AI is the Best Thing to Happen to Art
I watched this video about how AI has already ruined music. Her mom sent her a song and she told her mom it was AI. She played the song and it sounded like slop. It had inspired lyrics like:
From quiet roots, a garden grows She’s got that light, and now it shows Yes, she rises, and she glows Oh, she rises, now she knows
Pure slop. Compare it to:
I’m in the cut acting crazy I’m in the whip doing eighty Only God can judge me And only she can save me
Note that “cut” and “whip” are not exactly words, but products of a culture. Ulysses is particularly hard to read because you don’t know 1910’s Irish pop culture.
I can’t believe Marvel movies were popular. The first Iron Man was good, but by the time we got to Spider-Man: No Way Home it was practically a clip show with triple inside references and cringy fourth wall breaking humor. How it got a 8.1 on IMDB is beyond me, and just reduced my trust for IMDB.
Marvel movies are also the easiest things to make with AI. Little story and long term coherence, no “progression of the genre”, tons of eye candy special effects. It’s shocking with how large the budgets for them were that they couldn’t pay a story guy a little.
I felt similarly about Avatar 2, so much so that I rewrote the plot and didn’t care enough to see Avatar 3.
For many people, all they want is slop. I’m sure I’ve written about it before, but I see a world where 95% of people end up basically wireheaded. The people who don’t care about progression. The people who want to exist in their loops. They will find their loop and exist in it forever.
AI can play an amazing game of chess. Someday AI will produce good code when the RLVR environments get set up correctly. But I don’t see a path with current tech to not produce garbage art.
Art is defined as what pushes the boundaries of civilization. AI tools will be used to help produce all the audio/visual art in the future (as computers have helped for a long time), but as long as civilization is human, the loci of control of good art will remain human.
So yea. Bad art will be cheap to make. If you want 100 more Marvel movies and uninspired deriviative pop music, there has never been a better time to be alive – unless you wanted to make money producing that trash. That was never made by real artists anyway, just algorithmically driven sell outs. Does the focus group say they like giant spiders? I’m so glad AI will make that obsolete.
Art is defined by what is expensive. What is rare. What is expectation breaking. What is embedded in a complex and thriving culture. Not slop produced by a parrot like Marvel movies.
