Human Creativity and AI: Lessons from Angine de Poitrine
My first blog post under the tech side of my site, and I have decided to focus heavily on music. As someone who loves art and culture, this intersection of AI and human creativity is one that I spend a lot of time contemplating. What value is there in AI-generated art? Recently, I was introduced to a band that reinforced my views on the relationship between AI and art.
Let's start with an introduction to Angine de Poitrine, a two-piece band from Quebec that in the last couple of months has gone viral. If you have not heard of them, I would recommend you stop reading and go watch/listen to the song "Fabienk". Give it more than the 10 second cursory TikTok view. You may be so captivated that you don't return to finish reading.
Welcome to the world of microtonal, instrumental math rock with some rather visually captivating stage costumes. Once you get past your initial bewildered impression, you will find the music just grooves. On "Fabienk", the groove that comes in at 3:34 on the bassline is magnificent, danceable and in 14/4. When the guitar joins in at 4:28 it lifts off to another level, the guitar's microtonal sounds adding a feeling of uneasiness. As you listen, your ears start to adjust to the microtones and as more loops are added a singable melody appears, the layers building into an irresistible auditory experience. Here we wind up with a musical statement that is both familiar and odd at the same time. This is the type of artistic expression that forces an impression on you. Even without the costumes, we have a fun, listenable, musical statement.
And yet we must take a moment to focus on the costumes, for it is the quirky combination of sound and visuals working in unison that makes them utterly compelling. This is music made for a live audience and the costumes play heavily into that experience. Also, with the costumes lies one of the more interesting tidbits. The costumes were not created as a preconceived gimmick. The anonymous duo who go by Khn and Klek de Poitrine have played together for over 20 years on multiple projects. One of the venues they played had an open slot and the duo suggested they fill the spot. However, they had just played at the venue in the same week and thinking the audience would not want to see them twice, the costumes were created as a fun way to mask their identity. Today their anonymity lives on, as even in interviews they are dressed in full costumes, sometimes speaking in alien gibberish while their manager translates.
So, what does Angine de Poitrine have to do with AI? The use of AI has gone far beyond simply being used as a tool for human use. AI companies have unleashed a swath of tools and apps to create art, videos and music. Apps like Suno can create songs based on simple prompts. Thus, AI is now stepping into the realm of supplementing if not replacing human creativity.
As a musician with a fair level of curiosity, I have experimented with Suno to see what the app was capable of. Honestly, it is quite an insane piece of tech. Pick a topic, a genre, and a brief description and you will instantly get back a song that sounds like it belongs on the radio. Suno is great at replicating the expected and creating songs that musically cater to listener expectations. The fact that it is so good at following popular musical formulas has led to AI-generated songs at the top of Billboard charts. Personally, I found value in creating absurd songs with ridiculous lyrics to annoy my family. I think there were a bunch of evil Santa Claus songs made around Christmas.
As AI use has expanded into the creative realm, this has led many people including myself to step back and ask the obvious question, "If art is the ultimate form of human expression and struggle, how should we approach art generated by AI?"
When it comes to experimenting with AI-generated art, I'm not beyond reproach. Beyond the comical Suno songs created to annoy my family, I have experimented with AI-generated art in a more professional manner. On the initial Minecraft related guitar arrangements I made, I had my son create images or record videos of him playing Minecraft to use as title screens. This was fun because my son got to be creative as well, coming up with ideas based around the songs to build and share for the videos. One of the joys of those early videos was watching his excitement at lending his ideas to a video that would be published.
When I expanded outside of Minecraft music, one of the first songs I covered was "GrassWalk" from Plants vs Zombies composed by Laura Shigihara. My son couldn't build a unique image for a title screen to use, so I thought it might be cool to generate a zombie with a guitar that looked like a rockstar in the PvZ style. The image itself looked good, it was obviously AI-generated but I thought it fit the theme of a guitar instrumental cover and the game quite well. I also thought viewers would find the image more fun than just a still frame of me playing the guitar.
Some quick context, I'm not a popular YouTuber, I have a very small following, I'm not even monetized. Still, small creators like me get feedback related to our content via likes/dislikes. My like ratio is usually well above 90%.
I posted the short, I was expecting it would perform in line with my previous videos. I quietly hoped it might perform better because frankly I thought it was the best recording I had done to that point. I was stunned when it came back with an abysmal 50% like rate after more than a day. At first, I thought some of the dislikes might have been the kind of quick clicks that YouTube will remove from people who didn't watch the video. They were not. Multiple comments were made about AI usage. Some people assumed that since the title screen art was AI-generated the music was as well. The work behind making these arrangements, learning the parts, recording, mixing, and creating a video is probably over 20 hours. For that much work to be dismissed in seconds due to an AI-generated image was completely disheartening. The image didn't just turn the audience off, it led them to question the authenticity of everything else.
I decided to conduct a little experiment to see if the AI-generated content was the cause of the negativity. I edited the short, I switched out the AI-generated zombie and used a very basic screenshot of myself playing for the title screen and then reposted. The result, the new version of the short came back with well over a 90% like rate and more views and positive comments. Lesson learned: use AI-generated content and expect the audience to be skeptical if not dismissive of your work.
...Back to Angine de Poitrine, why do I love this band so much? Why have other people fallen in love with this band? I think in large part because the quirkiness in visuals and sound is not something AI would produce. This is a purely human experiment in creativity that eschews normal formulas that AI would pick up on. In a world where even human artists are often copying popular formulas we have something completely unique. Amazingly, they have been embraced by a large audience. The blend of microtonal, groovy math rock while donning crazy costumes has rewarded their audience by taking them on a wild artistic journey, a journey that leads to concert halls full of fans grooving, dancing, and interacting with the band and their music together, entranced into a shared human experience. This gives me hope that the future of human-created art won't just survive but it will thrive.