Saturday, July 05, 2025

Why the priests of Art Religion can't accept an AI-generated offering on its altar: remainder humanism; AI-generated music; and a figural reading of Levitical rites on the question of whether The Velvet Sundown is even a real band

First off, hope you had a happy and safe 4th of July if you, too, are a citizen of the United States. The essay is after the break.

The era of the internet is an era of self-publication and among Christian authors and bloggers in the post-industrial West the whole scene of Christian blogging is rife with metacultural speculation.  Much of it amounts to hot takes on hot takes.  I remember reading a blog post that was thousands of words long ruminating on the significance of two stupid lines in the trailer for Rogue One that didn’t even make it into the theatrical cut of the film. But lately there’s been blogging and journalism about the moral and existential crises endemic to AI generated music and because writers I regular read have been circling around these issues I figured I’d finally get around to writing something about The Velvet Sundown.  It is the convergence of blogging by the likes of Alan Jacobs and Ted Gioia with the vodcasting of Rick Beato that got me thinking of all this stuff, along with reading Jacob Milgrom and the lately deceased Gordon Wenham on the Book of Leviticus.  You’ve been warned, this post won’t necessarily make sense if you don’t already know Leviticus and Theodor Adorno.  So, here we go … .
 
I’m improvising on a couple of riffs here by way of Alan Jacobs’ blog.  The first riff is considering the idea of Remainder Humanism or “The Humanism of Leftovers”.
 
https://blog.ayjay.org/two-quotations-on-the-humanism-of-leftovers/
 
Leif Weatherby:
 
Remainder humanism is the term I use for us painting ourselves into a corner theoretically. The operation is just that we say, “machines can do x, but we can do it better or more truly.” This sets up a kind of John-Henry-versus-machine competition that guides the analysis. With ChatGPT’s release, that kind of lazy thinking, which had prevailed since the early days of AI critique, especially as motivated by the influential phenomenological work of Hubert Dreyfus, hit a dead end. If machines can produce smooth, fluent, and chatty language, it causes everyone with a stake in linguistic humanism to freak out. Bender retreats into the position that the essence of language is “speaker’s intent”; Chomsky claims that language is actually cognition, not words (he’s been doing this since 1957; his NYT op-ed from early 2023 uses examples from Syntactic Structures without adjustment).
 
But the other side are also remainder humanists. These are the boosters, the doomers, as well as the real hype people — and these amount to various brands of “rationalism,” as the internet movement around Eliezer Yudkowsky is unfortunately known. They basically accept the premise that machines are better than humans at everything, but then they ask, “What shall we do with our tiny patch of remaining earth, our little corner where we dominate?” They try to figure out how we can survive an event that is not occurring: the emergence of superintelligence. Their thinking aims to solve a very weak science fiction scenario justified by utterly incorrect mathematics. This is what causes them to devalue current human life, as has been widely commented.
 
Me, a year ago:
 
I doubt I will be safe for much longer. I can easily find myself in a position like that of the theologian who worships — this is a famous phrase from one of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison letters — “the God of the gaps,” a deity who only has a place where our knowledge fails, and whose relevance therefore grows less and less as human knowledge increases. If I can only pursue a “pedagogy of the gaps,” assignments that happen to coincide with the current limitations of the chatbots, then what has become of me as a teacher, and of my classroom as a place of learning? At least I can still assign my explications — a pathetic kind of gratitude, that.
 
No; there’s no refuge there. I must then begin with the confident expectation that chatbots will be able to do any assignment that they are confronted with. What follows from that expectation?
 
Jacobs’ connecting the dots of remainder humanism and god of the gaps is salient.  I think, of course, of Ted Gioia because he wants a new Romanticism and wants the algorithm defeated and for the tech overlords to be shown up.  The trouble is that it was back in Romanticism 1.0 that people began to distinguish between “real” and “fake” with particular attention to ethnic and racial details.  As Charles Rosen described the Romantic era, in the wake of Beethoven there emerged a kind of music that had an elevated style that aspired to be sublime but was often simply beautiful and Rosen didn’t hesitate to finger Felix Mendelssohn as someone who was identified as creating religiously kitsch music. We should hardly ignore that in a post Wagnerian era of Art Religion Jews have been consistently singled out for being “fake” compared to “authentic” and really “German” composers. Embracing cheese and camp are no safeguards against “fake” because we’re still dealing with dualisms introduced in the wake of German Idealism.  The rise of artificial intelligence as a product used to generate music makes the crisis of Art Religion more acute if music has supposedly been this inscrutable magic that machines can’t replicate.
 
Now whether or not The Velvet Sundown even is or isn’t a “real” band, it could be a random sample that tells us that in one important way Theodor Adorno was right warning that the build-a-bear pre-fab approach to the song factory ethos spanning from Tin Pan Alley into the present did one terrible thing wrong by doing it so well, making music that does all the work of listening for the hearer in advance of the listener hearing it.  Adorno complained that all those hit songs were schematic and prefabricated so as to do all the listening and thinking for the audience, who could shut their brains off and just soak up the ambience.  It’s why nothing Ian Bogost could write could have even the slightest bite in the wake of Adorno’s fusillades from almost a century ago against the interchangeable parts of the average hit song.  Artificial intelligence may not be intelligence but it may be the greatest vindication of Adorno’s complaint against formulaic songwriting, the formulas have become so entrenched after a century of hit-making industries that the industry can no farm out the writing of hit songs to bots.
 
https://blog.ayjay.org/two-quotations-on-giving-up-and-giving-in/
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/07/velvet-sundown-ai-band-spotify/683410/
 
Nobody cares, the title says. Nobody. 
As I drove and the music played, I felt nothing — but I felt that nothing with increasing acuteness. I was neither moved nor sad nor pensive, just aware of the fact that my body and mind exist in a tenuous zizz somewhere between life, death, and computers. This is second-order music listening, in which you experience the idea of listening to music. What better band to provide that service than one that doesn’t even exist?
But looking toward the blushing sky ahead of me, I realized that I didn’t even want this music to be art, or to feel that I was communing with its makers. I simply hoped to think and feel as little as possible while piloting my big car through the empty evening of America. This music — perhaps most music now — is not for dancing or even for airports; it’s for the void. I pressed play and gripped the wheel and accelerated back onto the tollway, as the machines lulled me into oblivion. 
Second quotation: 
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding!
O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. 
 
If all these points are taken then it just means that Adorno was write when he wrote “On Popular Music”.  Even conservatives like Roger Scruton didn’t exactly dissent from Adorno’s damning appraisal of popular song.  But Adorno didn’t think there was actually “freedom” in classical music, either.  Beethoven had become as formulaic and schematic by 1940 as pop songs and, worse, he saw American “music appreciation” programs as reducing Beethoven to half-minute soundbite distillations of “profound” in much the same way that pop songs about romantic love spiritually castrated the people who kept listening to them on Top 40 radio.  Neither pop nor classical music was any better or worse than the other under the demonic reign of monopoly capitalism.
 
Yet Adorno was ultimately wrong about American song and dance music. His rejection of tonality as “used up” did not mean he ultimately endorsed the integral serialism that came later. In fact Adorno damned integral more serialism more vehemently than Roger Scruton or John Borstlap or any guy connected to what used to be called the Future Symphony Institute.  Adorno’s double bind was left hanging in the spaces of the academic discourses that preserve his mixed bag of ideas.
 
Meanwhile, who actually has an answer for what the missing thing is from the “nothing” at the heart of what is supposed to be AI generated music? Back in the day of Richard Wagner enough people knew enough about the Abrahamic religions to understand what the concept of Art Religion was parasitically dependent upon, the concept of sacrifice.
 
Sheldrake style vitalism will miss the point of sacrifice if the concept of sacrifice isn’t explicitly invoked.  Ted Gioia can talk about shamans but it’s easy to miss the literal guts of what shamans worked with and what technical diviners examined.  Something has to die and blood gets shed.  That’s the difference between a spell being cast by a flesh and blood person and the same spell being performed by an executable script.  In more Abrahamic terms, the animal you offer to sacrifice has to be a real and not a virtual creature.  You have to wash out the dung or burn it up in the fire as applies to the specific offering in question.
 
In Pentecostal Christian theology there is an idea that God inhabits the praises of His people.  In the Levitical sacrificial system you could offer burnt offerings that were a pleasing aroma to the Lord.  Artificial intelligence can be thought of as a virtual sacrifice, the kind where it didn’t cost anyone any labor or toil and no blood was shed and it didn’t have to be handed over to a priest who would put the blood of the sacrifice on the altar to cleanse it of the impurities and iniquities of the person offering the sacrifice or to count as thanks and praise for God’s generosity.  AI generated music can be thought of (and is obviously condemned) as a simulation of a musical work that, from flesh and blood humans, demonstrated acts and processes of sacrifice.  There’s a sense in which, if I shift the metaphor to military bloodshed instead of sacrificial offerings, that for partisans of Art Religion the great sacrilege of AI generated music is that it is the ultimate form of stolen valor.  Saul slew his thousands, David his tens of thousands, but bot-generated Chad Heartthrob Quartet slew hundreds of thousands of Karens with their four-chord soul-bro stylings.
 
If Adorno had no good points his blistering condemnation of the formulaic nature of hit songs wouldn’t have been shown to be as right as it was by the crises generated, ahem, by AI generated music.  Adorno could be wrong about the “what” of the possibilities of American popular music while having been right about the problems he saw in the “how” of its production.  A fair-minded and generous approach to Adorno’s ideas should be able to draw upon his good ideas and reject his bad ideas without resorting to facile veneration that too often happens within the left or the doctrinaire well-poisoning that has happened on the right.
 
But there is another issue that comes up in the question of whether the AI generated song, as a kind of virtual sacrifice, is bloodless and unacceptable as a sacrifice within the sacrificial rubric of post Wagnerian Art Religion, it also reintroduces matters of cost.  It is here that the idea of cultural appropriation can be introduced.  I am aware there are conservatives and classical partisans who hate the idea of cultural appropriation but the nature of the concept is extremely easy to understand and explain in light of Levitical sacrificial concepts and prophet critiques of the abuse of the sacrificial rites in the Hebrew prophets. 
 
In Leviticus we see that hearers are told that when you offer a sacrifice you will take one of your animals from your flocks.  It has to be a good and healthy and perfect animal. You lay hands on it and the animal gets killed (by you) and the priest puts blood on the altar and so on.  The point is that the person who offers the sacrifice didn’t steal someone else’s animal to offer on the altar.  The animal was inspected to ensure it was healthy and without blemish. A charge of cultural appropriation is parallel to the charge that AI generated music lacks legitimacy because there is no sacrifice. There’s no blood to the offering but, crucially as well, the AI music could only have been created by taking the works of others as a starting point for imitation and replication.  In the wake of the Romantic era and the cult of the Artist Genius, the AI generated song is bloodless and a pallid imitation of a real and valid sacrifice, a sacrifice that cost somebody (else!) a great deal. When King David sought to offer a sacrifice in the wake of the disastrous census mentioned in 2 Samuel 24, he insisted he did not want to offer burnt offerings to the Lord that cost him nothing.   The force of the prophet Nathan’s parable to David about his wickedness hinged upon David’s ability to understand that taking the lamb that belonged to someone else to offer as food for guests was evil.
 
The concepts seem clear and simple on why people feel a moral aversion to AI generated music if we reach back to Jewish and Christian theological concepts about sacrifice and the reality of shed blood; and Ted Gioia could probably easily point out that shamans and technical diviners looked at actual animal livers.  The moral aversion to AI generated music for advocates of Art Religion is quite a bit harder to explain on the basis of what Charles W Mills called the hegemonic dominance of Rawlsian liberalism and no one committed to a progressive or post-Marxist politics is even going to have anything useful to say about music at all (I merely allude to Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs by way of a shooting fish in a barrel example). 
 
Remainder humanism has clearly not worked out and it will not work out.  If you want to say that the real grain offering of a flesh and blood human counts for more than a virtual bull on the altar of Art Religion you need to at least be literate enough in the concepts of religion to make that case; falling back on post-Marxist secular theories of art or on Rawlsian liberalism will not give you reasons to object to AI generated music somehow being less than ”real”.  In those two paths the end of global liberation and social contractarianism are ends unto themselves, political aims for which any and all art might be useful tools.  The priests of Art Religion want to be able to give a clear “no” for why a virtual sacrifice cannot be offered on the altar of their god but they can never give that answer if they are not speaking and writing as priests who can draw upon priestly concepts.

POSTSCRIPT 7-7-2025
Because I don't tend to read Rolling Stone (maybe it's safe to say that someone who eagerly awaits the recording of the second half of Nikita Koshkin's 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo guitar wouldn't be regularly reading RS!) I didn't spot this at the time of blog post publication

...

The AI band The Velvet Sundown, who currently have over 900,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, have officially admitted — in a new revision to their Spotify bio — what was obvious to experts and non-experts alike: their music is, in fact, AI-generated.

 

“The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence,” the band bio now reads. “This isn’t a trick — it’s a mirror. An ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI.”

 ...

Right, like trick mirrors don't exist in the real world. 



Circling back to my figural reading take on Leviticus and the animals sacrificed, you know what else besides blood all those sacrificed animals had that had to be dealt with?  Their dung, of course.  All that stuff the animal didn't metabolize that had to be excreted was there and there are instructions for how that crap is supposed to be taken outside the camp and burned in some of the sacrificial rites.  

For those of you who don't make a habit of reading Leviticus now and then here's a passage, chapter 4:8-12
8 And all the fat of the bull of the sin offering he shall remove from it, the fat that covers the entrails and all the fat that is on the entrails 9 and the two kidneys with the fat that is on them at the loins and the long lobe of the liver that he shall remove with the kidneys 10 (just as these are taken from the ox of the sacrifice of the peace offerings); and the priest shall burn them on the altar of burnt offering. 11 But the skin of the bull and all its flesh, with its head, its legs, its entrails, and its dung— 12 all the rest of the bull—he shall carry outside the camp to a clean place, to the ash heap, and shall burn it up on a fire of wood. On the ash heap it shall be burned up.
There's real blood and real crap with a real sacrifice. The idea that people have danced around on what it is about AI-generated music that seems so virtual can be expressed in other ways, obviously, but in the wake of Wagnerian Art Religion it makes the point forcefully that someone bringing an animal to a priest has to kill the animal himself and then the priest puts the blood on the altar.  AI has none of that and perhaps it's fitting that critics and journalists, so often the priests of post-industrial Western art religion, feel the crisis of AI generated music most acutely.

That and all the flesh and blood people in bands and who are musicians who realize that the virtual is being accepted as if it were real.  


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