Raindrops: November 2024
A religious AI experience and a weeping album cover
Welcome to the inaugural edition of Raindrops, a new stream of commentary here at The Muse. These are shorter pieces, gathered in pools of different topics relevant to the four conceptual pillars of artistic endeavor—Image, Word, Sound, and Movement—and the glue that binds them all together: human communication. Newsworthy items, events, or developments in the worlds of Art, Writing, Music, and Film, with a touch of insight, opinion, or observation, interspersed with musings on what I’ve heard or seen IRL or online.
Some will be light, some will land heavy. Some will be short, others almost a mini-essay. Some will be related to AI, some to tech, and some simply to life in this data-obsessed world. All of them, I hope, will bring you something new or an unexpected angle to something you’ve seen or heard before.
A raindrop is the first thing you feel on your face before the storm rolls in. It tells you to look up, smell the air, pay attention to the world around you. We can’t possibly take it all in, so these droplets are a gentle way to pull you away from the temptation to scroll, yet demand no more than a few minutes of your time. Even a short walk in the rain can be so soul-filling, wouldn’t you say?
We’ll do these intermittently, just like the rain: at minimum once a month, at maximum once a week. All depends on my workload, and the raindrops that fall on my face as I step out the door.
Let it rain!
Art
On November 11, the Vatican announced the launch of an interactive, AI-enhanced digital replica of St. Peter’s Basilica for Holy Year 2025, which celebrates forgiveness and reconciliation. A collaboration among the Vatican, Microsoft, and French startup Iconem, this project is part of a larger digital experience for worshipers, which includes—seriously—a digital copy of the basilica on Microsoft’s Minecraft Education. According to the news release, “The multiple projects use AI technology to help people weave together the historical, artistic and spiritual meanings connected with the world’s largest church.”
The trailer is, in a word, awe-inpsiring.
Sounds good on the surface no? If we can give this type of experience to people who wish to see St. Peter’s but have neither the time nor the resources to travel to Rome, that is a wonderful use of AI. For this does not generate images in the style of the various artists and architects who designed and decorated the Vatican, nor does it cheapen their work. In fact, it glorifies the art, for in its purpose to document rather than train, it stays true to it, and in some ways protects the original, for it has the potential to reduce the number of people walking through the Basilica in person—all those feet, all those hands, all those mouths exhaling CO2, do have a harmful impact on ancient monuments and works of art.
But there isn’t as much AI as you might think. In fact, the lion’s share of the work has been done by aerial and terrestrial photogrammetry, 3D scanning and modeling, and other techniques using drones, lasers and cameras to capture over 400,000 high-resolution images of the Basilica, amounting to 20 petabytes of data—by humans. The team used Azure to process the images and put it all together into a cohesive AI-enhanced 3D model of the Basilica.
This is quite different than prompting for “an interactive model of St. Peter’s Basilica”—which would be generated with data sources from a few million pictures scraped from across the Internet.
At the end of the day, though, there simply is nothing like being there in the flesh.
I have been both to St. Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel. I am not formally religious, but the Sistine Chapel was a spiritual experience. In the chapel, I stood transfixed beneath the ceiling, too far to touch with my hands but close enough for my eyes to drink in every detail. I stood, my neck craned far back, just as in 1508 the great Michelangelo labored standing up, neck craned and back aching, to create this extraordinary masterpiece. I stood there for ten minutes… he stood for over 4 years.
One of the guards came up to me, and patiently waited for me to return to this world. I looked at him, a little dazed. Was I in trouble for standing there too long? He smiled. “There are three kinds of people who come through here,” he said in Italian. “The… tourists,” waving his hand at the crowds passing through, “who don’t even notice there’s something above them. There are those who know a little something about the Sistine Chapel, and look up as they walk by.”
A pause. “And then there are people like you.”
If you’ve spent time in Rome, you’ll know what the guard was talking about. Do you think AI, or any digital model, can ever replicate an experience like that? And what do you think is Microsoft’s real intention here, given its history with OpenAI? Should the Roman Catholic Church trust a corporation with digital replicas of its treasures? Perhaps it is simply a case of AI-hype funding what is, in this case, a worthwhile cultural preservation project that would have been impossibly expensive otherwise.
Music
My 14-year-old loves The Strokes. And I mean, she loves them. She can name every song on all of their albums. She’s sung covers of their songs in her band. She can play some of the songs on her guitar. She’s probably their most dedicated fan—she’s been listening to them daily for the past three years. Heck she’s even managed to make me like the song “Juicebox,” which I couldn’t stand when I first heard it.
Naturally, she also likes The Voidz, another band started by The Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas. ( I admit I also like a few of their songs.) In September, she and a few friends organized a listening party in anticipation of The Voidz’ latest album, Like All Before You.
So imagine the chagrin when she came back from the party, not only disappointed with the music but ticked off that the album cover had been done with generative AI.1 She wasn’t the only one:
Anthony Fantano, the self-proclaimed “Internet’s busiest music nerd,” discusses the matter in some detail on one of his YouTube channels. He takes the balanced view of not railing against generative AI as a tool, per se, but against its being trained on human artists’ work and effectively ripping them off. Which, repeated ad nauseum by artists all over the Internet.
What makes this situation worse for The Voidz is that, according to Fantano, they didn’t disclose the fact that the cover art was done by AI until fans spoke up, and they also apparently didn’t ask the person who generated the cover image for permission to use it (although he was pretty thrilled they decided to use his work). It’s not certain what, if anything, was paid for the gen AI cover. Originally, they had a different cover created without AI—see here below—but that artist allegedly asked for $150k, so they went for the anime AI option.
Granted. $150k does seem like a steep price tag for cover art, but that’s ultimately relative (how many versions were made, how long did it take, how well known is the artist?) and there are plenty of artists a band like The Voidz could have easily hired for less, much less if they wanted, to design a solid piece of art for their new album.
And don’t get me started about the latest Tears for Fears album cover.
Musicians—well-known musicians—opting for AI art over hiring visual artists. Feels a little like killing your own.
Haven’t we had a similar discussion right here on Substack?
Your turn… what do you think about AI helping to preserve cultural heritage—and those images and data being stored in the cloud of a massive corporation? How do you feel about one type of artist using gen AI instead supporting other fellow creatives?
What’s been on your mind lately that you’d like to share as your own Raindrop? Just—pardon the pun—drop it in the comments!
I don’t blame her—she’s a visual artist herself in addition to being a musician.
The art thing does feel a little like killing your own. I've always drawn my own cover art for my music and my writing. Sometimes it's nice to use AI for inspiration, but I need to draw the final product myself. Otherwise it feels absurd.
Rain. Droplets of water. Reflecting the world around. Magical tiny worlds on their own. Gathering in strings of little worlds and thoughts…and everything. Pure and not pure. It depends. Bringing relief from …sadness, tensions, electricity in air…silently falling down on earth, whispering..like sounds of bees wings. Or drop by drop falling into a pitcher…until the last drop overflows the pitcher…and water runs out…like tears flow after days, weeks, months of events, sadness, suffering and so on…then one starts crying for no reason…as they say, but it is accumulation of all the little things, feelings, events drops during the time….and then we use drops of water to paint…watercolors, and create something beautiful. See beauty in every little tiny droplet….it is our choice…or is it?…