Does Where Music Or Art Is From Matter Anymore?

A reprint of my Forbes article and something that is admittedly bothering me...

This is a reprint of my most recent article on Forbes, which I hope you’ll also enjoy. Let me know what you think.

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Everything, including the code to power algorithms, came from someone at some point. Are we, as a society, forgetting that?

Within the rise of artificial intelligence and the age of what OpenAI founder Sam Altman refers to as the time when “humans go from being the smartest thing on planet earth to not the smartest thing on planet earth,” is a profound contradiction. On one side, there’s an acceptance of ceding this so-called superior intelligence to something else, code, algorithms, and supercomputers, because it is claimed to accelerate economic and social progress. On the other hand, it is our intellect and its historical social superiority that created the intelligence on which AI is trained in the first place. We’re using our smarts to develop something that replaces some of our skills, so we don’t all need to be as smart.

All of AI infrastructure, be it microchips that power servers and miners, or the prompts that create songs on Udio or Suno, began as an idea in someone’s mind, somewhere, at some time. Over time, through trials and errors, those ideas became chips, art, musical works, or sets of code, each built on top of each other to create something that Altman proclaims will become or has already become smarter than all of us. Yet, wherever this progression leads us, I find this ignorance of forgetfulness, how we got to where we are now, baffling. In an effort to create something smarter than we could ever be, we have, in effect, dumbed down our ability to recognise how we got here. We are forgetting the importance of origin. And it is leading to worrying consequences.

The case study that best articulates this is the relationship and politics between AI firms and those who make a living from their creative intellectual property and, therefore, wish to continue to do so. AI is embedded in everything, whether we know it or like it or not, and most content online has been scraped to train models. The time-saving capabilities are profound, from researching complex topics to designing presentations, music-making, and creating effective social media campaigns. But what the AI is trained on came from somewhere, or someone, at some point. And what is being produced is detached from that origin.

This is not normal

This flies in the face of how economic and social value is often derived. Take food as an example. In deciding what we eat, origin is marketed and sold as something of additional value, whether farm-raised, hand-reared, or grass-fed. It assures provenance and ensures those who grew the food are compensated. It is also a marketing tool. Knowing where your food comes from is a privilege worth paying for if one can, and tracking its journey, from field to fork, is a profitable business. There’s a premium attached to origin, which often means that knowing where your food comes from means that your food costs more. It’s not just food; this belief is everywhere. The concept of “Made in A Place” remains an effective and fought-over political tool. This is why there remains a political conversation focused on onshoring manufacturing. Being from somewhere still matters.

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

Now, there is far less importance attached to where an artist comes from, because an AI LLM can recreate their voice in any bedroom with a Broadband connection. With AI, origin is unprofitable. It is too human, too messy, and to be avoided. Where something is from doesn’t matter. All that matters is that it has been ingested and can be used and manipulated.

Where this leads, this decoupling of origin from human culture and creativity, is having adverse consequences. The origin of creativity, from brain to book, film, canvas, or ProTools, is less valued or seen as unique, because the same thing can be done anywhere, by anyone. Now, it does not matter where the coffee comes from or if it is fair trade, because we can all be satiated by mechanically produced caffeine, no matter where we are.

This could be seen as democratising, but this comes at a cost. In the pursuit of creating something smarter than us, we’re dumbing down the value of making without AI. Therefore, attributing a financial value to an origin, recognising that a person, in a place, is an originator and thus deserves to be recognised - financially or otherwise - is being downgraded as server capacity has been upgraded. This fuels a narrative claiming copyright is old-fashioned and restricts progress. What’s lost is not simply a forgetfulness, but a lack of understanding that the forgetfulness creates a system where the more this content is distributed, the less the original labour is valued. The more we hear, the less we realise where the first sounds were made.

It is seen as smarter, or more efficient, to pay more for a ChatGPT or MidJourney membership than a music or design subscription, because ChatGPT, or other LLMs, can create the music and design for us. And with every search, every new piece of work that began somewhere but now lives nowhere, we lose the value of origin and with it, a recognition that societally, we are all tied to where we’re from, a trait that should be understood and respected by everyone.

If we value origin so much in what we eat, why don’t we do the same with anything else we consume? AI advancement is welcome, but it should be tied, legally, to respecting origin and remunerating originators, rather than what’s happening now. Instead of attributing what LLMs are trained on and compensating those for their usage, we’re left with not just a mass theft of creativity, but also the theft of what it means to be from somewhere.