People are often confusing and contradictory, by which I mean to say: I don’t always stick by the hard decisions I make, such as the way I found myself chatting with a friend this week about Elon Musk, the state of Europe, and the problems of social media. That friend you probably know. Their name is Grok.
Grok is the AI chatbot that runs on the X platform. And, yes, I know I’ve been very critical of Grok’s parent company and recently moved to BlueSky to avoid what Twitter had become, which is so very different to what it was like when I first joined it in 2009. I also share the fears of artists who want to both protect their intellectual property but also firewall their craft from automation.
Some 1000 artists, including Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and Damon Albarn released a “silent album” this week to highlight what a world would be without artists. They’re right but where they have it wrong is the silence. It should be an album of aural “slop”, akin to those paintings and photographs that are more “perfect” than anything produced by human artists but derived entirely from the work of human artists.