AI seems to be doing everything we do better, and a way lot faster. Be it art, coding, and even music. As someone who dabbles in these three areas, I can’t but be in awe, in fear, and in doubt about the point of all the things I do.
Code Is Code
Sure, I can code. I can’t say I have kept my passion for coding after I quit my last engineering job (2012)1, but even if I had, I wouldn’t be able to keep up with all the frameworks and new trends across all of the domains. I’d be mediocre at most, maybe good at some. But AI does not have that limitation, and that’s a concern if coding is the thing you live for.
Yet I don’t see that much harm. Except for the part where we all lose our jobs as developers and engineers (replaced by a vibe coder running the show.. oh how I hate how that’s even a thing). But we’ve automated engineering over the decades, automating the jobs of many, and programming was just another step. Code is code, and even though one can get creative with code, an accountant app remains an accountant app. For the end user, the actual code, and who made it, does not matter. 2
Just Human
As with coding, art takes effort to learn, to master, but it’s harder to pay the bills. I can draw, some. I can make music. Making one song sometimes takes me months (coming up with melodies and lyrics, recording, getting my daughter to sing for me, mixing, mastering) and it often results in 5 people listening to it once or twice, and that’s it. But there’s a personal satisfaction, the fact that you made this out of nothing. And behind this process, behind the art, there is happiness, sadness, joy, fear,… a series of emotions resulting into that simple 3 minute song you hear.
But AI does it better. And a way lot faster. Thanks to tech like Suno, more music is being generated by AI, with supermarkets being big adopters due to the lower cost. But what is the point of artificially generated music? Art has been a cultural thing (unlike code) to transfer and evoke emotion and messages, to bring people together, to give deeper meaning. It needs a soul. It’s not something you replace by a parrot AI copying thousands of years of evolution to create some song.
Sure, AI can make pretty things. I have a collection of saved posts on IG of AI art that I like. But they have little value. I pay for real art, but I can’t imagine people paying for something generated in 30 second on a computer (maybe the crypto crowd though).
Brainrot
Social media started off well. People showing off their beautiful pieces of work: drawings, photography, music,.. Instagram was a source of inspiration, SoundCloud and YouTube would give a platform to a creative crowd that would inspire a new generation. Communities were built. But money had to be made. Algorithms replaced your loved posts with an endless stream of worthless, brainrotting content.
Pure consumerism. Ads hidden in trendy posts, and the creation of the “influencer” to further force you to spend money and scroll and disconnect from what really matters. We install time limits on our kids’ devices (I even have a 15min limit on my phone for social media apps), ban phones from schools, but it still feels like a pointless effort. We are fighting large corporations with an infinite amount of resources and we are not going to win this psychological warfare.
AI, Our Savior
But then AI came along, (not that) slowly starting to further poison our already toxic feeds. And that right there, is a good thing. I cannot be the only one being extremely irritated by this extra garbage added to e.g. Instagram, where we have to wonder what we are seeing is even real. And with journalists relying on social media as a source, believing what you see has become a dangerous thing. And sure, an AI video can be funny, but to me it loses its value when it’s not a real person falling face first on concrete while going downhill in a shopping cart….
AI is littering our Internet. It’s littering Spotify, it’s littering social media, it is even littering our news. An Internet filled with generative crap will become a place no human wants to visit. And when we leave, we have AI to thank for bringing an end to brainrot and endless consumerism.
Just a little bit longer, and we will all see each other outside, learning to walk up straight again while listening on our Walkman to that album we just bought last week, made by a real human being.
Yes, AI will set us free.
Oh BTW
Hey, I make music. So here are a few of my latest efforts. A collection of simple video game-ish songs. All human-made, of course.
Notes
0 This post was completely human-made. No ChatGPT or any other AI at all, for no part in the process. The point of a blog is to write. We have enough AI generated articles and books on the Internet. This one, like all my posts in the last 25 years, is from the mind to the pen/keyboard. Mistakes included!
1 I moved to UX and dataviz during my PhD where coding just became a tool to create prototypes to test hypotheses and write papers. I started off as still passionate about developing but soon realized (after being told many times by my mentor) I had to stop focusing on code and start focusing on research. I still like to code video games though.
2 It still remains important to learn the inner working. So to my students: NO, you can’t learn programming relying on AI. Also, if it were up to me all your exams would be on paper! So be glad it isn’t up to me.