{"id":151850,"date":"2025-11-21T11:51:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T11:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/151850\/"},"modified":"2025-11-21T11:51:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T11:51:07","slug":"tech-should-help-us-be-creative-ai-rips-our-creativity-away-dave-schilling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/151850\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech should help us be creative. AI rips our creativity away | Dave Schilling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Making music is hard. Well, at least it used to be. I remember the old days, when you had to spend hours and hours honing skills, coming up with something clever or personal to say, then actually recording sounds that people would want to listen to. But that\u2019s the past. In our sparkling future, a pre-teen can dump a bunch of words into a machine and out comes a catchy tune. In 2025, a robot can be a pop star. (Although Data from Star Trek did drop an album<\/a> back in the 90s. How soon we all forget.)<\/p>\n

Three AI-generated songs recently topped Spotify\u2019s \u201cViral 50\u201d charts<\/a>. One of the \u201ccreators\u201d responsible for these songs, Broken Veteran, who squirted out a track about immigration policies, told the Guardian that AI is \u201cjust another tool for expression, particularly valuable for people like me who have something to say but lack traditional musical training\u201d. It used to be that if you didn\u2019t know how to do something, you wouldn\u2019t do it.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll never be Shohei Ohtani \u2013 I\u2019m simply not handsome enough \u2013 but what if I could buy a robot to hit home runs for me? Could I then call myself a baseball player? Probably not, since I literally would have accomplished absolutely nothing, even if the robot wore a jersey with my name on it.<\/p>\n

Advocates for AI art always throw the word \u201cdemocratization\u201d around, claiming that these machine tools remove the barriers for entry to creativity. Those barriers were actually pretty valuable, because they prevented people from having to suffer through things that are objectively bad. But again, that\u2019s the old way of thinking. The concept of \u201cbad\u201d or \u201cgood\u201d hardly exists anymore. In its place, we have a goopy stew of garbage with a few nuggets of actual sustenance periodically bubbling up to the surface.<\/p>\n

Thousands of AI songs are uploaded to the internet every day<\/a>, by people who aren\u2019t actual musicians. I struggle to see how that\u2019s a good thing. Why would I want more music? I don\u2019t have time to listen to the music that exists now. There are over 100 million songs on Spotify<\/a>. What is the point of that? Why do we need to add more onto that Hometown Buffet of music? Did the world really need an AI song called I Caught My Knackers in the Cutlery Drawer<\/a>? The answer doesn\u2019t matter, because it\u2019s there anyway. It\u2019s like when Apple forced us all to download that U2 album<\/a>, but times a million. (And to be fair, I would rather listen to I Caught My Knackers in the Cutlery Drawer \u2013 I\u2019d take a robot over Bono most days.)<\/p>\n

At the core of all this artificially generated misery is the big, scary S-word: scale. Corporations, especially ones in media and entertainment, prize size over curation. More widgets \u2013 songs, TV shows, movies, books \u2013 means more monetization opportunities. More clicks, more watch time, more engagement. It doesn\u2019t matter how it happens or why. Streaming video services prize the amount of time something is viewed<\/a>. Whether or not a person finishes the show or movie is almost irrelevant, as long as they are spending more time on the platform. As Netflix said in a recent corporate statement, \u201cEngagement (i.e. time spent) is our best proxy for member joy.\u201d Only on the internet does time spent equal joy. If I take an hour and a half to build an Ikea dresser, does that mean I\u2019m experiencing joy? The two minutes and forty seconds I spent listening to the AI song That Fart Woke Me Up<\/a> in a bid to understand the AI-music phenomenon was not pleasurable in any way, but algorithms and data do not care about such things. Happiness can\u2019t actually be quantified, even if a Rotten Tomatoes score for a movie makes one think so.<\/p>\n

And that is the real tragedy of all this AI slop and obsession with scale. Human experience is made secondary to chunky bits of code or esoteric values on a spreadsheet. One of the chart-topping songs believed to be AI<\/a>, Walk My Walk<\/a>, by a mysterious entity known as Breaking Rust, is a middling country song about self-expression and perseverance in the face of doubters. Not an uncommon topic for a song when generated by an actual human. The irony here is that the song about believing in yourself is apparently made by a computer. When one gives their artistic voice over to a machine, they invite a mediator into that expression. Something else is literally doing the talking for you. You are not saying anything. The machine is, based on what you have asked it to create. When someone uses AI to write a thank you email or a personal essay, they are abdicating their responsibility to articulate honestly.<\/p>\n

Technology used to be seen as an instrument for our creativity. A pencil made it easier to record our thoughts. A typewriter and a personal computer did the same, increasing our ability to say what we felt or wanted. Now, technology is actively interrupting our dreams. Artificial intelligence is not a tool for creativity, it\u2019s a wet nurse who burps little babies and feeds them mashed peas every few hours. If I don\u2019t have to spend time learning how to write or make music, then what do I even do with my creative life? I suppose I could spend more time engaging with content. I could devote my remaining days on this earth to listening to all 100 million songs on Spotify<\/a>. Doesn\u2019t that sound completely dreadful?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Making music is hard. Well, at least it used to be. I remember the old days, when you…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":151851,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-151850","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151850\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}