Interview mit Paolo & Giulio von Hour Of Penance

You used AI art – why did you decide in favour of AI and against a collaboration with an artist?
Paolo: It’s quite simple really. We chose to use an AI generated artwork because we love to experiment with new tools, we are tech enthusiasts – my daily job involves AI training and LLM [Largue Langue Model] – and we spent a lot of time learning how to use AI properly to achieve something that matches both the concept and the atmosphere of “Devotion”. We tested and studied this new tool and we found it fascinating, how a software is able to provide endless possibilities to generate crazy images from prompts that match almost exactly what you had in mind. Experimenting and breaking new ground is at the core of metal music. We did eight albums and countless shirt designs created by artists, we just wanted to try something different for once. People forget that when Emperor released “In the Nightside Eclipse” a lot of metalheads were angry at them for using keyboards in black metal. It was blasphemy at the time because it was “synthetic”. Now it’s considered a masterpiece ahead of its time. The sad reality of some parts of the extreme metal scene is that a supposedly anti-conformist scene is actually very bigoted, full of retrograde prejudices and more comfortable sitting in an idealized vision of a past that didn’t exist rather than opening their mind to new possibilities.

AI art costs virtually nothing. To what extent did this play a role in your decision in favour of AI art?
Paolo: It didn’t matter at all. The artwork costs are covered by the label anyway so we don’t have to cut corners on anything like a couple of very insightful haters implied on social media. We discussed it with Agonia Records to see if they were open to this choice and they accepted it, fully aware of the controversy that might arise.

In terms of the image itself, where do you see the advantages of AI art over „real“ art? What can AI do that a human can’t?
Paolo: Generative AI is a new technology. Right now it can only do what it is programmed to do, which is generating images, some great, some bad. It’s not art, it’s a tool that generates custom images that is in its early stage of development. At the same time, not everything is art just because a human created it. Humans produce a huge amount of low quality content, and calling it art does not make it any better, in all areas of creativity.

I think your cover clearly shows a characteristic of AI: it looks incredibly detailed, but on closer inspection none of the details really make sense. Did you take the picture „in spite of“ or „because of“ that? Why is it the perfect cover for your album?
Paolo: We chose it exactly because it looks like that, weird, deformed and unsettling, like the byproduct of a hallucinating AI. The AI is perfectly capable of creating clean images, see the Deicide-cover for example, but we ended up liking a more chaotic result for this album. We think it is the perfect cover for “Devotion” because it represents the main concept of the album. The masses worshipping false, deformed deities that do not care about their subjects. They represent our governments that always work for the few and leave everyone else with barely enough to survive. And yet we continue to grant them our devotion.

How did you actually go about creating the picture? So which AI-tool did you use, how much work went into prompting until the picture looked the way it does – was it reworked or did you take it as generated by the AI?
Paolo: We used Midjourney with an unlimited subscription plan to learn how to use it properly. We spent a lot of time experimenting to see what it was capable of, what it could do and what it couldn’t do that matched our tastes. Then we experimented to find the perfect prompt considering the main concept of the album. It was important to us that the prompt was relevant to the lyrics and their themes, and after refining the prompt with some parameters we got an output that started to look exactly like what we had in mind. We then used the variation function to generate similar images until we were happy with the final result. After that, it didn’t take much work, color correction, tones, some cropping, but that was it. It certainly took us more uncompensated time than just writing an email to someone else to do the job and have him paid by the label.

AI art is currently causing shitstorms on the Internet – did you expect this?
Paolo: We expected a certain amount of controversy, but what we didn’t expect was an organized social media commando led directly by some “artists”. If you look at all the comments on our page, the Pestilence page, the Deicide page (they actually moderated the comments now, we won’t do it. People are free to show the world if they are smart or not), it’s always the same people. A very vocal minority who mostly never even listened or cared about HOUR OF PENANCE. They came to our page just to start this shitstorm against AI, but 99% of them never even bought a patch from us. At best they stole our music from the web and will continue to do so. It’s very embarrassing for them because you can clearly see from their comments that they have no idea what they’re talking about, they don’t understand how generative AI works and they’re all parroting the same talking points that you can see on some artist pages, reposting their cheesy “NO AI” banners. Imagine if we were to post a “NO MP3, NO STREAMING” banner on our page, you would think we are some kind of backward idiots. AI is already a lot smarter than a lot of those conformist haters.

One accusation is that AI art is just a generic throwaway product – how do you respond to this, or to the accusation that you have given your music, which was made with heart and soul, an emotionless AI visualisation?
Paolo: This is another misconception, all this talk about the importance of emotions and abstract ideas that lead nowhere in a real, intelligent discussion, while we forget much more important facts. Emotions are not universal, it’s a personal world and everyone gets emotions from very different things. Even if we assume that we write good music, not everyone will be emotionally moved by it. There is no universal value in a creative product. We do our best, we express our feelings, and maybe someone will respond emotionally to that input – maybe not. Van Gogh died poor because no one wanted to buy his paintings, and many real artists have had the same sad fate. We must accept that we are not special. Just as we have accepted that the earth is not the center of the universe, we must accept that we are not needed as humans. We have to accept that maybe one day an AI will do a better job of writing music or poetry or creating art without feeling emotions. Emotions are neurological responses to external stimuli, it’s not something that’s there to make us feel special, like we’re somehow an irreplaceable exception in the universe.

Even in the past, not all artwork was artistically valuable – and some of it was simply put together on the computer (think of Iron Maiden’s „Dance Of Death“). Do you think AI art is treated unfairly?
Paolo: Yeah, it’s just a trend. You know, the internet thrives on trends so that people can feel like they are on the right side of something and that their lives have some value because of an opinion. It’s all an opiate to keep people from seeing reality for what it is. I can name dozens of great albums with terrible artworks, but people never cared before social media became this dangerous echo chamber, where everyone feels entitled to have an opinion about things they know nothing about. It doesn’t take much effort to have an opinion, but it can make you feel part of a herd. Then there’s this other lie, the „old days“ where we bought CDs because of the artwork. We were there, most people complaining today were not. We were excited to hear new music and we enjoyed it whether the artwork was good or not. We had magazines with reviews that helped us know what to buy – if it was available – and we just bought it. I remember people talking about how ugly the Pestilence cover for „Consuming Impulse“ was back then, but now it’s „cult“. It became cult because the music was actually great, not the other way around. It’s just the fetish of a better past that some people need to make sense of things.

I think the question of copyright is interesting. At the moment, lawyers agree that AI art has no de facto copyright because it is created by a machine and it cannot be a copyright holder. In the end, anyone could print your cover on T-shirts without making themselves liable to prosecution – and another band could also use it as a cover. Have you considered this?
Paolo: You technically have a kind of copyright with a subscription plan, but the law is still not clear in the EU, it’s still new territory. But let me tell you, do you have any idea how many fake t-shirts, patches, accessories and even CDs are available on the web? Do you think we can really file an international lawsuit against some guy from a developing country for stealing a licensed artwork from us? Let’s face it: The copyright issue is a non-issue for an extreme metal band like us.

Artists criticize the fact that their art has been used to train the AI and that they are now being booted out. You can’t deny that to a certain extent, because it’s a technical fact. What do you think about that?
Paolo: I think some artists are very self-centered egomaniacs and need to understand that they are not the center of the world because they spent some time learning to paint, just like I don’t think I’m irreplaceable because I can play guitar and write some music or lyrics. It’s true that generative AI uses open databases, but let’s get the facts straight: Midjourney is a closed source AI, which means that NO ONE outside the company knows how its LLM works, how it uses the databases, nor its algorithm or its neural network, we don’t know anything from a technical point of view. So when I read some arrogant sheep claiming „AI STEALS FROM THE ARTISTS“ because he read it on some other uninformed sheep page it’s just sad. Just think about how huge the database of non-copyrighted content is, everything from prehistoric art to Monet could be there. We are talking about billions of images and real art. And you think the center of Midjourney’s generative capabilities is stealing from some artist on Facebook who made some artwork for some metal band that sells a few thousand copies? Do you see how ridiculous, arrogant and self-centered this is? And finally, do you know how we could fix this so we are all on the same page? They should get $0.0001 every time Midjourney uses their content (if they ever actually use it), like we get on Spotify, so they can afford half a pizza at the end of the year too.

Giulio: I think it’s a touchy subject for sure, the problem though lies beyond the AI methods of scraping the web to get the content, and it lies in how the digital content has been handled online since the advent of search engines and social media. I don’t think anyone has ever read all the terms and conditions on Facebook (just to pick one), the moment you sign in and you start uploading photos of your dog or any image that could be yours, or reposting some artwork from an artist, that said image, which is now on their server, can be used. There is a website called https://haveibeentrained.com/ where you can check if your image has been used by any service to train AI, ironically there are even images of our past album cover with our logo on it… at this point it’s something that is impossible to rule out unfortunately … unless you delete all the content and start from scratch. Now, I’ve watched a lot of videos and documented myself on how this scraping process works, the data collected is anonymized and aggregated and then through a million different statistical patterns the AI creates a new image, that’s why our album cover looks so „abstract“ the moment you focus on the details. It’s impossible to deduce a particular artist’s style from it.

You just mentioned it – I see this as comparable to the debate about streaming, too, where large corporations make a lot of money whilst musicians don’t get a fair cut. I guess, musicians and artists are sitting in the same boat now …
Paolo: I think we got to the heart of the problem. CD sales are down about 90 to 95% compared to 2000. Most people stream either from illegal uploads or from official streams where we make next to nothing. While we’re not happy that the digital revolution has crushed sales, we decided to focus on collectibles and merchandise because that’s the only thing that still has a niche, even if much smaller. But we are not here every day complaining on social media about how digital music, the internet or whatever has taken away our chance to make a living with our music. We accepted it years ago, we still do it with passion and we try our best because we love to play Death Metal. It’s okay if we can’t make a living from it. Those are stupid first world problems. If we wanted to be rich, we wouldn’t be playing Death Metal. And again, if Van Gogh died poor, I don’t think it’s a big deal if we have to have a steady job like everyone else to make ends meet. All this talk about artist solidarity … where were all these crusaders when the digital revolution involved musicians? Probably committing a crime by illegally downloading music.

What do you think what will happen next – will AI art prevail over handmade art due to improving technology and low costs?
Paolo: Too much is unknown. I think they will coexist, but AI will probably take an increasing share of the market. AI is a tool and like any tool, it has its uses. It will help designers who need it, for example you can create an image instead of using a stock image for digital art. But there will always be someone who wants handmade art from an artist they really like. It will mostly affect low quality art and force an improvement to keep up with the AI.

Giulio: I don’t think AI will kill art, there will always be people who create art for the sake of it, because they love what they do, because it makes them feel better. The same way we feel when we play our music. I guess you can compare AI to the introduction of digital cameras in our society, anyone can take a picture with a phone or digital camera today, while professional photographers are still alive and breathing.

Even before images, it was possible to generate text with large language models. If you are open to AI images – what about AI lyrics? Would you use AI to collect text ideas or even write entire texts … or where do you draw the line?
Paolo: Of course, I already tried to see the results of asking a LLM to write lyrics in the style of HOUR OF PENANCE. The result was not too bad, but since the data pool is very limited (we only have about 80 songs) it was not very interesting and quite similar to the original material. LLM need a huge amount of data to work properly. If you ask it to generically write some death metal lyrics, the results are more interesting. I don’t feel the need to use AI to write lyrics for two reasons:  I write the vocal lines first and then the lyrics, I don’t like to work the other way around and it would be more of a hassle than a help. Secondly, I enjoy writing lyrics and expressing my ideas. I am not against it though, everyone is free to do what they want- I don’t feel the need to take a stand on everything.

We’re at a point where it is no longer inconceivable that AI will soon be making metal based on all the music on the internet – so also on yours, so to say. How would you feel about that?
Paolo: Technology is here to stay. We can waste time and effort trying to empty the ocean with a bucket or just keep doing what we like. If or when we’re no longer needed, we’ll have fun playing our songs in a garage like when we started over 25 years ago. We could start a cover band and play some classic metal. I don’t understand, why people need so much approval in their lives from some stranger to do what they want to do. It has become a disease.

Do you think there is a market for AI-music in general, but especially in Metal? Would you give it a listen?
Paolo: I’ve listened to some AI-generated music already, but it’s still a long way from the quality of LLM and image-generating AI. The main reason is that it’s not very useful commercially and since AI requires huge investment, big companies don’t care much about it. LLM can be used in thousands of ways: smartphone assistants, customer service, virtual lovers … the endless possibilities are definitely scary. But AI music, it’s more of a technical challenge for researchers and geeks than something with real commercial value. But I’m sure the time of AI music will come, and who knows, maybe it will be good and coexist with human musicians.

Let’s continue the mind game: Would you as a musician consider making music with AI, for example having it design riff variations or a melody?
Paolo: I’m not ideologically against it, it’s just that writing music is a personal challenge for me. I like to improve it, work on it, think about what I could do better and what I could change. Asking an AI to do it would take the fun out of it, but I am not afraid of it. I would still be writing music, just like when I started writing MIDI in my room 25 years ago and no one was interested in what I was doing. I don’t live to sell music like it’s a can of beans.

At the end of this interesting talk, let’s get philosophical – what is art for you? Can an AI really create „art“ – or does it need an – human – artist?
Paolo: Well, that’s a very complex question, and we need to start with the basics. What is art? Is every human creation with the intention of making a work of art really art? The tragedy of Western postmodern society is that people don’t understand that the world is cruel, and stupid phrases like „everyone is unique“, „everyone is an artist“ and so on, are just crap to put a blanket on the real issues of inequality, global warming and war. We’re a bunch of mammals, slightly more intelligent than primates on average, fighting over stupid shit like money and power. Creating something does not make you an artist and you are not an artist because you think you are one. I would never call myself an artist, I find it extremely arrogant. I even find it strange to be called an artist by other people on a website or in a magazine. I am just someone who has spent a lot of time trying to improve his skills because of my passion for music. Most of what people call real „art“ in the context of our discussion often is just not that good. It’s derivative, unoriginal. 90% of the artwork looks the same. Now it’s a trend having organic alien matter with flashy colors on the artwork or copying the style of old-school death metal artworks. I find it unoriginal but I don’t feel the urge to throw some shit against a band if they like it. If the music is good, that’s ok. Other bands just took a painting and put it on the cover. Nobody ever said „YOU STOLE ART FROM HYERONIMOUS BOSCH“. Very few people can create art. Beethoven, Dostoevskij, Caravaggio, Shostakovich, Van Gogh, Tarkovsky, even Messi is an artist in his own way. The rest of us are just normal people trying to do our best, some with more effort, while others prefer to spend more time on social media and just add „art“ to their nickname.

Thanks for your answers – the last words are yours:
Giulio: Thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to share our views on the subject. Maybe this interview will clarify our take on the matter and help people who feel outraged to look deeper into it and maybe educate themselves on how AI works instead of jumping to conclusions.

Publiziert am 1. März 2024 von Moritz Grütz