Does AI have any place in creating culture?

A question spurred by a rather innocuous hardcore "compilation"

I was scrolling through Facebook a while back, when I came across an interesting post in the Demolisten Podcast group. It was a link to an AI generated hardcore record called Tomorrow’s Uproar AI Compilation. The songs on the “comp” – aping a wide swath of bands and motifs – were entirely composed and “performed” by generative AI.  

Like any other “creative” person, I reflexively recoiled. I’m slowly getting used to life with AI-written job postings and “gay version” memes of my favourite 90’s songs. You know, relatively harmless intrusions that don’t affect anything I truly care about. Making a fake hardcore comp, on the other hand, struck me as a tasteless, cheap ploy – certainly devised by some talentless hack to gain internet clout. What kind of clueless moron would even try such a thing? 

I then saw “generated using AI by Trevor Vaughan” in the album credits. Trevor, for anyone who doesn’t know, is probably one of the MOST creative and talented people in modern hardcore. He helped write some of the best hardcore ever as a member of the Rival Mob and continues to work on stuff I care about to this day. Suddenly, my demeanour changed. 

Let’s clear the air before we go any further. This isn’t an essay about the ethical implications of using generative AI. There are a trillion articles on either side of the fence to help affirm your bias on that. Anyone looking for my moral stance can have my pragmatic one instead: I’m a writer. I’m fucked.  

I’ll be toiling away in some stupid factory for the rest of my life while companies outsource my only natural talent to robots. I’m not pro-AI. I’ve never used ChatGPT in my life. That doesn’t mean I’m more creative than someone who has. We’ve been fed a narrative that the AI debate is firmly entrenched between tasteless, talentless tech bros and broke, exploitable creatives. In actuality, the lines are blurrier. 

The tracks on Tomorrow’s Uproar are middling. They’re delivered with a computerized competence but lack personality and creative ingenuity (imagine that). The “vocalists” all sound like 40-year-old men reciting lyrics they wrote in high school. Every song is either 1:06 or :34 in length. There’s one good riff on the record, but it quickly fades out as the song inexplicably ends.  

Would I listen to this a second time if it wasn’t for the AI novelty? No. You can say the exact same thing about a million different human generated comps, though.  I’ve also heard bands comprised of real human beings write music that’s a lot shittier than this.  

UNCREDITED PHOTO OF TREVOR VAUGHAN

This comp wasn’t a labour of love or painstaking expression of creative brilliance, either. Vaughan created the songs using a program called Udia, typing in simple prompts like “straight edge song in the style of 80’s hardcore” or “skate punk song about losing a girl in the style of Descendants”. He made the entire comp within a couple hours before heading to work one day. 

So, this project doesn’t prove that generating art with AI takes remarkable talent or ingenuity. It does the opposite, if anything. Still, it’s a testament to Trevor Vaughan’s creativity that he would spend time on this at all – just to see if he could do it and what it might sound like.  

Truly creative people are inclined to make stuff using the tools around them. AI is a complicated tool, but a tool, nonetheless. People in creative sectors are losing jobs because software is stealing their work to pump out inferior, yet cost effective, versions of what they do. That sucks. On the other hand, AI streamlines processes and makes things more accessible. Why not leverage the tools you have, to work through what’s painstaking or prohibitive? 

In sharing his process for making Tomorrow’s Uproar, Vaughan also shared his thoughts on AI as a whole. “I’m not for or against AI, honestly. I feel like if it’s used as a supplemental tool, like say as a reverb plugin – where you can add reverb to make your snare sound bigger without recording your drums in a cave, then it’s cool and can help people realize their vision in different ways.” This sentiment cuts to the core of what I’m getting at. People whose brains operate on a highly creative level see possibilities everywhere, even in places they “aren’t supposed to”. 

MESHUGGAH USED AI TO MAKE A MUSIC VIDEO (IT SUCKS).

I was recently part of a project that commissioned some artwork from a talented illustrator. His vision for the piece involved using a photograph as the main image. He couldn’t find anything that fit the bill, so he used AI to generate a “photo” and altered it in Photoshop to put his own spin on it. Then he incorporated that image into a larger piece using graphic design.  

The only qualm I can find with that is an ethical one regarding the sourcing of the image. Anyone who wants to discredit this guy as creatively fraudulent for using AI is ignoring the ten other steps he took to arrive at a final product. He would have used the exact same creative process if he found a photo online somewhere.  

Is the final product a masterstroke of artistic brilliance? Not exactly, but not everything has to be. This man is a working artist who needs to pay his bills, and he saw a way to streamline his process while also giving the client what they wanted. I know there are a million ethical implications I’m not addressing here, but like I said, go read the Economist if you want to have that debate. All I’m saying is, the tools are available, and people who are smarter and more creative than me have found ways to use them. 

It’s funny — the only time I use AI is to help me write. I pay for LinkedIn Premium so I can have AI craft messages to prospective employers. I hit a button, the message auto-generates, and then I edit it. I write better than AI, but it writes faster than me. So, when quality and creativity isn’t an issue, I use the available tools to do the boring shit. Then I have more time to come on this blog and inundate my wonderful readers with hot takes.