Last night, I was at a friend's place for dinner and at some point, he whipped out his phone and asked us for prompts to generate a song on the go. We settled on something eccentric like a drum ‘n bass jazz song with intense guitar riffs, a splash of jungle and opera vocals.

At first, the music sounds impressive. Clearly, it knew what drum ‘n bass was and two out of four songs had integrated jazz so yes, for anyone not paying attention, this sounds, well… sufficient, I think is the best word to describe it. I can certainly see the appeal for streaming services to put this kind of music in their “lo-fi background music” playlists as it works just fine as that.

But, as with all AI art, it starts crumbling down the moment you start paying attention. The piano riff was abominably cheesy and low-quality, the lyrics straight up made no sense at all but were clearly inspired by the style of modern pop music lyrics where a few interesting life-affirming buzzwords are smashed together to sound profound but on close inspection add up to nothing. It served its purpose as a nice piece of after-dinner entertainment.

With real, let’s call it human art, the opposite is the case. The more attention you pay, the more it starts to come to life. Details start unveiling themselves and the mastery of the artist slowly shines through. It reveals the deep knowledge they have about the world and the sheer amount of hours that have been put into making this piece of art. It comes to life.

I remember very clearly when I stood in front of Rembrandt’s famous The Night Watch painting being struck in awe by how ridiculously beautiful it is. How stunning and realistic everything looks and how many tiny little details adorned the painting to become something I can understand people come back for over and over.

When Picasso was sitting in a café being asked to make a drawing on a napkin, of course, he was able to ask millions for it. It’s not the 40 seconds that took him to make it, it’s the 40 years it took him to master the skill to draw that doodle.

It’s the same with music. I could argue even more so, as it’s so ephemeral. My favourite songs reveal new details after years of listening to them.

Human art has a level of intention and detail that AI art can just only dream of. By its very definition, it is mediocre at best and infringes on all that we hold beautiful at worst. Because there is a real danger that AI lowers the bar of what we think of as art until we don’t care about whether it’s made by Picasso or a computer. Or we can’t see or hear the difference any more.

AI has its place in this world. It’s amazing at coding, at summarising, and it’s great to get started on learning new things, for instance, but it will never be “art in service of the mind” as Duchamp put it.

Be attentive to what you consume and if it breaks down when you pay attention, it’s probably not worth your time. What do you think?