Musician's AI Project Challenges Tired Perceptions of Art and Creativity

Eclectic Method's TrishaCode makes a case

Musician and visual artist Jonny Wilson, aka Eclectic Method, has been at work on an AI project that often creeps into our feeds with captivating allure. We give you @TrishaCode, which first entered our ether on the enthusiastic recommendation of consultant and writer Matt Muir:

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The TrishaCode project boasts a series of TrishaSodes that appear every few weeks—but “she” creates a video each day. Here’s one about cats on the internet.

Trisha’s an odd entity who, in a late-night Cartoon Network sort of way, vibes like a self-referential, creative AI reckoning with a weird world that’s half human-influenced and half digital maze.

“The AI is the least interesting bit of it,” Muir told a wonky group chat we share. “There’s something about the writing (human) and the pacing (human but determined by tech) that reminds me of quick-fire sketch comedy from the late-’90s/early-’00s, the sort of thing you’d stumble across at 1 a.m. on Channel 4 or BBC 2.”

While the daily videos are flash-in-the-panny, the TrishaSodes are more elaborate, usually spanning around 15 minutes. As Muir observes, AI is the draw but hardly the most interesting aspect.

In TrishaSode 5, Eclectic Method describes the amalgam of tools that help bring the production together: “Yes it’s AI, well mostly. Used a ton of tools in this one … but mainly Luma Labs, Camenduru’s Live Portrait, Midjourney, Flux, Suno, Udio, Kling, Magix Vegas and some soft synths.”

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In addition to being musically delicious, TrishaSode 5 tosses a big wink at Minecraft and a bunch of other pop-culture references. But it’s when Trisha, the AI entity herself, starts rapping her case that things get really interesting. “We’re all a feedback loop that keeps the world turning, draw from the same pool, ideas reoccurring,” she spits. “You can ban the models but they’ll train them again.” The hook wraps the manifesto up neat: “AI is not sampling. AI is learning.”

The internet is replete with panicked missives about how AI is coming after the creative class. That’s a complicated conversation, but at least one writer—Ted Chiang—has come down on the side of AI being incapable of making art.

This argument hinges on the idea that art requires countless decisions. “An artist—whether working digitally or with paint—implicitly makes far more decisions during the process … than would fit into a text prompt of a few hundred words,” Chiang writes. In contrast, AI programs are designed to spit out lots of stuff based on small, specific prompts. “In essence, [AI companies] are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated,” he asserts.

And that’s true, from what we’ve gathered in our own AI experiments. You ask one question and ChatGPT will give you reams of responses, which then require sifting and gauging, fishing for what’s true, false and useful. It’s most interesting when used for storytelling or visual art. We’ve asked Bing AI to tell us stories, and used the same program to produce images. But even then, it takes prompt after prompt, and our fingers itch for the capacity to just take the damn thing and fine-tune the images ourselves.

It’s no surprise, then, that Chiang thinks artists can use AI and still be artists, provided that they perceive tech as one more element in their toolkit and not a replacement for creativity or humans overall—the latter being a misguided belief that usually stems from the desire to save money. (That’s going as well as you can expect.)

David Bowie notably commissioned an app called the “Verbasizer,” which analyzed sentences, jiggled them around, and randomly distributed words and themes to help him make songs. He released 27 albums over the course of his career, and his mark on music, art, advertising and the iconography of stardom is unquestionable.

Eclectic Method takes that basic premise, uses AI as a starting point, and throws more tools at it. Best case: the final product reveals multiple layers of conceptional meaning.

As our buddy Muir notes, AI is the least interesting aspect of TrishaCode, whose ever-shifting face and landscapes disorient us even as her voice—and the trademark pink that saturates her videos—lend a sense of stability to her otherwise uncanny valley.

It’s a project that’s doing something to our brains, and maybe also to the mind of Eclectic Method, who is clearly also thinking through our creative relationship to AI as he messes with the medium.

“AI gives people with ideas but no creative talent the ability to see the shape of those ideas and build them/play with them/evolve them, and I would contend that the building, playing and thinking is where the ‘art’ is,” says Muir. “I am very much of the opinion that TrishaCode is more art than latter-day Jeff Koons.”

That’s a wild opinion. But when we look at TrishaCode—and consider her undeniable digital presence and the provocative opinions she conveys amid surreal shifting environments—it doesn’t seem all that controversial.