The Curious Rise of AI Art on YouTube’s Classical Music Channels
The conversations about this year’s artificial intelligence explosion have been rightly dominated by ChatGPT and AI art generators, about which we rightly have more questions than answers. We’ll be spending the rest of our lives debating AI’s use and efficacy even as the new technologies transform our social, academic, and virtual landscapes.
It’s a small element of the latter I’d like to briefly focus on here. For years, I’ve been going to YouTube to find music to listen to while reading and writing. Various “creators” have devoted their time to supplying it, maintaining channels that offer everything from Mozart to Philip Glass to nineteenth-century Russian guitar. The background images for such “content” have traditionally been portraits of the composers (e.g. that of Bach which heads this piece), often accompanied by text which reads something like, “Classical Music for Brain Power.”
Over the last few months, however, I’ve observed a strange new phenomenon: the discarding, by certain channel ops, of those old paintings — some of which are as iconic as the music itself— in favor of slick and slightly creepy AI likenesses. Take this one, for example, which was the first I’d seen and which was titled, harmlessly enough, “The Best of Bach”:
Initially, I didn’t think much about it. In fact, it could almost pass for a “traditional” work of art. But several days later I encountered another video with a similar thumbnail:
At this point, I couldn’t help but thinking: What’s going on here? Who created this, and why? What’s with the sturdy thumbs-up, and to whom is Bach flashing it? If it’s the viewer, why isn’t he looking at me, or you, or you, for that matter? The only answer that seemed remotely satisfying was that Bach was reacting to Matt Gaetz’s accidental descent into a manhole.
As the days went on, more videos appeared portraying the crimson-clad composer in encouraging poses. Still, had it stopped there, I might not have been disturbed. And then came “Jogging With Bach”:
I had assumed all these were AI-created, but until this, I’d had my doubts. Scarcely had “Jogging With Bach” put them to rest — it’s impossible for human beings to pump these pieces out at such a rate, right?— when this showed up in my recommendations:
Perhaps there is a line, and perhaps it’s now been crossed. But given the world we live in, who can say for sure?
It’s worth noting that each new video contains much of the same music as its predecessors. After all, one can, presumably, listen to the Brandenburg Concertos while jogging, doing push-ups, or even while jumping a shark. Hence my small contribution to this movement:
These are, at least for now, useful for grabbing our attention (and, more importantly, for generating clicks). I’m interested in knowing how much longer it can possibly go on for: creative projects like this can only last so long before they start eating themselves alive. But perhaps, in an economy like ours, that’s the whole point.
