5/3/26 - for the record (re: ai)
if i am to involve myself with the "ai" debate, i think it's important to clearly state my intentions for doing so, because i feel that if i don't, people will make all sorts of bad-faith assumptions about me, which would be undesirable, to say the least. i will not be explaining all my positions in detail, because if i did, then this post would be ludicrously long, though i do plan to make a video essay explaining them. this post primarily exists to state what my positions are, not to convince you to follow my positions.
For the record:
i do NOT think ai can ever replace artists, nor should it. the fact that people think it can or will is very frustrating, as it reduces the amount of sensibility in this debate by adding loads of stupid ass fearmongering.
i do NOT think "ai" is an accurate term to describe the neural networks and large language models we have today, as they are not intelligent, not even artificially. i think that the fact we call it ai is a deliberate ploy by the biggest companies developing "ai" technology, trying to grift/appeal to the people who believed the Big Smart People who were saying in the 2010s that ai was gonna take over one day. (however, i will still call it ai in this post to avoid confusion + i'm lazy.)
i do NOT think the way many corporations tend to use ai is good or acceptable. OpenAI has consistently prioritized profits over users' safety, as have other companies, especially Character AI. additionally, corporations have pushed ai into spaces that don't really need it, presumably in an attempt to appeal to investors. However, I also do not believe this is a fault of ai technology itself, rather just an inevitable consequence of capitalism.
i do NOT think the way many corporations tend to market ai products is good or acceptable. Suno is NOT a tool that lets you Finally Express Yourself Artistically without going through the Agonizing Agony of learning how to do it by hand; it is, at best, a fun little toy with a few genuinely cool, albeit niche uses.
i have little interest in using ai to make my future work, barring the AI Slop album i mentioned last post, for the very simple reason that it doesn't even remotely do the things i want a creative tool to do. if there was a way to truly make any art you want with little-to-no effort, that would pretty undeniably be a good thing in my eyes, but ai is far from that.
However:
i do NOT believe ai art is inherently bad, and the fact that so many people do is so incredibly beyond frustrating that it's hard to describe with words. i also find it very strange that people seem to try to say ai art shouldn't exist because it sucks because it's ai, and then proceed to agree that art is subjective and their opinions are, in fact, just opinions. like, if you know it's just an opinion, surely you wouldn't use it as an actual argument, right? shouldn't you make sure your arguments are absolutely true before you make them?
not only do i not believe ai steals from artists, i believe that art theft is good and based. go ahead and ask me how i'd feel if a big corporation used my work or even reuploaded it somewhere without asking or compensating me. ok, ragebait aside, i firmly believe copying is not theft, copyright attempts to make art a commodity, which it is not and should never be, copyright is censorship, originality is subjective, just as all aspects of art are subjective, and saying ai is theft as an argument against it is very regressive and heavily reinforces the commodification of art and the devaluing of more derivative forms of art like vaporwave and plunderphonics in ways i refuse to let happen. i also firmly believe that pre-creation monetization methods are vastly superior to post-creation monetization methods (like copyright) anyway.
i believe that saying art is what it is because of the effort, time, sweat, blood, tears, etc. is a bit ableist and definitely elitist. i very strongly believe that the author is dead; or, in other words, that the intentions of an artist do not and should not matter in the slightest when judging a piece of art, nor should what the artist did to make it. all that exists now is the art itself; trying to judge the artist for what they did to make it like it's a fuckin' sport is unacceptable, in my eyes. what if i want to make an eerie 3 hour long drone that is a single synth chord that gradually gets progressed with various effects over time, but it only takes 10 minutes to make? what if i want to release an hour of random field recordings as an album? what if i want to STEAL a song, slow it down, add a couple effects, and release it? cuz that's basically what the entire genre of vaporwave is. what if i have a disability that hinders my ability to make something you'd consider "high-effort?" just... fuck off. please.
i think that art made by hands-off processes is just as valid as any other art. indeterminacy in music is a concept that has been explored for decades, and i see no reason to go against it. i also think that saying "you didn't make that ai art, the ai did" is very nothing argument, because who fucking cares who made it? as said previously, the art is the only thing that exists now. and even if you still do care about that, ai can't Make anything cuz it's a fucking program. again, it's not intelligent, not even artificially, so humanizing it like this and saying it's Making Art makes no sense. plus, we use the word "make" for low-effort activities all the time; you can "make" toast by just putting some pre-sliced bread into the toaster, for instance. the only way i can see this making sense is if you think you have to put a certain amount of effort into a piece of art to call it Yours, which i find unacceptable.
i don't even know what saying "ai art doesn't have a soul" is supposed to mean. like, ok, i can Kind of understand it when you're talking about, like, random brainrot youtube shorts, but it lost all meaning the moment you used it to refer to the music video for Igorrr's song ADHD. also, the author is Still dead. something being made with ai is not necessarily a good or bad thing.
i think that the environmental impacts are way overstated and also transparently an excuse for people to hate on something they already hated, because they never complain about the impacts of things they support like sending emails, drawing traditionally, the meat industry, or, hell, the internet as a whole.
i think that the way some corporations push ai everywhere is a bit annoying, but i also believe that a lot of people have a very low tolerance for seeing ai products everywhere. like, the ai assistants in the bottom right corner of a bunch of websites are fine. they do their job, unless they don't, in which case they're usually pretty ignorable. the only reason i can think of as to why someone would be so hung up over having it there is if they think ai is inherently bad, which it's not.
i think that people are way way way too morally purist over ai usage. like, stop feeling guilty that you used dall-e mini once in 2022 or actually liked A Single Piece of ai art or used chatgpt to help you remember what that one thing was called or, god forbid, think that generating images is actually kinda fun. ignoring the fact that ai is not inherently harmful or bad, that's not helpful or healthy for you or anyone.
i think that the way some people group together entirely different technologies and entirely different uses of that technology under one umbrella and point to one usage of one piece of technology to say why a completely different piece of technology is bad is dumb and stupid. like, the military "ai" bullshit that spotify is supporting is bad, and you shouldn't need me to tell you that. but saying this is even remotely comparable to image generation technology just because "they're both ai" (even though "ai" doesn't even exist) is absurd.
i think that people have gotten way too neurotic with their "ai-vestigations."" like, for one, the only reason why doing that would make any sense is if you thought something using ai was inherently bad, which it's not. and for two, people go Way too far with this shit. i'm sure you've all heard horror stories of artists getting harassed off the internet due to false ai allegations, but beyond that, the methods people use to try to determine if something is ai have gotten absurd. like, this video tries to say that Oh, these weird little blocky discolored pixels mean it's ai!!! when, no, that's just fucking JPEG compression. This video got over 500k views. I'm going to kill myself.
perhaps more than all this, i think the anti-ai side has gotten scarily vicious and rabid over ai, constantly making bad-faith assumptions about people who use or defend it even remotely, getting in useless arguments in which they get way too heated to a point that makes it impossible for them to convince anyone of anything, and occasionally even harassing and sending death threats to people who they don't even know for certain use ai, they just THINK they do. they get mad that people don't label their work as containing ai (as though that even matters), but maybe people would be more open to doing that if there weren't a significant amount of people who go out of their way to hate on and even harass the creators of art that uses any amount of ai. i know it's a loud minority, but god DAMN is that minority loud. i talked about this a little in this post, but i've found even worse cases of anti-ai hatred since then. for example, people posting "memes" of how We Need to Kill Ai Artist:
they always say it's "just jokes," but i swear to god this is going to become a pewdiepipeline 2.0, especially when people like this exist:
and before you say anything, yes, i know people like this are a very, VERY tiny minority, but it only takes one person this deranged for something awful to happen. we absolutely do not need to be enabling this.
people always say they're tired of ai being everywhere, but i really just do not care. in fact, i'm tired of people complaining about ai, mostly because i know most people who hate it hate it for reasons that aren't just bogus, but actively hurt art and artists. i'm super fucking beyond tired of people pushing regressive and reactionary art takes that harm the art world as a whole simply because of a bunch of shitty ass fearmongering from both sides. that's why i choose to involve myself with this debate: not because i just love ai so much and can't stand to see people hate it, but because i just love art so much and can't stand to see people hate it.
"What Am I Doing Here" is certainly a question i've asked myself plenty in the past year or so, but i think i have an answer now. i'm here to make art for myself and nobody else.
stay tuned for AI Slop coming 2026.