The year is 2026. Food comes in pill form and is transformed into 5-star meals with just a drop of water. Cars are flying around the busy cities, using a newly created fuel that's safer and cheaper for the earth and its people. Most diseases have a cure now, and humans on earth are living longer and healthier lives because of it. Artificial Intelligence has made our lives better as it does all the jobs humans don't want to do, and allows humans to focus on creating art. Haha, just kidding, AI is actually creating all the art now, and humans are just trying to create as much AI art as possible to make money from people who can't tell it's not made by a person. Also, all the other stuff hasn't happened yet, and everything is just way more expensive now.
I poke fun at the year 2026 because back in the 80s and 90s, we all imagined a more Star Trek-like utopia coming in the future, and it's not even close to that. But really, I wanted to talk about all the AI art that's been dominating social media these days and how weird it's making life right now. It's really funny how AI is being used these days to create so much art, when we always imagined it would be used to do all the mundane tasks we hate so that we could have more time to create art ourselves. Instead, people are just spamming prompts into every AI generator to get works of art without actually doing anything. Now, I don't want to completely shit on AI art as a whole, as I'm sure there are good uses for it in art, music, movies, and writing. Maybe as a way to iron out some minor details or add some little details in the background, if you have a small budget for a movie, perhaps? For smaller studios or artist it could be a tool, but for billion-dollar corporations, it's not necessary at all. I mean, we recently saw Coca-Cola using AI for their Christmas ads here, and that's the kind of thing you don't want to see. Coca-Cola 100% has the money to pay artists to actually animate a commercial, so they are just doing it to save money and screw over actual talented workers. That's the kind of use of AI I don't want to see.
The one thing I never thought we would see, though, is AI making music that not only gets lots of listens, but gets so many listens it goes viral and even charts on Billboard. "We Are Charlie Kirk" was created by the totally real band called "Spalexma." AI couldn't even come up with a good fake band name. What the hell is a Spalexma? Anyway, they are known for such awesome songs as:
"With Jesus Love America Great Again"
"Stop, in the Name of God"
and of course, "We Carry The Flame - Powerful Female Mix."
Gotta love a good female mix, that's also powerful. Okay, so clearly this is an AI Christian worship band. Well, not just any Christian worship, but Christian Nationalist American worship. You know, the worst kind of worship. The band has also managed to release about 20+ albums in less than two years, working those AI generators pretty hard. "They" didn't hit it big until they released a track exploiting the murder of Charlie Kirk with the song "We Are Charlie Kirk." The song was probably made just a day after Kirk's murder, but wasn't officially released until 6 days after. It went viral pretty quickly as it was posted across all social media platforms, especially TikTok, which is known for helping songs go viral quickly. It's so obviously AI because, of course, a song like this couldn't be made so quickly after an event occurs. I would imagine a lot of its listens came from people poking fun at it for its exploitation, as well as it sounding like it's meant to be a joke song, when it's actually being 100% serious. It's so weird seeing AI music being used to worship God or honor someone, because obviously, the AI doesn't personally worship a God or know anything about Charlie Kirk outside of the information it's fed on the internet. The song itself (We are Charlie Kirk) isn't even good, especially the vocals that sound so off-putting, just one of the things AI can't really get right at this point.
That was the first big viral AI hit so far, but there have been lots of artists uncovered on Spotify that are just posting music created by AI generators. Another band called Velvet Sundown admitted that all their music was AI, but this was after a couple of their songs had already gained over a million listens. There are plenty of other AI bands out there on Spotify that have some songs that have reached over a million streams, it's getting pretty crazy. As if streaming didn't make it harder to get discovered as an artist already, now you have to compete with a bunch of AI slop being uploaded to Spotify in mass. I mean, at the end of the day, I think people are going to always want to hear music from actual people and not AI-generated artists. It just won't be the same coming from a computer, and at the moment, all AI music has this eerie quality to it that just makes it hard for most people to connect with. I'm kind of hoping it always stays that way, because I can't imagine how annoying it would be to have AI music that actually sounds completely human-made.
I don't know where this AI slop craze is going to go at this point. I figured it would be tired by now, but it looks like it's still going strong. AI is being abused in a lot of creepy ways, especially on Twitter, with people using GROK to create some pretty disturbing things. That, along with people trying to pass off AI art as their own, leads to a lot of frustration from real artists and people who are being used in AI pictures without their permission or having their art stolen. The soulless music of AI is not as serious as that other stuff, but it's still annoying, and I feel like there should at least be some kind of disclaimer forced on all AI art to let everyone know it wasn't made by an actual artist. Also, maybe stop letting companies that are worth billions cut out actual artists they can totally afford in exchange for that ugly AI art.
Wait. What if this whole post was written by AI? NOOOOOOOO
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