So here I am with something on my mind again...
I recently wrote a song called Exotic Love and wanted to do a special video for it's debut release. My idea was to have a friend of mine on TikTok who is a professional dancer, perform a freestyle contemporary improvisation with the sounds used from my song as the theme/backdrop. I was crushed when he messaged me and I learned from him that he was out of the country working as a judge right now for several dance contests and would be unavailable to do it. Since the song was due to be released within a few days I had to scramble to come up with another promo idea. So, I got busy on my computer determined to create a solid piece of work that would do my music justice. I came up with a funny video that would showcase a liger sitting in the jungle wearing head phones jammin out to my song. I have created many, many videos manually using movie maker software and have found it to be seriously time consuming, sometimes taking weeks to create a polished and professional video. But clearly I did not have that kind of time, so I decided to enlist the help of this AI thing that everyone is talking about. I used it to literally breathe life into and generate my liger. I did not use anyone else's artwork or anything, simply a photograph of an actual liger in the wild. The AI made an extremely realistic version of what I had in my head, although it looked nothing like the photo I provided which surprised me. I still had to do a lot of video movie editing, hook several clips together, add my music track, and do quite a bit of polishing of this and that to get everything right, but overall the finished product came out well.
Once done, I posted the video online accompanied by my song for the world to see and hear. It's done well netting me thousands of streams all over my socail media platforms, but it has come with a very unexpected side effect that I never could have expected. There were tons of loves and likes on the video, which I thought hey that's cool, my song is getting heard which is all we as musicians really want. It's not about the money for most of us, it is about you the listener hearing what we the artist have torn from our very souls. But I digress, my point is that there is a phenomenon that is happening to artists and musicians who post anything that showcases there work with the use of AI animation. On my BandLab account I was rather stunned to see over fifty comments ripping me and my lil Exotic Love mascot liger for using AI. As I alluded to previously, I had never used it before. So unbeknownst to me apparently I comitted an absolute cardinal sin in doing so. Although alot of comments praised my video, the majority on BandLab were downright rude. I checked with some of my other fellow musicians who also used some AI annimation and the hate they were receiving made what was happening on my page look like child's play. Funny cause I also found it interesting that the majority of it was coming from Gen-Zers otherwise known as Zoomers and Millennials. It got so bad I had to turn the damn comments off and delete the hate. Then an older dude who is an artist at some place called Humble Dumpling, came on my Facebook page and this is what he wrote:
He then got even more nasty and told one of my very close long time followers who had told him to stop being a hater, that maybe she needed to stop sucking the d*#% of technology etc. It was at that point that I was like WTF is going on with people over this whole AI mess?! Now for the record, I am completely and perfectly aware about everyone's serious concerns about AI taking away peoples jobs and affecting the environment, but it causing people to troll, hate, and bully enmasse has got me puzzled. So I ask you, what do you feel about AI and it's effects on media creation? Do you love it, or hate it, and why?
