Observing Versus Creating

 

Using AI to generate art or music involves shifting your role as a creator and a viewer/observer/listener. Simply generating content is mostly an observer role. Creator roles are much slower and involve experimentation, which is much different than generating take after take and finding the ones that work as art.

The other day I generated some music based on a diary entry from November 2004 about American culture being all about the rodeo, as well as American culture being about jazz. Both are equally important to American life. The one that was generated with AI, and liked very much, is not something that I would typically do if I were working as a creator. But I composed another version, just with an acoustic guitar, and resulted in something that I liked as well. The funky version was music that I created as a listener (machine in the loop), which is 180 degrees from music I created as a creator (human in the loop). Of course, anything we make is done in the creator role, but one is more of an assembly-line/manufacturing  process (machine in the loop), as opposed to artist/studio work (human in the loop).