This essay could be about a lot of things, and by that I mean, approachable through a lot of different medium and topics. However, once again, I choose this one. How quaint.
How to begin?
Our lives are made of choices, constellations of them. Even the things we take from granted, they come from choices. Not necessarily choices we consciously make (a lot of times they come prepackaged with others, or disguised) but choices nonetheless. Sometimes they are "non-choices", which is what I call choices that we make seemingly at random to get out of making one and in themselves are just another option of choice. People instinctively flee from choices, because they perceive the grave burden they contain. I hinted at the topic before.
But that's WAY too abstract and difficult for today. Today I come to talk about about, you guessed it, AI.
Please hold your boos until the end.
It turns out, computers can do music. I don't give a crap if it's "real music" or not. It sometimes punches you in the gut when you listen to it, and that's all I care about. So, the same way I did when I figured out it can play chess, when it started writing, when it created visual art, I started to experiment with what it could do. In that space, I found very similar problems with the image creating ones. Styles converge into formulas, community seemingly cares only about making joke, meta or obvious content (pictures or girls, cats, and AI itself), it's somewhat easy to get beautiful things, hard to get meaningful things, impossible to get what you want. What infuriates me the most is not the cosmic belligerent attitude of artists (poor souls are trying desperately to preserve their livelihood with a crusade, or maybe because they see as something that pertains to the magical realm of human agency, even when every single one of their inputs pass in some way or another through transformative process linked to a machine) but the indifference of people interested in art. We have these "things", that very well could be aliens, in our hands. A bunch of cables and metal that is trying to understand the human mind through creating and listening to music. And we do nothing with it.
So I decided to do something with it (I always fail for the same trap).
Long story short, I sometimes make AI music now.
But do I really make it? I don't know. I input a bunch of stuff in a textbox and an audio file comes out. It surely doesn't feel like making music, playing music, or composing music. Some of the lyrics for the song are mine, others are from old poems and others are unapologetically stolen from songs I like (or what I call them, homages). But then, if the machine makes the sound, what am I "doing"? Easy, I am choosing. Every song in the world is, deep down, a combination and choices: both big and small. In this case, I am bypassing most of the small ones. The process is somewhat comparable (and equally bizarre at the beginning) of mentioning an idea for a song to a friend that is fiercely intelligent but don't quite understand social cues and has a loose grip on reality, only for the guy to send you an audio three days after with a fully (over)produced single that he has made following an amphetamine binge. And now he will be sleeping for a week so you can't make any changes ever. And the result is sometimes eerily beautiful, even if only he should just tone down a bit the autotune. But I guess a big artist giving the lyrics or a post-it with an idea for an album to her production company, and that outputting a fully fledged world tour is not that far off what happens inside my computer case.
But this is how it's done. How it feels is different. Because I do that stuff, and could be good or could be bad, but it feels somewhat mine. Like I willed something into existence. Something that was already there somehow, but needed to be teared from the collective musical unconscious into a form. I selected my words, I selected my styles, I listened to the results, and from all the songs, I have chosen one.
Ah, choice.
It feels like making a playlist. You know me, I make playlists. I decide a theme or a narrative, I mix some well known songs (well known to me, at least) with some other songs, with some obscure shit I found scraping spotify pages with less than a thousand monthly listeners. When you find one of those songs, it also feels like you are rescuing them from nothing, from oblivion; and putting it in a place to be seen, in a prominent place between Queen and some recent superstar, feels like a deliberate and transcendental choice. The result, even when I don't look for it, doesn't look like a list of songs (even when they are of a particular style), at least not to me. They always feel like something more, that they sort of converge into sense by the strings of some shadow puppeteer. And no wonder. That's me. That's what those songs have in common. Me. Not the instruments they use, not what they talk about. They talk to my individual experience as a human on earth, and if I make a good job out of it, I can hope that I expressed such experience in a way that, abstracted enough, is capable to make other people relate to it and feel that "it" too.
In a sense, by how AI works, those songs are "already there". Just waiting to be pop into existence (oh my god computers have made me into a transcendentalist). So, choosing them is akin to creating them.
Let's zoom out a bit.
Have you ever begin to known someone are got stuck in the "pass me some music or film" phase? I did. Surprisingly, to pick something can be unbelievably hard. Why? The song you send them is not only a song you like. I mean, it is, but it's much more. In that particular conjuncture of time and space, that song is you. Even if you don't try to send some cryptic message about the relation itself in the lyrics or song title (I am looking at you) the choice is always very significant. Through our choices (specially when it comes to art) we identify us, we individuate us. The cumulative of our choices contain us. Suddenly, every seemingly "accessory" or technical part of a song is of uttermost importance; it's rhythm, cadence, mood, feel, lyrics, riffs.
"Don't overthink it! Just pass me one, whatever, you like."
But we can't.
It's the same with clothing, when we decide today to just wear whatever. That "whatever" contains an endless list of hidden constraints and conditionals. It's not really whatever, it's something that communicates that "whatever" in a very specific form. We enter the terrain of non-choice once again.
The same happens with photography. Sometimes you are "making" something, orchestrating it to output a product. But other times, specially the kind of photos I take (candid, for lack of a better word) what I am actually doing, more than "photography", is "to photograph" stuff. I am manufacturing an experience, when not recreating it. I am taking real life or reality or whatever and extracting from it a single frame that I think it's relevant, significant of the whole, that symbolically insists upon itself, and putting it in a pedestal for everybody else to see. In that process, I reveal myself. Not by showing myself (most instagrams have that backwards) but by the seemingly mundane choice of choosing what to pay attention to, what to see, what to listen, what to do. It baffles me that the barrier of entry to "do stuff" is near zero (well, that's a lie, you still have to pay time) and still we primarily communicate our identity through consumption instead of by creating. So, I input things in a computer, filter and choose from the results, put videos that I find fitting for some reason with a little bit of edit and upload then to youtube to create something that feels like mine and that existed but couldn't be accessible for humans before I clicked the button "create".
Sue me.