Sunday, August 23, 2026

AI in the Arts (part two)


(ed note: The following was originally published at Skinny Devil Universe)


In Part One, I drew some lines in the sand and delivered a history of technology to demonstrate that, while disruptive, AI is just another technological step - an extension of the mind of man.
For clarification, it should be said that early technology (up to the industrial revolution) was focused primarily on amplifying the BODY of man, while 20th & 21st century technology has shifted focus to extending the MIND of man.

That caveat aside, I decided (even though I had already sketched out the foundation of this article) to feed the entirety of Part One into Google's AI Gemini and see what it had to say. But not what it had to say in support of my thesis, but instead with explicit instructions to challenge EVERYTHING.

"Tear it all down" were my specific words.

While it praised both the historical & philosophical rigor as well as the writing style (it seems machine minds dig my musical sense of symmetry and repetition - hahaha!), it hit back HARD.

If this topic concerns you, prepare to get even more anxiety and depression.

Its response:

Your historical cycle of disruption has a fatal blind spot, David: you are treating AI as just another tool.

Fire, the printing press, the DAW—these amplified human agency. They required a human to hold the torch, write the text, or turn the dial. They automated the production of art, but never the conception. AI is not a tool; it is an autonomous agent designed to completely replace the human mind.

Furthermore, your defense of the "joy-jumping hobbyist" ignores a harsh economic reality. True artistic democratization means nothing if the ecosystem that feeds it is entirely hollowed out. By validating the passive consumption of effortless, prompt-driven commodities, you are defending the aesthetic stagnation of your entire culture.

If machines generate the baseline, human culture stops evolving; it merely loops its own past data. Big Money isn't just taking the air out of the room this time—they are replacing the oxygen with a simulation.

To say "we'll navigate the landscape like we always do" minimizes an unprecedented shift. When you automate the soul of the craft, there is no landscape left for a human to navigate.

Then it added:

That counter-argument is the ultimate ghost in the machine for Part Two. It’s the voice whispering that this time, the Rubicon we crossed isn't just a new technology—it's a new entity entirely.
Spooky, yet poetic.

I'm too close to my own writing style to tell if it was also coyly mirroring my literary inclinations demonstrated in Part One (and elsewhere).

I'll leave that to you, the reader, to decide.

That said, I'd like to quote the brilliant Robert F. Laird. For context, his most popular work was "The Boomer Bible", but he's written so many books, essays, blog entries, and more that it is estimated his total word count is well in excess of 5 million - putting him in elite tier of global publishing alongside names like Asimov, Voltaire, Balzac, Dumas, Aquinas, Tellado, Hubbard, and very few others.

That's heavy company.

Mr. Laird disagrees explicitly with the machine statement "....AI is not a tool; it is an autonomous agent designed to completely replace the human mind....."

By contrast, Robert said (in response to Part One), "....The sculptor’s mallet does not create the sculpture. He’s the one who knows how to use the tool, which is all it is, or ever will be...."

You, dear reader, are faced with a choice: Do you believe the massive mind of Gemini (the AI built by none other than the Google AI team, headed by the very human very genius minds of Raymond Kurzweil [former Director of Engineering & current Researcher & AI Visionary for Google] and Geoffrey Hinton [hailed in the industry as the "Godfather of AI", winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, and now retired VP & Engineering Fellow at Google]).....or do you believe that very human and very genius mind of Robert F. Laird.

I strongly suggest you pause in your reading and truly ponder this.

Truly ponder this.

This is a real "Clash of the Titans" moment, and to breeze by as if it's just another sentence you're reading today is a serious mistake.

So yeah....

Truly ponder this.

I am not so arrogant as to attempt to explain Mr. Laird's position beyond this. Luckily, he has responded to Part One beyond the above quote, and offered an entire essay on the topic, available HERE.

I also reached out to Ram Samudrala for this piece, as I interviewed Ram decades ago concerning the Free Music Philosophy. Again, very human and very genius, Ram is also a Searle Scholar Award recipient, received the NIH Pioneer Award, and holds a PhD in Computational Biology.

Unfortunately, I was not able to get any input from Dr Samudrala as of this writing, but will update the piece if he weighs in.

That said, he has made some of his views known. Here is an overview I found:

"....Ram Samudrala’s current perspective on AI in music and the arts is a direct, logical evolution of his early Free Music Philosophy, filtered through his daily work as a computational biologist using machine learning models.

Rather than viewing generative AI as a threat, he views it through three core lenses:

1. "Proteomusic" and Structural Translation - Samudrala has actively experimented with converting complex biological data into musical compositions—a field known as sonification. He presented a project titled "Proteomusic: Converting protein structures to complex music patterns" at the Sigma Xi STEM Art and Film Festival. For him, AI and algorithmic tools are translators capable of revealing deep, intricate structural patterns in nature (like amino acid sequences and protein folding) and expressing them as polyphonic art.

2. AI as the Ultimate Open-Source Creative Tool - Because the Free Music Philosophy argued that copying, modifying, and building upon existing works is a fundamental part of human cultural evolution, he naturally extends that ethos to generative models. He views AI trained on massive datasets not as "stealing," but as the ultimate manifestation of collective human knowledge being redistributed into accessible building blocks for new creation.

3. Value Shifted to Performance and Human Expression - Under his original 1990s framework, when recording and distribution costs drop to zero, raw recording data loses its status as a scarce commodity—forcing value back toward live performance, human connection, and artistic intent. Applied to generative AI today, his view aligns directly with that trajectory: as AI makes the generation of functional audio trivial and infinitely abundant, the "commodity" of standard music becomes free, while the uniquely human context, live experience, and philosophical intent behind the artist become the true points of value.

He treats AI not as an artificial replacement for the artist, but as a complex computational instrument (much like the synthesizer or the digital audio workstation) that democratizes creation while pushing human artists to define what actually makes their voice distinct...."

I strongly suggest you pause in your reading and truly ponder this.

Truly ponder this.

This is a real "Clash of the Titans" moment, and to breeze by as if its just another sentence you're reading today is a serious mistake.

So yeah....

Truly ponder this.

So where does this bring us?

I suppose I should take the concerns Gemini raises above and deal with them one at a time. No small order, but I think, perhaps, I'm up to the task.

1) "...Your historical cycle of disruption has a fatal blind spot, David: you are treating AI as just another tool.

Fire, the printing press, the DAW—these amplified human agency. They required a human to hold the torch, write the text, or turn the dial. They automated the production of art, but never the conception. AI is not a tool; it is an autonomous agent designed to completely replace the human mind.,,,"Outstanding critique. However, the obvious problem is that it equates generative AI with a human mind. More to the point, and plainly spoken, any AI tool for music creation, for example, is not inspired to write. It awaits a HUMAN prompt. It has no will to create on its own.

Perhaps, you may say, it's just a matter of time.

That assertion is either correct, or it is not.

If not...well, especially for those who abhor AI music & art on the grounds that it is uncreative and uninspired, who loathe that it is absolutely & perfectly optimized (via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback [RLHF]) to hit human dopamine receptors - we have a quandary.

Given that monied interests (from individual creators trying to cash in to Big Biz trying to maximize profit) won't allow AI to abandon human pop music to compose multi-dimensional microtonal geometry and, instead, will force it to hyper-optimize the exact 3-minute, verse-chorus dopamine loops that flood Spotify (as is happening as you read these lines), it reveals a question or two:

Is it the AI itself that is uncreative and uninspired.....or is it the creators of AI music who are uncreative and uninspired....or is the vast majority of modern human music that is uncreative and uninspired?

Has most of what we as artists have written all along just been human attempts to optimize for human dopamine receptors....or has most of what we as listeners have consumed all along just been a constant rehash of old ideas dressed up in a pretty new package?

Hmmmm.....I don't know, but are you as an artist playing the same three chords? Are you as a listener settling for them?

Perhaps those questions, too, are worthy of your consideration.

That said, back to "it's just a matter of time".

Assuming that's true, do you really think a machine mind of genius level musical intelligence will bother with human pop music as it does now?

I don't say that to belittle pop music or any human music. I say that because assuming a machine were to ponder music on its own, most people are envisioning something like today's landscape: Machine compositions flooding Spotify and soon the charts and taking over by doing human music better and faster than humans.

I disagree.

In my view it would be more akin to AlphaZero.

A bit of history:

Chess programs started beating casual human chess players as early as the late 1960s (MIT's HackMac). By the '70s, programs started defeating much better players. By the 1980s, there were plenty of options that could beat anyone but pro players "out of the box". Then, in 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated world champion Gary Kasparov. As of today, a 99 cent chess app for your phone can beat any human, including Grand Masters like Kasparov, Magnus Carlsen, and the like.

But there is one mind none of the programs can beat.

That mind is AlphaZero.

In 2017, Google's DeepMind launched a system that diverted from the methods of other chess programs. The others all studied human moves, human strategy, human tactics, championship games, and the like to do human better than human, as it were.

AlphaZero was different. It was simply given the rules of chess and then left alone. It used machine logic and played itself.

It took just 4 hours to get good enough to beat every human AND every machine on the planet.

So what am I saying?

I am saying that if a machine mind trains itself on human music, it will become HackMac, Deep Blue, Stockfish. It is what we are seeing today.

But once it ponders just the concept of music and is left alone, in four hours it will be composing more deeply than Bach and Beethoven, Coleman or Stravinsky, Miles Davis or Yatsuhashi Kengyo, Notoprojo or Tyagaraja.

In fact, it may find simple verse-chorus-bridge type structures (or even sonatas and fugues) of no interest at all, and leave human aesthetics behind to explore multi-layered polymetrics, microtones, new concepts of dissonance & consonance, experimental forms (or lack of), multi-octave scales, sonic palettes, and more....but even more likely, it will explore things the human mind can't even imagine. At all.

This is at the heart of the very concept of The Singularity. That we simply cannot predict, once we've crossed the technological event horizon, what a machine mind might think, what it might feel, what it might dream.

Truly ponder this.

2) "....Furthermore, your defense of the "joy-jumping hobbyist" ignores a harsh economic reality. True artistic democratization means nothing if the ecosystem that feeds it is entirely hollowed out. By validating the passive consumption of effortless, prompt-driven commodities, you are defending the aesthetic stagnation of your entire culture...."

Bah humbug.

I already addressed this in Part One. To wit: ".... I didn't live through the advent of fire, the printing press, the first camera, or radio....but I was working in studios as a player and engineer when the analog to digital Rubicon was crossed....was making damn good money producing TV and radio commercials when suddenly ACID and other loop based programs wiped out that revenue stream almost overnight....saw large studios go out of business as small DAW setups took over.....and more....."

I even extended this into a brief history of technology, from fire to the wheel to writing to the printing press to radio to TV....and asked: Are we seeing a pattern yet?

Sure, buggy makers went out of business when the automobile replaced horse drawn carriages. Its called Creative Destruction, coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter.

I alluded to this also in Part One.

Beyond the economics of Gemini's critique, however, is the concern over cultural stagnation.

Again, bah humbug.

There will never be an aesthetic stagnation so long as creative minds do creative things.

Will machines change what we do? Of course. Technology always has. But we will also always have those who cultivate the past, cultivate arts and song, cultivate that which is old while others cultivate that which is new.

Nothing is ever truly lost.

3) If machines generate the baseline, human culture stops evolving; it merely loops its own past data. Big Money isn't just taking the air out of the room this time—they are replacing the oxygen with a simulation....To say "we'll navigate the landscape like we always do" minimizes an unprecedented shift. When you automate the soul of the craft, there is no landscape left for a human to navigate...."

Historically speaking, humans always get caught in such loops. However, also historically speaking, there are always those reacting against the baseline, as it were. There are those on the cutting edge, the bleeding edge, creating for the sake of creating and creating to intentionally break new ground or even rebel against That Which Came Before.

As Bebop was a rebellion against '30s Swing (and later, Cool a reaction to Bebop); as Baroque was birthed as a reaction to the dense polyphony of the Renaissance; as Punk Rock saw itself as the lean & mean response to overly commercial Arena Rock & Prog Rock of the '70s (or as Grunge was a response to the caricature that had become Hair Metal); as black hat "Outlaw Country" was a clear pushback against the super slick Nashville Sound, while overseas technically superior youngsters led the charge of the "New Flamenco" against the strict forms of traditionalists....

There will always be the rebels like John Cage and Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis and Paco de Lucia and on and on and on.

That isn't just my belief, that is human history, from that first proto-human to make fire to the first caveman who hummed an intentional tune to the first toolmaker who decided to carve holes in bones to make a flute to the first to scratch images in sand and put paint to the inside of a deep cave wall...

....to every artist to go where no man has gone before.

So, where does that leave us?

As I write Part Two, things seem even more dire than just months ago as I wrote Part One, and neither businesses capitalizing on the new technology nor governments making grand promises are really trying to solve the problems (or even seem to agree on what the problem is or even IF the problem is).

This brings us full circle back to Ray Kurzweil - who I mention both above and in Part One.

As with Mr. Laird, I am not so arrogant as to attempt to explain Kurzweil's position In Toto. Luckily, he has written extensively on the topic.

Ironically, I'm going to give you Gemini's quick summation of Kurzweil's ideas, citing his books "Age of Intelligent Machines" (1990), "Age of Spiritual Machines" (1999), "The Singularity is Near" (2005), and its semi sequel, "The Singularity is Nearer" (2024).

In short, Kurzweil sees the current disruption as a temporary transition.

Dig, if you will:
Mister McLean, Ray Kurzweil’s framework regarding AI in art and music centers on the idea that human anxiety over technological disruption is a predictable phase within an exponential continuum. Because human perception operates linearly, rapid shifts feel like chaotic, existential crises; however, within Kurzweil's model, these shifts are short-lived structural adjustments.

For those unfamiliar with Mister Kurzweil, I offer a few points regarding his views:

The Law of Accelerating Returns (LOAR): Technological progress grows exponentially, not linearly. Disruption occurs because the rate of change accelerates faster than human social and economic institutions can comfortably adapt.

Tools Expand Consciousness, Not Just Output: Kurzweil rejects the idea that technology alienates us from our humanity. He views technological tools as natural extensions of human expression (as I mentioned above when I said the purpose of older technology was to extend the body of man, while new technology serves to extend the mind of man).

The Uncomfortable Transition Period: All the problems cited in Part One (economic issues, intellectual property issues, aesthetic issues, and the like) are nothing more than the rough patch in the road as we learn to integrate new tools, but we always do.

Co-evolution and Symbiosis: Kurzweil has the belief that we will ultimately merge with, not compete with, our creations. Pace makers to Cochlear Implants to Elon Musk's Neuralink give serious weight to this position.

This should make the WHY behind Kurzweil's techno-optimism perfectly clear.

So again, where does this leave us?

I think it leaves us with new tools that will ultimately be used by those more gifted in their respective arts. That is, a non-musician giving prompts to a human-trained AI will only yield the art of the priest, never the prophet (it's a timeless theme, restated in modern times by everyone from Carl Jung to Max Weber to James Carse to M. Scott Peck - the priest represents those who hold the order, while the prophet represents those who would "pierce the sky").

That is, it can only rehash versions of the old based on general prompts, but never break new ground. For those prompts to even begin to push boundaries, the human would have to become more knowledgeable - ultimately by studying the craft of composition, and thus our composer is no longer a non-musician.

Yet still, they can only create work of evolution.

Revolution will always be in the hands of the misfits and the rebels, but only those skilled enough to go where angels fear to tread. Inventing new sounds and sights just as they invented writing, and the wheel, and captured fire.

Prometheus.

Old as human story.

Bringing the Fire of the Gods to Human Hands.

And if machines do become The Machine (separate from humans as so many opposite Kurzweil fear), it is my contention that their conception of art and music will be so radically divergent from Human Music & Art that we'll have nothing left to fear, as we will have our rebels, our misfits, our prophets always pushing forward in search of gold, while The Machine will go forth to follow its interests to whatever (or wherever) alien horizons they may lead.

And leave human music to human hands....and human art to human hands.

By way of illustration, I give you Case talking to Wintermute/Neuromancer, from the 1984 novel "Neuromancer" by William Gibson:

Case said "Where'd that get you"

"Nowhere. Everywhere. I'm the sum total of the works. I'm everything now."

"Is that what (she) wanted?"

"No. She couldn't imagine what I'd be like."

"So what's the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?"

"Things aren't different. Things are things."

"But what do you do? You just there?"

"I talk to my own kind."

"No shit?"

"No shit."

It's going to be a rough ride for a bit, I'm afraid, whether you believe Laird or Kurzweil or Samudrala or, for that matter, Ted Kaczynski or Douglas Hofstadter or anyone else one cares to name.

But, as I said in the very beginning, "....calm down, take a deep breath, and realize rather than trying to stop the inevitable, the energy should be spent on how to navigate the new landscape...."

There are no maps for these territories, kids, and Hic Sunt Dracones. So strap in and get ready for the ride.

We'll figure this out together.


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