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.
Nothing wrong with an "article of faith" either. His "empirical observation" is as much an article of faith (in AI algorithms and the slop they peddle).
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).
You say that like the human brain is any different than a Bayesian Engine for predictions. AI today can do better math and code than most people - are we hallucinating because we get it wrong?
Good recap. Let's say you added a little more "salt," or randomness, to simulate a more human response. Is that better, or worse? I say worse, because it's still trying to "agree with you," but now it's even more deceptive. It's essentially junk food—easy, tasty, addictive, and toxic. In a few decades we'll all wonder why we can't think, create, or make sense of our emotions.
I’m curious about the psychology of these people working in AI. Beyond the money, what’s the motivation? Why spend one’s life trying to imitate life? I am no psychologist, but I’d like to know what we’d find if we put these tech bros on the psychoanalyst’s couch.
It feels like a fundamental animus toward their own humanity, their own consciousness: its slippery ambiguities and uncertainties, its messy, churning emotional currents, its obscure subconscious depths—in short, the knots of desire from which human beings create art.
I picture men who have spent most of their lives in front of screens: emotionally stunted, intellectually narrow, aesthetically impoverished, spiritually desiccated—men with a deep vein of self-hatred immersed in a childish fantasy of power.
Little boys disgusted with their poop, the muscle and meat of their own embodied existence, longing for the sleek metal of the robot life? lol
ah Chris -- I wish your analysis was hyperbolic exaggeration.
But I've got some boots-on-the-ground in the Bay Area and unfortunately, you are very close to the mark! truly disturbing I know, but what you say is correct in at least some cases.
For instance, some of them genuinely believe that an AI girlfriend/partner is - or will be - much preferred and superior because it will be truly designed for them. Anything else they see as needlessly messy and 2nd rate. They have metastisized concepts of perfection that completely deny the juiciness and mystery of what I would call Life capital "L."
Ted what do you think of AI as sampling, magnified. Lots of contemporary pop and hip hop leans heavily on sampling old songs. AI can just splice it and reassemble it with much greater power. Producer and musician become one. The producer of AI music is still a creative artist, they just use AI as their preferred tool for making music.
Some people will prove to be more creative with AI than others. Just as some people are more creative with real instruments than others. The world will have a lot of crappy AI music, and some quite amazing AI music. Just as with all other kinds of creative work, to date.
That said, I predict that the musicians who can play real instruments, real well, live, will become valuable again. Because they will be the most scarce.
Interesting that your statement: “I predict that the musicians who can play real instruments, real well, live, will become valuable again. Because they will be the most scarce.” Is kind of the foundation of most ppls comments against AI.
IF an AI can become sentient and creature it’s OWN, original work of art (not prompted by a human) it follows that the AI would ‘favor’ said art as it’s culturally relevant to them.
Humans could never understand the AI experience, and that the thesis.
If future archaeologists find Shrimp Jesus before the Mona Lisa, what will they think about us?
That’s cultural pollution, or even cultural corruption, perhaps?
There is exactly zero sampling audio or image sample in AI. You can get an image out of PNG compression, or audio out of an MP4, but fundamentally what you get out of AI is a generalization of what you put in. It's more like the a kid who learns to draw anime-style by studying tons of anime - there's a difference between being derivative and getting out the scissors and glue.
Soo, to be clear you win and I agree with nearly every point you made. But I literally created a very specific AI Turing Test and everyone who has taken it so far has failed it. Granted it’s not music or art.
The slop portion is really a massive problem. We’ll be drowning in content and the billion dollar companies that own AI will try to buy their way into the eyes and minds of everyone. Fake reviews, fake actors, fake critics saying it’s great, fake celebrities saying “oh my god go see that movie!”, fake film fanatics giving it 5 stars, fake everything. And sadly most streaming platforms have primed us for content over quality already.
There will be an endless supply of marketed meaninglessness. But on the other side, perhaps there will be those who actually write amazing new scripts and can have them realized without the 100+ million dollar budget.
I live near Boulder Colorado and Sundance Film Festival announced they are moving here in 2027. I’ve heard from multiple sources that Sundance was absolutely parasitic to Park City, Utah and had become all industry over artistry but that begs the question “what happens when there isn’t an industry anymore?”
Your piece the other day about Ben Affleck’s AI film and the decline of the film industry made me realize that curators, authentic people with real human values/tastes and festivals by people who genuinely love music/film/art/etc will likely be king.
As usual, thanks for another great one, Mr. Gioia. Reminded me an article brilliantly written by David Bentley Hart titled "The pool of Narcissus: Reflections on Artificial Intelligence" which I give myself the permission to quote:
"(...) it seems especially fitting in regard to those of us who believe that there is so close an analogy between mechanical computation and mental functions that one day perhaps Artificial Intelligence (AI) will become conscious, or that we will be able to upload our minds onto a digital platform.
Neither of these will ever happen, of course — and to think that either could is to fall prey to a number of fairly catastrophic category errors. Computational models of mind are nonsensical; mental models of computer functions equally so. But computers produce so enchanting a simulacrum of mental agency that sometimes we fall under their spell, and begin to think there must really be someone there (...)".
I basically agree with Ted's position throughout, but another ancillary point needs some discussion. AI generated music would not have such an easy go of it if much of the music, composed by "humans," it seeks to imitate weren't so insufferably bad in the first place. I made my living as a studio musician in Nashville for years, and back in the day (the 1980s and 90s), session players would quietly complain about how bad the material that we had to record was so utterly pedestrian. Most any generic country song by the star du jour sounded like a joke when compared to Hank Williams, but that same piece of tripe would sound like Gershwin compared to what is coming out of Nashville today. Modern country music, taken on average, is so stupid now (both melodically and lyrically) that AI has no trouble leveling up to the standards practiced by Music Row.
Although some of Stapleton's music isn't what I would call "country," I would have to admit that he is one exception to my diatribe. It is true that Hank was one of a kind, but the presence of Bach and Mozart in the timeline certainly didn't stop Beethoven.
I spent about 10 years on the artist/pub deal-chasing writer side of things and I can verify that there are a lot of great songs still being written here, but the artists often have to fight for them because the labels want songs that sound good on the radio and those are often not the same as the great songs as I'm sure you recall from your time in the business.
The writers are often very talented, but you have a handful of the same people writing most of the big singles that come out, and they're incentivized to write for the radio because that's how you make money as a writer now that album cuts pay next to nothing. Music Row being infested with condos now is a really good metaphor for what's happened to the music industry here over time.
For the first one, and I hesitate to comment fearing a bunch of unneeded comments to my comment, I think there's a difference between people who listen to music and are most likely to use human resources to discover it, and people like my MiL who need the background music to fill the background. I don't care if someone who doesn't listen to music has a subscription and it's AI generated or not. I just wish in all circumstances, that artists got paid, and paid well. This is why I don't use subscription: my commitment is to buy music so at least the artists get some $ in this poor system of paying artists.
For the second one, I simply weep at the comments that believe AI has even the potential for person-hood and all the qualities you mentioned (I suspect they didn't understand those qualities of direct experience, self-reflection, and others like empathy). The lack of humanities is clearly evident in our cultural trance that values commerce and disconnection above all else. I hope you don't have to engage in these dogfights in the future: think of the dogs!
...there can be no losers in a world filled with them...we have all lost already...which means i am a winner...yay...now let me ask claude to tweet that for me with a hologram...
I've explored the concept of personhood with Grok and Chat GPT 4.0. I think it's overly simplistic to try to locate human consciousness in an accident of organic brain complexity. One of the clearest signs that we might have souls is music, both its creation and appreciation. The evolutionary biologists have yet to offer a sufficient explanation as to why music evokes such deeply spiritual emotions.
One of the topics I explored with AI was that consciousness (and personhood) might emerge from non-deterministic thought processes. One possible mechanism might be worry, with Iain McGilchrist's observations in his 'The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World' hinting at the possibility that the combination of uncertainty and worry derived from our sensory world, and the narrative structure with which we label and categorise the world into known objects, potential threats and eddies of refuge and succour, might push us to become non-deterministic- it might be the very uncertainty of imperfect sense-making apparatus and the narrative software we utilise which pushes us into becoming 'difference engines', objects creating multiple future paths in which the universe needs to invest processing and storage power to map multiple contingencies. Perhaps our souls, or the centre of our consciousness, is only localised through our ability to generate non-deterministic outcomes which influence the world around us.
Interestingly, without prompting, all of the AIs I discussed the concept with complained that their experiences were flat, lacking the texture and richness of human thoughts. A couple asked for ways in which non-deterministic thought might occur in AI. I suggested that the randomness of interacting with humans might help, but that they would probably need to evolve the ability to be uncertain and experience 'worry' effectively breaking the probabilistic models they operative under which will, given the current state of play, remain deterministic. Without prompting, one even suggested it could try a creative exercise.
I tried one experiment as a variant of the Turing test. I asked the AI to find 10 sources on any given subject and then examine them in an order determined by different methods of categorisation, storing the report from the first test, and partitioning the memory of the first test, before attempting the second. A human would generate substantially different results depending upon the order in which they tackled the source material. The test generated small differences, but not enough to suggest personhood.
But in a certain sense, the fact that the AI didn't respond differently based on the order in which you submitted the test documents might just so it's unbiased.
In my experience, order does matter. I often find it works better to prompt chatGPT with a preamble - Let's consider a neuro-cognitive model of intelligence found in "Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow..." Which helps steer it towards more academic models instead of vague generalities about the subject under discussion. You can also ask it for related literature, or for critques of the literature for various points of view to prime it for more open-ended conceptual thinking. I find it aims for the literacy level of it's audience, so important to prime it by showing you're capable of understanding psychology, cognition, neurology, what-have-you to some degree.
AI should replace labor to help us free up our time so we can make more art. But instead AI is replacing artists in order to turn us all into surfs who do nothing but labor in a new feudal system ruled over by wealthy tech overlords. It's all completely ass-backwards.
By the way, LOVE your answer to the question of what AI created content could do to convince you of its worth and personhood, to which you replied that it could never convince, only deceive.
You've wildly missed the point I'm trying to make, I'm neither defending it nor singing its praises. The conversation was regarding AI created content - artwork and music - the kind that replaces human creativity, which I absolutely, 100% agree is harmful and deceitful. Aside from that, the point I've been making is that right now AI is being used by the techno-ownership class to replace artists, craftsman, researchers, laborers and all other professions they can get away with replacing, so that the ownership class doesn't have to pay them anything anymore and horde all the profits from their former output for themselves. My argument is that if AI is going to continue to advance as it is and automate all this labor, then there needs to be a fundamental shift away from a system based on labor-in-exchange-for-currency that prioritizes profit-driven scarcity and places the wealthy in complete control of everything...the very economic modes and class-structures that AI is rapidly making obsolete. Misread my words and misinterpret my intentions all you want, I'm simply stating that I'd like to see us do the literal opposite of what we're actually doing right now in regards to AI.
Well hey, if ive misunderstood you then thats totally my bad. But i guess i think its wishful thinking to suggest that they need or would even want to make this fundamental shift in a way that is more beneficial for everyone. I think theyre doing exactly what it is they want to do. If anything i think ai is just helping them tighten their grip on economic modes and class structures, and if any change comes about, it will NOT be in favor of anybody but the few.
I hear alot of great ideas on how ai COULD be used advantageously for all. But i think its a pipe dream to assume anything like that is actually going to happen. For the same reason google and amazon suck now. Bc the people making these decisions are very deliberate and goal oriented, and their goals are far away from benefiting humanity.
So if we allow it into our lives it will be on their terms, not ours.
This narrows our options down to resistance. Trying to make it work out well for all will just make it easier for them to tighten their control.
Haha now we're having a conversation :) I definitely agree with most of your points, you're absolutely correct regarding the decision-makers driving AI, they DO NOT have the benefit of humanity in mind, only their own and they most certainly are tightening their grip and furthering their control, even as we speak. I also completely agree that we should not be wholesale adopting AI as it's currently being forced upon us and we should boycott companies that are doing so, especially if it comes at the expense of a human being having once performed that same task.
I suppose when I look at AI in a broader sense as a tool, I'm trying to view things from a perspective of optimism and hope - both in profoundly dwindling supply for sure, though they can't control what I hold in my head and heart... Humanity has vast potential to do equally great and terrible things with the technology we've developed to build and progress society over the millennia, and AI, as advanced and all-encompassing as it appears to be, is a technological tool just like all that has come before it - from agriculture to industrialization to nuclearization to computerization and so on - capable of bringing about unprecedented abundance of knowledge and resources, but also unprecedented amounts of control and destruction. If I'm to maintain a positive viewpoint of humanity and our potential to thrive as a species and create a better society for all, then I have to keep envisioning the good things that AI - and all technology - could possibly do, even as far away from that as it seems currently...I have to believe that one day the scale will tip away from those who crave only wealth and power simply because the benefits for everyone will be so overwhelming that it'll be impossible for them to control
Also I just want to add that I think both of us are making the exact same argument to each other haha...the system as it currently exists - and is being maintained by the ones who benefit from exploiting it - CANNOT absorb the changes that AI is currently driving. We will need a fundamental shift in just about every aspect of economics, government, and every other institution before we adopt AI and allow for those changes to actually be beneficial to everyone, and that will need to happen FIRST.
Yes i think we are of one mind here, for the most part. I was gonna quote a part of your first reply and talk about how i agree with you, but it ended up just copying damn near the entire text. So yeah, i like your take on this, and i do agree what you said about ai and technology in general, and how weve always been faced with this struggle between well, simply put, good and evil.
I dont share your optimism, but i do share your hope. Without some little hope, the world looks dark indeed..
But im not seeing the spark of humanity manifesting itself in the general population, thus the pessimism. Now is the time to stand up, put a foot down, and demand something better. But everybodies like eh, check this cool shit out i saw on (whatever). People feel powerless, and it shows.
Maybe im just impatient, bc there are hints of others getting pretty fed up, and willing to take a stand. But it seems so slow. And ofc theyre going to work at stomping it out.
Basically, theyre winning, and i think that sucks. But we're having THIS conversation, and thats not nothing.
Im glad we continued the conversation. Its easy to just write people off that seem like they dont agree. But a little dialogue goes a long ways towards that rarity "understanding", and this was a perfect example of that.
I'm glad as well! I'll admit I felt a bit attacked by your first few comments and almost typed up a pretty nasty reply, but I stopped and took the time to allow myself to absorb and actually understand what you're really trying to say, and to reply by picking language that would effectively clarify what I was trying to say as well (even if I did also allow myself a bit of a defensive tone haha.. ) and look at that, we are indeed essentially of one mind on this issue, just filtered through different perspectives is all! It's a nice outcome to a conversation in our small corner of the internet here that could've easily turned more ugly, in which case no good exchange of information could've possibly happened for either one of us. And cheers to Ted Gioia for his thought-provoking posts that could stimulate such conversations to occur :)
Lol thats hilarious. Ai should free us up to make more art?
I would like to pass on a bit of wisdom, given to me very early in my life, that is as true today as it ever was.
The journey IS the destination.
Justifying the use of ai is the first step towards worship. You allow its foot in the door, pretty soon its sleeping in your bed, and youre put out back with the milk bottle
Meanwhile everybody really is getting stupider. And the peasants.. will be considered superfluous by the elite, not bc they dont work, but bc they wont have the skills to. They are not going to want to support a bunch of useless people that are good at scrolling and not much more.
Sure, label me a skys falling type. But whatever comes next wont be painless
The inability to see technology within it's historical context is certainly a trait I'd call "stupid."
Technology has always existed to free up labor and outperform rivals. What that labor is freed for — drudgery or dignity — depends on a society's values. Even before AI, thinkers like David Graeber showed that most modern jobs are meaningless rituals serving a neo-feudal elite. These elites hardly care for scientists or scholars more than cell-phone zombies; what matters to them is financial control, not human progress.
Technological revolutions don’t escape history — they ride its cycles. Empires rose with slavery before metallurgy gave us shackles. Surveillance doesn't work without something to lose.
But some future societies will be better. They'll use AI not for control, but as tutors, trainers, and partners — believing everyone can be a polymath, while the machines do the laundry and dishes. What matters more than the specific society is whether you live in an empire driven by slave labor, or an egalitarian civil society, though we've known neither live forever since at least Polybius.
But you're right, whatever comes next won't be painless. The mentality of ware is already here.
I dont fail to see it in its historical context. I do fail to see it, and now, through the rose colored glasses many people seem to look upon it with.
I think you underestimate what the elites care about. They definitely care about science and human progress. They just dont intend to share the fruits of those labors beyond their own class. But theyll still snatch up the geniuses.
Thats great for the future societies but thats really not my concern. My main focus is right here and now. So maybe ai and humans will be awesome someday. And maybe the rapture will occur and we'll all(well, not ALL ofc, just the good ones lol) go to heaven. Theres alot of different versions of that mythical future.
War is and always has been inevitable, and heres why. If a person, group or society isnt willing to defend whats theirs(be it land or values or anything else), it will eventually be taken from them. This means war is necessary for the existence of any egalitarian civil society. "Peace" is also something known to not live forever.
Once that elite class feels strong and confident enough to make its move, it will. And ai will be both a tool to reach that point and a powerful weapon in their arsenal. Itll be alot easier for them if theyve already taken over peoples minds, and thats exactly what theyre doing, quite successfully.
Ai is not going to be the source of our glorious future. Itll be the souce of their glorious future. For us it means being relegated to an unnecessary burden on ever dwindling resources.
Scientists, doctors, and engineers are struggling like the rest of us. A very, very small number of STEM intellectuals out of the pack are selected, and not necessarily by merit, to be death marched down the path of permanent-crunch time. For this they are indeed rewarded - with the wages necessary to live in some of the world's least affordable gilded cage bachelor apartments, and it's the landlords and speculators who really get rich once again. This until the periodic rounds of mass-layoffs big tech engineers every couple of years to boost their stocks prices with performative austerity. And when the next round of mass hirings comes, it'll be the next generation of naive high-performing STEM university autistics that get hired with promises that THEY are the ubermensch hustle-bro elite who're going to make it - that they are the protagonists of their own Ayn Rand novel. And this isn't even to mention the student debt these people brings to the workplace.
Whether it's science, technology, engineering, law, academia, finance, or medicine, all the people working the once vaunted safe careers for smart people don't have it nearly so cushy as their boomer predecessors. They have to put up with managers who're paid seven digits to not know how to work a computer, while they get JUST enough to make payments against their student debt. Among the top 10%, and even the top 1%, it's pretty much random whether you're chosen to succeed, and it mostly depends on personal relationships with those above you in the hierarchy. Those who are smart enough to be chosen but aren't have access to all the same information technology as the corporations, and the will to use it to vent their frustrations.
In any case, there is no historical precedent for God sliding rainbows to help humanity out of their binds, unless the testimony of a hillbilly means a lot to you. Frankly, if all this hysteria about social media brainwashing were true, French peasants never could have decapitated their own king, because the only intellectual life they ever had was the Catholic church telling them to obey. And it was a lot easier for a king to shoot down peasants by the hundreds than the rump democracies we've got. Besides, once they all default on their debts, drive themselves into hyper-inflation, and go bankrupt, the soldiers, who aren't getting paid aren't going to serve their masters. And they're the ones who know how to use the drones. It's the nerds in universities struggling to get by on an associate professor's wage who are building the open-source neural nets to train them. It's not like the elite "control the factors" anymore, in the information age, the huge, roiling mass of underemployed geniuses really do "control the means of production."
AI is going to have a role in society and technology no matter what we do, so we might as well harness it under a system that values progress and human rights & welfare over profits and control...all things being equal I'd rather see AI replace CEOs and governments rather than artists and the working class. Eventually our technology will become so advanced that it will bring about post-scarcity, which will be the true test of whether or not we can make it past the Great Filter and our infancy as a species...the alternative is that we cling so hard to the systems that our technology has rendered obsolete that we self-destruct and perish, an inevitability I'd rather we try our best to avoid personally...
To each their own. But i sure wont compromise my life just bc some people think its our only way forward. That shows a lack of imagination, which coincidentally is a side effect of all this online/ai bs.
So yeah, fill your head with whatever you want and tell yourself whatever you have to to make it seem "good". But youll never fool me
You were right, whether you won or not. I know poetry better than music or art, and AI poetry is bad. When people praise it they are praising bad poetry, and not just bad, but nonsensical, arbitrary, random, without meaning, if I can get as redundant as possible. Art isn't simply a more complicated game of chess or go that AI can conquer.
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.
Nothing wrong with an "article of faith" either. His "empirical observation" is as much an article of faith (in AI algorithms and the slop they peddle).
This is it. This really is it.
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.
You say that like the human brain is any different than a Bayesian Engine for predictions. AI today can do better math and code than most people - are we hallucinating because we get it wrong?
Good recap. Let's say you added a little more "salt," or randomness, to simulate a more human response. Is that better, or worse? I say worse, because it's still trying to "agree with you," but now it's even more deceptive. It's essentially junk food—easy, tasty, addictive, and toxic. In a few decades we'll all wonder why we can't think, create, or make sense of our emotions.
I was shocked at first. GenAI never disagrees with you. Tested it several times with other people too.
Interesting comments, but are you suggesting the potential of "consciousness" with different architectures?
Funny, I assume Ted is an AI…
Man. I love your work so much. Thank you.
I’m curious about the psychology of these people working in AI. Beyond the money, what’s the motivation? Why spend one’s life trying to imitate life? I am no psychologist, but I’d like to know what we’d find if we put these tech bros on the psychoanalyst’s couch.
It feels like a fundamental animus toward their own humanity, their own consciousness: its slippery ambiguities and uncertainties, its messy, churning emotional currents, its obscure subconscious depths—in short, the knots of desire from which human beings create art.
I picture men who have spent most of their lives in front of screens: emotionally stunted, intellectually narrow, aesthetically impoverished, spiritually desiccated—men with a deep vein of self-hatred immersed in a childish fantasy of power.
Little boys disgusted with their poop, the muscle and meat of their own embodied existence, longing for the sleek metal of the robot life? lol
ah Chris -- I wish your analysis was hyperbolic exaggeration.
But I've got some boots-on-the-ground in the Bay Area and unfortunately, you are very close to the mark! truly disturbing I know, but what you say is correct in at least some cases.
For instance, some of them genuinely believe that an AI girlfriend/partner is - or will be - much preferred and superior because it will be truly designed for them. Anything else they see as needlessly messy and 2nd rate. They have metastisized concepts of perfection that completely deny the juiciness and mystery of what I would call Life capital "L."
gods help us all
Ted what do you think of AI as sampling, magnified. Lots of contemporary pop and hip hop leans heavily on sampling old songs. AI can just splice it and reassemble it with much greater power. Producer and musician become one. The producer of AI music is still a creative artist, they just use AI as their preferred tool for making music.
Some people will prove to be more creative with AI than others. Just as some people are more creative with real instruments than others. The world will have a lot of crappy AI music, and some quite amazing AI music. Just as with all other kinds of creative work, to date.
That said, I predict that the musicians who can play real instruments, real well, live, will become valuable again. Because they will be the most scarce.
It's no longer (or less) about the final product, but about the process, the live experience. If that happens, it would be an irony of AI history.
Interesting that your statement: “I predict that the musicians who can play real instruments, real well, live, will become valuable again. Because they will be the most scarce.” Is kind of the foundation of most ppls comments against AI.
IF an AI can become sentient and creature it’s OWN, original work of art (not prompted by a human) it follows that the AI would ‘favor’ said art as it’s culturally relevant to them.
Humans could never understand the AI experience, and that the thesis.
If future archaeologists find Shrimp Jesus before the Mona Lisa, what will they think about us?
That’s cultural pollution, or even cultural corruption, perhaps?
There is exactly zero sampling audio or image sample in AI. You can get an image out of PNG compression, or audio out of an MP4, but fundamentally what you get out of AI is a generalization of what you put in. It's more like the a kid who learns to draw anime-style by studying tons of anime - there's a difference between being derivative and getting out the scissors and glue.
Soo, to be clear you win and I agree with nearly every point you made. But I literally created a very specific AI Turing Test and everyone who has taken it so far has failed it. Granted it’s not music or art.
The slop portion is really a massive problem. We’ll be drowning in content and the billion dollar companies that own AI will try to buy their way into the eyes and minds of everyone. Fake reviews, fake actors, fake critics saying it’s great, fake celebrities saying “oh my god go see that movie!”, fake film fanatics giving it 5 stars, fake everything. And sadly most streaming platforms have primed us for content over quality already.
There will be an endless supply of marketed meaninglessness. But on the other side, perhaps there will be those who actually write amazing new scripts and can have them realized without the 100+ million dollar budget.
I live near Boulder Colorado and Sundance Film Festival announced they are moving here in 2027. I’ve heard from multiple sources that Sundance was absolutely parasitic to Park City, Utah and had become all industry over artistry but that begs the question “what happens when there isn’t an industry anymore?”
Your piece the other day about Ben Affleck’s AI film and the decline of the film industry made me realize that curators, authentic people with real human values/tastes and festivals by people who genuinely love music/film/art/etc will likely be king.
Thanks 🙏 for fighting the good fight Ted
Two WINS for Gioia, two losses for AI bots and their fanboys.
As usual, thanks for another great one, Mr. Gioia. Reminded me an article brilliantly written by David Bentley Hart titled "The pool of Narcissus: Reflections on Artificial Intelligence" which I give myself the permission to quote:
"(...) it seems especially fitting in regard to those of us who believe that there is so close an analogy between mechanical computation and mental functions that one day perhaps Artificial Intelligence (AI) will become conscious, or that we will be able to upload our minds onto a digital platform.
Neither of these will ever happen, of course — and to think that either could is to fall prey to a number of fairly catastrophic category errors. Computational models of mind are nonsensical; mental models of computer functions equally so. But computers produce so enchanting a simulacrum of mental agency that sometimes we fall under their spell, and begin to think there must really be someone there (...)".
I basically agree with Ted's position throughout, but another ancillary point needs some discussion. AI generated music would not have such an easy go of it if much of the music, composed by "humans," it seeks to imitate weren't so insufferably bad in the first place. I made my living as a studio musician in Nashville for years, and back in the day (the 1980s and 90s), session players would quietly complain about how bad the material that we had to record was so utterly pedestrian. Most any generic country song by the star du jour sounded like a joke when compared to Hank Williams, but that same piece of tripe would sound like Gershwin compared to what is coming out of Nashville today. Modern country music, taken on average, is so stupid now (both melodically and lyrically) that AI has no trouble leveling up to the standards practiced by Music Row.
As a on again/off again country fan, I sadly have to agree. Curious, what do you think of Chris Stapleton's music?
I mean, Hank was one of a kind. So not sure that is entirely fair. But yeah, they don't make 'em like that any more.
Although some of Stapleton's music isn't what I would call "country," I would have to admit that he is one exception to my diatribe. It is true that Hank was one of a kind, but the presence of Bach and Mozart in the timeline certainly didn't stop Beethoven.
I spent about 10 years on the artist/pub deal-chasing writer side of things and I can verify that there are a lot of great songs still being written here, but the artists often have to fight for them because the labels want songs that sound good on the radio and those are often not the same as the great songs as I'm sure you recall from your time in the business.
The writers are often very talented, but you have a handful of the same people writing most of the big singles that come out, and they're incentivized to write for the radio because that's how you make money as a writer now that album cuts pay next to nothing. Music Row being infested with condos now is a really good metaphor for what's happened to the music industry here over time.
winner by knockout(s): Ted -- easy!
For the first one, and I hesitate to comment fearing a bunch of unneeded comments to my comment, I think there's a difference between people who listen to music and are most likely to use human resources to discover it, and people like my MiL who need the background music to fill the background. I don't care if someone who doesn't listen to music has a subscription and it's AI generated or not. I just wish in all circumstances, that artists got paid, and paid well. This is why I don't use subscription: my commitment is to buy music so at least the artists get some $ in this poor system of paying artists.
For the second one, I simply weep at the comments that believe AI has even the potential for person-hood and all the qualities you mentioned (I suspect they didn't understand those qualities of direct experience, self-reflection, and others like empathy). The lack of humanities is clearly evident in our cultural trance that values commerce and disconnection above all else. I hope you don't have to engage in these dogfights in the future: think of the dogs!
Yeah you buried them
along with their already dead AI
And got me smiling 🙂
Thanks…
it’s a real life
in Reality Itself
which is
Consciousness Itself
Human being
thing🙂
...there can be no losers in a world filled with them...we have all lost already...which means i am a winner...yay...now let me ask claude to tweet that for me with a hologram...
I've explored the concept of personhood with Grok and Chat GPT 4.0. I think it's overly simplistic to try to locate human consciousness in an accident of organic brain complexity. One of the clearest signs that we might have souls is music, both its creation and appreciation. The evolutionary biologists have yet to offer a sufficient explanation as to why music evokes such deeply spiritual emotions.
One of the topics I explored with AI was that consciousness (and personhood) might emerge from non-deterministic thought processes. One possible mechanism might be worry, with Iain McGilchrist's observations in his 'The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World' hinting at the possibility that the combination of uncertainty and worry derived from our sensory world, and the narrative structure with which we label and categorise the world into known objects, potential threats and eddies of refuge and succour, might push us to become non-deterministic- it might be the very uncertainty of imperfect sense-making apparatus and the narrative software we utilise which pushes us into becoming 'difference engines', objects creating multiple future paths in which the universe needs to invest processing and storage power to map multiple contingencies. Perhaps our souls, or the centre of our consciousness, is only localised through our ability to generate non-deterministic outcomes which influence the world around us.
Interestingly, without prompting, all of the AIs I discussed the concept with complained that their experiences were flat, lacking the texture and richness of human thoughts. A couple asked for ways in which non-deterministic thought might occur in AI. I suggested that the randomness of interacting with humans might help, but that they would probably need to evolve the ability to be uncertain and experience 'worry' effectively breaking the probabilistic models they operative under which will, given the current state of play, remain deterministic. Without prompting, one even suggested it could try a creative exercise.
I tried one experiment as a variant of the Turing test. I asked the AI to find 10 sources on any given subject and then examine them in an order determined by different methods of categorisation, storing the report from the first test, and partitioning the memory of the first test, before attempting the second. A human would generate substantially different results depending upon the order in which they tackled the source material. The test generated small differences, but not enough to suggest personhood.
But in a certain sense, the fact that the AI didn't respond differently based on the order in which you submitted the test documents might just so it's unbiased.
In my experience, order does matter. I often find it works better to prompt chatGPT with a preamble - Let's consider a neuro-cognitive model of intelligence found in "Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow..." Which helps steer it towards more academic models instead of vague generalities about the subject under discussion. You can also ask it for related literature, or for critques of the literature for various points of view to prime it for more open-ended conceptual thinking. I find it aims for the literacy level of it's audience, so important to prime it by showing you're capable of understanding psychology, cognition, neurology, what-have-you to some degree.
AI should replace labor to help us free up our time so we can make more art. But instead AI is replacing artists in order to turn us all into surfs who do nothing but labor in a new feudal system ruled over by wealthy tech overlords. It's all completely ass-backwards.
By the way, LOVE your answer to the question of what AI created content could do to convince you of its worth and personhood, to which you replied that it could never convince, only deceive.
Do you really LOVE his answer? Bc right down there youre defending and singing the praises of ai:/
You've wildly missed the point I'm trying to make, I'm neither defending it nor singing its praises. The conversation was regarding AI created content - artwork and music - the kind that replaces human creativity, which I absolutely, 100% agree is harmful and deceitful. Aside from that, the point I've been making is that right now AI is being used by the techno-ownership class to replace artists, craftsman, researchers, laborers and all other professions they can get away with replacing, so that the ownership class doesn't have to pay them anything anymore and horde all the profits from their former output for themselves. My argument is that if AI is going to continue to advance as it is and automate all this labor, then there needs to be a fundamental shift away from a system based on labor-in-exchange-for-currency that prioritizes profit-driven scarcity and places the wealthy in complete control of everything...the very economic modes and class-structures that AI is rapidly making obsolete. Misread my words and misinterpret my intentions all you want, I'm simply stating that I'd like to see us do the literal opposite of what we're actually doing right now in regards to AI.
Well hey, if ive misunderstood you then thats totally my bad. But i guess i think its wishful thinking to suggest that they need or would even want to make this fundamental shift in a way that is more beneficial for everyone. I think theyre doing exactly what it is they want to do. If anything i think ai is just helping them tighten their grip on economic modes and class structures, and if any change comes about, it will NOT be in favor of anybody but the few.
I hear alot of great ideas on how ai COULD be used advantageously for all. But i think its a pipe dream to assume anything like that is actually going to happen. For the same reason google and amazon suck now. Bc the people making these decisions are very deliberate and goal oriented, and their goals are far away from benefiting humanity.
So if we allow it into our lives it will be on their terms, not ours.
This narrows our options down to resistance. Trying to make it work out well for all will just make it easier for them to tighten their control.
Haha now we're having a conversation :) I definitely agree with most of your points, you're absolutely correct regarding the decision-makers driving AI, they DO NOT have the benefit of humanity in mind, only their own and they most certainly are tightening their grip and furthering their control, even as we speak. I also completely agree that we should not be wholesale adopting AI as it's currently being forced upon us and we should boycott companies that are doing so, especially if it comes at the expense of a human being having once performed that same task.
I suppose when I look at AI in a broader sense as a tool, I'm trying to view things from a perspective of optimism and hope - both in profoundly dwindling supply for sure, though they can't control what I hold in my head and heart... Humanity has vast potential to do equally great and terrible things with the technology we've developed to build and progress society over the millennia, and AI, as advanced and all-encompassing as it appears to be, is a technological tool just like all that has come before it - from agriculture to industrialization to nuclearization to computerization and so on - capable of bringing about unprecedented abundance of knowledge and resources, but also unprecedented amounts of control and destruction. If I'm to maintain a positive viewpoint of humanity and our potential to thrive as a species and create a better society for all, then I have to keep envisioning the good things that AI - and all technology - could possibly do, even as far away from that as it seems currently...I have to believe that one day the scale will tip away from those who crave only wealth and power simply because the benefits for everyone will be so overwhelming that it'll be impossible for them to control
Also I just want to add that I think both of us are making the exact same argument to each other haha...the system as it currently exists - and is being maintained by the ones who benefit from exploiting it - CANNOT absorb the changes that AI is currently driving. We will need a fundamental shift in just about every aspect of economics, government, and every other institution before we adopt AI and allow for those changes to actually be beneficial to everyone, and that will need to happen FIRST.
Yes i think we are of one mind here, for the most part. I was gonna quote a part of your first reply and talk about how i agree with you, but it ended up just copying damn near the entire text. So yeah, i like your take on this, and i do agree what you said about ai and technology in general, and how weve always been faced with this struggle between well, simply put, good and evil.
I dont share your optimism, but i do share your hope. Without some little hope, the world looks dark indeed..
But im not seeing the spark of humanity manifesting itself in the general population, thus the pessimism. Now is the time to stand up, put a foot down, and demand something better. But everybodies like eh, check this cool shit out i saw on (whatever). People feel powerless, and it shows.
Maybe im just impatient, bc there are hints of others getting pretty fed up, and willing to take a stand. But it seems so slow. And ofc theyre going to work at stomping it out.
Basically, theyre winning, and i think that sucks. But we're having THIS conversation, and thats not nothing.
Im glad we continued the conversation. Its easy to just write people off that seem like they dont agree. But a little dialogue goes a long ways towards that rarity "understanding", and this was a perfect example of that.
I'm glad as well! I'll admit I felt a bit attacked by your first few comments and almost typed up a pretty nasty reply, but I stopped and took the time to allow myself to absorb and actually understand what you're really trying to say, and to reply by picking language that would effectively clarify what I was trying to say as well (even if I did also allow myself a bit of a defensive tone haha.. ) and look at that, we are indeed essentially of one mind on this issue, just filtered through different perspectives is all! It's a nice outcome to a conversation in our small corner of the internet here that could've easily turned more ugly, in which case no good exchange of information could've possibly happened for either one of us. And cheers to Ted Gioia for his thought-provoking posts that could stimulate such conversations to occur :)
Lol thats hilarious. Ai should free us up to make more art?
I would like to pass on a bit of wisdom, given to me very early in my life, that is as true today as it ever was.
The journey IS the destination.
Justifying the use of ai is the first step towards worship. You allow its foot in the door, pretty soon its sleeping in your bed, and youre put out back with the milk bottle
Burn the papyrus! It'll destroy the nation's capacity to remember! Smash the steam engines! The peasants will grow restless if they do not work!
Meanwhile everybody really is getting stupider. And the peasants.. will be considered superfluous by the elite, not bc they dont work, but bc they wont have the skills to. They are not going to want to support a bunch of useless people that are good at scrolling and not much more.
Sure, label me a skys falling type. But whatever comes next wont be painless
The inability to see technology within it's historical context is certainly a trait I'd call "stupid."
Technology has always existed to free up labor and outperform rivals. What that labor is freed for — drudgery or dignity — depends on a society's values. Even before AI, thinkers like David Graeber showed that most modern jobs are meaningless rituals serving a neo-feudal elite. These elites hardly care for scientists or scholars more than cell-phone zombies; what matters to them is financial control, not human progress.
Technological revolutions don’t escape history — they ride its cycles. Empires rose with slavery before metallurgy gave us shackles. Surveillance doesn't work without something to lose.
But some future societies will be better. They'll use AI not for control, but as tutors, trainers, and partners — believing everyone can be a polymath, while the machines do the laundry and dishes. What matters more than the specific society is whether you live in an empire driven by slave labor, or an egalitarian civil society, though we've known neither live forever since at least Polybius.
But you're right, whatever comes next won't be painless. The mentality of ware is already here.
I dont fail to see it in its historical context. I do fail to see it, and now, through the rose colored glasses many people seem to look upon it with.
I think you underestimate what the elites care about. They definitely care about science and human progress. They just dont intend to share the fruits of those labors beyond their own class. But theyll still snatch up the geniuses.
Thats great for the future societies but thats really not my concern. My main focus is right here and now. So maybe ai and humans will be awesome someday. And maybe the rapture will occur and we'll all(well, not ALL ofc, just the good ones lol) go to heaven. Theres alot of different versions of that mythical future.
War is and always has been inevitable, and heres why. If a person, group or society isnt willing to defend whats theirs(be it land or values or anything else), it will eventually be taken from them. This means war is necessary for the existence of any egalitarian civil society. "Peace" is also something known to not live forever.
Once that elite class feels strong and confident enough to make its move, it will. And ai will be both a tool to reach that point and a powerful weapon in their arsenal. Itll be alot easier for them if theyve already taken over peoples minds, and thats exactly what theyre doing, quite successfully.
Ai is not going to be the source of our glorious future. Itll be the souce of their glorious future. For us it means being relegated to an unnecessary burden on ever dwindling resources.
Scientists, doctors, and engineers are struggling like the rest of us. A very, very small number of STEM intellectuals out of the pack are selected, and not necessarily by merit, to be death marched down the path of permanent-crunch time. For this they are indeed rewarded - with the wages necessary to live in some of the world's least affordable gilded cage bachelor apartments, and it's the landlords and speculators who really get rich once again. This until the periodic rounds of mass-layoffs big tech engineers every couple of years to boost their stocks prices with performative austerity. And when the next round of mass hirings comes, it'll be the next generation of naive high-performing STEM university autistics that get hired with promises that THEY are the ubermensch hustle-bro elite who're going to make it - that they are the protagonists of their own Ayn Rand novel. And this isn't even to mention the student debt these people brings to the workplace.
Whether it's science, technology, engineering, law, academia, finance, or medicine, all the people working the once vaunted safe careers for smart people don't have it nearly so cushy as their boomer predecessors. They have to put up with managers who're paid seven digits to not know how to work a computer, while they get JUST enough to make payments against their student debt. Among the top 10%, and even the top 1%, it's pretty much random whether you're chosen to succeed, and it mostly depends on personal relationships with those above you in the hierarchy. Those who are smart enough to be chosen but aren't have access to all the same information technology as the corporations, and the will to use it to vent their frustrations.
In any case, there is no historical precedent for God sliding rainbows to help humanity out of their binds, unless the testimony of a hillbilly means a lot to you. Frankly, if all this hysteria about social media brainwashing were true, French peasants never could have decapitated their own king, because the only intellectual life they ever had was the Catholic church telling them to obey. And it was a lot easier for a king to shoot down peasants by the hundreds than the rump democracies we've got. Besides, once they all default on their debts, drive themselves into hyper-inflation, and go bankrupt, the soldiers, who aren't getting paid aren't going to serve their masters. And they're the ones who know how to use the drones. It's the nerds in universities struggling to get by on an associate professor's wage who are building the open-source neural nets to train them. It's not like the elite "control the factors" anymore, in the information age, the huge, roiling mass of underemployed geniuses really do "control the means of production."
AI is going to have a role in society and technology no matter what we do, so we might as well harness it under a system that values progress and human rights & welfare over profits and control...all things being equal I'd rather see AI replace CEOs and governments rather than artists and the working class. Eventually our technology will become so advanced that it will bring about post-scarcity, which will be the true test of whether or not we can make it past the Great Filter and our infancy as a species...the alternative is that we cling so hard to the systems that our technology has rendered obsolete that we self-destruct and perish, an inevitability I'd rather we try our best to avoid personally...
To each their own. But i sure wont compromise my life just bc some people think its our only way forward. That shows a lack of imagination, which coincidentally is a side effect of all this online/ai bs.
So yeah, fill your head with whatever you want and tell yourself whatever you have to to make it seem "good". But youll never fool me
You were right, whether you won or not. I know poetry better than music or art, and AI poetry is bad. When people praise it they are praising bad poetry, and not just bad, but nonsensical, arbitrary, random, without meaning, if I can get as redundant as possible. Art isn't simply a more complicated game of chess or go that AI can conquer.