Rick Beato definitely addresses an alarming trend with his ‘Eli Mercer’ AI music/artist example…
Accessibility and proliferation of tools and techniques has increased output amounts in many domains for many years in human history. Ever less knowledge and effort was needed to produce valuable output. We used to call that Progress. But…ever more doubts are creeping in, now Progress seems to spiral out of control.
Mostly Progress was about more for less. In many domains, including ‘The Arts’ one factor remained pretty much out of reach for automation: Creativity. Effectively the (re)combination of existing knowledge and experience towards new ideas and implementations.
But with the arrival of AI, to the surprise of many, creativity and ‘The Arts’ have become the front line of development. AI’s ability to digest, remember, categorize, correlate and transform huge amounts of data enables it to create near unlimited new permutations derived from its near unlimited knowledge base.
I guess it’s not so much the qualitative aspect that worries me. It’s the quantative aspect. AI generated content is flooding the internet. Way more than any human or even the whole of humanity can ever consume.
So, any value derived from scarsity is under threat. Already it is nearly impossible for any artist/creator to even get noticed in the current relentless tidal waves of AI generated content.
The same goes for any form of content on the internet. It is estimated that already, the majority of new content is partly or wholly AI generated. And the balance is shifting ever faster in the AI direction. This development has already given rise to the Death of the Internet theory.
Some have the hope that humanity will simply keep attributing value to human created output, simply for the sake of the fact that something was created by a human (and not by a machine).
So, stuff might start carrying a ‘Human Made’ label. Although it would not surprise me that the label itself was AI generated…
In many cases value is not primarily derived from objective attributes of an object/product. Instead value is derived from inherently subjective evaluation of attributes and related emotions. For example HOW it was made and/or WHO made it.
Knowing something was created by a human might simply make us value it more and feel better about it…
Since music is mostly about conveying emotions…I hope they are right.
