AI and art in the upcoming years

After thinking about how to find a method to filter out AI "slop" from quality art, I've realized it's a meaningless pursuit. And no, you can't spot an AI by looking for "em dashes" ('—'). Em dashes are still widely used by humans, and making an AI use the other dash ('-') would require nothing more than one line of code - which would also very much be in the interest of people trying to use AI to their advantage to cheat, make money and take shortcuts, those who want to reap the benefits of their work without doing the work themselves. Extend this example to other areas and you quickly see that there will be no way to distinguish AI music from human music either. You can guess and sense, but it will become harder and harder as the AI becomes more and more like us humans. But there will always be a tiny bit of unimitable core of artistic uniqueness in every unique person and every unique artwork, and that's the only thing you'll be able to use when all the other telling factors don't work anymore.

So, there will be no sureproof way to distinguish what's created by AI and what's not - at least if you focus on the AI part. If you instead focus on distinguishing high quality from low quality in general, regardless of if it comes from AI or not, it's as easy (or as hard) as it has always been. But to be able to do this, you first have to become a person who actually values quality art over unoriginal mind-numbing entertainment, or at least one who is mindful about when and how much to consume either of these. If you've been okay with unoriginal radio pop made by humans, you'll probably be completely fine with the flood of unoriginal radio pop made by AI.

Because it's always the artistic quality that is interesting. All other questions about technology's and AI's place in art just lead up to this final question (at least if kbrecordzz.com gets to decide the priorities of the world). The generation growing up alongside generative AI also won't care about making the distinction between AI and non-AI at all. It will probably make as little sense to them as it makes sense to millenials to categorize melody-less rap and machine-programmed techno as a different kind of music than "real" music with "real" instruments. AI generated people, products, art and ideas will live alongside everything else for the new generations, just like we live alongside the internet and other technologies we've grown up with and treat them as just as real as our physical lives. For us who got generative AI as an add-on later in life it won't be intuitive to live side by side with it, but we should be able to understand how the new generation does it by thinking about how we did it ourselves with our time's technology.

Now, generative AI doesn't seem to be able to create quality art, so learning to separate quality art from garbage content will probably weed out AI content at the same time. But if generative AI could make great art, then I would probably use this post to praise AI instead of the opposite! Because we're against bad art and bad content, not AI. And AI can at least be used as a help for creating quality art, if used in the right way, manner and time. And if humans create low-quality content without the use of technology (as they've been doing as long as they've existed, and as long as they've wanted to cheat, make money and take shortcuts), we want to stay away from that too. Garbage is bad, whichever form and origin it has. It could even be seen as a leap forward to let AIs create the low-quality content instead of laying our precious human time on it (as DHH says). We have to learn to live side by side with AI, because there won't be any good and effective way to reduce it from our lives, and the tools claiming to do so will only give false positives, and deep down we probably don't even want to. And being overly-positive or overly-negative towards it will take the focus away from what's actually important, which is to know what's great and not so we can consume and create great things instead of the opposite. That's what we need to keep in mind going into an inevitably more and more AI-based future. Low-quality content will flood over all areas, so we have to care even more about art than before. If you want to be numbed by mindless content because it feels good, AI will have you in its grip. But if you value originality, art and real connections with raw emotions, you'll have a chance to continue being an independent human and free thinker even in the future.

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