"It fails so majestically that we have to take note of it."
That's a 2023 quote from Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, describing his experiments with early generative AI tools like OpenAI Jukebox in the production of his album Again. Jukebox was first published in 2020; its code repository was archived a little over two weeks ago. Much happened in between.
Even as recently as 2023, AI's creative output had the distinct aesthetic shade of a blurry, druggy memory. At the risk of imparting more feeling onto the Algorithm (Nolan et al, 2020) than it deserves: if a song generated in April 2026 via Suno is indistinguishable from an anodyne filler track in a DreamWorks movie, then a song generated 6 years prior via Jukebox feels more like that same song filtered through the auditory equivalent of a Rothko forgery.
Which is not to say it's "good," necessarily. But the spectacular artistic failures of early 2020s neural networks are considerably more interesting than the sanitized outputs we see today.
I don't know which specific components of Again started with Jukebox, but I hear that spectacular failure of technology in the guitars that start 1:45 into the 4th track, "Krumville." When I hear those guitars I think of my grandparents' Gateway 2000 desktop PC hearing Nevermind for the first time, picking up guitar.exe, and trying its absolute best.
Contemporaneous image generators like DALL·E Mini shared those same qualities. The image at the top of this post was the result of a prompt I gave to an image generator in 2022:
glenn greenwald at bubba gump's on the pier
I sent this prompt to the generator knowing that whatever it returned would be hideously disfigured beyond recognition. If Glenn Greenwald made a visit to Bubba Gump's on the Santa Monica pier in 2022, the end result was likely not as hallucinatory.
But there is a real beauty to what the computer produced! And that's because there's real beauty in failure. When a system fails an attempt at plagiarism, that failure itself is undoubtedly human, even if the result isn't lifelike.
And despite many claims to the contrary, generative AI left liveliness behind many years ago. It got an industry job producing contemporary Christian rock, and it doesn't know how to get the juice back.