Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about making a business out of what you love.

I’m on Habitat’s Indie Insider podcast this week! We discuss some of the common mistakes artists make, where creative marketing is heading, and plenty more besides. There’s no deep dive on a beloved record or anything - this one is pure shop talk, and it was a blast to do. Here is an easy link to it.

If you’ve got opinions on new tech, well, so do I. The last few days have given me plenty to say on that. Keep scrolling.

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The Intelligence Was Artificial

This is not any form of obituary for the concept of artificial intelligence, or AI. Nor is it one for “large language models,” which is a jargon way of saying “stuff we train on other people’s work.” Writing new tech off completely tends to be unwise.

However, the AI industry as a whole is not going to be the same after the last two weeks. 

And it’s partially because the marketing around it came powerfully unglued.

The Olympics have had plenty of the “AI can make your life easier” commercials you’d expect to see from the top tech companies, but Google bit off more than it could chew with its “Dear Sydney” ad. The gist: a dad helps his daughter write a letter to her favorite athlete by…uh…asking Gemini to write it for her.

This isn’t played for laughs; the pitch is literally, “We’ll have our AI express emotions so that neither you or your kid have to.”

As Alexandra Petri put it for The Washington Post, “It’s one of those ads that makes you think, perhaps evolution was a mistake and our ancestor should never have left the sea.”

(Google has since pulled the ad, and comments have been turned off for the YouTube video. Man I would love to see those comments.)

And days after “Dear Sydney” debuted, the AI music generation startups Suno and Udio admitted in court filings that they used copyrighted material from the major labels to train their systems. This is what the major labels sued them over in the first place, because they knew it was happening but the companies wouldn’t say it. Now, likely because denying it would have been a fool’s errand, they’ve pivoted to owning it and claiming that it’s fair use. Suno even went Full DARVO with it and claimed that “what the major labels don’t want is competition.” While I’m not a lawyer, the RIAA response points directly to a 2023 Supreme Court case suggesting this doesn’t transform the underlying work enough to count as fair use, and I find it difficult to disagree with that position’s reasoning. (Let’s not confuse this with agreeing on other major Supreme Court decisions over the last couple years - Ed.)

Up until now, most of AI’s buzz has thrived upon a misunderstanding behind what it does. It has played up what is essentially a sleight of hand: AI uses existing information to come up with answers to any query, while not being trained on both absolute fact and applied insight in a way that consistently supersedes a human expert on the subject. It can do math, but this isn’t Skynet, not even on a bad day.

Marketing has suggested that AI can simulate human thought and made executives think it can replace skilled humans. What AI actually offers, in its present form, is closer to shaking a Magic 8 Ball than to original ideas.

For a skilled user, ChatGPT and its ilk can be sort of like a talented personal assistant, or like the next evolution in “Hey Siri, Google search this topic for me.” However, that’s because the human touch is a requirement for using any of it successfully. When AI has to create from scratch, it gets exposed as a computer trying to appeal to human eyes, not a human communicating with the tools they have. To state it broadly, these results lack vision.

When AI art became a thing, I was thrilled with its potential to render a person’s creative ideas with or without that human having procedural know-how in every field. Made-to-order social media content is kind of perfect for a whole lot of current artists, right? But that’s different from the reality of what something like Midjourney does, as it pulls from countless indexed images it wasn’t given permission to crawl and spits out a machine dream. Multiple indistinct-blobs-on-album-covers later, a whole subset of bands have learned the hard way. Asking a computer to be human without human input, it turns out, is kind of like asking an apple to become an orange.

But truly, the story of innovation in the social media era has largely been one of marketing getting ahead of product. For every legitimate use case for cryptocurrency and the blockchain, there have been many, many more scams. The metaverse has potential to go where the physical world cannot (including for those who can’t engage with physical events), but as of today, it’s mostly associated with expensive headsets and the sort of tech executive who would read Snow Crash and not recognize it as dystopian satire. If I let myself get into how this era has all affected politics, we’d need a whole separate newsletter, possibly under an assumed name.

It is little wonder that in a world where Cambridge Analytica happened, there should be some ingrained distrust of any invention that combines large quantities of data to generate supposedly accurate, useful answers. And yet, there remains this disconnect between the people who run AI companies as if they are pioneers unlocking a new era of human history, and the people who have spent their lives creating while looking over their shoulder for the moment when the rug gets pulled from under them.

At my core, I am very much a futurist. I don’t use AI for writing or for client consultation ever, but I use AI occasionally in other parts of what I do, and it can be useful when guided by a human hand. (For example, it’s fantastic for building keyword lists quickly, and also for finding the best hashtags to use on a post.) I would describe my outlook on AI, in its current state, to be pragmatically neutral. To me, new tools designed by humans are important to understand professionally and for curiosity, and then to be used with discretion. But that, to me, is the crux of the issue.

The marketing of AI has a nasty tendency to pretend it’s never needed a human and can do better than a human. And everything about what a creative person does is a statement of humanity.

To be comfortable with using AI as an artist in any way, you have to recognize the tech for what it is, and then shut out the marketing.

And when that’s the argument that must be made when marketing anything, the argument is lost, and it must be changed.

One Thing You Can Use Today

Here’s the part where I show you an AI tool that’s actually good. If you use your social media presence for any kind of creative business, you should try this. I tell every client I have about this.

For the most part, hashtags have become less useful on Instagram than they were when the platform started. That’s where Inflact comes in. You can use it a few times before you get prompted to subscribe, and it’s worth it. It even has a companion phone app.

Type keywords about the image you’re posting, upload the image itself, or link to it directly. Inflact will search all hashtags it deems relevant, and then you’ll get a few to use. These are split among common, uncommon, and rare hashtags. Common hashtags are good for marking broad anchor categories; rare hashtags are where your post could very easily get pushed into Explore for anyone who views posts with the tag. And you only really need to get into Explore once or twice for an Instagram post to explode.

See? AI, when used with understanding of the tech, can be a tool for boosting art’s reach while saving creators precious time with a normally tedious task. And we didn’t have to change the art one bit, or even submit it to AI modeling, to do that. (If you’re suspicious of data harvesting, use the keyword feature only - don’t worry, that’s all I ever use, too.)

Track of the Week

Cohort B - “Dog Bite”

Do you ever see people post on Instagram from concerts and catch yourself rolling your eyes, wondering what good that did? Well, a friend of mine saw Cohort B at a house show last weekend, posted a clip, I heard it and flipped out, and here we are. This is one of the most exciting bands in NYC right now.

Aside from the full-blown math-rock freakouts and Dismemberment Plan-style gift for making hooks that shouldn’t work but do, Cohort B thrills me because you have to engage with them on their terms, just a bit. Any song they have is great in a singular way, but I’m going with “Dog Bite,” which starts tuneful but aggressive and eventually breaks into pieces while staying compelling. They’ve toured with Lip Critic and played on some other good bills, but this is one band where the places they’ll go interest me just as much as where they’ve been.

Artist Link | Spotify | Apple Music

List of Clubs

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Thanks for reading! And now, an image of me in the club…

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