Feeling: Betrayal
violation of a person's trust or confidence, of a moral standard, etc.
My recent road trip featured a conversation that started like this: “I recently heard a really cool new song, let’s listen to it: Step by Step in Time by Benny Rivers”
So we listened to it, and all agreed that it was indeed pretty cool. I wondered how old Benny Rivers was, since the voice still seemed to have a lot of control which many singers lose as they age.
That’s where the problem started. A couple of searches seemed to agree that Benny Rivers was in fact entirely invented. The picture was AI generated, the music was AI generated, the lyrics that assured me “there’s nothing wrong with growing old” were written by an algorithm for which growing old means nothing.
Now I’ve read The Death of The Author. I’ve occasionally argued that if we create art that resonates with people, that makes their lives better, then why would it matter if that is generated directly by a creative human mind, or by an algorithm trained on centuries of our cultural millieu to mimic the output of a creative human mind?
I’ve even used Suno myself for fun, and on my own machine set up acestep 1.5 and created a metal version of Charge of the Light Brigade:
But still…
It feels wrong when you find yourself engaging with a work only to discover that the process that created it was dramatically different to what you thought.
I have never knowingly finished reading an email signed by a human but written by AI. It feels like being lied to, and who would stand for that?
In retrospect of course, there were hints. Metaphors that connected strangely. I’d already been struggling to work out what the symbolism of ’little sparks in a grand design’ meant. Usually if you get sparks on your grand design, you’re going to want to put them out quick.
But there was no question I’d been fooled, and this was really the first time that it has happened to me in such a clear way. Given that people seem to prefer AI generated art over human art, you can expect to see more of this. I expect that I’ll be feeling that same sense of dislocation and AI-betrayal many more times before I inevitably resign myself to it and stop assuming that the default is for art to be created by something that experiences the world in a similar way to me.