2025-11-03
It can be a lot.
From the hyperventilation over the generative artificial intelligence-manufactured band The Velvet Sundown, to the shocking paydays coming for constructs like Xania Monet and "actor" Tilly Norwood, if you are once again feeling the cold creep of a shadow of Cyberdyne Systems above the entertainment landscape, you are not alone. It can be disheartening to those who value tangible emotional connection over Stepmaster vibes to see industry power players willing to shovel millions to these digital bodysnatchers invading from the Uncanny Valley.
And let's be real. For a time, these will have the brightest spotlight and there are a few reasons for it.
First and foremost is the whole freak show curiosity angle. The numbers for the Americana-70s-ish goulash known as The Velvet Sundown - complete with smeary, vaguely realistic images of dudes looking straight from the extras tent on Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous - are a tad misleading. That morbid curiosity from the public, wanting to know if this really sounds real or not, helped goose the percentages of listeners who likely would never have found the "band" conventionally, and also likely have no interest in the Laurel Canyon pastiche anyway. It was more like a true-crime gamification, and once people made their investigative conclusions, there wasn't all that much left to keep around.
Second, these stories about how A.I. is coming for your art are being broadcast by news outlets that are themselves feeling the encroachment of A.I., either indirectly by all the tech companies advertising on their platforms, or directly as those same tech-bros have financial interests in the platforms themselves. The Ellison family of Oracle own Paramount and are looking to add Warner Bros. to their portfolio. Amazon's Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post. It's not as much about the slow drip of information to get you either comfortable with or panicked about artificial intelligence. It's knowing that this is the sexy topic of our times, the one that will capture ears and eyeballs, the one that will drive clicks and ad revenue., a tricky version of self-dealing. It is in their best interest financially to keep you engaged in the subject one way or another.
Third, and this is important to come to grips with, is that some of this media will hit. Some will get past our filters and better judgment and we will actually like them. It's not unfeasible. But I honestly believe these will be outliers.
I do not deny that A.I. is here to stay, and that the era of flesh and blood superstars is probably on the way out. In the movies and television realms, we've already seen the diminished returns from our Pitts, Clooneys, or even Letos, as they no longer deliver "boffo box office cumes." Their high costs aren't justified to studio heads always needing that glorious return-on-investment. Studios are very likely to turn away from expensive special effects visionaries from Industrial Light and Magic or WETA to a handful of crafty prompt-writers because of costs. And our background music sources may soon be more Slop-ified because the music you fake yourself is cheaper than music made by artists. But that's not the end of the story.
The whole of human history, if not life itself on this planet, has relied on self expression. We had animal calls and bird songs. We had our own noises to create awareness of situations, through claps and whistles. We invented machines like instruments to approximate those beats, voices, and whistles; wrote our maps and stories on the walls so that others would know, not strictly for our own edification; and we passed our stories and songs down verbally for the same reason. Our present fascination with the all-singing, all-dancing T-1000 seems like doom while the A.I. bubble grows bigger, but humankind is compelled to create (sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse)
Big Band/swing music "died" but you can still find it, both old and new. Disco is dead, only if you aren't listening carefully to a lot of new pop music (and the same can be said of the synthpop of the 80s). Rock's been dying for decades, and so it goes, but there are still rock bands in so many subgenres, making music, connecting with audiences. Will they hit the top of the charts the way they once did? Unlikely. Remember, those charts are largely driven by those same tech-bros mentioned before. Therefore, they have that vested interest in you believing A.I. is the only way forward as they tell you about it, shove it down your throat, and then tell the world how you "allowed" and maybe even appreciated that shoving down. It fits their business strategy.
The music didn't die. The artists, even if they are no longer with us in the flesh, remain close to us anyway. And I deeply believe that as humans who demand and derive connection from other humans, we'll get tired in the majority of a faceless Matrix-generated illusion of musical closeness. It will, however, require the seekers to seek it out more. Rather than having your new favorite artist served up for you as if on a conveyor belt, you're going to have to go after it. It will also require the artists in our world to keep making it, to see the good and the value of continuing our "oral tradition" of creating and speaking forth. It may feel daunting, even pointless at times, but you know it's something you have to do and will do anyway. Don't deny yourself that.
We bother to create because we are innately compelled to. But in the end, we will find those who gain emotional capital from our compulsion. Long after the car crashes of the A.I. wunderkind have been swept aside by those just there to rubberneck, those with something to say will still be here to say it. Millennia seem to support that.
_________________
P.S. None of this article was created or polished by an A.I. source. My assertions - and any mistakes found therein - are my own. I thought it was important to make this clear.
From the hyperventilation over the generative artificial intelligence-manufactured band The Velvet Sundown, to the shocking paydays coming for constructs like Xania Monet and "actor" Tilly Norwood, if you are once again feeling the cold creep of a shadow of Cyberdyne Systems above the entertainment landscape, you are not alone. It can be disheartening to those who value tangible emotional connection over Stepmaster vibes to see industry power players willing to shovel millions to these digital bodysnatchers invading from the Uncanny Valley.
And let's be real. For a time, these will have the brightest spotlight and there are a few reasons for it.
First and foremost is the whole freak show curiosity angle. The numbers for the Americana-70s-ish goulash known as The Velvet Sundown - complete with smeary, vaguely realistic images of dudes looking straight from the extras tent on Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous - are a tad misleading. That morbid curiosity from the public, wanting to know if this really sounds real or not, helped goose the percentages of listeners who likely would never have found the "band" conventionally, and also likely have no interest in the Laurel Canyon pastiche anyway. It was more like a true-crime gamification, and once people made their investigative conclusions, there wasn't all that much left to keep around.
Second, these stories about how A.I. is coming for your art are being broadcast by news outlets that are themselves feeling the encroachment of A.I., either indirectly by all the tech companies advertising on their platforms, or directly as those same tech-bros have financial interests in the platforms themselves. The Ellison family of Oracle own Paramount and are looking to add Warner Bros. to their portfolio. Amazon's Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post. It's not as much about the slow drip of information to get you either comfortable with or panicked about artificial intelligence. It's knowing that this is the sexy topic of our times, the one that will capture ears and eyeballs, the one that will drive clicks and ad revenue., a tricky version of self-dealing. It is in their best interest financially to keep you engaged in the subject one way or another.
Third, and this is important to come to grips with, is that some of this media will hit. Some will get past our filters and better judgment and we will actually like them. It's not unfeasible. But I honestly believe these will be outliers.
I do not deny that A.I. is here to stay, and that the era of flesh and blood superstars is probably on the way out. In the movies and television realms, we've already seen the diminished returns from our Pitts, Clooneys, or even Letos, as they no longer deliver "boffo box office cumes." Their high costs aren't justified to studio heads always needing that glorious return-on-investment. Studios are very likely to turn away from expensive special effects visionaries from Industrial Light and Magic or WETA to a handful of crafty prompt-writers because of costs. And our background music sources may soon be more Slop-ified because the music you fake yourself is cheaper than music made by artists. But that's not the end of the story.
The whole of human history, if not life itself on this planet, has relied on self expression. We had animal calls and bird songs. We had our own noises to create awareness of situations, through claps and whistles. We invented machines like instruments to approximate those beats, voices, and whistles; wrote our maps and stories on the walls so that others would know, not strictly for our own edification; and we passed our stories and songs down verbally for the same reason. Our present fascination with the all-singing, all-dancing T-1000 seems like doom while the A.I. bubble grows bigger, but humankind is compelled to create (sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse)
Big Band/swing music "died" but you can still find it, both old and new. Disco is dead, only if you aren't listening carefully to a lot of new pop music (and the same can be said of the synthpop of the 80s). Rock's been dying for decades, and so it goes, but there are still rock bands in so many subgenres, making music, connecting with audiences. Will they hit the top of the charts the way they once did? Unlikely. Remember, those charts are largely driven by those same tech-bros mentioned before. Therefore, they have that vested interest in you believing A.I. is the only way forward as they tell you about it, shove it down your throat, and then tell the world how you "allowed" and maybe even appreciated that shoving down. It fits their business strategy.
The music didn't die. The artists, even if they are no longer with us in the flesh, remain close to us anyway. And I deeply believe that as humans who demand and derive connection from other humans, we'll get tired in the majority of a faceless Matrix-generated illusion of musical closeness. It will, however, require the seekers to seek it out more. Rather than having your new favorite artist served up for you as if on a conveyor belt, you're going to have to go after it. It will also require the artists in our world to keep making it, to see the good and the value of continuing our "oral tradition" of creating and speaking forth. It may feel daunting, even pointless at times, but you know it's something you have to do and will do anyway. Don't deny yourself that.
We bother to create because we are innately compelled to. But in the end, we will find those who gain emotional capital from our compulsion. Long after the car crashes of the A.I. wunderkind have been swept aside by those just there to rubberneck, those with something to say will still be here to say it. Millennia seem to support that.
_________________
P.S. None of this article was created or polished by an A.I. source. My assertions - and any mistakes found therein - are my own. I thought it was important to make this clear.