Hi, everyone. Athony Itano here, the internet's busiest music nerd, once again talking about the topic that just won't die, and that is artificial intelligence.

But hey, can you blame me? This is a pretty huge and persistent topic in the music industry right now. And honestly, as dismal as the present and future looks due to the proliferation of AI-generated music, how often this boring, uninspired garbage is being fed to people – a lot of the time without their knowledge through music streaming platforms and through social media platforms.

But we've actually seen the effective collectivization of people who actually want to see some effort and some soul being put into the art they're consuming and just standing against this crap when it's handed to them.

Now, this happened most recently toward the end of this week due to some promotional visuals that were released by none other than Alchemist, producer extraordinaire, who recently announced an upcoming collab project with none other than Erykah Badu, something that I and many other people were understandably looking forward to.

Just this past week, we got our first taste of music from the project. However, the attention that should have been going to that new song ended up getting sidelined into the unfortunate and disappointing visuals attached to the song.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Alchemist (@alanthechemist)

First, we got an inkling of this through this green with black line drawings on top of it little illustration which had some fishy vibes to it. There's something about the art style that feels like the residuals of when we had that run of terrible Studio Ghibli rip-off art, just toxifying the internet.

On top of that, I don't know why there's smoke coming out of the back of Erykah Badu's head. But I was like, Cool. Let me share it. I'm excited for the song. Could just be that the art's not mind-blowing. It's cute enough. It's fine.

But then the new song comes out and there's an animated series of visuals to go along with it, and it's very clearly some AI slop. You would think two artists of Erykah's and the Alchemist caliber would look at something like this and just be like, 'No, this looks terrible. This is actually a pretty poor representation of the music that we're making together.' The animation is choppy. Chopy as hell, in fact.

Far worse than the animation you used to see on Adult Swim shows back in the day when they were working on the most shoestring of budgets. The dimensions and perspective of some shots, like this one where Erykah Badu is doing some graffiti on a wall next to Alc are kind of confusing.

You also have Erykah Badu's character here singing into a disconnected microphone with these mangled music notes coming out that don't even look like music notes.

There are some spots where Alchemist's hair is depicted as blonde, other spots where it's seemingly dark. Bro just changes hair color when he wants to. There's not a lot of visual consistency to the characters in the animation here. Sometimes the hands are mangled, and there's other goofy stuff going on.

Look, if I was an artist and I paid an animator to make this to represent a song I was coming out with, I'd be like, "What the hell did you do? This is terrible. You need to go back to the drawing board, literally."

Love Erica holding a joint that is longer than her forearm while the Alchemist has Casper the Ghostly Aura around his entire body as he just walks down the street.

The fans picked up on this. They were very vocally disappointed about it on social media. And the Alchemist surprisingly responded by skewering his fans over and over, or at least trying to and failing miserably.

While I'm not one to automatically endorse an idea or a perspective or an opinion simply because a bunch of people on the internet are voicing it and dogpiling somebody who they disagree with, Alchemist was completely unable to actually deliver some coherent response or justification for the AI use case here. All he really brought were snide remarks and just piss poor perspectives on the topic.

"Yo Grandmaster Flash, chill! You can't be touching the record and moving the turntable like that! That's not real music! You are a disgrace to those that play real instruments!" - you if you were alive in the '80s." - @Alchemist

Again, the first, worst go-to argument anyone defending generative AI hits you with, "You just hate technology. You just hate the future." People want to see and hear a representation animation of human expression from a human, and hopefully also see an artist celebrated or compensated for the work that they put into that animation that could have been attached to your promotion here if you actually did get a person to do it.

We also have the Alchemist retweeting somebody saying, "I'm stealing your beats and calling it AI," which is that an endorsement of the idea?

And while I agree, it is true, I do think artists' minds and creativity move faster than whatever AI, right now at least, is capable of as far as generative art. You, as a commercial musician, should know that whatever your next new ground-breaking idea might be that you cook up in the studio that nobody sees coming. No matter how big brain or pioneering that idea may be, there's always a massive chance that the audience hears it and is like, "I don't like this. This is terrible. I hate this direction. I don't want to have anything to do with this."

So here you are stuck in a situation where you've come up with some new idea, some new direction your audience doesn't take. People aren't streaming it. People aren't buying the records. Meanwhile, here you have AI flooding the zone with beats that it generates off of sounds that you've made a while ago that are actually still hot. You've got AI essentially pretending to be the old you more successfully than you are being the current you.

AI doesn't have a drive or a passion or an artistic process. If that ends up overshadowing you because AI is just able to generate more material faster and unflinchingly dedicate itself to the demands of the people feeding certain beats and ideas into it, that they just want to see generated over and over and over, you're fucked.

And when you have use cases and situations where AI is able to fill those voids and gaps and create a bunch of basic slop over and over and over that people will basically tolerate or passively consumed based on a formula that's already been set in stone by a trend or some popular songs or a relevant artist or two, it's going to abuse that dynamic. It's going to flood the zone. We've already been seeing it with lofi hip hop for years at this point, and ambient music and some subgenres of electronica, too.

Now, the worst of all the tweets, Alchemist, dropped in the midst of this firestorm. This one is really a doozy.

I can't really tell if what's happening here is just outright gaslighting, and he's hoping to trick fans into being stupid enough to just eat this lineup, or if he's actually being genuine here. And part of the reason that he thinks this is because a lot of the discourse around AI, why it's problematic, and what it actually is, is purposefully muddied. So when a lot of people go into these conversations, they don't exactly understand fully what generative AI is, because after all, in the art and tech space today. There is a giant boom for investment on AI technology.

Often, a lot of things that are sold or pitched as AI are not actually AI or are maybe a different AI than is actually being said. And that's not to say AI isn't actually a concern or genuinely impactful. There's just a lot of misinformation out there these days in terms of what it is and when you're seeing or hearing AI.

And sadly, this tweet right here contributes to that issue. There may be certain apps or elements of your cell phone's operating system that make use of AI in some form or fashion, but that is not the same thing as saying, "Your cell phone is AI. Did you know that?"

So, yeah, this all happened. The only update I have right now in regards to all of this is that the Alchemist has since deleted a lot of these tweets, which I think is good, even if he hasn't necessarily changed his mind on the issue. At the very least, garbage tweets like the one I just read you aren't floating around, inspiring people to think the worst and most uninformed things about AI.

But yeah, disappointing. Disappointing one from Uncle Al. What else is there to say? If there is something to say, I'm sure you guys will generate it using your own brains in the comments. Would love to see some human comments underneath this article, honestly. Appreciate you guys reading this one greatly.

Anthony Fantano, music, AI.