During a recent video on my YouTube channel, I made a flippant comment regarding an up-and-coming release by That Band that has The Featured Artist quite prominently displayed. Your personal taste in art is obviously aesthetically subjective, but I found the image quite “ugh”. I joked about counting the tuning pegs as the image looking like something AI might have shat out. This was a flippant joke because I make at jokes at everyone’s expense (even my own – I mock everyone and everything, so don’t get yer boxer’s in a bunch about it, eh) and I thought little of it. You do the do and then move on such is my want.
Over on FaceBook, sometimes I get suggested posts from people I do not follow, like The Featured Artist and his second-in-command. I suppose I could just block them and this would end the constant badgering from the algorithm to be interested in this gibberish, but then I wouldn’t be here writing about the subsequent furore thrown up by this artwork.
Apparently, the cover was created by the son of the second-in-command. Who said nepotism is dead? But hey, I got my daughter to create the sleeve art for “Post Cultural Blues” and you wouldn’t even think it was digitally created. That’s because she followed the brief and is very aware of the AI slop revolution and rails against it actively. I love her. She is great (and so is my son, can’t leave him out). But indeed, the style of this album cover has caused a little bit of an uproar. The drones believe it is the greatest album sleeve of all the time, while those with a questioning mind wonder if AI might have been used somewhere along the line in order to create the composition. They are focusing on the tuning pegs of the guitar (which caught my eye) and the position of the hands.
If you’ve ever picked up a pencil and tried to draw hands, you’d realise that they are the hardest thing to master and this is why the great Leonardo Da Vinci practised over and over and over again to perfect the anatomical structures of the human hand. You should check out his notebooks, they are quite remarkable. But anyhoo, the animals are bleating and it poses an interesting conundrum which cycles back to a point I made in a video a while back.
Is it time for artists (of any sort) to actively declare that their work is indeed Human Verified. Perhaps if some AI is used, then they could be a five-star grading system to ascertain how much of the work was aided with AI. For example, my most recent set of recordings featured some songs that I’d used AI. In this instance, I’d fed some of my own music into the AI and asked it to create a cover version of it. I then took those cover versions (of my own music) and then deconstructed them, removing any AI content and recreated all those bits with my own music parts. In fact, I’m not sure how you’d even characterise that? Maybe that would score a 1-star on my proposed grading system? I don’t know.
The point is that we are now in an age where art will now be questioned for his veracity to be 100% human. Personally, I think this is great and I have no problem with being transparent with anything I put out. I happily explain what I do because I hope it can be inspirational for the next person who might want to waste their lives being creative. (Stupid creative people being creative for no other reason than, well, that’s what we do, innit guvnor).
So while I feel a little sorry for the son of the second-in-command copping a healthy dose of flak for his album sleeve, there needs to be total transparency now in the creative industries, otherwise you could find yourself losing the goodwill of your potential customer base. Also, if you are a digital artist, you will now find the finger pointed directly at you because AI uses the same tools and stylistic trappings that come with that platform. You might need to find a way of using digital art in a more creative fashion (ie. not in an obvious computerised style with all those clean lines) or even revert to more traditional artistic methods, paint and a brush perhaps, that would create a more obvious delineation between the human and AI creative arts.