Bricks Are Heavy & We Never Asked for This

The thing about AI is that no one was sitting around saying, "Oh geez, you know what would really improve music? Making it better than what humans can do."

We loved music. We admired the musicians who made it and recognised how talented they were. Sometimes the really good ones even made an absolute shit-ton of money from it, but most of the time people weren't making much at all. It was, and still is, an incredibly competitive industry.

So the idea that the use case for generative AI making music is somehow to improve our lives is a poor argument. It didn't, and it doesn't—except for those wanting to profit from it.

What it does is make some people money because they can churn out heaps of tracks incredibly quickly and dump them onto platforms to generate revenue. Or it creates jingles for advertisements because companies want to cut costs by not paying human beings. Then, of course, there are the people using generative AI to flood streaming platforms with songs that earn royalties every time someone presses play.
So, apart from a very small handful of people who might genuinely feel their lives have been enriched by being able to express themselves creatively through AI, it hasn't improved anything about humanity at all.

Humans were already really fucking good at music.

All generative AI music does is feed an economy. Don't tell me it feeds our souls, or that it's created with the soul we used to appreciate in music. It's essentially plagiarising vast amounts of human creativity, stitching it together in different ways, and outputting something that people can monetise.

If it were truly about expressing yourself in a way that wasn't possible without AI, it wouldn't immediately be uploaded to Spotify or YouTube in the hope of generating streams and royalties.

So what I'm really trying to say is that we're fooling ourselves. If we think generative AI is improving the world of music, it isn't. We were already good at that. All it's doing is taking away something we're really good at and replacing it with something that can make money, but lacks a soul.

VALE JENNIFER FINCH

The bassist from L7 who died this month didn't use AI, and I bet she wasn't thinking, "Fuck, I wish I had a robot to write a kick-ass bassline for me."

Jennifer Finch, early '90s – image from Wikipedia.

Driving around town today I was listening to the RRR radio program Respect the Rock (I reckon @thebighigg would dig this show), which is on Thursday arvos. I had it cranked to 11, as though I were still 18 in my black dress and Doc Martens, heading to a punk gig instead of shopping for light fittings and driving to get an X-ray as a follow-up to my elbow fracture.

I had to text my mate who lives in country Victoria because she was the only person I knew who'd be enjoying loud L7 as much as I was in that moment. I think we even saw them live together back in the '90s. Well, I know I saw them a couple of times. Bricks Are Heavy absolutely ripped, although I was hooked on the earlier release, Smell the Magic.

Either way, those driving basslines were awesome.

And now you expect me to think getting AI to write a song in the style of L7, with a few tweaks, is somehow legit?

Perhaps this song is appropriate.

Thanks, L7.

You guys rocked.