MY THOUGHTS ON AI THIS WEEK

There is an elephant in the room that has been shapeshifting, changing dazzling colours, dancing, had celebrities riding it. This colossal being has been on the horizon for a few years, but the slowly trudging forwards has quickly turned to sprinting in circles around your living room. Threatening to take your job, your girlfriend, probably your pet and maybe planet earth itself.  When pandoras box was opened, we thought with obvious naivety that the shelf stackers would go first, windows would be cleaned by mechanical bees and amazon would be parachuting microwaves onto our roofs. So the elephants would be welcome, our governments would be prepared, that some sort of universal income would be introduced as all the manual labour jobs disappeared

Fuck me, the elephant in the rooms having none of it, it seems to have taken a leaf from the bull in a china shop and adopted a Kookaburra in the kitchen. We were expected orthodox and we now have to fight the southpaw slayer.  Chat GPT is not only telling my mum how to cook the greatest paella north of Valencia, it is also closing in on the likes of Da Vinci and Beethoven to create works of art that make us weep. This wasn’t meant to happen, the digital helper, was meant to go for the laborious jobs first and leave us with art, creativity and thinking.

First thing in the morning I’ll open instagram to see whats cracking and the amount of ai artwork that bombards me is unreal, events promo, single covers, albums. I know its the perfect storm, the cost of living crisis hit the entrepreneurs and sole traders hardest. To keep up with the keeping uppers the marketing budget is first to go and the ai robots take over and help you out.  Before you know it your musical endeavour and musical event has wiped out the whole creative department, that you couldn’t afford to pay anyway. But like that old adage says if you don’t stick up for the people around you, it will be your neck on the chopping board next.

But I get out of bed and in the shower and this is the place where all negative thoughts should be washed away, Immediately I start thinking about Jungle & drum and bass culture. We’ve been here before, this isn’t our first rodeo. I started promoting when the only equipment on stage was two turntables and a mixer, at the start of the night you would cut up tennis balls to put under the concrete slab to minimise feedback, blu-tacking pennies on the needles top stop the skipping. But in came the CDJs and out went the need for dubplates (tunes cut onto acetate before a full run on vinyl, these created the DJ hierarchy as the dubplates were expensive and only given to select DJs). Now the tunes could be mastered at home and burnt directly to CDs, the faster internet connections meant the tunes could be finished, mastered, sent around the world in time for Marky’s set in Brazil or Makoto’s set in Japan. But with the MP3’s came the pirates; Napster, Pirate Bay and now it was a free for all, the hierarchy slipped. But as usual order followed chaos, until the chaos follows order. Laptops connected to controllers, until the USB took over the laptops, the CDJs evolved with sync buttons and all manner of digital fireworks and wizardry. The chaos of this happening just before Covid lockdowns meant that we were in the wilderness again and the landscape altered and people cried in despair for the golden days. But order followed the chaos and Goldie still ruled, High Contrast still produced the best work of his life, Hospital Records still dominated and Andy C is still the best DJ. What I’m saying is evolution is disruption and the chaos from the fallout is always organised by the human beings. Goldie had a great quote about DnB sometimes not being flavour of the month, but I think we can take the sentiment and flip it to be about the chaos of evolution. He said ‘Drum and Bass goes through these phases where it is deemed ‘uncool’, but none of us give a fuck and continue to put our hearts and souls into it regardless’. And thats how I feel about the art and music, even though ai has tried to replicate and de-montise, we will still create art, because it’s in our DNA. Sometimes its cheese on toast, sometimes it’s steak for tea.

I know that like the DJs and producers before me I’m going to have to adapt to the chaos and join in with the evolution. If I don’t I know the inevitable future is to slide in obscurity and I will be left to do it just for the love (which I would except and do as designing is my burning passion, its what I’d do in my spare time if it wasn’t my job). My belief is that we create most disasters in our head and a lot of them never come into fruition. Concrete Junglists is a one man band and I already technically use ai to build the site (WIX), to advertise worldwide (Meta) and these could be considered the shelf-stacking jobs of my universe. Both these bits of ai have saved countless punch holes in laptops, its not like I haven’t tried, I have a Masters Degree in multi-media and would still rather eat my own arm than create a website. Closer to the art world, I release a new tee every month, they are printed on the 28th of the month and on sale on the first. This leaves a three day window to shoot, edit and release all the advertising material. In Wales in the winter this is close to impossible as most days are howling winds and downpours of rain and sleet. Budgets for studios, models and photographers are still a pipe dream. I’ve been experimenting with ai to create worlds that could show the tees off in a setting that remains uncompromisingly Concrete Junglists. I would still never let it take over the full gamut of photographing models and would only be a hybrid at worst, but when the art becomes a chore or the deadline unrealistic the brand could creatively use the tool to its advantage. My love is the art and I pain over small lines hidden meanings and that is what the ai will save is time to concentrate on that, whilst still maintaining the brand to be fully independent. This is the fork in the road I am at, at this very moment, do I even let it in a little bit or do I soldier on into a world where I’m slowly becoming the dying breed.