We Must Accept That We Are Not Needed As Humans

Agonia Records seems to be really embracing the new wave of AI art lately. While Pestilence changed the art for their upcoming career retrospective Levels Of Perception (albeit begrudgingly), Hour Of Penance is doubling down on theirs with possibly the worst take of the year.

In an interview with Metal1, Hour Of Penance guitarist and vocalist Paolo Pieri defended the AI art for the band’s upcoming record Devotion as one that is part of the non-human revolution. To quote Pieri: “Just as we have accepted that the earth is not the center of the universe, we must accept that we are not needed as humans. We have to accept that maybe one day an Al will do a better job of writing music or poetry or creating art without feeling emotions.”

I’m sorry, but this is nothing short of silly. Accepting humans’ “uselessness” and accepting that the Earth is not the center of the universe isn’t even in the same realm of factual accuracy. One is a provable, scientific fact and the other is an opinion defending lazy artwork. Great point!

Also, we don’t have to accept that AI will “do a better job” of making art. AI bases its creations off existing works. AI does not have original thoughts. And isn’t the point of creating art to infuse it with emotion, or the current wave of politics, or personal issues, or so on and so forth? It’s just the type of quote that makes you take a step back and take stock of how off-base it is.

To clarify, this wasn’t even a case of the band hiring an artist to make the art with the use of AI. Pieri freely admits this is just hours of plugging in prompts into Midjourney.

“We used Midjourney with an unlimited subscription plan to learn how to use it properly,” said Pieri. “We spent a lot of time experimenting to see what it could do, what was possible and what wasn’t, what suited our tastes. Then we experimented to find the perfect prompt for the main concept of the album. It was important to us that the prompt fit the lyrics and their themes, and after refining the prompt with a few parameters, we got a result that looked exactly as we imagined.

“We then used the variation function to generate similar images until we were happy with the final result. There wasn’t much work needed after that: color correction, tones, some cropping, but that was it. It definitely took us more time than emailing someone to do the work and get paid by the label.”

Pieri also has an interesting take on artists and their craft, essentially going further down the rabbit hole of them being replaceable. Which seems to be a common theme throughout the interview – viewing everything as a replaceable commodity rather than different facets of art, and saying that maybe artists should get Spotify-like royalties when AI uses their art to generate new images.

Pieri also uses the phrase “sheeple” which like, dude. Come on.

“I think some artists are very self-centered egomaniacs and need to understand that just because they’ve spent some time learning to paint doesn’t mean they’re the center of the world, just like I don’t consider myself irreplaceable because I play the guitar and can write music or lyrics. It’s true that generative AI uses open databases, but let’s get the facts straight: Midjourney is closed-source AI, meaning that no one outside the company knows how the LLM works, nor how it uses the databases we its algorithm or neural network.

“We don’t know anything from a technical point of view. So when I read from some arrogant sheeple that AI is ‘stealing from artists’ because he read that on a site from another uninformed sheeple, it’s just sad. Just think of how huge the database of non-copyrighted content is, anything from prehistoric art to Monet could be there. We’re talking billions of images and real art here. And you think the heart of Midjourney’s generative capabilities is stealing from some artist on Facebook who made a few pictures for a metal band that sells a few thousand units?

“Do you see how ridiculous, arrogant and self-centered this is? And finally, do you know how we can fix this so we’re all on the same page? They should get $0.0001 every time Midjourney uses their content (if it’s used at all), like we get from Spotify…so they can also afford half a pizza at the end of the year.”

I guess my point is this – I don’t understand how a band like Hour Of Penance, comprised of real musicians making real music, can just sit back and have such a “eh, the future is the future attitude” when it comes to AI. It feels like such a shitty laissez faire attitude to the art they claim to love by virtue of creating and selling it. Shouldn’t artists be raging against something that could replace them?