Ink Tea Stone Leaf

So far as I am aware, I have not yet been tricked into admiring a song that was composed and performed by a computer program. I can scarcely believe that we have already reached a time in history when we actually have to be on our guard against that sort of thing, but apparently we have been there for some years now, and as the internet continues to recycle and repackage its own waste in the pursuit of our time, data, and money, we’ll probably be there for a while. Country music fans have already been thoroughly bamboozled, and make no mistake, there’s no style of music that is impossible for a generative AI program to replicate with a convincing pastiche.

I don’t know what percentage of people who have consumed this content have actually done so knowingly, and I don’t really think it matters—it’s still accurate to say that they have been tricked. In fact, they have been duped on multiple levels, the most fundamental of which was their acquiescence to the framing of creativity as “content,” to be “consumed” by ears rather than listened to by hearts. They have consented to regard music as a noise generated for the purpose of filling time, and disinterested themselves in who produces it, or how they did it and why they bothered.

If I sound bitterly contemptuous, it’s because I have nothing but contempt for the people who want to make or save a few dollars by pretending a program is a person, and because the thought that an industry’s century-long quest to turn music, of all things, into a pure mass-market commodity might be on the verge of an ultimate, nightmarish fruition is more than enough to make me bitter. The interests of commerce have always been part of the musician’s craft, and technology has always served in the search for the right sound for the moment, but the push to sell music without musicians is a qualitatively different outrage than any before.

But I’m not as bitter as I could be, because despite the logic of capitalism, it is not actually possible to automate the human creative voice into oblivion. I received a welcome reminder of this truth yesterday evening, while watching two recent episodes of Austin City Limits, featuring performances by John Batiste and Brittany Howard. They both played and sang with joy, passion, and purpose, without any indication that the possibility of being replaced by generative  AI should bother them in the slightest. How could it? As I watched and listened, I thought to myself, a sufficiently advanced AI could probably generate a digital sound file that sounded exactly like this—perhaps it could even generate an identical video to go along with it. But it could never actually do this.

However many passive content consumers click “play” on whatever artificial playlists Spotify serves up, human performances are the only thing that can move a human audience with joy, passion, and purpose. People want to hear something that matters from somebody who understands them, not a simulacrum programmed to reproduce the elements of whatever charted well in the past. Until AI programs can have real lived experiences like humans can, that’s simply not in the offing.

So despite everything that’s rotten and inhuman in this digital, artificial era, it is with profound relief that I can say we aren’t beaten yet. And no matter what nonsense the tech companies foist upon us, I don’t really think we can be beaten, unless we let them. I don’t think we will.