Ethan Hein

Bob Crumb coming out of retirement just to say "RFK Jr. is right about vaccines and my ex-wife should've taken more advice from me" is such a fitting end to Boomer Americana and everything the "alt-comix" movement claimed to stand for

I live to serve

AI slop is such a powerful metaphor for boring human art! Peter, Paul and Mary are like an AI trained on Bob Dylan and the Weavers. Jan and Dean are like an AI trained on the Beach Boys. Eric Clapton is like an AI trained on Albert King. It's a fun game!

But you know what? If your music is as boring and derivative as Velvet Sundown, that is on you! Like, I'm sorry to misidentify that band as non-human, but not sorry to find the music slop-like.

In class a few weeks ago, I wanted to talk about Velvet Sundown, but misremembered their name as Velvet Sunset. There is a band by that name. I was playing one of their songs and saying, see, this is the kind of bland, featureless extrusion that you get from AI. But oops, they are human.

By the way, I do not mean to equate Chic's aesthetic with AI slop. I love Chic! Just to say that Chic came before DAWs.

This is true but I think that good personal art is much more similar to good commercial art than either of them are to AI art. George Michael is closer to Daniel Johnston than he is to Suno or Udio.

And so our job as educators is not just to push back on AI slop made by AI, it's also to push back on AI slop made by humans.

By the same token, AI slop existed long before AI did; it's all the boring, derivative, committee-driven, risk-averse copycat filler that has been clogging up the pop charts forever.

And then DAWs and MIDI made that production style vastly easier to attain, but the style already existed.

So, "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees and "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac are both built on top of drum loops. People heard those songs and thought, oh yeah, this is the sound, I want to sound like that! So you get people like Chic working really hard to sound machine-like on instruments.

For example: it would be easy to say that loop-based song structures and metronomic timekeeping are the result of drum machines, MIDI sequencers and DAWs. But it turns out that those aesthetic qualities were present in music well before the technology came into play.

It's a fallacy to say that technology drives music because many of the musical movements that we think of as being driven by technology actually predate the technology itself.

So, Michael Jackson is better than Bruno Mars because Michael is a sui generis weirdo, whereas Bruno Mars is a highly skilled Michael Jackson mimic.

AI slop is a useful aesthetic category because now we can point to actually good pop songs and say, these are the things that are not LLM-like, these are the aspects that you can't interpolate from a giant database of already existing pop songs, these are the specific choices and personal touches.

There's nothing inherently wrong with top 40 pop music, but if the humans making decisions are behaving too much like an LLM, that's how you end up with Shawn Mendes or Dua Lipa or whoever you currently find most annoying while you're waiting in line at Walgreens.

The problem with, say, a bad top 40 pop song is that it has been through too many hands, there's no longer a point of view there, it's no longer communicating, the choices are driven too much by consensus and not enough by a person expressing emotions to another person.

This is a convincing argument for why generative AI sucks but I also think is a useful argument for why bad art also sucks, because of its resemblance to AI slop.

Ted's point is that since the AI isn't communicating and it's not making choices, it can't make art, even if it's output superficially resembles art. He makes an analogy to the eyespots on a butterfly's wings. They look like predator eyes but fundamentally are not.

"... the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new."

"... What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable..."

Anyway, I'm thinking about this paragraph: "Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience...

(First of all, if you haven't read Ted's short story collections, do not deprive yourself another minute. They are haunting.)

Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence.

One of my back burner writing projects is a book chapter about generative AI in music education and why I think it's a Bad Thing. I'm rereading Ted Chiang's New Yorker essay about why AI isn't going to make art, which I completely agree with. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

I do not recommend watching Game of Thrones while also reading Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books to your kids because the comparison does not reflect well on GoT. Even though Ursula is ostensibly writing YA, her stuff is vastly more mature

Zohran should create little schools everyone has to go to that teach you to still talk with a 1987 nyc dirtbag accent the way the Irish do with Gaelic

Most surprising fact about this song is that Otis Redding wrote the music and Steve Cropper wrote most of the lyrics rather than the other way around

Borough of Manhattan Community College is looking for adjuncts in the music department bmccprodstroac.blob.core.windows.net/uploads/2025...

Portrait of Portrait of Tracy, by Ethan Hein from the album Jazz Remixes

Happy Bandcamp Friday, you might enjoy this new remix I made of "Portrait of Tracy" ethanhein.bandcamp.com/track/portra...

a screenshot of my inbox showing 16 bandcamp emails, and those are just the ones that fit onto one screen

you there, boy! what day is this?