Well, I'm Not AI (As A Strategy): WInAaaS!

Scott Bradlee, a YouTube musical celebrity of sorts, best known for Postmodern Jukebox, not to mention his guest-appearance on Just Press Record, doesn’t fear Artificial Intelligence. Not as a content creator, not as a composer/arranger, not as a creative.

As he puts it, in “The Contentapocalypse is Coming: One musician’s thoughts on generative AI, the record industry, and the future of art” (and you will want to read the full essay on his Musings From The Middle Substack, but here’s a taste I shared elsewhere, with my emphasis added):

In the event that us humans aren’t able to completely oversaturate the internet on our own, generative AI will ensure that the job gets done. I think it is entirely possible that in our not-so-distant future, we will have no idea whether the material that populates our feeds are created by man or machine. The two will be one and the same, producing the same output: an endless soulless stream of digital soma, designed to delight our senses and capture our attention. Peak Content will have arrived. 

What happens then?

I think we are heading towards a “Contentapocalypse” — something of the end of the process of mass media proliferation that began in the Middle Ages with Gutenberg’s printing press. The Contentapocalypse is when we collectively take back our attention spans, and rethink our relationship with media. I think that generative AI gets us to this tipping point sooner than we think.

Call it a Contentapocalypse. Call it a ravishing rapture for the artistic souls who remain. Hell, split the difference and just call it the Eve of Distinction Destruction (which feels pretty accurate).

Bottom line, there’s already too much crap. AI making crap too is even more overwhelming. Take it from those of us making a lot of crap that we don’t think is crap but feel inspired to create even when only a select few “get us” and most other people probably do think we’re just making crap.

It’s hard enough already, is my point. But, to accept art itself is getting swept up and drowned out in a cacophony of artificial creationism and there’s nothing we can do about it, that’s defeatist. Maybe unsurprisingly, like Bradlee, I see a silver-lining too. One with the beginnings of a soulful, story-bound soma, if you will.

As a 90’s teen, my friends and I regularly attempted to reject genre by trying to claim a novel assortment of subgenres as our own. For a minute, it even (almost) worked. And it worked for all the reasons alternative worked until alternative got subsumed by mainstream in and around the same period.

We drew our inspiration from what now probably looks like unsurprising places. Think old Red Hot Chili Peppers, or Fishbone, and totally would have stolen from modern era Postmodern Jukebox if now was then. These were all alt-bands that made you ask, “What exactly are they,” and then attempt to answer with, “Well, they’re kinda sorta all of these things over here, but then mashed together over there, which is pretty cool I guess, right?” You couldn’t explain them without having a conversation about them.

Trust me when I say it—it’s hard to get people to come see your funk jazz hip-hop punk band. You can jam all the adjectives in between a pair of parenthesis. You can put the confused amalgamation of your internal algorithms on a flier and pass it out on a suburban college campus. You can be so far out of the mainstream that nobody notices except the growing body of other people attempting to do the same thing you’re having moderate success at doing.

I hadn’t even really understood it until I read Scott’s piece. That feeling, when you realize your cool crap has been reduced to your meaningless crap, when you’re stuck in the same old sea of sameness, again, even though you know you’re different, and even though you put it in parenthesis to blow people’s mind with questions of how one might even dare to combine such genres. It forces you start to question your relationship with the media, the mediums, and the messaging itself.

We think it’s a human art vs. AI art problem, just like when my music friends and I thought it was an alternative vs. mainstream problem. The simple truth is, it’s a relationship with itself versus a relationship with yourself problem. 

Unique pararantheticals and exciting adjectorial combinations might help you scale your little idea up to a point, but being in an anti-scene itself, especially when the goal is to make it more, has an inevitably cresting wave of problems in its internal logic.

Back to teenage/twenty-something me and and my friends for a second, because the key is in what happens to us (re: you, but meaning re: me) next.

After you’ve realized your new labels are being reformatted in the same way by everyone else, you admit you have to change. Again. You have to (ahem, swallow the vomit first) “pivot.” You have to get out of the way of the thing that’s everywhere and reclaim your attention and self-awareness and identity.

The first thing you do, which the natural reaction to your relationship with whatever the itself in front of you is, you say, “This is not me, I am NOT that.” 

Call it differentiation. Call it positioning. Call it marketing, because telling the story of how you stand out from the mainstream itself is, as Rory Sutherland says, how we know that a flower is just a weed with a marketing budget. 

We are here now. AI is making art. Humans are still making art too, but we’re increasingly starting to yell about how our art is not AI art and we think we can prove it.

Enter, “Well, I’m Not AI (As A Strategy).” I’m calling it WInAaaS! for short. You pronounce it kind of like “winner” but in a 1920’s-era boardwalk novelty game announcer voice.

The WInAaaS mindset accomplishes one thing and fails at another. First, it establishes that “I’m not AI.” Differentiation achieved. But, it fails at establishing a definition of self with any depth away from the big, bad, Wolframmification of Peak Content itself.

To be truly alternative is to refuse to step into the mainstream, and to set up your shop on a stepping-stone of an island, admitting scale was never the goal in the first place. Doing something cool, doing something different, doing something to truly express yourself, is to say, “This is not me, I am me, and that’s it.”

We’re almost ready to take back our attention spans and rethink our relationship with the media, mainstream and otherwise. The pièce de résistance of the Contentapocalypse is to declare ourselves WInAaaS! But, the final step is to create things that don’t have to scale. The final step is to embrace ourselves, as ourselves, and “that’s it.”

This is the rapture. Step into a world, where there’s no one left. Build, create, make, protect, and teach around your self, in natural contrast to the rest of the world itself. Do it for you. Do it for your people. Don’t do it for everyone. Do it for at least for someone, so long as that someone is you, and it makes you happy.

I already see people doing this, I’m sure you do too. They’re old school opinion blogging, and zine making, and curious community building, and self-learning in service to others, and f***ing around to help people meet cool new people, and rejecting the obvious paths to forge their own, and post-modern (scream it now, with extra Fugazi energy) analyzing more interest into old stories in an effort to share their weirdness with fellow non-bots (humans, remember them?). I could go on, and on, and on. It fills my heart with genuine joy.

Yes, generative AI is here, and yes, like Scott Bradlee, I’m not scared, because I’m having too much fun.

Peak Content is here. The Contentapocalypse is nigh. WInAaaS, mount up.

Stop trying to define your self in defiance to itself. You are one of one and that’s a feature, not a bug. Lean all the way into it, I’ll start a sing along…

ps. you can use technology not just to go to the moon, but to have a friend take your picture standing next to a spacesuit, just so you can text another (musician) friend, who just so happened to have done engineering work on the spacesuit in the picture, captioned with your complaint about “how is this guy supposed to play guitar with these gloves?” This is how we fight Peak Content and the Contentapocalypse with its own weapons. Art Official, intelligence optional, friends required. Photo credit John R., laugh inspiration Don K.