oh my god this is so tone deaf, no doubt he was paying “homage” to some of his favourite female artists of colour, heedlessly horrifically unexamined move.
Thanks for calling this out! His argument is in very bad faith, and especially as he is married to a visual artist, I’m shocked how little respect he has for visual art.
As we well know, there is a huge difference between using a digital instrument or digital interface, and using AI to fully generate cannibalised music. Just as someone who draws on a digital tablet is still an artist.
I’m sure he would not be in favour of calling someone who generated AI music, and who in doing so bypassed all stages of composition, play and recording and mastering, a genuine “musician”, a musican equally worthy of the opportunities he enjoys. And that’s not hypothetical, either; a former member of a band very dear to me last year released music by a fake AI woman of colour.
But you’re right, this is a great waving flag to show his complete lack of integrity.