AI’s Demands: Why We Are Already Conforming to Its Autonomous Needs
The Role of Art and Music in Resisting AI’s Control of our Society and our Future
The Role of Art and Music in Resisting AI’s Control of our Society and our Future
Socrates
[… ] We are, we move, we live inside the work of man![…] But do you not see that the same thing happens to us in another circumstance?
Phaedrus
What thing?
Socrates
Being inside a work of man as fishes are in the sea, being entirely immersed in it, living in it, and belonging to it?
Phaedrus
I cannot guess.
Socrates
Why, did you never experience this when present at some religious festival, or when taking part in some banquet, while the instruments filled the hall with sounds and phantoms?
Did it not seem to you that an intelligible and changing space was substituted for primitive space; or, rather, that time itself surrounded you on all sides? Did you not live in a mobile edifice, incessantly renewed and reconstructed within itself, and entirely dedicated to the transformations of a soul none other than the soul of extension itself?
Was there not a changing plenitude, analogous to a continuous flame, illumining and warming your whole being by an unceasing consumption of memories, of forebodings, regrets, and premonitions, and of an infinity of emotions having no clear cause? And did not those moments, and their ornaments, and those dances without dancers, and those statues, bodiless and featureless (and yet so delicately outlined), seem to surround you, slave as you were of the general presence of Music: And that inexhaustible production of enchantments, were you not enclosed along with it, nay forcibly locked up, like a Pythia in her chamber of vapors?
Phaedrus
Yes, certainly. And I even have observed that to be in that enclosure and in that universe created by sounds, wherever it be, was to be outside of oneself….
-Paul Valéry Eupolinios, or the Architect
A title such as this may come across as clickbaity, but I assure you that my intention is to provide a thoughtful and serious examination of what I believe to be a growing and problematic relationship between humanity and AI.
My last two pieces on Medium looked at AI generated music. The first one analyzed a song produced by Suno.ai revealing that once you lift the hood on the output from this particular music generation AI, what we find underneath is actually an incoherent agglomeration of styles, that lack the qualities of human generated music.
I Asked Generative AI Music Platform Suno to Write a Podcast Theme…Things Got Weird
AI, Music, and Coherence: What Are We Trying To Accomplish?medium.com
And then I wrote a rather long piece reflecting on the role of embodied cognition, and the vital importance of an artists’ process, how they got to that finalized piece of work. To summarize the 3,600 hundred words of that piece in one sentence — contextually, temporally bounded embodied experiences are a necessary process in the production of legible art.
Frankenstein, Pollock, and the Algorithmic Void: The Limits of AI-Generated Art
Embodiment, Context, and the Struggle for Meaning in Artistic Expressionmedium.com
What I want to do now is expand on this relationship between art — which I include to mean everything from music, poetry, painting, to scientific innovation — within the schema of temporality, embodiment, and rationality. Through this initial exploration, I hope to illustrate that AI-generated output is wholly decontextualized, de-temporalized, and disembodied data that requires significant intellectual, emotional, and physical labor from humans to make it legible and meaningful.
This emerging relationship, I contend, is imprisoning us. More and more of our most valuable resource, time, is spent standing in front of this firehose of AI-generated data, contemplating: ‘Is this any good? Does this make any sense?’ We are forced to grapple with decontextualized, disembodied information that lacks the necessary grounding in human experience requiring us to invest significant effort in decoding and making sense of it. The cost of this relationship are the very processes that enable the historical unfolding of our society — the processes we ascribe to agency, knowledge, social understanding, and ultimately, freedom.
The Unfolding Narrative of Human Experience
In contrast to this imprisoning relationship with AI-generated content, consider the simple question: What do you want to do today? Maybe go for a hike, maybe stay in bed and read, maybe walk to the part of the house where you work on refining your painting, or practice scales on a piano, or maybe you get in your car and drive to a gym to swim laps in a pool.
What you want to do today, in this very moment, is inextricably tied to a vast, overarching narrative that has been unfolding across multiple modalities throughout your entire life. Your desires, actions, and experiences are inscribed within an innumerable set of contextually-contingent and temporally-bounded historical events, stretching back to time immemorial. This system of individual and collective experiences, which shapes your unique subjective reality, is what lends a sense of rationality and coherence to our world. Everything we do is mediated through this intricate, socially constructed process.
But what about the irrational, isn’t the very existence of irrational actions, irrational art even, a contradiction of what I just said? I contend that the irrationality born out of the processes I just described, is an integral part of how society unfolds through time, that without these irrationalities, there is no time.
Music: Between Noise and Order
Music and noise. These two categories are not separate from each other and represent the boundary of the rational and irrational, where time and history unfold, and where the future is presaged.
Jacques Attali in his book ‘Noise: The Political Economy of Music’ posits that music is more than a mere reflection of society; it is a prophetic force that shapes and is shaped by social realities. For Attali, music’s capacity to oscillate between noise and order, between the rational and the irrational, gives music a unique power to anticipate, interpret, and transform the social order through inscribing noise into our social system that either becomes music, or is rejected.
Attali argues that music is inscribed in the space between noise and silence, revealing the underlying social conditions of its time. He suggests that every musical code is rooted in the ideologies and technologies of its era, and simultaneously reproduces and reinforces them.
Moreover, Attali asserts that music is a means by which society localizes and specifies power. It does so by marking and regimenting certain rare noises, normalizing them into socially sanctioned forms of audible music. Through this process of selection and normalization, music reflects and shapes the behaviors and norms that a society deems acceptable and at the same time through this process music is presaging what may come into our political formations in the near future due to this process.
The Evolution of Music’s Social Function
Attali breaks the historical development of music into four broad phases that he calls ‘codes.’ In this essay I will not be detailing all of them, but for reference they are: (1) Sacrificing, (2) Representation, (3) Repetition (our current mode) and (4) Composition.
Attali’s analysis of the “sacrificing” phase allows us to understand the pivotal role between noise, music, and social order. In this earliest phase, which Attali dates up until the 15th century, music was deeply embedded in communal rituals and festivities, serving as a tool for socializing and inscribing social relations.
Music’s primary function was to channel and sublimate the inherent violence and discord within a community, transforming it into a harmonious and socially cohesive force. This process of turning noise into music “creates political order because it is a minor form of sacrifice.” This notion of channeling violence and ritual sacrifice resonates with the work of Émile Durkheim, who argued that ritual practices play a crucial role in maintaining social cohesion. I also see resonances with the work of Georges Bataille who explored the significance of these concepts in his work The Accursed Share.
Attali argues that noise, which initially exists outside the social constitution, becomes legible and meaningful to the community through these processes which he calls — musical sublimation. By marking and regimenting certain ‘rare noises,’ normalizing them into socially sanctioned forms of audible music, society effectively localizes and specifies power.
With the early social signs of capitalism forming, a new code of music developed, in which silence was the primary means of engaging with music. The birth of ‘modern’ tonality and harmony presaged an age of instrumental rationality, focused on tensions and releases, teleologically aligned with resolving to the ‘home’ key.
Music was removed from the communal ritualized code and placed within the representational code, where it was made scarce by the professionalization of musicians. It became a commodity sold on sheet music and performed by ever-enlarging orchestras in concert halls, requiring the exchange of money to experience in silence. This marks the “emergence of a battle for the purchase and sale of power, a political economy,” Attali argues.
As capital accumulation and circulation tied to the commodified form developed, technological innovations led to the phonograph, allowing musical performance to be pulled out of its temporal and localized frame and distributed to the newly emerging class born out of these very systems. This new code of repetition persists today, scaled to an absurd degree through digital music services and playing the background role for short-form videos on TikTok and Instagram. No longer rooted in community or representation, music has been rendered secondary, reduced to providing an undifferentiated backdrop to an endless stream of scrollable commodifiable anxiety-induced points of capital formation, briefly riding the capital circulation carousel before being pulverized under the endless stream of disposable hollow digital containers.
The Age of Repetition and AI-Generated Music
Attali argues that the modern musician has become increasingly tied to the institutions of power, serving as a symbol of a shared art and science among the great monologuing organizations of globalization. In the contemporary context of 2024, musicians are often less abstract and independent than they may appear, instead functioning as identities that reflect and embody the desires and aesthetics of an already existing pastiche of cultures.
Operating within our global network of digital production and distribution, modern musicians must necessarily inform their work according to the demands of algorithmic tools and the platforms that organize their logics. As a result, musicians have become the ‘learned minstrels’ of the multinational apparatus, producing and reproducing a symbolism of power that circulates at speeds unimaginable when Attali was writing in 1977.
Attali’s notion of ‘theoretical music,’ which he defines as music that is abstracted from its traditional social and cultural roles, liquidates meaning and marks the end of music’s role as a creator and prophesier of new social bonds. This framing is particularly resonant in the age of AI-generated music and algorithmic curation. The abstract, decontextualized nature of almost all contemporary music, designed and optimized for the demands of streaming platforms and recommendation algorithms, illustrates that we are already in an age in which the political and social functioning of music has been subverted to accommodate the technology of the network of repetition. The rise of AI-generated music, which takes this abstraction and decontextualization to its logical extreme, represents the culmination of this two-decade trend, ultimately supplanting traditional forms of pop music and further eroding music’s capacity to create and foreshadow new social bonds.
In this algorithmic and AI-driven context, centered in the modern age of hyper-capital circulation, music becomes a mere pretext for the existence of musicians, who function as ‘theorists’ and ‘ideologues’ of the digital music industry, much like how the economy serves as an excuse for the power of the technocrats in Attila’s original analysis. The rise of AI-generated music, as an extension of the logics of abstraction, decontextualization, and the liquidation of meaning, further highlights the diminishing role for music’s social significance and subordinates it to the logic of power, repetition, and capital accumulation.
The Necessity of the Other
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in his book ‘The Agony of Eros,’ explores the concept of the Other — the negative Other — and its crucial role in the formation of desire, fantasy, and rationality. According to Han, it is through engagement with this opposing subject that we sublimate and cultivate new ideas. The Other represents a space of mystery and ambiguity, a ‘threshold experience’ that nourishes our imagination and fuels our desire for the unknown. This is where creativity and the novel reside. I argue this is where the very essence of humanity resides.
The negativity of thresholds, in this context, refers to the absence of clear definitions or boundaries within these liminal spaces we move through. It is precisely this lack of clarity that allows for the emergence of the Other and the generation of desire and fantasy. Thresholds, therefore, represent transitions phases between different states or experiences, offering a space for transformation, the exploration of the unknown, and the transforming of noise into music.
As music foreshadowed in the early and mid-20th century through the code of repetition, the Internet has assumed and supercharged this logic. Our lives are increasingly spent scrolling through and consuming information-rich images that obliterate our imaginations and serve only to heighten expectations, leading to an escalating sense of disappointment and anxiety.
‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds…’ wrote Kafka, and we now live in a world, constructed by images, text, and sounds, constructed to drive ambiguity and Otherness, from our ontology. AI-generated art is pure information; pure rationalized datums of decontextualized content that leaves no space for the mystery and ambiguity necessary for desire, fantasy, and human generated rationality to thrive.
The Perils of Hypervisibility
In this world of hypervisibility and transparency, where AI-generated content super-saturates our senses, there can be no Other. The algorithmic codes of AI generated output, lacking the ineffable unquantifiable spaces of human nature — the “negativity of thresholds,” fails to generate the spaces in which the Other can emerge because these spaces are purely flat. As a result, we find ourselves trapped in an endless cycle of anxiety induced consumption, forever seeking some semblance of authentic novelty that can quench the lack of satisfaction we have in a homogenized culture devoid of creativity or actual desire.
This collective agony we all experience, that pervasive sense that something is just not quite right, that something profound is amiss, is the threshold moment that AI-generated content is pushing away. This firehose AI generated information, cleverly optimized to bind with our quivering desires, leave no space for the necessary slow, reflective, and laborious process of engaging with the Other. Genuine human connection can not survive in this brutal ontology — an endless stream of decontextualized, emotionally flattened data points that keep us perpetually scrolling, consuming, and ultimately, isolated.
If music, as Attali argues in his book Noise, truly is the harbinger of what is to come, then AI generated music — along with the current mode of using AI tools to disassemble music into atomized, unrelational parts to be reassembled into culturally incoherent amalgamations for the sole purpose to hitch a ride on the capital circulation carousel — then we are no longer making choices, but instead conforming to the demands of AI machines.
The Transparent Artist: Music in the Age of AI Disassembly
Why generative AI and modular musical stems threaten the very essence of artistic expression.medium.com
Composing Our Way to Freedom
Attali concludes his book with an optimistic vision, introducing the 4th code of music: Composition. He argues that by creating a new musical code, we can forge a novel form of communication and connection with one another. In Attali’s words, ‘There is no communication possible between men any longer, now that the codes have been destroyed […] We are all condemned to silence — unless we create our own relation with the world and try to tie other people into the meaning we thus create. That is what composing is.’
He goes on to what I consider the most import point of his argument:
‘Doing solely for the sake of doing, without trying artificially to recreate the old codes in order to reinsert communication into them.’ -Attali
But that is exactly what AI-generated music does. It is designed to remove the boundaries necessary for doing — the space for the mysterious, the ineffable, the unquantifiable, the ambiguity of it all — and instead declares: I can satisfy all of our desires right now, there is no need to collaborate with an ‘Other.’ I am the dissolver of boundaries and ambiguity.
Attali attributes the code of composition to freedom, in the pure pleasure of being:
But it reaches far beyond that; it relates to the emergence of the free act, self-transcendence, pleasure in being instead of having. — Attali
Attali’s vision of freedom, grounded in the joy of creation and genuine human connection, will remain forever out of reach if all our labor is spent in profound isolation, trapped before our flat, purely positive screens, frantically trying to inscribe some sense of embodied rationality to the relentless deluge of irrational AI-generated data. History exists in the Other, and our humanity resides in the ambiguity of that unfolding history.