Will They Sing for Us Tomorrow?

Things in the world are topsy-turvy at the moment. Up is down. Good is evil. War is the goal. Distraction is the goal. Submission is the goal. Violence is being injected as a strategy for domination. Ultimately world domination.

Will they sing for us tomorrow?

Looking at our moment in time, this moment. I am here with cats and the idea of a path forward. It is hard. No one is hiring. AI is defeating creatives in every single job role.

Artists, human artists, are being put at risk. Their creative work is being harvested for robotic refactoring. A push toward monetization of everything. Something gets good and business fucks it up. The rocket billionaires have nearly destroyed the human creator economy.

Where we head from here is anybody’s guess. I’m not guessing, I’m planning. Fighting. Exploring other engagements for work, for fun, for relationships, for the future of human creative expression.

In the last year, the third year of ChatGPT, there has been more content generated than all the previous years combined. Okay, I made that up. The RBs* are starting to flood the social and creative content platforms with AI SLOP.

90% of AI-generative content is crap, meaning 90% of the AI-world is using billions of dollars to produce new memes. The music streaming services are starting to create non-human AI-digital artists. One pop artist and one country artist have made it to #1 on the streaming charts. This sucks for musicians of all genres. They’ve already taken the artist’s share of music streaming down to a thousandth of a cent per stream. What more can they do to music? I guess they can squeeze all that is left out of the platforms by over-monetization.

AI MUSIC is not MUSIC. It’s something. It’s … SLOP.

It’s true, the human-augmentation of AI is where things get interesting. But, even as I’m generating images for this novel, for example, I’m bored by most of what AI creates. I don’t want it to look AI-generated.

If we think about things like digital photography and the introduction of Photoshop, it did not kill photography. But it did change photographs forever. We need to fight back, we creative humans. I’m proposing a marking term, like a watermark or tag for creative artifacts generated by humans that does not us AI: #notai I am not sure if this novel qualifies. There is certainly no AI being used generatively. I am using it for images and Grammarly, with the grammar part turned off.

Everywhere, AI is being force-fed down our throats. It’s draining our economy and stressing the grid.