AI - The Biggest Lie

Why I’m not ‘excited’

AI art is getting right on my tits.

There, I said it.

If some of that shit y’all are posting is real, then I’ve died and gone to the place where Jehovah’s Witness kids pet tigers.

It started with filters and went rapidly south from there.

A rainbow can’t just be a humble rainbow anymore, can it?

Has to be a double rainbow, just as a moon has to be a ‘supermoon’ and the Northern Lights have to trip more colours than Jefferson Airplane.

Um….sorry, we’ve already seen those rainbows, those moons, those Northern Lights.

Next!

Bring me the ones with the pristine waterfalls in the background and the heart shaped cloud with Jesus’ face imprinted on it, then I’ll look, ’kay?

Erm, NO!

Fuck off.

I used to look at art on the internet with wonder.

More often than I’d like these days, I’ve found myself looking at it the way I’d view porn. I shudder a little, recoil at the blatant, brash fakery, feeling rather sorry for those who actually believe it’s a true representation of what it claims to be.

And it’s not just ‘AI art’,  is it?

It’s AI EVERYTHING.

Johnny Cash doing a cover of ‘Barbie Girl’ is amusing for all of ten seconds.

But there’s a reason he didn’t cover Aqua when he had chance, yeah?

Hmm…….dignity, credibility.

But what does it matter?

Not like the Man In Black’s a comin’ back now, is it?

How ’bout we bring ’em ALL back for the karaoke night they’d have never had over their own dead body……

RIGHT NOW over their own……um…..dead body….

John Lennon covering Spice Girls ‘Wannabe’?

Kurt Cobain doing ‘Y Viva España’?

Yay! Let’s press some buttons and make it happen, kids!

‘There’s a guy works down the Chipshop swears he’s Elvis’ just took a whole new twist. Let’s have The King for the verse, Kirsty McColl for the chorus and bring in a selection of Paul O’Grady’s favourite rescue dogs on backing vocals.

Only music after all, hey? Y’know, something someone once wrote and actually cared about.

And people keep telling me they’re ‘so excited’ about it, too.

Um….no they’re not.

I’ll tell you what they’re ‘excited’ about.

MONEY.

THAT’S what they’re excited about.

Why?

Because they don’t have to do anything, do they? It’s the chocolate machine they whack violently and out thunks the free candy.

But here’s the thing.

SOMEONE DID have to do something.

The lie that AI is ‘done by a computer’ is one of the biggest fibs ever told.

It’s grand scale THEFT; a heist of all the art, literature and music HUMAN BEINGS ever created.

The obnoxious school bully has raided  the National Gallery and is taking great joy in defacing all our best loved treasures.

(Oh hang on…..that was the ‘Just Stop Oil’ protest wasn’t it? Wrong Psy Op!)

A legacy of heartfelt endeavour is being stolen from under our very noses.

‘Feed me Seymour’, it demands and like an appeasing set of dickheads we do, creating our very own global shop of untold horrors.

If no-one ever fed the monster, what exactly could it spit out then?

I’ll tell you what.

Jack Shit.

This ‘excitement’ people claim to have is probably that same kind of glee folk felt when calculators became popular.

Lazy Bastarditis

That realisation that heads could shamelessly become sheds because something took the heat off.

And that’s fine (ish) when it applies to mental arithmetic or labour saving devices in the home. After all, we’d all be wringing clothes and getting the broom out of an evening, had we not embraced any technology.

BUT

The Arts are different.

The great works we rightly prize, have arisen from a need to connect, express and move others. They birth from souls and deserve more respect than to be stuck on shuffle and shat out on demand like digital ‘Kinder Eggs’.

And when we’re all freed of the need to craft or create because Metal Mickey’s mate can knock one out quicker, what fool’s paradise is left, exactly?

When we’re all sat tossing it off in a chair, telling Alexa “I want that one” like Andy from ‘Little Britain’  what then?

Will it still be ‘exciting’?

When the live music scene becomes a night in with a virtual reality headset, will you be ‘excited’ then?

I suggest not.

We can’t turn back the clock.

But like Johnny, I hate this jazz.

So let’s support real life artists, musicians and writers.

Let’s stop pretending to be ‘excited’ over things that are frankly quite scary.

And start instead, getting bloody uncomfortable about them for damn good reason.