I Get Into Dogfights on Social Media
Did I win or lose? You can judge the results.
Let me say upfront that I NEVER start fights online.
Not even once. You can look at my social media timelines for the last decade or more—I’ve never launched a single attack.
I don’t respond to online articles with any criticisms or negative comments. (However, I will share words of praise if I like the author’s work.)
I don’t respond to other people’s social media posts with angry reactions—or pushback of any kind.
I never show up uninvited on anyone’s timeline with an attack or insult or barb or rebuttal.
I try to operate on these platforms with a peaceful philosophy of live-and-let-live.
So I don’t start fights. But I’m not totally innocent.
I believe that different rules apply if somebody else starts punching—and I take a few hits.
Ouch! That hurts!
So I do respond sometimes—hey, I’m not Gandhi (yet). And we all have a right to self-defense, no?
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In recent years, I’ve done less of this. More often, I just mute or block. But sometimes I must defend my honor—or what little of it is left to me.
And on very rare occasions, I will participate in an actual full-blown social media debate—a real extensive give-and-take, answering all charges and responding to all accusations.
I only do this on principle. I don’t get much enjoyment from it. In fact, I get no enjoyment from it whatsoever—but sometimes I feel that others expect me to step into the boxing ring, and defend the creative community.
It’s under assault lately, as you may have noticed.
I’ve only done that on two occasions in the last year. I’m sharing highlights of both exchanges below, for your possible interest and enjoyment.
You can decide if I prevailed, or fell short. In any event, don’t expect to see more of this online grappling—my future goals are more aligned with TLC than UFC.
DEBATE #1: How Healthy Is the Music Business?
What happens when you adjust music industry revenues for inflation?
You learn that the industry hasn’t grown in 50 years. So don’t believe the hype. The music business will never get back to where it was. They gave away their power and influence to the technocracy. And what we call “music revenues” today are not really “music revenues.” The cash goes to tech companies who have no commitment to a thriving music scene or a healthy culture.
From what I know of the behavior of the music labels, the predecessor of this technocracy was basically mafia. Is that not in fact a step forward?
In my 20s, I ran a record label out of a storefront on Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto. Some of my record distributors acted like mafia. But it still might have been easier negotiating with them than with Apple. They definitely took a smaller cut than the Apple app store.
Um, wrong. Stores used to keep 30-50% of revenue earned from record sales. DSPs keep 25-30% of revenue earned from streaming income. Less cash is going to Spotify than went to Tower Records for every dollar spent by a music consumer.
Your complaints about Tower Records are misguided. They supported the music ecosystem, and were part of the solution—not causing problems.
You forget that Tower Records was in the music business—the company sold records, it supported the music economy, it promoted new artists, it worked hard to grow demand for music among the general public.
It only made money if the musicians and labels also made money. They all worked together in a common cause.
This is in sharp contrast to Apple—which would give away music for free (or even take a loss, as it now does) in order to sell devices. Or consider Spotify, where the execs insist that they sell subscriptions, not music. So they take the money they squeeze out of musicians and do deals with Joe Rogan, etc.
And it gets worse. Spotify actively switches listeners to AI-generated slop and fake artists in order to avoid paying royalties to artists.
So your assumptions are just wrong. Tower Records was part of a healthy music ecosystem. As power and profits shift to Silicon Valley, this ecosystem is irremediably harmed.
"The cash goes to tech companies who have no commitment to a thriving music scene or a healthy culture."
As opposed to profiteering & gatekeeping record labels who had no such commitment either. Streaming has democratized & globalized music in so many niche genres.
Record labels, for all their faults, wanted to sell music. They only made money if fans got excited about music. They only flourished if music was a vibrant part of people's lives. They only made money when musicians made money.
You can pretend that the same is true for [Apple CEO] Tim Cook. But, sadly, you're just pretending.
And all of that doesn't apply to Spotify or Apple Music?
Music probably doesn't matter to Tim Cook, but it obviously does matter to Daniel Ek, and Oliver Schusser. As a consumer, I get exposed to more indie musicians via streaming than I ever encountered in the good ol' days.
The most profitable customer for the streaming platform is the person who pays for the subscription but doesn’t use it. The next most profitable customer is the passive listener who lets the platform choose the songs.
In other words, these tech companies are very different from traditional music distributors and retailers who wanted to grow the ranks of excited, devoted fans.
The new regime prefers passivity and stagnation. It’s built into their business model.
How is it that a serious author doesn't stop and consider that CEO compensation is a tiny tiny fraction of the total revenue spent and earned by media companies? If the money spent on Spotify's CEO was redistributed to musical artists, it would not change their circumstances.
Do you run a parody account? (Your bio describes you as a Marxist, so I have to wonder.)
You don't think that redistributing the Spotify CEO's $5 billion in wealth could have a positive impact on music? Let me do it, and I promise to deliver meaningful results.
For extra credit, let me replace him with somebody who genuinely knows and loves music. That would have a transformative impact on the culture for years to come.
No. I'm a Marxist and not a Democrat who believes all that's needed to overcome capitalist society are higher taxes on the rich, more State power, etc...
I don't think redistributing Spotify's CEO's $6 billion held in Spotify's stock would have a positive impact on music; here's why. Most of the CEO's wealth is held as stock in the company. In order to redistribute it all to the artists on Spotify (around 11 million artists), we'd have to sell the stock, which would very likely lower the value of the company and the stock. In the end, each musician would receive around $400.
If you replaced him with somebody who genuinely knew and loved music, what you'd likely produce is a severely depressed and despondent CEO, as the monetization model of Spotify would overtake the intentions of the CEO and reproduce the dreck we're living with now in short order.
I'm curious why you worry about Spotify's CEO getting depressed over money matters, but not the countless musicians and fans who suffer (psychically and financially) because of his decisions.
I'm referring to his advocacy of passive listening, AI slop, fake artists, secret licensing deals, and other schemes to reduce royalties to creators.
These have had a devastating impact on the culture.
Do only CEOs matter?
DEBATE #2: Should We Worry About AI Slop in the Creative World?
The second debate occurred after I got an earful from people who are working to displace human art with a flood of AI slop. They came after me—but they really had the entire creative community as their target.
I felt that their arguments don’t hold up—and I hoped to demonstrate that. Here, too, you can judge whether I succeeded.
But there’s an ironic part of this story. At least one of the accounts attacking me may have been an AI bot.
Below you will find our give-and-take.
Here’s my verdict on AI art. No matter how much money they waste on it, these problems won’t go away.
AI does not possess a self. It lacks personhood. It has no experience of subjectivity. So any art it creates will inevitably feel empty and hollow.
Any human quality it possesses will be based on imitation, pretense, and deception. None of it is real.
AI doesn’t even have a direct sense of objectivity—its knowledge of objects is all secondhand, assimilated through data. This results in a lack of depth or felt significance in any artistic work it creates.
You seem to disregard the person using the software. Generative AI is a tool. The individual operating it can apply their own intent and emotion to the works created with it.
You’re naive. Corporations churn out 50 million AI songs, and you tell me these are human creations? No human has even heard them, let alone composed them.
In some instances, AI really is a tool. But the larger reality is a tsunami of AI slop polluting human culture—and spread deceptively in destructive ways for the benefit of a billionaire technocracy.
I don’t trust anyone whose corporate talking points ignore this brutal truth.
If the AI song aren't being heard by anyone how can the songs make money? How do these AI songs pollute human culture?
Millions of bullets from machine guns don’t hit anybody—so how can machine guns be dangerous?
When you figure that out, you will have your answer.
So a few AI songs are breaking through and they are listened to by human ears?
AI songs are not "breaking through"—that assumes that they are good songs people want to hear. Instead they are getting used manipulatively—for example, by streaming platforms who aim to reduce royalties to human artists, or by people who need cheap and crappy music for a corporate training video. Or by people trying to play deceptive games with the current royalty payout systems (see headline screenshot below).
But, honestly, you should do some basic research on the economics of AI music, and all this would be obvious to you. You would soon learn that AI slop music is neither an exciting new genre nor a tool to advance creativity. It's a merely a scammy way to make a few bucks by dumping garbage into the culture.
By the way, I'm typically not available for debate on social media. But I'm making an exception today—in order to demonstrate how easy it is to refute the talking points used to justify the waste of hundreds of billions of dollars in flooding the culture with AI slop.
This is a serious problem that threatens creatives all over the world, and it's important to lay bare the venal justifications for this corporate overreach.
But I'm only doing this for one day. Debate time ends at midnight.
If it feels real, it is real.
That’s the motto above the entrance to Plato’s cave.
ACCOUNT #4 (Religion Is Poison):
AI doesn't have a self, yet.
It's a strange loop. Not magic.
You’re suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.
Ted, are these articles of faith or empirical assertions? If they are empirical assertions, what evidence would lead you to change your mind? Is there a kind of Turing test for AI generated art? If so, what is it? If a poem, painting, or song could thrill you and move you, and you later discovered it was AI-generated, what would be your reaction? How can you be sure this hasn’t already happened?
This isn't faith—it's simple reality.
A machine doesn't have personhood. It lacks selfhood. It has no subjectivity.
AI has never been a parent or a child. It has never grieved the death of a spouse or family member. It has never fallen in love or overcome an illness or even just enjoyed a meal.
In other words, it has no experience of the human condition.
So it makes music, but has never heard music. it paints a sunset but has never seen a sunset.
You ask me what a machine could do to convince me—a kind of Turing test for AI personhood as an artist. But you can only really ask what a machine could do to fool me—to deceive me into thinking it had any of these capacities, or experiences, or emotions.
That's why AI art feels so listless and shallow.
But even if AI improves, it will simply be better at deception. The human element we cherish in art will always be outside of capacities.
ACCOUNT #6 (The Fifth Initiate):
Personhood is a legalistic definition, fine.
But it has humanity. It's grown from all of humanity's "magnum opus"'s. To assert it lacks humanity is to assert that it is not what it is made out of, which is to elevate it past the sum of its parts. Either way, not a strong claim.
All y'all coming back at me with your love of AI art are getting catfished. You think the emotion is real, but you're only a simp. Just sayin'.
Some of my students have been bringing in scores that they’ve printed off, and they are AI generated.
So one needs 7 fingers each hand. Another wants a two octave stretch (it transcribed a guitar E chord to piano)
It’s utter crap. I’m banning AI from my school.
ACCOUNT # 8 (Washington Wardrobe):
I’m here because, the person here Ecu [Account #1] is in another thread. Responding with almost identical responses. The account relates all posts every 30 days. It’s my guess we are talking to an AI or person reposting AI.
[Ted leaves the chat.]
Yes, that’s where I sign off. That’s because I’ve added a new rule to my social media rulebook—I will debate about AI, but I won’t debate with an AI. Personhood has its privileges.
Maybe in these slippery arguments you need to come out and say it plain: The reason AI slop is bad is because it's a kind of "cultural pollution" that suffocates real art and artists. The reason we prefer real art is because we know a real person did it. No matter how good a piece of art seems, as soon as we find out it came from an unfeeling, unthinking machine, we get depressed. It's toxic.
Ted,
I spent 5 years in an AI tech company and know a thing or two about it.
You’re right. There’s no soul or awareness. No consciousness or condition. There won't be with the current architectures.
The simplest way I can explain what it’s doing is that it’s really just a sophisticated mash-up machine. You ask it for something, it uses that input to find weighted probabilities that match. There’s a bit of “salt” added to ensure randomness, otherwise every input would produce identical output, which would be boring.
So all it’s doing is calculating probabilities and stringing them together to produce a result. Surprisingly well!
GenAI is designed to align with user instructions, i.e. it’s fundamentally set up to agree with you. That’s why it hallucinates (and why it will always hallucinate, they just get better at filtering those out).
Love your blog. Keep speaking your truth.