bad musician doesn’t hear what they play,
a great musician plays what they hear
By Pierre Ortalo Yuzupulse
I was 17, in high school, talking to this guy, the cool kid in the classroom, who told me about playing the guitar. “You should buy one and start playing”, he said. That was a leap of faith, that felt like a crazy, stupid idea. Yet, carried by his pure, contagious and intoxicating enthusiasm. I bought a guitar online.
I wanted to learn fast to impress my friends, so I used guitar tabs. Using these easy-to-read notations, I could learn a new song quite quickly. That was fun and motivating.
A few years later, I’m there, trying to play with a band, they play a few chords and ask me to jump along, but I have no idea what they’re doing. At this moment, I realised I spent my entire time learning the guitar using hands and eyes, but never my ears.
The English language uses the word ‘power’ to encompass a broad range of meanings, whereas French distinguishes between “le pouvoir” (power) and “la puissance” (which we will refer to as “ability” in this article). Power is what we can make others do, while ability is what we are capable of doing ourselves. These two concepts are crucial for understanding the impact of technology and AI on creativity.
For experienced creators, AI is an extraordinary tool. These individuals have already developed their abilities and can delegate peripheral tasks to AI while remaining critical and in control. AI serves as a supporting tool, not a replacement for the creator’s abilities. By using AI to handle peripheral tasks, creators can focus their energy and time on their main tasks, which require their unique abilities. Even for tasks related to their creation, experienced creators can guide AI efficiently to achieve their vision and detect errors with their expert eye.
However, the use of AI also presents a temptation, especially for beginner or average artists who are still developing their abilities. The principle of least effort, a strong drive in human beings developed through evolution, makes it tempting to rely on AI for quick and easy results. This principle suggests that humans naturally tend to choose the path of least resistance, opting for solutions that require minimal effort. In a productivist capitalist economy, where time and resource pressures are high, this temptation is even stronger. Beginners may be replaced or tempted to develop only their power by relying on AI, leading to a lack of ability to critically evaluate AI’s deliverables. This can result in a flood of ‘average plus’ content, a phenomenon already evident today in the form of ‘AI slop’ in image searches.
To curb this perverse mechanism, we need a robust education system that teaches children to make an effort, think, and create for themselves. Creating moments of disconnection, such as no-AI days, and relearning how to touch and sculpt matter can help cultivate our abilities. Technological tools give us power, but we must cultivate our abilities to use them effectively.
An artist’s main tools are vision and creativity; technique and technology only support the process of turning the vision into materiality. However, vision and creativity, intuition, and artistic heuristics are built through hands-on, analogue, physical practice—exactly what art schools’ first years focus on. This is due to embodiment, a cognitive psychology concept suggesting that our cognition is deeply intertwined with our physicality and environment.
AI is blind to art; it is an algorithm trained to generate things close to our descriptions. Maintaining “analogue” activities to develop our vision and cognition outside the scope of digital and AI is crucial. Otherwise, we won’t build our artistic vision and will let the blind lead us.
