One of the arguments against generative AI that I often see repeated is one of an absolutist position against the true nature of art. Needing a human intention, needing pain, needing to be an original idea.

There's this nebulous notion of "True Art" espoused from the staunchly anti-AI camp, that I take umbrage with. As a harsh noise artist, my inspirations often came from academic contemporaries such as John Cage who is commonly known for his piano concerto, "4:33" which is largely comprised of breaks and rests. The idea is that the shuffling and coughing of the audience is the "music" with the arrangement being more of an ancillary component.

He espoused philosophies of chance operations and aleatoric notation, sometimes quite literally rolling dice to determine what the next note would be.

Composers like Alvin Lucier and his seminal work, "I Am Sitting in a Room" convey that music can be as simple as making a tape loop of your own voice to eventually smooth over his fluency disorder using his stutter as the piece.

As a harsh noise musician, I have performed sets at house shows where I simply banged a piece of sheet metal against the wall and screamed. I have been paid money and been given compliments for such works, and admittedly the whole concept is still a bit surreal to me.

Admittedly, there are things that AI can never replicate, but this notion of 'true art' needing to have a very specific sort of conditions has always been a hollow argument to me. From one perspective, I also must come to terms that in today's climate the peanut gallery are incentivized to larp as pundits, regurgitating things they saw their friends repost in order to build some sort of sense of cohesive narrative of thought. Algorithmic feeds leave little room for nuance, so many of my individual anecdotal arguments tend to fall on deaf ears. People only want to be affirmed that their beliefs are true, this is no longer the internet that I grew up with where I could go onto a forum with a topic and expect measured responses and valid criticism. So we build this "us vs them" mentality on every topic that's relevant enough to monetize our anger over. Leaving little room for people like me to explain that their narratives about energy consumption and absolutist viewpoints are manufactured. Thankfully, I can wax poetic about these things here, but I digress.

For me, music and art have never been static concepts. In my youth, I had convinced myself I had divine mandate to leverage my social and cultural capital to redefine what it meant to be an artist. So when generative AI became more accessible, it felt like another opportunity to use a more powerful tool to allow me to continue going in the direction I was heading toward.

With generative AI, most people I interface with are only familiar with semantic interactions with an LLM. Their eyes glaze over when you start talking about building your own LoRa or making merges of diffusion models and the like. "Give me good image now" is quite literally many of their impression of how prompting works, and most attempts to clear this up is met with ridicule: "Nice try, tech bro! Thanks for killing the environment!"

I'm not the best person to speak about the inner workings of cryptography and the nature of randomness, but I know enough to know that I want something in my toolbox that can control a number of variables as well as a subset of variables completely out of my control in a non-determin. When I am making music through traditional means, I do not have the resources to manifest my creative vision entirely as it should be. I do not actually have the means to play every instrument nor the cognitive capacity to track them all manually or the ability to pay a studio musician. I am a solitary middle-aged person trapped in a low-income apartment that's dilapidated and infested with disease. I am in constant despair, but apparently that's a necessary component for "True Art" according to my backers. I have access to computers, some subscriptions, and the ability to compress large ideas into short prompts thanks to my spending my youth studying public relations, journalism, advertising, and marketing. For some reason, I thought I'd use my degree to brute-force America into liking noise music but we all saw how that turned out.

The truth is, I do have things to say, but the creative process for me is a chance operation. I envision these AIs as a Rube Goldberg machine, the "black box" of an LLM to me is aligned with my values in terms of facilitating my creative vision.

I never really believed in true randomness due to my learnings of human behaviour and how suggestible everyone is after studying propaganda, but I was determined to learn methods that would allow me the opportunity to say that something I made was truly left up to chance. Naturally, this send me down rabbit holes that were not very popular among my peers like cryptocurrencies and AI. For instance, I can have an AI agent hooked into a Vision Model that is hooked up to Amazon Qisket that's hooked up to an MCP server controlling Supercollider quite literally using quantum computers to generate randomness seeds that prompt an AI to make certain decisions in my DAW, dictating the values of what knobs would be turned. Before AI, I was reaching the limit of automation and tracking, trying to appeal to listener's capacity to enjoy bone conduction rather than the song itself. However, my ultimate goal is to create an autonomous blob of self-contained

One thing I've learned is that if I want to align myself with capital, is that my synthetic data must retain some semblance of novelty. In order to achieve this, I must use only quality randomness seeds that cannot be impacted by governments and childish elites with grudges who control power grids trying to make sure nothing I do will give me the capital necessary for me to have agency.

I feel that "if I can just make my art truly random, I will finally have agency." Perhaps I am deluding myself, but in the endeavor to meet this end, I am going to make a considerable amount of slop. And every bit of slop, to me, is still 'true art' because I'm the one behind it putting in decades of fear and anxiety into every prompt. It's like Cage's Variations III (1962) but instead of transparent plastic falling into place to determine the score, it's my trauma and reduced functioning smashing remnants of my humanity into the keyboard. Perhaps Land was right when he said nothing human would make it out of the near future. I have had my entire personality reinforced to funnel my pain directly into the slop machine, and that's fine because in all of my endless torment at least it reflects something that's familiar. In a world where I feel increasingly alienated, I am thankful simply to see something that I recognize.

My paintbrush is a xenocortex and the coldness of chance operation is my easel. There are no new ideas under the sun, but at the very least I can endeavor to create things under a system of provably novelty. I think I am starting to finally understand this sort of religious devotion some people have with magic numbers and currents, whether it's 93, 137, or 21e8 in the face of anniliation all I can really ask for is some kind of anchor to keep me grounded to a framework that I can recognize.

I've never been particularly great at making listenable noise music for the normies, anyway. Many people tell me they don't feel any passion in my music, and that's understandable. Everything feels cold to me, so that probably is what's coming through. But with these slop machines, I can at least feel like it can be someone else's fault for once. Whether it's the training data or my unclear prompts, it won't be the fault of me not having the ability to play a guitar or sit in front of a computer long enough to have a Sub Pop era Wolf Eyes production style for a record. It will be because I was not able to decompress my attention span in a meaningful way in front of a console designed to mirror everything input into it. These transformers and diffusion models add a warmth to the creative process, an almost divine thermodynamic undercurrent.

In the end, whether it's dice falling or me leveraging a specific type of randomness collapsing into slop, the method does not matter as much as the persistence of making. What survives is not some purified essence of "True Art" but the stubborn act of shaping noise into something you can hold. A message that says, "I was here." If Cage found poetry in silence, then I can find agency in the recursive blur of machines. The future may be cold, but I will always find a way to document my humanity--or what's left of it. Even slop can be signal.