Where Art Goes To Die – And A Big Announcement!

* This is a long post but I do have an announcement so it wasn’t clickbait 🙂
If you’ve spent time reading online today is highly likely you read something 100% generated by a computer with no human involved.  If you’re the social media scrolling-type, you also most certainly saw fake videos generated by AI. 

If you use music streaming services, especially Spotify, you also likely listened to a song or two created by a data center, with perhaps the only human involvement being a sentence to request it be created. 

Such is life in 2026.  There ain’t no going back my friends.  

 

Art

The arts are a human cultural tour de force that are arguably one of the main things holding us together as a species.  From Michelangelo to Andy Warhol, Bach to the Beatles, Shakespeare to J.K. Rowling, the arts define us.  They make statements, create connection, expose vulnerabilities, give hope, and in many ways are the official record of who we are.

They lay our souls out for all to see. 

When NASA launched the first spacecraft destined for interstellar space that might possibly one day be discovered by another species, they included musical pieces by Bach, Mozart, and Stravinsky, as well as Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, and Blind Willie Johnson.  That’s how important music is to our culture.  

So are we destined for a future where most or all art is created by algorithms in data centers? 

Just a decade ago virtually none of it was, while today a sizeable percentage of new art is just that.  And that percentage is growing every minute of every day.

If we continue to outsource writing, painting, music creation, and other forms of art to AI and robots, where will that get us?

 

Atrophy

Many studies have shown that people’s sense of direction has gotten significantly worse in the past 20 years because of the reliance on tools like Google maps.  When we outsource any part of our brain to something else it atrophies. 

I used to have great handwriting and learned perfect cursive in school.  Now I can barely sign my name legibly. If you’re at least 40 years old or older you might remember a time when you had phone numbers memorized.  How many can you remember now?  Are you even capable of doing so any more?

If we as a species create less going forward and consume art mostly from algorithms, how many generations will it take until our ability to be creative at all is just a historical blip, lost to the ages?

 

Two Very Sharp Edges

Like any new technology AI has big upsides and big downsides.  But with AI those two paths are put on steroids.  The goods are infinitely good and the bads are the possible end of humanity.  No big deal, right?

The internet is increasingly filling up with “writers” who can’t write, “artists” who can’t create, and soon it’s going to be filled with people claiming that they made amazing pottery and sculptures that were actually done by robots.  These deceptions are increasing exponentially as the technologies get better. 

Once the arts and culture get flash-mobbed by AI and suspicions arise everywhere that a humans aren’t creating it, the very trust we have in each other’s word and bond will start to erode with it. 

And….

There’s lots of human disease and suffering out there. Google’s AI DeepMind famously solved a significant piece of the mystery of how proteins fold, and won the Nobel Prize for it. It was a big step towards curing a lot of diseases. No doubt more advancements are being made every single day with the help of AI.

I want to see diseases and human suffering reduced or wiped out completely.  I want a world where we can all flourish and reap the benefits of technologies that assist us. 

Not replace us.  

 

I’m On Team Human

I’m not a luddite.  But I do prefer humans over computers.  I love seeing someone’s soul poured into a novel, revealed in the chords of a song, or exposed through the paint on a canvas.  Much of the “art” that AI has flooded the world with over the past few years is horrendously bad. 

The stuff that isn’t bad or that’s even good is still tainted with the knowledge that a human didn’t make it.  An algorithm learned how to make whatever it was by training on the hard work of real human artists.  The law will have to decide whether we’ll continue to tolerate that. 

But as this stuff has unavoidably come into my life every day, I’ve felt an innate urge to create. 

As if creating more myself will somehow turn the tide of this soulless future.  I’m plenty humble to know my meager talents can’t make even a blip, but the urge increases nonetheless. 

I already have a graphic arts business, and I write on this blog, although way less frequently than I used to.  The last of the “big trio” of arts, to me at least, is music.  I play guitar and have been in numerous marginally talented rock bands before.  I’ve always wanted to start making my own music. 

Well, now I have. 

 

Bad Time

And boy did I pick a bad time to do so.  Estimates say that about one-third of all new songs uploaded to online streaming services today are AI.  One-third.  And that will continue to grow. 

Prior to this madness it was already hard enough to get heard and to get any traction as a musician.  Now it seems impossible, that any newbie would just be drowning in an endless sea of sounds. 

Some surveys show that young people not only listen to AI music, they often (not always) know that they are and when they do they also often don’t care.  Conversely most surveys indicate a majority of people would not read a book entirely written by AI. 

So it seems most people are more accepting of AI created music than they are of writing.  I want neither.  Why music loses in this battle is beyond me, but I’m not indicative of society.

 

Time To Get Vulnerable

This post is already too long and if you’ve gotten this far I thank you profusely.  Yes I teased a big announcement in the title and here it is.  I’ve made my first original music and published it on Bandcamp.  Before I give the link I’d like to briefly explain my choice of what I call myself. 

I know these songs aren’t great.  I’m new at this.  But again, I feel the urge now more than ever.  So I couldn’t not do it. 

But my self awareness of my mediocrity and more importantly the anonymity that I should preserve online based on the career I had left me struggling to name myself. 

So I decided to have fun with it and be pretentious as hell, in a tongue and cheek way.  A one-word artist name full of mystery is the way to do that. 

So I’m “Arete”.  You can look up the word and you’ll see it fits the theme of a guy who climbs mountains. 

It takes a certain vulnerability to ask folks to listen to music you created, because the inner voice will be saying “they’ll hate it… it sucks… you’re embarrassing yourself”.  But here goes. 

 

My Bandcamp Page.

 

Both songs are instrumentals.  While I can sing in a certain narrow range the quality and tone of my voice sucks.  So I didn’t.

The first song is “new-agey” as my friend said and meant to be listened to sitting by a quiet wilderness lake at sunset.  Or, it fits in with my relaxing morning playlist while drinking coffee.  It’s total chillax.  The second song is a bit more peppy and I’m kinda happy with the melodies I came up with. 

Importantly – No AI was used in the making of these songs. 

I played all instruments.  Because technology is great I play bass guitar and violin and cello on my keyboard through simulators.  That’s not AI, that means I still play the keys and notes and instead of a piano sound the computer translates it to a violin sound.  And yes I used a drum machine but again that’s not AI, they have to be programmed and they’ve been around since the 70’s. 

Bandcamp doesn’t allow AI music and they are the best at supporting independent artists, so please support them!

 

Be Kind

Tastes in music are endlessly extensive and for many music is very personal.  If you don’t like my songs that’s okay, I expect that. 

If you do I’d be ecstatic.  Either way I just ask that you be kind and diplomatic with any response and realize I’m just a guy who wants to live a creative life and is trying to learn.  Creating these songs, however imperfect they are, gave me joy, and I’m beyond stoked to keep doing it.