How do you kill something that can't possibly be alive?

That was the tagline for the 1983 movie "Christine," based on the Stephen King novel of the same name.

What relevance could this tagline possibly have for any situation that ISN'T about a sentient car that murders people? Oh, right; we're living in a world with AI where I'm still scrubbing my own toilet, but entire species of animals are going to die so that a robot can tell me that there are three E's in the word "seventeen." KILL IT NOW!!!

A friend recently sent me this article by Terrence O'Brien about a folk singer named Murphy Campbell. Campbell discovered that someone had made AI covers of her music and uploaded them onto Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube. These sites allowed these fake tracks to be uploaded and distributed without any checks or verifications from Campbell, the alleged artist. The plot thickened when the uploader then used the AI tracks to claim copyright infringement from the ACTUAL Murphy Campbell. There is also a Rolling Stone article about Campbell and other musicians who have been dealing with the same issue.

One of the many problems here is that when a human creator discovers something like this, it's incredibly frustrating and time consuming to deal with, because the entire process is automated. I managed the social media accounts for the music department at the university I used to teach at, and our department always promoted the creative work of our faculty. During the COVID-19 pandemic, one of our professors made a video and asked me to post it on Instagram. In the video, he was playing a song that he had written and previously recorded and released on an album. When I uploaded the video to the department account, it triggered a check that Instagram did for copyrighted content, and automatically took the video down. Yes, this WAS copyrighted content, but it was the copyright holder himself who had asked me to post it! THAT IS LEGAL. I tried to push back and get the video re-posted. I even got a letter from the copyright holder, granting our department permission to post the video, but the problem continued to be that there was never any human involvement from Instagram; it was robots all the way down, who didn't have the capability to deal with any type of nuance.

And this isn't how any of us should be spending our time. Murphy Campbell shouldn't be spending months trying to take down fake versions of her songs. My former colleague and I shouldn't be spending hours trying to legally post a video. We should be practicing, teaching, and creating. That's what people in creative fields do! Colson Whitehead wrote a really funny guest essay about AI in The New York Times a few weeks ago, and I can't stop thinking about it.

"Some people say, 'I just use it to brainstorm ideas.'

If you don’t know what to paint

or compose or write, you’re in the wrong job.

Art is the business of making up stuff —

go make up some stuff."

-Colson Whitehead

Anyway, could these AI idiots please turn their attention away from art, WHICH NO ONE WANTS, and make some progress on AI toilet cleaning so that we can go back to living our lives and speaking to humans and making real music together? If not, let's find out how to kill it like Arnie did with Christine the bloodthirsty car. Thanks.