Comment by sublinear
2 hours ago
Autotune, and quantization in general, is a legitimate artistic choice though. It's like using a ruler. It's not strictly required either.
AI is literally the exact opposite of that. We had been building software with ruler-like precision even when it was unnecessary and got in the way. That's the only reason we ever wanted AI to begin with.
One mistake people keep making is the assumption that arbitrary and probabilistic imprecision ("wisdom of the crowd") is automatically equivalent to artistic or experienced/curated choice. It's absolutely not. Another mistake is that approximations are always enough to satisfy all problems, or at least "real world" problems. That's obviously not true either. That's flat out ignorance.
Check out some off Connor O’Malley’s YouTube videos lately. He’s a collaborator with Tim Robinson and has an absurdist take with heavy AI used
What I’m saying is he made an explicit artistic choice to use AI and it’s an integral part of the work. You can’t tell a creative person they aren’t allowed to do something.
AI is going to be used, and already is used, by creative people for legitimate uses that only enhance the statements they are making.
The fact that lazy people are using it as a shortcut for a lazy audience is not an indictment of AI
Yeah, I'm not saying there's no artistic value in using AI.
I'm saying that less intentional use has less artistic merit. AI hasn't made an impact on the toil involved in the creative process. It's instead another brush.
It all boils down to the fact that humans are not outsourcing anything to AI. If anything, it just raises the bar and makes humans have to work harder. Decision fatigue was already a problem long before this era of AI, and AI can make it worse.
That's exactly what happened to music with beat quantization and autotune. People just zoomed in, nerded out, got snobbier, stopped seeing the forest for the trees, and ultimately produced very boring music from exhaustion. Not only that, but a ton of nuance was lost. We took so much agency away from the performance and made it all march in line and in time. It's up to the audience where the breaking point is.