I hope the hardy, but smaller, summer readership here has enjoyed this diversion from our usual literary poetry combined with original music subjects. It’s been somewhat difficult to write. Why?

When I run across comments or longer-form writing about artificial intelligence – given my interests, mostly from folks in artistic fields – the feelings and cold convictions I read come in hot. AI gives me a lot of feels too: frustrations, fears, disgusts, distrusts, worries, even amusements at its fails. Yet, earlier in this series I’ve honestly talked about AI features I’ve tried. I wonder if I’m alone in these mixed feelings – if I’m just a wishy-washy old guy who won’t say it plain. For my final installment let me focus on those concerns.*

I’ve referred to some of those “guild concerns” earlier in this series. Let me expand on that. Let’s say you are a professional, semi-professional , or aspiring visual artist, voice talent, translator, editor, writer, composer, musician. AI claims it’s achieved parity with your field’s trades. “No!”  you reply to any such suggestion, for you are informed of all the small things that a master in your field provides that AI, as yet, can’t. But along with that comes the fear that most customers and many consumers of your art may judge as inessential elements you’ve learned to provide and appreciate, that your professional value-add may be judged dispensable. Capital’s royal decision makers may not hear your objections, give them any bottom-line weight. There’s an unavoidable term for a resulting outcome: enshittifacation. Everything then may drop to just above the level that would drive commoners to revolution.

And there’s a tsunami of salt to be poured into artist’s wounds from the use of Large Language Models in current AI. LLMs digest realms of work by artists, almost entirely without compensation to them, and apply pattern and categorization processes to this hoard to make it into reusable parts that can be recombined into other work – work whose ownership has been severed from artists and transferred in part to oligarchical corporations. This injury isn’t speculative. It’s already occurred in titanic amounts to create current LLMs, and ex post facto attempts to get paid for this seizing of work or to prevent future accumulations of scraped up art are being resisted by the AI industry who is seeking government protection for this reuse.**

So, where organized as unions, workers in the arts have attempted to counter this, concerned both as keepers of artistic excellence and as counter-forces seeking to protect incomes for their members. Will this succeed? Who am I to predict, watching ignorant beach-sand techbro armies sweep across the darkling plains amid alarms. But I understand the anger/fear of the artists, endorse it.

But I, myself, am an odd case. Poetry has low capital needs, a loaf of bread, a jug of iced-tea, and a roof, and I’m good to go there – and the renumeration market for poetry is scant. I used to inconstantly chase after giving readings with a couple dozen attendees, or the small paper presses aspiring to three-digit sales. I still admire those things and support them, I just don’t see them as precious scraps to struggle over at this point in my life. With the Parlando Project I most often use other people’s poetry, using and promoting work from dead and/or public domain poets or small excerpts of words from the living. With this Project I can aim for my hundreds of readers or listeners for a piece – a tiny audience in Internet stats, but an appreciable reward by poetry standards. With my music production and distribution here (aided by affordable computer technology) I find that I’m part capitalist and part worker-in-song. And there’s a conflict there.

I’ve already confessed in the series that I sometimes use what is called AI to extend the long-standing feature of computer music arpeggiators, programs that suggest and play patterns of notes on command. Honestly, I don’t feel good about using these – there’s shame mixed in there with the approval I find with my producer’s hat on from the effective results they bring to the finished musical piece.*** It’s not just breast-beating when I confess it feels fraudulent to me to use some computer aided line or expression played with an accomplished verve. A human should do that, and I can’t do that, and yet that part of the ensemble is  there – I’ve allowed it, and its level of success to some listener could be assigned to me. The alternate path I left some time ago was organizing bands of musicians to realize the music I create. I may wonder about that untaken path, but then I consider how dissatisfied those musicians might be at my non-commercial aims, how frustrated or dismayed they would be with my musical naivete, how stressful and ill-fitting it would be for the composer-hat-me to wear the bandleader-hat as well. Yet, those struggles, despite unfitness on my part, may be the necessary dues to engage in musical work. Guild concerns might hand down a harsh judgement on what I’ve done: “If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t do that  –  you’re taking away jobs from skilled tradesmen.”

In this I support the guild with one side of my heart, and yet I could be charged with working against its union shop.

A musical piece from a pair of DVDs issued decades ago that my child and I treasured when we both were younger. I don’t have details about how this music was produced, with what technology, but this is so much better than the trite AI slop illustrations I could have chosen to use instead. The Animusic web site is defunct, and I don’t know how you could still purchase this.

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Full-fledged AI music? The examples I provided in my last post satisfied my curiosity in my quick attempts to see what the current state of the art can do. Even more so than with my frustrations with AI illustrations I discussed in the first part of this series, I’m not tempted to continue to use that level of AI music creation. I don’t have to test my ethics in this: AI generated songs can’t get close enough to what I want, what I intend to communicate. I like playing instruments, and despite my not uncommon artists ability to procrastinate on getting down to composition of new work, once I’m into the process, I find it absorbing. If what results isn’t always a perfect realization of intent, so to it is with AI, and typing a few words into a prompt has no visceral rewards.

As I wrap up this series today, I’ve honestly tried to report my contradictions. If I’ve done anything, it’s my hope that you, my widely curious readership, will use what I’ve written to spur your own considerations of the challenges AI brings to art. I’ve used music as the main example, but literature and many other arts – as well as work that isn’t viewed as artistic – have like dangers, allied concerns.

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*Let me mention that I also share environmental concerns with the energy usage to provide AI. While earlier in this series I wrote that we likely don’t really know what those energy needs are with precision – and our existing general use of ubiquitous computers both saves and costs energy in some balance that’s hard to calculate.

An another issue: brevity keeps me from delving today into the important risk of extended capitalist and or authoritarian control of expression by ceding tools of production to oligarchs.

And lastly, there is a great deal of techbro hype around AI. In some ways it’s encouraging and scary how well it works, and in others it’s risible and scary how badly it works. I don’t mind so much laughing at its limitations in the world of musical art – like the satire in the last post where it created outrageous protest songs that can still sound sonically plausible – but the thought of non-analog safeguards in life-and-death contexts is concerning. It’s already hard enough to hold capital to account for grievous errors and oversights. Giving another level of kings-X granted to the passive voice of “computer error” worries me.

**As I was finishing a draft of this on Saturday I read an egregious example of AI theft from a musical artist. Emily Portman (and others, it appears from the linked news story) had their artistic presence on leading music streaming sites invaded by someone greedy enough to try to steal the widow’s mite that independent artists receive.

***If I was to play advocate in my defense, I could say that the uses I make of these tools are not the same as typing in a few generally descriptive words and having AI generate an entire song (or painting, or story, or essay) such as the song examples I supplied in the last post. I work iteratively with the specifications and adjustments for the patterns – though so do many who work on elaborate prompts for generating entire songs – but I’ve supplied them with the harmonic structure by playing or composing the chords or melodic centers of the resulting pattern to be generated. Those substantive contributions I supply make a case for these uses being collaborative extensions of the human.

I’ve so long used drum machines – and entire accepted genres of music are built around the expectations that they will be used – that using computers to play drumbeats in patterns seems more allowable to my inner ethicist. If I dig deeper, and acknowledge that I know and appreciate the musicianship and sound of a good percussionist, this is inconsistent, but this is my honest emotional report.

Summarizing and speaking here in guild specifics: the composer in myself may feel justified, while the internalized musician’s guild inside my soul still feels shame at my stooping to this.