Everyone’s talking about AI, and you’re being pestered to use it every time you open your phone. But are you aware the extent that AI has taken over how much of what you see and hear online?
A study by Five Percent reported a few weeks ago that 52 percent of all new text online is now generated by AI. Seventy-four percent of all writing online now shows signs of “involvement” of AI. The French music streaming platform Deezer says some 50,000 AI-created tracks are uploaded to its site every day. That’s a third of all the new music Deezer gets in every day. And you’ve probably noticed that your Facebook and TikTok streams are clogged with atrociously improbable AI video.
AI chatbots now produce nearly flawless text and images. A staggering amount of new software code is created by AI (especially good on Claude). New Sora and Veo video generators and Suno and Udio music generators spin out millions of songs, all of which are created just by users describing what they want. Even a seasoned producer like Rick Beato was blown away.
Debates about quality of these AI-produced creative products seem to be all but settled. AI songs attributed to AI artists now rack up millions of listens and followers. Made-up AI social media “influencers” have huge loyal followings. And Eline Van der Velden, a British-Dutch technologist and actress who founded the AI talent studio Xicoia, created an AI actress named Tilly Norwood, and announced she was up for roles.
But you can tell the difference between human and AI products, right? Maybe not. A new study reported that 97 percent of listeners, when tested, couldn’t tell whether the music being played was AI or human. In the classroom, AI use is so rampant — by both teachers and students — that one educator lamented that courses are being created by AI for students who have AI do the work to be graded by AI.
To come full circle, AI not only creates but also consumes. News websites are now besieged by AI bots crawling their content and delivering it to users using AI for their queries. Human traffic is down as much as 40 percent at news sites as bots answer searches. Journalism’s already precarious business models start to look impossible when there’s little need for users to visit original sources. Recent estimates suggest that more than 50 percent of all traffic on the web is AI bots crawling sites for content. The traffic can be so intense that sites such as Post Alley can slow to a crawl due to AI bot traffic.
One recent study claims that AI will never create art better than what would be considered human amateur level. Maybe. But it doesn’t really have to. In the early days of YouTube, critics decried the shaky camera use and bad lighting of the uploaded user videos. But it wasn’t long before those technical flaws were embraced not as lower quality but as signifiers of authenticity. Time and time again, “lower” quality as defined by one generation becomes ubiquitous must-have qualities for the next generation. Along the way, the subtle (and not-so-subtle) failings often turn out to be “values” as the new form takes over.
AI-generated creativity has already firmly inserted itself into the middle of our culture, and with each passing day is influencing the language and values of new work being made. Soon its ubiquity will be banal, unremarkable. For sure, the base level of what the average person can create will rise. Just as the cameras in our phones made everyone a photographer, AI will boost the sophistication of our abilities to make things. Surely a more creatively-empowered public… is a good thing?
Already, though, slogging through the tsunamis of AI-slop (great word, that), it becomes easier and easier to be put off by the too-perfect video, the generically-inspirational songs and the emotionally-empty cloying images cranked out by the machines. Yes these things are real, but they’re also kind of meaningless in their calculated reality. Just the fact they’re so easily spun out in endless variation in which any “artistic” choice is an effortless algorithm of the same value as any other, is… well annoying.
On the other hand, the generic Big Mac, turned out by the millions every day, seems to not only satisfy a hungry public, but genuinely appeal to them. A healthy, thoughtfully-prepared organic meal might, in every objective measure of quality be a better choice, but we all know which Happy Meal will win with consumers.
The backlash to AI is building. Artists, teachers, and even some technologists insist that real art has to be rooted in experience, in decision, accident, failure, experience and the insistence of a point of view. Machines don’t possess any of these, which is precisely why the results can feel so frictionless. Yet a public increasingly acclimated to letting algorithms choose what culture they consume seems unbothered. If culture arrives already sorted, playlisted, captioned, and optimized, maybe intention becomes just another optional setting.
There are plenty of historical parallels. Every major technological shift has forced a reconsideration of what counts as art or artists: photography, film, sampling, Photoshop. The difference this time is we are no longer talking about a new tool or style but an absorption of the making itself. The question isn’t whether AI work “counts” as creative (it already functions that way in the marketplace), but what happens to the human urge to make when the cultural value of “making” shifts.
Enthusiasts say that AI won’t replace humans but that humans who know how to wield AI as tools will have an enormous advantage over humans who don’t. Undoubtedly. And just as having Photoshop at your disposal doesn’t make you a good artist, using AI likely won’t transform the average human into a brilliant artist. But the systemic shift in the directions art will go because AI makes the formerly impossible possible, will change our notions of what art is and how it functions.
The old what-is-art debate is a long-running cliche. We’ve never definitively named it, preferring perhaps to let it live in mystery. But in a world where creation becomes ambient, authorship porous, and meaning optional, human art might not disappear so much as move to the edges where some who still care bother to wrestle with the stubborn, inconvenient business of deciding what something should be. That won’t stop the flood of AI-slop, or the millions who happily consume it. But it does suggest the next frontier isn’t proving machines can’t make art, it’s figuring out why we still try when the culture doesn’t seem to care.
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The advent of computers and Computer Aided Design (CAD) didn’t stifle design creativity. It inspired inventive architects like Frank Gehry to design buildings that were fundamentally different than anything seen before by enabling them to achieve structural and exterior enclosure systems that were infinitely more complex.
And this has been so throughout history. Modern valves made it possible for musicians to make horns play like they never have and composers to use them in new ways. New more capable tools historically expand the creative imagination, change the language and make more things possible.
When Photoshop came to be, in the early 1990’s, many of us strongly believed that photography, as we knew it then, was dead. It was pretty easy to determine when an image was over processed in Photoshop, and when the image was bungled by a less than capable user. But, with time and experience, and further upgrades, Photoshop proved itself to be a very capable and creative tool, once mastered by the practitioner and accepted by public viewers of images. The software’s ability to record even the finest of detail separation far exceeds the film’s ability to do the same. Now, it seems to me, that both film, or wet, photography and digital processes have their place. “Wet” photographers are still active, as you can see by exploring different Facebook groups. And, as a practitioner of both over many years, I find that digital photography has its place in the pantheon of image making. AI is not going away any time soon. I suspect that there will be a lot of growing pains, eventually leading to responsible and creative image making and creative writing.
Agreed. Better tools — like Photoshop — don’t make everyone an artist. But they do elevate the base level. And artists who learn to work with them become even better. It also widens the language — we still value analog for the qualities it has. We don’t yet know what tropes specific to AI will become standardized.
The art business, I’m not too worried about. My art angle is music. Though only amateur who has made only trifling money from it, I know people who have taken it on as a livelihood. One of them is to this day playing in a small New Orleans street jazz band, and I’m sure not getting rich on it but I don’t think AI is going to cut into his act even the tiniest bit. It’s real performance.
The musicians who are getting elbowed out by AI, honestly, who cares? I mean, they can be replaced by a robot, and what does that tell you? Eventually it may give the audience for this kind of music something to think about, and there will be a growing audience for authenticity in music that the industry has been scrubbing away for generations. Maybe this is a typical old man perspective, but it seems to me like music has been drifting in the recent era, and this could be the merciful death of a segment of the market that didn’t have much real life in it anyway, and maybe a renaissance outside the commercial space.
This is not to say AI is nothing to worry about. AI content can lie too convincingly, that’s going to have consequences. AI’s parasitism of news sources is going to force us to find another economic model, but that isn’t a new problem as the search engines have been doing it for years.
“It seems to me like music has been drifting in the recent era, and this could be the merciful death of a segment of the market that didn’t have much real life in it anyway, and maybe a renaissance outside the commercial space.”
I agree — screw young people. Eagles forever!
Eh, no thanks. It already seemed like forever at the time. Blast from the past? How about Hootenanny, don’t remember that do you? Early 60s TV. Dropped a lot of quality music of various genres on an American viewing public that was used to over-varnished pablum, and I think its effect on popular music is underrated. Live performance on a little stage in the middle of a big audience. That’s the kind of thing I’m hoping for – after a few years of what AI can give us, the public will turn to real live music in its various forms and AI will be left singing in elevators.
As a former professional musician, I’m sympathetic to the anxiety. But an awful lot of art and design and music of all kinds is pretty basic stuff recycled endlessly. This will go away with AI. That said — it’s very easy as you stay within your algorithmic masters’ defined taste to think that music has become less creative in recent years. And certainly there is more and more uninspired dreck. But with some effort, it’s easy to be inspired and blown away by the unbelievable talent out there.