How ChatGPT Helps Make Independent Artists into Independent Hobbyists

My friends divide neatly into two groups, writers and musicians.

My writer friends tend to do okay in life. They typically have spouses or jobs or kids, sometimes all three, and they get on in the world as one might expect folks to get on. I don’t worry too much about them, any more than I worry about any of us.

My musician friends are less likely to be okay. They’re less likely to have spouses and jobs and kids. They’re less likely to have stable lives that offer protections from downturns and unforeseen events. This is, by and large, their choice, but it’s not like that stops me from worrying about them. They made and make their decisions, and that’s fine, but I sometimes wonder how they make it through the day.

What do these musician friends want from music? I think I know, because I’m quite a bit like them. They’ve all had some success in their musical ventures, but that success happened a while ago. They recognize we no longer live in a world where that success is likely repeatable, and it wasn’t much likely in the first place. There is little hope in 2023 that they might be discovered by some record executive who would pay them to record their songs, or by some club owner who would put them onstage with regularity, or by some manager who would get them on a tour and promote their careers. They instinctually look for something magical to happen in their musical lives. It’s how their brains work, and they do whatever they can to keep the magic alive.

The world has changed quite a bit since they started down this path. There are now few people whose job it is to find musical talent. The dream that you’re going to woo some industry person into signing you is by and large a thing of the past. That job has been taken over by the internet. If you have musical talent, the idea is, you’ll eventually have success garnering interest from folks online through YouTube or Spotify or Tik Tok, and the funding of your work will occur without the middlemen of the traditional music industry. Either that, or the middlemen will show up after you’ve proven your money-making capacity on the internet and not before.

If you think about it, this was the world many musicians fought for. Among most rock musicians back in the day, the music executive was a primary target of ire. This perceived person—few of us actually knew a music executive—was someone who signed lame acts to big contracts, and we were forced to listen to these acts through radio and MTV. These executives had—so the story went—no musical talent, and they decided which acts would go on to support themselves through the industry and which would flounder. We believed these people could not tell a good musical act from a lame one, and they continually made life harder for the real musical artists who struggled every day to have their music heard. It was unfair.

Well, now it’s “fair.” We have a world where most anyone can release anything musical into the world, and most anyone can experience or purchase it. We could argue about how well this has worked out for musicians. The thing that seems indisputable to me—after a few decades of watching the digital music market develop and participating in it as both buyer and seller—is that music listeners generally seem less enchanted by the idea of a new song or album coming out these days. They might give it a listen or half listen for free on the internet. Then again, they might not. They probably won’t purchase it without some serious cajoling from you. Your only real financial hope as a musician is that your audience might appreciate your free music enough to pay for a concert ticket someday. If they do so, you have to get your show on the road, which means lots of time and expense to be away from home to entertain the masses. Will they pay for a ticket? Will they buy a CD or T-shirt once they’re at your show? These are things you have to take on faith. You book the tour and hit the road. You hit the audience up from every stage, remind them that you can only do this if you’re supported financially through the purchase of product. Some will, bless them, buy an album or T-shirt. It might help you break even or profit a little. It might encourage you to try the whole thing over again next year, or you might come to realize that there isn’t enough of a demand for your music and fold up your touring act.

None of the above has led to musicians like my friends being able to sustain their lives through music. They aren’t that ambitious. They haven’t been that lucky. They’re not entrepreneurial enough to handle the logistics of putting together an album release or tour. They’d rather keep it closer to the ground, hope for something to pop up around the corner with a gig at a local club or some other opportunity. They’ll play as hired hands for other artists if it means they can keep the dream alive and take home some cash. Maybe that’s where the magic will happen.

Live local gigs, both on their own and with others, have sustained their fading dreams for decades by now. Of course, live gigs took a serious blow over the past few years when COVID brought live music to a virtual standstill. For a while, there were no gigs, and the musicians I know were forced to adjust. They learned how to play live online. They released YouTube videos of their new songs. They played shows where masks were required. Or maybe they just hunkered down at home and worked on new material or learned a new instrument. Things might turn around, and they’d be ready when they did.

Let me tell you everything I know about ChatGPT. It’s a free online service that creates content for you. You can, for example, tell ChatGPT to write a research paper for you on a certain topic of a certain length, and it will do it. This particular program is different from every free computer program like it in that the pieces it creates have the capacity to fool the layperson into thinking that it was written by a person as opposed to a program. ChatGPT doesn’t create campy, Max Headroom-like content that we can all tell was created by a computer—unless of course you ask it to. It creates content that can fool us into thinking it was created by a human. Every student from grade school through college must have rejoiced at the news of this service. You never have to write anything again. Pop a few terms into the system, and your English homework is finished.

A writer friend brought into our writers’ group a poem written by ChatGPT. This writer is also a school administrator, and it became important for her to be aware of the way ChatGPT might be impacting her students’ homework. It was a fun thing that everyone in the group was interested in on some level. The poem was strangely nuanced in its composition, like a human had written it.

One last connection for me to this technology: A songwriter friend of mine with some success in the 90s used ChatGPT to write a verse in his own songwriting style. The verse was so convincing that he only had to change the words minimally to include it in one of his new songs.

That’s the extent of my knowledge about ChatGPT. I’m sure you know more such stories or have perhaps used the service yourself. I get that the program has capacities well beyond these types of minor applications and that my examples are merely the tip of the iceberg of what it has to offer. I also get that there are legitimate questions about whether ChatGPT infringes on the copyrights of the works it uses to create its content. Those are important issues, but I’ll keep my discussion focused on ChatGPT’s capacity for creating what we might call creative content, and what it means for people like my musician friends.

What this technology means for them is, on its surface, negligible. Most of the folks I’m talking about long ago gave up on the idea that they might someday write a song that would change their circumstances. They often still love writing music, but they’ve moved on to focus on corralling live local gigs, sideman gigs, or cover gigs, or they’ve abandoned music altogether. If one of them were to write the 2023 equivalent of “Like a Rolling Stone,” I don’t think they imagine it would change their lives much. There’s not really a lane for that kind of artistic expression anymore, or at least a lane that might be mistaken for a reliable income stream. If one of them did write such a song, I’d recommend they play coffee houses and bars as many nights a week as possible, performing that special song every time and hope—a decade or so from now—that the overall impact on those many small audiences eventually changes their circumstances. Good art has to shine through eventually, right?

In any case, to these folks, ChatGPT is just another technological advance that makes the emergence of the next Bob Dylan—and the level of human interest in him that might benefit a slew of downstream songwriters—even less likely than it already was. If ChatGPT hasn’t already achieved Dylan-levels of songwriting creativity, I don’t doubt it’s coming. I think of these struggling musicians the way I think of poor people in developing countries dealing with climate change. Yes, they know even harder times are nigh, but what are you gonna do? It’s just another thing they’ll have to deal with.

My reaction to this new technology from March 2023 to today is the same: Does anyone actually want art created by ChatGPT or similar algorithm? I find the idea specious. I look at my bookshelf, with its collection of books spanning the decades of my reading life. The connection of each one of these 200 or so books to an actual person is essential to my attraction to it. If one of these great works was written by an algorithm, I instinctually wouldn’t want it. It would be devoid of meaning. Without a consciousness behind the words—without a fellow human to connect with—there would be nothing there for me to read.

Likewise with music. When I hear a favorite song, I imagine the artist writing or singing it. For me, this human connection is vital to caring about the song. If I didn’t believe someone was behind it, it wouldn’t matter.

Why do I feel this way? Why don’t I just listen to a song in a vacuum and enjoy it or not based on what unravels in my ears? There were once these types of book critics called New Critics who famously didn’t consider anything outside of the words on the page. They didn’t care who wrote the work or any details about that person’s life. They offered close readings of the work, tried to mine the meaning of the words without acknowledging the fact that there was an author behind them. What would the New Critic make of a piece written by ChatGPT? In the purest sense, they’d have to be completely open to it, right? Does their lack of critical concern with who wrote the work extend to examples where a person didn’t write it? Does the New Critic contract between writer and reviewer get broken if an algorithm instead of a person is behind the work? Why should it? Shouldn’t we be focused on whether the work impacts the reader?

Of course, there are people behind these algorithms. Software engineers use digital technology to mine past art to create a kind of amalgam work. Why can’t I get behind these works as somehow the products of these software engineers? I have nothing against software engineers. I use their products all the time. I’m on record as loving online banking, digital word processing, and music production software, to name three of many programs. My world is way more convenient through the use of these products. I don’t ever want to live a life where I can’t employ them. Moreover, I’ve done some paint-by-numbers computer coding, and it’s not an easy job. It’s frankly tedious as hell, so respect where respect is due.

I also can’t get behind these works as amalgams of the works of past practitioners because I recognize that these past practitioners in no way benefit from the use of their work by ChatGPT. They don’t get paid for it. They’re not likely to gain a better foothold in life because of the use of their work by this technology. Their legacies as artists are not recognized through this use. ChatGPT takes from them and gives little to nothing back, mirroring a series of internet-related advances stretching back to the 1990s. The mode, while not without its consolations, doesn’t lift the artists up. It tears them down.

As much as I talk about my concern for losing one more grain of hope for my musician friends, I’m most afraid of what it might mean for folks younger than them, and this concern cuts two different ways. First, I know how important the music business was to me as a kid. I know how much hope I had wrapped around the idea that I might someday make a living from my musical work, and I fear that they won’t have the same opportunities. We no longer live in a world where a handful of musical artists makes $6 million a year but where a million artists make $6 a year. The advantage of this new digital system is that almost anyone can do it. Most any contemporary PC allows for access to a recording studio, YouTube, Bandcamp, social media, and many more tools to aid a fledgling musical artist. You supply some talent, and you can produce it and disseminate it to the folks you can reach. With ChatGPT, now anyone who can type some criteria into a search box can create content with the capacity to stimulate or even enchant. Musical talent, threatened for decades by digital technology, now is no longer required. I suppose choosing criteria is a kind of talent, making the user a kind of designer, but it’s one that’s hard for me to get excited about. Because of ChatGPT, that $6 a year will go down, along with any hope for a livelihood as an artist.

Secondly, what kind of “artists” is this new technology likely to spawn? I imagine deeply ambitious people who think that their ability to choose criteria equates with creating original work. Such personality types have existed forever, but they abound in 2023. I’m reminded of a time when Kel and I lived in San Francisco. This was 2000. We searched for an apartment in the city during the first dotcom boom, and we struggled to find a place that would accept our dog. We wound up looking at a house in Sausalito—too rich for our blood—but we were getting desperate. Maybe this Sausalito listing would work out somehow.

We arrived at the apartment and were let in by a guy, maybe 65 years old, wearing a cravat. He showed us around and took us out to the back yard, where a large deck expanded just outside the glass door. “I put this in last year,” he said, motioning to the deck. I was confused. He seemed too old to put in a deck, and he struck me as of a certain class of people who didn’t put in decks. These people had decks put in.

Putting a deck in is not a matter of choosing criteria and giving someone some money to fulfill the criteria. It’s about drawing up plans and picking up lumber and getting that scary saw going and no doubt dealing with several other aspects I’m not skilled enough in the area to know about. I respect the craft and skill. I also respect great pop songs and great pieces of writing. To this point, it’s been nice not to have to get too caught up in whether a person was behind the work. It was a luxury I didn’t know I had.

But now we have to. I can’t hear a song or read a piece and assume it was actually written by a person. You can’t assume this piece is written by me (it is). This new stumbling block is going to cheapen the experience of music listening and prose reading overall, and it’s enough reason to regulate this technology to the point that we don’t have to worry about the pieces we encounter as being written by bots. 

Let me tell you about James McMurtry. He’s a 61-year-old singer-songwriter who’s been making records since 1989. I’ve been listening to his albums since 2008 when a friend gave me his live album. McMurtry’s most recent album, The Horses and the Hounds, came out in 2021, and it features the single “Canola Fields.” I mention it here because it’s the kind of track that, a few decades ago, would’ve been a big deal. How do I know? Because it’s simply too good and too accessible and too universal not to be recognized and loved by other people: people in the business, fans, anyone who might appreciate a good song.

The industry that might support such a song is entirely different from the one we have today. Of course, McMurtry’s label has gotten his album out at all the usual places in the 2020s, but there just isn’t the kind of network anymore to take such a song beyond his loyal fans. Instead, McMurtry continues to play the venues he’s played for decades. He comes to my town here and there, where no doubt a few hundred people show up and drink beer and hear one of our great contemporary songwriters do his thing. It’s a way to pay the guy, who is pretty much a contemporary Bob Dylan (or at least John Prine). If you do one thing after reading this essay, buy his single “Canola Fields.”

So, the returns have been diminishing for creative folks since the rise of the internet and digital technology, probably even for people like McMurtry, not to mention my musician friends, and ChatGPT is the new reason to despair.

Unless we regulate it. We regulate all kinds of things engineers make: drugs, cosmetics, infant formula, tobacco, alcohol. These engineers aren’t wrong to want to develop these products, but we are if we think everything an engineer creates ought to be freely disseminated with no consideration for its effects on society. A simple question to ask of any new technology might be: does it take away jobs humans don’t want, or does it take away fulfilling ones? We can disagree one what a fulfilling or unfulfilling job is. If you found life as a janitor fulfilling, I would support limiting ChatGPT or some other technology from encroaching on the fulfillment of your life. Why would we create a digital replacement for tasks people actually want to do? Because it’s cheaper for companies and therefore better for the economy? We all know which way those cost savings travel, and it’s not into the pockets of musicians like my friends.

As a touring musician in the 90s, I was amazed by Canada’s radio stations. They seemed to make a point to play Canadian artists: Rush, Gordon Lightfoot, The Tragically Hip. How cool that these stations supported their homegrown artists and national identity. I brought it up to a radio promoter, who set me straight. By law, 35 percent of the playlist of any Canadian radio station had to be Canadian artists. Yes, over one-third of all of the music played on these stations has to come from Canada. These stations weren’t necessarily playing Canadian artists out of the goodness of their hearts. The commitment to a national musical identity was baked into the country’s laws. No doubt, if left entirely to the free market, artists from the U.S. or Britain eventually would’ve taken over the airwaves. Canadian people wanted something other than an international pop music invasion, and because they regulated their system, they have it.

As stated earlier, ever since I heard about ChatGPT, my one question has been, Does anybody actually want this? Not corporations or the entertainment industry—who no doubt salivate at the idea of not having to pay creative people—but real people. Do we want to live in a world where a substantial portion of the art we experience is created through such methods? If we do, then there you go. If we don’t, then let’s start a resistance.

Here's one example of what the resistance might look like. People might walk around in green hats that say REAL ARTIST. Each carries a backpack filled with their physical product. You go up to these people and hand them a 20-dollar bill, and they give you one of whatever they have in their backpack. That’s it. No song and dance, no Amazon, no YouTube, no credit card company. Their customers might be fortunate people in society who have weekly or monthly budgets of 20s, and they buy product over that period from green-hatted people until their 20s are gone. Maybe they like the product. In that case, they’ve enriched their lives and no doubt have new search terms for the internet to find more from the artist. If they don’t, they drop the product into the garbage or recycle bin and know that at least they’ve supported art created by people.

Yes, the environment will take a hit from the wasting of physical product, and it’s fair to worry about it. I’m not an expert in these issues, but I doubt digitizing all of our art (and everything else) is a great thing for the environment. Maybe these green-hatted artists take a vow not to digitize their works, thereby making up for their reliance on physical product, or maybe they don’t tour.

Also, these artists of course take a vow not to use ChatGPT to create their work. It’s easy to imagine green-hatted frauds getting away with bogus work here and there, but it’s also easy to imagine resourceful artists taking pride in doing it themselves. I suspect many ChatGPT designers would never want to work so hard as to fill a backpack and hit the street.

Perhaps I find such an artist movement easy to imagine because I spent a decade or so helping my wife sell her visual work at art fairs. These fairs were created in the 1960s by creative folks disillusioned with the effects of records, books, and magazines on society. As they saw it, artists in these mass-produced realms could create a painting or write a book or record a song and then make millions of copies of it to sell to people. I obviously have nothing against these types of artists—I am this type of artist—but where did their ubiquity leave a painter who could create an original work every time they sat down? Or an artist who with nothing but a pencil could render original works of birds or buildings or vistas at the drop of a hat? Typically, these artists sold their work through galleries, but galleries back then tended to occupy big cities on the coasts—a world inaccessible to many artists, not to mention their potential patrons. Wouldn’t we have lost something if these types of artists had had no path to commercial success?

Hence, groups of artists banded together to start art fairs. These fairs typically happened outdoors, and typically in cities without prominent gallery systems. Once a year, people would descend upon the art fair of their area and buy original works directly from artists. These fairs expanded over the decades to the point that now any major city has several of them a year. The fairs were and are far from perfect, but they’re something, and they’ve provided a living for generations of original artists.

Similarly, we need to create a lane for musicians like my friends who have seen their chances at a living diminish with the rise of digital technology, capped by Chat GPT. What would that lane look like? Don’t like my green hat idea? Great. Come up with a better one, only don’t make the good idea a slave to the perfect.

We’re quickly running out of time before this technology is engrained in our culture and becomes too big to fail. Below is a quote from a Facebook friend from August 2023. “Getting a free trial of Audible to listen to Werner Herzog read “I Am Code” is totally worthwhile. It's a book of (bad) poetry written by AI that gets creepier and creepier as it goes along […] I would actually recommend doing this...It's great.” Amazon recently limited the number of books published by a single publisher to three books per day. Unless someone is writing a book for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, that’s the effect of ChatGPT.

I’d venture that folks in 2023 get more artist work for free than what they pay for. I’d put myself in that category. Enjoy whatever you feel compelled to enjoy for whatever you’re willing to spend, but let’s also build a new avenue for creative people to continue to do their thing. It would support the artists we have now and give the next generation of artists a little hope.