AI slop predates AI

It's a helpful aesthetic category for bad art

One of my back burner writing projects is a book chapter about generative AI in music education and why I think it’s a Bad Thing. In preparation, I reread Ted Chiang’s New Yorker essay about why AI isn’t going to make art, which I completely agree with. To put ourselves in the right frame of mind for this discussion, let’s enjoy some beautiful patriotic AI output.

Anyway, I’m thinking about this paragraph from Chiang’s essay:

Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new. We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Chiang defines the creative process as a huge series of tiny choices. Every word choice in a story, every brush stroke in a painting, every note in a composition, every knob twist in a recording: the work of art is the result of all of those choices, and the artist communicates through their choices. Since the AI isn’t communicating and it’s not making choices, it can’t make art, however much its output superficially resembles art. Chiang compares AI slop to the eyespots on a butterfly’s wings: they look like predator eyes, but fundamentally are not.

Chiang makes a convincing argument for why AI slop sucks, but I also think it’s a useful new conceptual category for bad art made by humans. Sometimes art is bad because it’s inept; that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about highly polished products made by professionals that leave your senses feeling dulled.

Think of the emptiest, most boring top 40 pop song you know. We all have our anti-favorites. For me, it’s “Levitating” by Dua Lipa. On first listen, it’s fine, but the more I hear it, the more it bothers me. All the ideas sound like they were interpolated from other pop songs. Every phrase in the melody sounds vaguely like a phrase from a better song. Every synth and drum sounds like everything else on the radio. The track has been through too many hands, there were too many meetings about it, you can feel the corporate consensus. There’s no point of view, no possibility of specific thoughts or feelings being communicated. I have no problem with mainstream pop, and I also have no problem with that mainstream pop being derivative. However, if the music is so derivative that it sounds like AI slop, that is a problem.

AI slop is also a useful aesthetic category because it enables us to point to actually good pop songs and say, this does not sound like AI slop. We can identify the aspects that you couldn’t possibly arrive at by interpolating from a giant database of already existing pop songs. When you listen to Jimi Hendrix or Michael Jackson or Talking Heads or Björk, sometimes you hear them making contact with the consensus opinions of their time and place, but they frequently surprise you with awkward and counterintuitive choices. This is true for entire stylistic movements, too. I love 1980s hip-hop because there’s no way to predict it from projecting trends in 1970s pop. It questions basic assumptions! It’s missing elements that you might have thought were necessary (like melodies) and it brings in elements you didn’t know you wanted until you heard them (like samples and turntable scratching.) Now the 1980s rap exists, it’s easy to feed it into an AI as training data and get more 1980s rap, but there’s no way that AI could have produced 1980s rap if it was only trained on 1970s pop.

It’s a common assumption that technology drives pop music. However, many of the musical developments that we think of as resulting from technology actually predate the technology itself. For example: it would be easy to say that loop-based pop song structures and perfect metronomic timekeeping are the result of drum machines, MIDI sequencers and DAWs. But it turns out that those aesthetic qualities were present in pop music well before the technologies were widely available. “Stayin’ Alive” by the Bee Gees and “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac are both built on top of drum loops—they’re tape loops, not digital samples, but the effect is the same. People heard those songs and thought, oh yeah, this is the sound, I want to have this kind of steady and predictable groove! So musicians like Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards worked hard at machine-like timekeeping in their live instrumental performance. DAWs and MIDI made that style of groove vastly easier to attain, but by then, the style already existed. And by the way, this is not to equate Chic’s aesthetic with AI slop. I love Chic! Just to say that Chic’s music came before DAWs made it more attainable.

AI slop existed long before AI did. It’s all the boring, committee-driven copycat filler that has been clogging up the pop charts forever. I think that our job as educators is not just to push back on AI slop made by AI, it’s also to push back on AI slop made by humans. Bob Dylan and the Weavers are better than Peter, Paul and Mary because Peter, Paul and Mary sound like an AI trained on Bob Dylan and the Weavers. The Beach Boys are better than Jan and Dean because Jan and Dean sound like an AI trained on the Beach Boys. Eric Clapton sounds like an AI trained on Albert King. The Eagles sound like an AI trained on Neil Young. Everybody is inspired by somebody, but there’s inspiration and there’s finding correlations in a giant metaphorical database, and they are not the same thing.

In class a few weeks ago, I wanted to talk about The Velvet Sundown, but I misremembered their name as Velvet Sunset. I was playing one of their songs and saying, see, this is the kind of bland, featureless pap that you get from AI. But then someone in class pointed out that we were listening to the wrong band. As it turns out, Velvet Sunset is actual humans. I’m sorry, Velvet Sunset! But you know what? If your music is so easy to mistake for AI, that is on you!

It has been suggested to me that commercial pop music has to be AI-like in order to come across, but that isn’t true. Maybe you can only find moderate success by interpolating what’s come before you, but the truly huge generation-defining smashes are always weird and are frequently annoying. Good commercial art is much more similar to good personal art than either of them are to AI slop. George Michael is closer to Daniel Johnston than he is to the Velvet Sundown.

By the way, if you haven’t read Ted Chiang’s short story collections, do not deprive yourself another minute. They are haunting and excellent.