This is the thread where we compile a list of AI defenders / embracers / apologists (music edition)

Name, shame and / or attempt to explain

Waterboys:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DR8KPc-gkZX/

Merzbow:
https://slowdown-merzbow.bandcamp.com/music

Holly Herndon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZrR1rc5NAA

more from Merzbow on AI:

A Few Minutes with Merzbow https://t.co/Gt4AUmNUom pic.twitter.com/xwlq6Dob84

— 🐖🐐🐓Merzbow🐄🐏🦃 (@MerzbowOfficial) October 8, 2025

Pretty sure Laurie Anderson has been exploring AI for quite a long time. I think she even made a Lou Reed chatbot to help her deal with his death

People who were into it in like 2019 seem less bad. If they were into it then but hate it now that would be better of course.

Apparently Kanye West has been using AI on his last few albums, but hard to know for sure as nobody listened to them.

People who were into it in like 2019 seem less bad.

I agree with this, if only because there's at least some plausible deniability regarding its disastrous effect on...well, everything

ftr I found Holly Herndon insufferable well before 2019

I just clicked on the Holly Herndon video linked above and clicked to a random place in the video and it was an AI slop video of "Holly" herself singing "Jolene"

TS: AI Holly Herndon vs. Holly the Red Dwarf AI

Holly Herndon was big on crypto and NFTs IIRC.

the second "environmental" part of the merzbow statement is so fucking annoying

there are a lot of amusing comments about the merzbow AI thing on the merzbow reddit page

I just can’t get mad at Laurie Anderson.

Get mad at this person instead then

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1AT3LH5rtS/

Lol of course she used sampling in her analogy

Holly is nice, as is her husband/partner … I like them as people I used to see at shows and hang with

I got a free ticket to see her do PROTO live, would have been October 2019. The audience was so noisy and chatty that other parts of the audience kept sshhhhing them.

This has no real relevance to anything it's just what always comes to mind.

Lol of course she used sampling in her analogy

― Bertolt Blecch (Neanderthal), Sunday, 18 January 2026 14:22 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Not sure we can assume this person is "she" - all the artist pictures etc. are also AI-generated, would assume the name & bio is too.

Anyway, you are not prepared for how shit the music is, I know you think you are, but you are not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYI0XiLYLIE

i indeed was not! AI bringing you the sounds of 1996, today!

TS: AI Holly Herndon vs. Holly the Red Dwarf AI

― Gentler Death Squads Please (Boring, Maryland), Saturday, January 17, 2026 1:42 PM (yesterday)

me watching the third season of "Red Dwarf" where Holly travels to an alternate universe and sees a girl version of himself and is like "oh shit i want to be a girl now" and just, like, becomes a girl

this being red dwarf it was the most normal thing that happened in the episode:

Following the events of Parallel Universe, Dave Lister (Craig Charles) gave birth to twins who had to be sent back to the universe of their origin because of his universe's physical laws resulting in them rapidly aging.

that was the other thing i liked about it, holly was like "hey, i'm a girl now!" and everybody was like "oh cool" and got on with it because they had more important things to worry about

Not sure we can assume this person is "she" - all the artist pictures etc. are also AI-generated, would assume the name & bio is too.

― Dance Yourself Dizzy To The Music of Time (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Sunday, January 18, 2026 8:12 AM (thirty-two minutes ago)

did you just assume this ai "artist"'s gender?

lol seriously i think there's no less reason to assume "she/her pronouns" than there is to assume "she/her" pronouns for, say, a vtuber with a female avatar. i mean, worst case scenario, it does happen to be a guy who created this fictitious woman for clicks and doesn't tell anybody his actual name and he is DEEPLY OFFENDED that people assume he's a girl? good. stay mad, bro. fuck that guy.

for the record holly apparently went back to being a guy under circumstances that are too convoluted for me to explain without watching the episode in question...

which, again, i approve of... i do know people who have "detransitioned" and the circumstances are _far_ more similar to the sort of thing that happens on a red dwarf episode than the bullshit the transphobes say about detransition.

The entire ship is reconstructed by nanobots and everyone is reset apart from the four members of the crew iirc? only watched season 8 once and that was one time too many

Everyone other than Lister, Cat, Kryten and Kochanski is reset, including the entire ship, which includes the original Rimmer because S1-S7 Rimmer went off to become Ace Rimmer in Stoke Me a Clipper. S8 also uses the nanobot-revived Holly as first seen in Nanarchy although a second, smarter nanobot-revived Holly is seen for a while in Back to the Red, which I won't go into because spoilers.

Feel like I'm in my element here :)

I do hope the AI backlash retroactively extends into digital effects in general. I get that the original model was destroyed but CG Red Dwarf and the whole remastering was pretty tastelessly done.

Also, didn't most everyone already get off the Merzboat when he went full laptop? Was any of that era interesting in a way that's tainted by the new LLM mode?

Im surprised The Waterboys are AI defenders

I’m not an AI user*, defender, apologist or appreciator— but I’m decidedly agnostic about artists who choose to embrace it and work with it.

I have worked on a film that contained unnoticeable AI elements— the director pointed out a minor detail in a shot that he said had been accomplished with AI usage. It seemed merely like something that CGI could’ve done and too inoffensive to feel any way about.

The asterisk is put in place above because I have consulted ChatGPT for certain analyses and queries, unrelated to anything artistic, and I have asked ChatGPT to “write lyrics” and “write poetry” in the style of [x] but it was solely a diversion, more to assure me that AI is at present still-incapable of creating anything but slop

I have worked on a film that contained unnoticeable AI elements— the director pointed out a minor detail in a shot that he said had been accomplished with AI usage. It seemed merely like something that CGI could’ve done and too inoffensive to feel any way about.

Probably one of the many tools that have been rebranded as "AI" because that's the buzzword. I wasn't attacking artists for using these before the AI hype started so it would be silly for me to do so now.

Park Chan Wook's latest has an "AI artist" listed somewhere in the credits but as nothing in the film felt particularly AI I'm assuming it's one of those cases.

Artists publicly enthusiastic about AI though are almost certainly using shit that will make their art worse.

I’m definitely more “pro AI” than many of my friends and colleagues, but my optimism rests in the potential I see in its usage for, at the present moment, debugging software, improving car engineering, improving medical care— and, ideally, in the long-term future, debugging socioeconomic issues like income equality and hunger and so on, finding solutions that aren’t tied to dogmas of existing economic structures (capitalism communism socialism etc etc)

Of course an overriding skepticism toward the aforementioned optimism lies in the fact that I’m sure that AI’s developers already are on a course to program the software to serve— and limit its usage— to the existing ruling classes, but hope springs eternal

If it was a tool that was created or deployed via machine learning techniques, it's bona fide AI in the modern sense. If it's a hardcoded algorithmic tool, it's AI in the older "Ghosts follow this pattern to eat PacMan" sense.

To me, both senses are pretty attack-worthy in that they're more often than not deployed reflexively, lazily as a substitute for consideration or thoughtfulness, or even worse (but sometimes awesomely), from a genuinely perverted and deliberate aesthetic.

I feel like the Jesus Lizard video was going for the latter but not very successfully. It's funny though because apparently Yow's job for years was basically doing photoshop touch ups?

xpost fgti lol just wait until the water wars

like honestly it's really wild to be for someone to look around the world today and how deeply the technology industry it's embedded in modern fascism and misinformation and maintain some kind of early 90s techno-utopian early 90s white dread view AI is like mind boggling to me

Fair take, but you didn’t have to type “white dread”

how about “devil stick and hackeysack”

:) that’s more like it

haha

Mike Scott seems right-on and progressive in his other views, so a bit of a surprise how much a raging hardon he has for AI

xp to ums also I reiterate (in case it wasn’t clear) that any optimism I do carry about AI’s future is eclipsed by the “overriding skepticism” I subsequently described, I’m not an optimist, I’d just describe myself perhaps as “more optimistic” than certain of my friends who have switched to flip phones

Something that I noticed that was perhaps interesting is that I do feel the inescapability of AI slop has degraded the aesthetic value of CGI and other human-made/computer-assisted forms of art. Those mattes and backdrops in “Poor Things” hit my eyes like a fist made out of dog turd, they just appeared so “AI coded”— and they apparently weren’t AI at all. I attempted a rewatch of “Annihilation” recently and just couldn’t enjoy the visuals.

thanks for the clarification fgti

there's so much pathos in AI optimists I can't hardly be mad why, it's like getting mad at the kid with an alcoholic dad who he sees one Saturday a month who believes him when he says he's going to get Michael Jordan to show up to his birthday party

Those mattes and backdrops in “Poor Things” hit my eyes like a fist made out of dog turd

Lol i was interested in this movie and i when came across it streaming i took a quick look and the first thing i saw was (i think) some ship made with hideous cgi and i went no further... not for me.

It's worth it for Emma Stone, the union of her character's bizarre dialogue and her delivery of it is something amazing. Score is amazing amazing. Politics of the film are pretty dire tho. And yeah, those visuals

Something that I noticed that was perhaps interesting is that I do feel the inescapability of AI slop has degraded the aesthetic value of CGI and other human-made/computer-assisted forms of art. Those mattes and backdrops in “Poor Things” hit my eyes like a fist made out of dog turd, they just appeared so “AI coded”— and they apparently weren’t AI at all. I attempted a rewatch of “Annihilation” recently and just couldn’t enjoy the visuals.

yes - and now, when vetting / approving poster art, cover art, et al, one has to be really aggressive about making sure the artist or designer isn't using AI, and this state of vigilance makes everything look like AI. annoying as hell

I saw Peter Gabriel live in September 2023 and he was all in on AI. Spent a break between songs expounding at length about how it's going to lead to massive breakthroughs in science, medicine, and education (he thought every child would have a sentient educational assistant soon). I guess the guy's always been a big time tech optimist, but yeah, felt like an old man drinking whatever kool aid is handed to him. The show was great though.

oh yes he has always been like that, but I don't think he's actually using it in his music yet so that's good

In Your AIs

Timbaland: https://variety.com/2025/music/news/timbaland-gets-deep-about-ai-tata-greatest-hits-1236512095/

As much as I loathe the rise of AI in general and think it's a net negative for the world, it's not going away and I think it's ok to recognize that there's a spectrum here, and that there are valid, non-slop creative uses. Stem splitting to sample a break that was never previously accessible? Taking stems that you recorded by hand, having AI make music out of them, then chopping, resampling, and writing a new song over them? Dan Snaith using it as a voice changer to sing his melodies and lyrics, or duet with himself?

Some could be extensions of the ways artists have long introduced randomness for inspiration (randomization functions in electronic music tools, automatic/cut-up writing, etc). Obviously they lend themselves to lazy slop, genuinely creative uses will be in the minority, and personally I've been increasingly drawn to humans playing music in real time, but I don't think it necessarily needs to be an all-or-nothing purity test.

All of the videos for the last Peter Gabriel album were AI generated; he didn't have any of them made, he solicited work from people who would use stablediffusion etc. Fine, whatever, but depressing since Gabriel is a music video vanguard who has a great backlog of amazing videos, and notably, not a single one of those created for i/o are memorable in the slightest.

It is kinda funny how artists who work in one medium will blithely use uncredited or Ai-generated art in another (ie writers and musicians for visual art).

xxp I can agree with that, as much as I disagree with Holly Herndon and find her new music unlistenable I do admit she's at least doing something interesting with it. I do like the recent Mouse on Mars album from 2021 which uses a lot of AI tools and leans heavily into their uncanniness. But I really hope it's out of their system and they do something totally different next time.

idk how I feel about the voice changing stuff. Because at this point it is pretty good. Back in 2014 one of those Eno/Hyde albums had a track which had a vocal that sounded like a strange, glitched out Dolly Parton. I thought they'd just treated some guest singer but I think it turned out to actually be Karl Hyde's voice run through some algorithm. the glitchiness made it interesting but I dunno if I like the idea of people just putting fake singers on their albums like that. It's a cool novelty but I'd hate for that to become commonplace.

The stem splitting is pretty cool, at least. I do kinda hope it brings in another age of plunderphonics now that you can isolate very specific parts that otherwise you probably couldn't. That said this doesn't really feel like "AI" in the sense everyone's talking about it now, though.

stem splitting has been going on a long time

It is kinda funny how artists who work in one medium will blithely use uncredited or Ai-generated art in another (ie writers and musicians for visual art).

Yeah I see AI images being used to illustrate blog posts by otherwise smart and right-on people... It's baffling to me that they don't see how ugly the pictures are, undermining their message.

I finally saw Laurie Anderson perform last year, & while she was great there was some very specious pro ai stuff in there. The show is structured as a series of portraits of ppl who have inspired her, & she ends a bit on the work of Gertrude stein & John cage with the line “Americans have been making AI art for decades”. It’s an ok punchline, also a good argument if you’re not a person who thinks at all

There’s another bit where she gets ChatGPT to fake a bunch of old photos & then makes fun of how shitty they are. Again she pulls this off with more panache than just about anyone else could but it’s a pretty tired routine by now and I just think on balance I would rather have a habitable biosphere myself

https://www.amazon.com/Live-Die-L/dp/1644284650

i spotted this depressingly AI book cover for To Live and Die In L.A. at a bookstore here recently. No credited cover artist, which wasn't the tipoff. It was the terrible fake painting.

not music but still

In Your AIs

― Bertolt Blecch (Neanderthal), Monday, January 19, 2026 1:18 AM (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

applause

when I saw Nektar a couple years ago (or at least the band calling themselves Nektar these days) nearly all their video backdrop was AI slop, as though they'd just fed in the lyrics and titles of their songs and added "+ psychedelic". I had the same thought, does no one realize how ugly this shit is, or do they not care because it's easier than making something yourself? there is just so much going on in these videos but none of it actually connects with the human brain. it's like rainbow vomit. contrast that to when I saw Michael Rother and the backdrop was mostly just artifacts from the 70s, little videos he took of the German highways and countrysides, images of the Neu! multitracks and session notes, things of that nature...it didn't add much but it added *something*, at least made the cool connection of "this is what video looked like when this music was actually recorded", whereas what Nektar did I thought actively took away from the show and really their catalogue as a whole

I have a bias, I think voice morphing belongs to the trans community and it’s ugly when cis people do it (Prince being an exception)

And Ween

I do get the sense that voice-morphing is trans-coded, along with a lot of the hyperreal post-Arca/Sophie noises. Trans ppl making electronic music seems like one of the most vibrant and active music communities of the last decade and idk if I've ever read something that ties together all the threads on a purely sonic level

I have a bias, I think voice morphing belongs to the trans community and it’s ugly when cis people do it (Prince being an exception)

― ron zertnert (flamboyant goon tie included), Monday, January 19, 2026 10:52 AM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this Peter Frampton hate will not stand

I kinda like that the fact that the trans-electronica boom of the last ten years hasn’t been parsed, keeps the vibes going, you know?

On a lark, I just asked ChatGPT why Peter Frampton did voice morphing if he’s not trans, and AI admonished me (“that’s a voice box, not voice morphing”), cited several other examples of cis men and women doing voice morphing, and cautioned me away from misgendering Peter Frampton

For sure.

Agreed about the voice changing (straight people are still allowed to make their voice sound like a robot though).

Do you sincerely beliee-ee-eeve that

seems like it depends on the sort of thing it's being used for, for instance Dan Deacon using a female voice morpher on "Feel the Lightning" is quite different than someone recording a horny rock duet in which they recorded both voices

Prince didn't need any technology to do that!

Well other than a multi track recorder and a microphone

Lol sure, but he still used it in addition to his natural gifts

I don’t think there are any rules per se but I’m just trying to in a roundabout way express that Dan’s a buddy and a ride or die for me but that last Caribou album was the pits to listen to

I do kinda hope it brings in another age of plunderphonics

Irony of ironies, but this would likely inspire a wave of copyright litigation not seen since I Need A Haircut

Nah, only if it goes viral on Tiktok and actually makes someone money

rappers seem to be loving ai. mixtape album art but also beats and lyrics, seems there's not as much stigma about it

Master P’s album covers were AI slop before its time