by scarecrowbob | 2025-08-09 16:51:51+00:00
The best we can do with the dead-eyed psychos who are cool with these kinds of projects is to use the situation to reflect and struggle about why these kinds of generative projects are heinous.

Because the folks that stand 10-toes-down thinking they are solving some neat problem simply don't have the context to understand their idiocy.

They ain't gonna get it. You're not going to get them to understand because they don't believe the result of artistic work is to change the artist as much as it is to produce the art.

There is an iterative process in which artists struggle to make something which, in turn, changes the artists in ways that, in turn, changes what artists want to make, which then, in turn, changes what they make.

I'm not an ML person, but as I understand them this feedback loop is precisely -not- what an LLM can do- it's not gathering info about how it has failed, which is largely what good artists are doing.

Still, the discussion been helpful for me, as as I have discovered why I find the idea that it's somehow useful to randomly generate music to be so gross:

that "understanding" of music fundamentally mischaracterizes a complex process.

What I find so odious is that these kinds of projects are saying: "you are this- this is what you're doing".

And while that misunderstanding not true (and thus I agree that folks should have their dumb toys) I also understand why almost anyone who has ever worked on art finds that reductive statement about their praxis to be offensive and is thus correct to be offended when folks casually express it.

I made my peace with commodification of art and music a long time ago- I will charge for my dance band's performance tonight simply because I want the gas money and it selects for folks who are willing to give a little to get a little.

It's not commodification of my music, insofar as there's no point at which there is a Real "I can trade x minutes of music for N feet of cotton string", but it's close enough that I understand why the hardcore and psychotic capitalists would think they are the same thing.

In a certain sense this is why it's probably wise to push back against the LLM folks just like it's good to push back against a totalizing capitalism:

- the capitalists reduce everything to the commodity form, yet there is always an excess they can't write into their ledger

- the LLM folks reduce art to outputs, yet there is always the context which frames the work which they can never bring back into that work.

So I'm fine with "commodification" of music- one of the deep contradictions of the culture here is that at the same time there is no ethical consumption under capitalism there is also always an excess that doesn't get soaked up into the money form.

However, what I still haven't sorted through is the idea that folks think music is somehow just "making noise in some kind of ordered manner", and thus that if they can find the statistically likely ways that noise is ordered then they are doing what I am doing when I make music.

I find that idea highly objectionable because it reduces a process that's taken all of my life up to any given point to become comfortable with, a process that I deeply grapple with daily, and reduces it to its output.

For instance, I have been playing real book jazz tunes on clarinet with a couple of the jazz majors at a bar in my town for the last 5 or 6 Friday nights.

These kids are great- they have chops and ears and curiosity. What I also like is that they don't have a lot of baggage about their professionalism, so they don't mind if I sit in on clarinet with my not-pro chops.

That's a fun situation; my 45-year-old-self gets to hang out with a bunch of kids in their 20s and learn a bunch of tunes ("All Blues" or "Four") that never got to learn because I was playing bass in punk rock bands at their age.

And what is better, last night the bass player couldn't make it so I called a buddy of mine who has been playing guitar in big bands since the mid 1960s to sit in with these kids. We all had an excellent time- I swapped onto piano for a while and he had to play bass for a while, the 21 year old guitar player got to pick with another player almost four times his age in a very equal setting.

That situation is radically complex, in that it contains so many levels of interaction, generationally, musically, contextually, and so on, that it becomes impossible to reduce it to a single axis. It's likely impossible to fully trace out why it was so satisfying to all the folks (audience and musicians) involved.

However, the singularly least satisfying way of understanding the situation there would have been to record it and say "this is what it was", and even more insane would be to say "this LLM generated thing which sounds similar is the same thing".

My point here isn't to shit on folks who are so disconnected from the reality of making music as to think that there is a need for -more- of it (randomly generated by machine): those folks are already living a hard enough existence. And there is always already so much music in the world that a use case for generating more of it randomly is dumb.

Fuck those folks for their interpolation of my activities, but I mostly just feel sorry that they are so disconnected from something I find so helpful.

Rather, my point is that the process of trying figure out what to say and how to say it changes people, and the LLM generation skips all that work.

I like a forklift as much as anybody, but thinking that dock workers are doing the same kind of thing as people in a weight lifting gym and therefore automating the weight machines is its own kind of insanity.

And, further, my point is that it took writing all that out in essay form and revising it to really understand how deeply that feeling of disgust at LLM-generated music really runs in me.