It’s always so fascinating to learn how incentives completely unrelated to creative choices shape culture. I wonder how many iconic artistic decisions from classic movies (or even songs, fashion, etc) are actually just economic choices in a trench coat
Your closing discussion of Baumol’s cost disease caught my attention because it points toward an argument I have been making for nearly three years now -> the economic endpoint of generative AI in the arts, and especially in music, is the obsolescence of the body.
You do not make that claim, although you mention studios eventually using AI to replace “some human labor.” The word “some” is doing quite a bit of work there, lol.
Baumol’s classic string quartet example exposes exactly what is happening, as a quartet cannot become more productive without changing the nature of the activity itself. Making music is necessarily constrained (hence the “disease” labeling). Four people must inhabit the duration of the music together, and, of course, they bring their collective individual decades of study to get to that point. Generative AI exists to solve this cost “disease” by removing those bodies and collective histories and producing hyper-scalable simulations of the resulting sound, whose economic objective is to capture the anxious, directionless attention of a mass population seeking attention and witness.
My concerns, research, and writing on this topic do not lie in the employment segment of this. I argue music’s meaning arises from our encounter with an embodied act unfolding in time. Generated music preserves the audible signs of such an act while severing them from the act itself. As I wrote in a recent essay, AI-generated music is smoke without the originating fire. I am not trying to be cute; the semiotic and epistemological stakes are civilizational here.
I also learned when I got my grad degree in Public Administration with a focus on economics that there are solutions to this that do not portray a string quartet as “diseased,” but they would require changing the structural relationship of value. I was surprised in my studies that almost every single modern ailment we move through today, such as the unsustainable cost of housing and the idea that an unpaid internship is morally fine, has already been solved, and it is just that we choose to live this way rather than choose to live in another way.
I am a BIG believer in #StayInUSA - but #StayInLA is debatable.
From LA's perspective, it's a big deal. The film industry is part of their brand. But there's also no denying they took the biz for granted and dropped the ball in numerous ways.
Other states (and alas, other countries) picked it up.
But isn't it better to have many cities benefitting from the film industry instead of one?
It’s always so fascinating to learn how incentives completely unrelated to creative choices shape culture. I wonder how many iconic artistic decisions from classic movies (or even songs, fashion, etc) are actually just economic choices in a trench coat
Interesting piece.
Your closing discussion of Baumol’s cost disease caught my attention because it points toward an argument I have been making for nearly three years now -> the economic endpoint of generative AI in the arts, and especially in music, is the obsolescence of the body.
You do not make that claim, although you mention studios eventually using AI to replace “some human labor.” The word “some” is doing quite a bit of work there, lol.
Baumol’s classic string quartet example exposes exactly what is happening, as a quartet cannot become more productive without changing the nature of the activity itself. Making music is necessarily constrained (hence the “disease” labeling). Four people must inhabit the duration of the music together, and, of course, they bring their collective individual decades of study to get to that point. Generative AI exists to solve this cost “disease” by removing those bodies and collective histories and producing hyper-scalable simulations of the resulting sound, whose economic objective is to capture the anxious, directionless attention of a mass population seeking attention and witness.
My concerns, research, and writing on this topic do not lie in the employment segment of this. I argue music’s meaning arises from our encounter with an embodied act unfolding in time. Generated music preserves the audible signs of such an act while severing them from the act itself. As I wrote in a recent essay, AI-generated music is smoke without the originating fire. I am not trying to be cute; the semiotic and epistemological stakes are civilizational here.
I also learned when I got my grad degree in Public Administration with a focus on economics that there are solutions to this that do not portray a string quartet as “diseased,” but they would require changing the structural relationship of value. I was surprised in my studies that almost every single modern ailment we move through today, such as the unsustainable cost of housing and the idea that an unpaid internship is morally fine, has already been solved, and it is just that we choose to live this way rather than choose to live in another way.
I have seen plenty of CGI I consider remarkable
I am a BIG believer in #StayInUSA - but #StayInLA is debatable.
From LA's perspective, it's a big deal. The film industry is part of their brand. But there's also no denying they took the biz for granted and dropped the ball in numerous ways.
Other states (and alas, other countries) picked it up.
But isn't it better to have many cities benefitting from the film industry instead of one?