The FASO Way newsletter — exploring how to thrive as an artist in the age of AI
This piece originally appeared on Clint’s personal newsletter, The Universal Riddle, here. We will be locking this piece in a few days to prevent duplicate content issues.
“What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits quantity.”
—William S. Burroughs
Since you are a creative person with a soul, you may have noticed that modernity—at least for those of us who care about beauty, kindness, art, and humanity—is currently a bit of a shitshow.
We live in a culture that treats beauty as optional, art as entertainment, and creativity as “content.” The “big tech” companies—particularly the dominant social media rage-inducing advertising platforms—have trained us, like laboratory rats, to create bite-sized “pieces of content” to “maximize engagement.” (That reminds me, please click “like” on this piece as I haven’t yet had my intermittent dopamine-inducing bit of digital cheese yet today. Thank you!)
And, even worse, many of the big institutions we’ve trusted to guard the sacredness of The Arts (“big art”) have followed “big tech” down this highway to hell. “Big tech” and “big art” are starting to look suspiciously like the same thing.
The major record labels no longer invest enough in developing creative young artists. Music has been reduced to content, and it is judged by the metrics of social media followers and number of streams. The labels are snapping up the rights to the music of our past rock stars because they haven’t invested in developing enough new rock stars. Record companies today are basically just private equity firms holding portfolios of past hits. Expect lots of re-releases, old music returning to the Top Forty, and even more dull biopics about geriatric or dead musicians. Maybe I’ll get to relive my teenage years and go see some original hair bands shuffling around the stage with their walkers.
One notable exception seems to be country music1, which still seems capable of producing and developing real, new stars. Whatever Nashville is doing differently, it’s working. It’s no coincidence that, even though I’m primarily a rocker, I find myself listening to more and more country these days.
Real artists deserve recognition, and so I’d like to give a shoutout to Ella Langley, Morgan Wallen, Megan Moroney, Bailey Zimmerman, Lainey Wilson, Riley Green, Kane Brown, Luke Combs, and many others for continuing to produce real human-made music for a world that desperately needs it. And let’s face it, Jason Aldean is basically hair-band rock with a twang, so double shoutout to Mr. Aldean. Power ballads live on in Nashville. Country music’s current vitality reveals what fans actually want, and the other genres should book a flight to Nashville and take some notes.
Turning to the streamers, Spotify has allowed itself to be flooded with AI-generated music. And although there is no evidence that Spotify itself is generating that music, investigations have uncovered something nearly as damning: the company has filled some of its playlists with cheaply commissioned “ghost artists” to reduce royalty costs. Nor has Spotify shown any serious interest in keeping slop, AI-generated or human-generated, off its platform.
When I listen to jazz, I want to hear Coltrane, Davis, and Monk, not third-rate knockoffs trained on their music. And when I listen to classic rock, give me Bad Company, Fleetwood Mac, and The Doobie Brothers and, for the love of all that’s holy, not the AI band The Velvet Sundown.
Plus, I’d love to see some newer real acts in these genres, but, as I said, that’s not something “big music” invests in these days.
Increasingly, outside of country, I’m going back to listening to music I own on CD/MP3 and switching to services like TIDAL that have taken strong anti-AI stances. As a streamer, TIDAL pays significantly better royalties to human artists, and I want to support that. We also find ourselves listening more to indie artists these days—artists who have never been part of the mainstream ecosystem (though they deserve to be). This increase in indie artist listening points to the trend and opportunity that prompted me to write this essay—which I am getting to.
In the movie industry, Hollywood studios are dripping saliva, like that scene from Alien, onto the cutting room floor as they think about AI. They drool hungrily at the thought of replacing expensive and sometimes-difficult human actors with cheap AI actors. One of the first attempts at an AI actor recently released an appropriately cringeworthy music video which was lampooned by everyone with more than two neurons to rub together. I certainly hope “she” can “act” better than she can “sing.” You can watch “her” here if you’d like to waste the next four minutes and sixteen seconds of your life. I don’t recommend you do.
Slop abounds. Great movies are rare these days. Netflix looks at movies as “content.” They fill the service with low-cost, low-quality videos so that it looks like you’re getting your money’s worth. Quantity over quality, I guess. We recently watched a Netflix movie that was so terrible I would have rather watched a middle-schooler’s film-class project. I can’t believe anyone actually invested money to make it. We persevered to the end because it was filmed in Italy and we desperately miss Italy. We drank some wine, talked, watched the “Italy-porn” and tried to pretend the acting was good. At least it gave us both a good laugh.
In the field of writing, there are now companies boasting that they are able to use AI to publish thousands of books at a time on Amazon. I assume these books are terrible. But sadly, they don’t have to be good; they’ll make money even if each book is only sold to a handful of gullible people.
We used to call such quantity-over-quality tactics spam. Now companies build whole business models around flooding out real art and ripping you off. They’ll take your money and give you the finger for being the obvious idiot they think you are. I, for one, propose that we stop being idiots and that we stop giving such companies our business or our attention. Let’s give them our (collective) finger.
Everywhere you look, the companies that were supposed to be the guardians of creativity seem to be trying to replace human artists with cheap content or AI. And why not? After all, to spreadsheet sluts, art is just “content” isn’t it? And content is just another word for slop. “Be a good ‘consumer’ and consume your slop.” “It’s good for the economy to eat slop, don’t you know?” “Oink. Oink.” And those little piggies said wink, wink, wink all the way “home”...to the bank.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
—George Orwell, Animal Farm
Like a third-rate abstract expressionist splattering paint in a furious frenzy after an argument with his wife, these companies are slopping their bright, attention-getting colors onto the canvas of our screens. That’s what my short story Poppa Color was really about.
Throw enough crap at the wall screen, they seem to think, and some of it just might stick. And they really, really need it to stick after spending trillions of dollars on slop-creating machines, both human and AI powered.
Believe it or not, I’m actually not completely anti-AI. I see legitimate uses—even good uses. We use it at my company in ways that support human artists. What I’m against is using it, or anything else, to create slop and then attempting to replace art with that deluge of slop. We can do better, and I will explain my view of how we can do better in a future essay.
But, on the slop front, here’s some good news as I finally approach the point of this tirade: The slop companies have a serious problem. And that problem is you and me.
Their problem is that most of us still have taste, and it doesn’t matter how much crap they fill our feeds with. It’s still crap. And there are a lot more of us who know it’s crap than these companies think.
Maybe that’s why they’re trying to get kids so addicted to AI that they can’t read or think for themselves. If they can’t sell slop to us, maybe the next generation will bite. Hey, the “hook the kids” plan has worked swimmingly for plenty of other ideologies. Maybe it’ll work for slop too. God help us if it does. God help us anyway.
As I said, the big creative institutions are abandoning us. The old powers have written us off because...
They’ve written off beauty.
They’ve written off taste.
They’ve written off meaning.
They’ve written off The Good.
They, just like the people they target, have become attention-seeking whores who hope to ensnare us with their dark arts.
Just like spammers, they’ve written off everything except the bottom line.
And that’s fine.
Because we now have an opportunity.
A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Those “big art” and “big tech” institutions have been the gatekeepers for decades—for my entire life. But to make back their investments in slop, sooner or later, they’re going to have to charge somebody market rates. And the somebody they’re going to try to charge is you.
But they are about to find out—the hard way—that while people might “engage” with free AI-slop memes on free social media, those same people—who still have taste—won’t trade their hard-earned dollars for slop.
We can be tricked into paying for garbage for a while. Eventually, though, we’ll notice that we are being fed garbage, and we’ll go looking for something better. In fact, many of us already are.
That’s their problem and that’s our salvation.
Art, the kind people pay for, is not what they think it is.
It’s about something different. It’s not about making content. It’s about making masterpieces. That’s what we understand that they don’t.
If any of you gatekeepers are reading, and I know you’re not, here’s our message to you:
If you want our money, you better provide real art—human-made art. You know, masterpieces—those things that real artists spend time, blood, sweat, and tears carefully crafting because they know that quality, craftsmanship, beauty, and soulful storytelling matter.
So, that’s their problem: We have taste. We want art that connects us to other humans.
I care that Morgan Wallen thinks the world’s insane—I see it too. I feel a slight connection to him when I hear that song; for I, too, am a “red letter rebel” and “a coyote in a field of wolves.” But I don’t care what the AI-generated band “The Velvet Sundown” thinks because “they” don’t exist to think—“they” exist only to drive revenue to somebody. Well, I’m driving the other way.
So, when the platforms take away that human connection, we will go elsewhere. And, as droves of people abandon the major platforms, in search of real art, those people are going to be looking for that “elsewhere.” Those droves are going to be looking for alternative places to find art.
Our job, as artists, is to give them those alternatives.
Some of these alternative platforms already exist: Platforms like Substack for writers, FASO for visual artists2, or Bandcamp for musicians. I don’t know what the equivalent is for movies. People will also flock to all kinds of indie outlets in local markets. It’s already started.
So, here’s the thing: We must learn to support each other and connect with each other.
Artists should help other artists. If we want a future that values human artists, then we all damn well better start supporting those people and platforms who actually do. And we better give less of our time and money to the huge platforms that don’t.
It is true that a few of the big platforms have recently made small overtures toward being more transparent about AI-generated content. That is a positive development. Their leaders may finally be starting to read the room.
However, these small concessions do not change the heart of my argument because these platforms have already shown that they are willing to reduce art to “content.” In my view, we need to trust our art to those institutions and platforms who value great art intrinsically. We need to support those who love art for art’s sake and we should move away from those who begrudgingly throw us a bone only after it begins to threaten their bottom line.
In other words, we, the artists, must, once again, become The Resistance—The Counterculture. The Outsiders. But that’s okay. That’s a great spot for us because being The Counterculture has always been our sweet spot. A vibrant culture needs a strong counterculture and, in a healthy culture, the counterculture is tolerated; sometimes even admired. A culture that doesn’t tolerate countercultures is just a cult.
The best art is rarely found in the mainstream. The world currently needs a strong counterculture. It needs us creatives to step up. Because, as Morgan Wallen says, we might be a little crazy but the world’s insane.
We are the people who must shine a flashlight into the dark corners that terrify most people. And, right now, that flashlight beam is aimed squarely at the crumbling institutions of our past who have abandoned us.
So let’s create some new ones. Creating is what we do.
Who’s with me?
PS — If our philosophy resonates with you, please join us. This is about more than just where you host your website. In a world of growing AI, this is about joining with others who wish to protect the ecosystem of human artists. It’s about working with people who view the importance of human art the same way you do. If we don’t band together in this time, we risk losing something important to the all-consuming beast of the algorithm.
When this piece published on my personal Substack, a commenter said there was a contradiction in the title using the word “taste” in the same piece that spoke positively about country music. Here is my response to that comment:
“Well, it was all
I could do to keep from crying’
Sometimes it seemed so useless to remain
But you don’t have to call me darlin’, darlin’
You never even call me by my name”—David Allen Coe
I can’t tell if your comment is serious or a snarky joke but will reply:
Though I don’t dislike (some) country music, it IS too bad a hip hop / rock / pop lover such as myself has had to turn to Nashville to find what the gatekeepers of those genres no longer seem willing to deliver.
I won’t be embarrassed for my support art of any genre that supports real, working human artists, and today’s country contains elements of those other genres that I enjoy (which I expounded upon in the article). Kane Brown is borderline hip-hop. Aldean is borderline hair-band rock. Chris Stapleton is straight up rhythm-and-blues. Morgan Wallen has a modern guitar/popish/layered vibe that I enjoy. Meghan Moroney is more millennial pop. Country seems to absorb the other genres and add a twang. At least they’re trying something new. I respect that.
But my larger point: Supporting artists—all artists—is how we get out of this mess. So, I see no contradiction.
We, the artists, need to support each other.
I don’t claim that everyone has to have the SAME taste. If you don’t like country, no problem. I don’t like opera. I prefer realist art to abstract. I generally prefer impressionism to realism (but not always). I prefer good, human-created-from-the-soul art in all genres and mediums. I hate soulless slop. We can disagree about preferences. But we should stand united against those who wish to replace us with machines and content factories.
I claimed that we, with taste, want human-made art and not slop and I stand behind that point of view.
And that’s why we build, and are expanding what FASO does and taking a stand against slop and AI-generated slopworks
Wow! Great verbal rampage and I felt all of your humanity in it!! I AM WITH YOU! I’ve been with FASO since 2019 and I’m not going anywhere. Thanks for your support and all the resources you provide to get our art shared with the world. Here’s to being human.
I greatly appreciate your emails! I'm looking at updating content and will be posting recent work soon.
In the last couple of years, my health has made painting difficult. I'm ready to get back to making art and appreciate all you do for myself and other artists. Thank you!