Question: If I can write music and another person cannot, should we get paid the same in the music industry under “equality”? If someone is beautiful, should she share the cover of a magazine with a less-than-attractive woman and get paid the same? What happens to genius in a recording studio where everyone can be a producer using AI and requires no decades of training, where what took Jimi Hendrix, Van Halen, and Prince decades to master can be done with a prompt?
Our recording studios back in the day in Croydon, UK
This modern illusion has created two competing, incompatible conditions: an unrealistic definition of perfection, and the lust that everyone can acquire it as an inalienable right. I can be obese with a poor diet, and every time I click on social media, I am bombarded with perfect people, but under the banner of “equality,” I, too, can participate in that, despite reality saying otherwise. And I can do so without any real investment. If my voice is weak, I can use AI narrators; if my skin is not unrealistically Vogue smooth, we have AI filters. If I cannot hold a camera steady, there are all kinds of AI software in my phone to make my out-of-focus, poorly framed shot look like Roger Deakins. I, too, can be equal to the best of the best without the investment.
Who remembers what those are? Well, you had only opportunities to nail a shot to be considered a photographer. Today with infnite shots they still cant get a shot without AI assistance. But we nailed it
Money vs Moral.
Long ago, art was killed by immoral capitalist greed and poor taste and standards. It was no longer an art but how to exploit art and make as much money as possible as safely as possible. So AI is just the nail in the coffin. But go back to that nonsense music that all sounds the same. Those manufactured artists designed in labs by investment firms. Talentless was made famous by a video and some plugs. Like that female artist coming out of South Africa. It is a formula that everyone uses with the right money behind them. And fashion is no different.
People are no longer looking for talent based upon what they give; they all want to look and sound like that person who says they get 38K views on TikTok, while offering nothing original.
Posting an AI factory that never opens gets more traffic than opening a real factory in Africa
Where my lack of talent is no longer a barrier to me also creating art. Where before you needed skills to design clothes, or be a historian and a songwriter, we are all now equally creative, with AI assisting our handicap. The woman who has no business on the cover of anything men need to look at, with AI, is now Beyoncé. The old and haggard, who should probably be in a retirement home, is selling “beauty” to the youth.
And we all get to live in this alternative world where the fat are slim, and the cracked are smoothThis is what people expect now: totally fake humans. And then they try this to get this Euro look in the real world.
The quest for “equality” as “justice” creates corruption. And we with our working eyes are damned to silence.
Ugly now can be beautiful
I am looking at 20 Nigerian fashion companies on Instagram, and I honestly, if I tried, could not tell one from the other. Their platform has the same photos, the same style, the same marketing, the same products, the same business approach, and worst of all, the same mindset following them, making the same exact comments. Robots for robots.
So we are trained to understand aesthetics, design, and the politics of art. To get these gifts takes natural talent and a lot of hard work. Someone wanting them would traditionally have to follow this path. But now with AI, they can skip all of that and cosplay as scholars. The boy spending hours on the piano and uploading it to YouTube is now in competition with talentless, soulless AI-generated kids who can play with 20 fingers— and no one cares. And it spills over into the schools, my kid has to read books to get knowledge, the other kid just uses an AI prompt: To hell with the books. But we all know what goes up, has to come down. And all fictions eventually touch down in reality, where they have no hope of performing. That is why, despite the economic diversity in a given market, all the stuff looks the same. All the music sounds the same. They take a template from Rihanna and make a South African version of it. An AI research bot calculates what is trending, and all the videos thereafter look the same. Because creativity is always risky, and that is one thing AI could never do. Because it is rooted in studying what came before, and replicating it economically.
They passed the same test as their European male counterparts
And I always go back to piloting a plane, it makes no difference if you are rich, poor, African, Arab, or LGBTQ+, none of that comes into it when doing your pilot’s exam, only your talent. If we need more female Ethiopian pilots, we must create that talent, not fake it, or use identity politics to make an incompetent woman “equal” to a man, for the sake of good PR.
Back in the day, the guitar shops in London were our Weekend hangouts; these days, few are left.
AI is now here to give hope to those who had none of being creative. You no longer need hard skills; you can shortcut the system and become the next genius. But this is not my opinion, just listen to how creativity has been democratized to the untalented, at the expense of the talented. The founder of Suno claims, “making music is not fun.”
