The AI Tension Inside Slipknot is Actually a Good Sign. How it got covered? Not so much.

When it comes to banging on stuff and making lots of money in metal music over the last few decades, Slipknot's Shaun "Clown" Crahan is likely second only to Lars Ulrich. After all, Slipknot recently completed a massive catalog sale. I think it's interesting to listen to how he's using AI, which came up in an interview with The Escapist (unlike most sites talking about this, I am actually linking you to the correct link for this interview, a point I'll get back to later).

Clown calls AI his "professor in his pocket". To me, AI doesn't seem like so much of a professor as it does an enthusiastic lecturer at an overcrowded community college. It can give you a lot of factually correct information (at least some of the time), but opinions and judgement are so malleable as to be useless. And aren't opinions and judgement exactly what you'd pay a real professor or famous producer for? I've asked various LLMs questions that started with "Act as a political science professor in the US specializing in comparative politics... blah blah blah," but I wouldn't trust that about anything like I would a real professor like that.

For example, I asked ChatGPT if John Mayer is single-handedly proving that guitar still matters. And it responded with some big long essay where it's essentially saying "yes, but not in the old guitar hero way." And then I was like "Well what about Ed Sheeran?" In response, it acknowledged that Ed Sheeran destroys the "single-handed" argument.

I don't really want to nitpick Clown though. Or even influence your thoughts on this too much before you read the article yourself (since a lot of other sites aren't even giving you that chance).

To Clown's credit, I think he sounds like he thinks about technology in a pretty serious way. For example, he says he's using Minecraft because of "The potential of it, because of coding and utility, it’s sort of like a giant cracked-out OpenGL situation for me.” That's a sophisticated viewpoint IMO from someone thinking about it not as a game but as a system you can build on top. I love that kind of thinking and have built my own career in software on it (even though I've never done anything in game development). I also thought it was interesting that Clown said, "I’ve been using AI my whole life." I'm really curious what that means! A lot of people don't really realize that AI, in various usable forms, has been around much longer than ChatGPT. Neural networks as a concept have been around longer than I've been alive, but only really started becoming feasible compute-wise for a lot of applications in the 2010s. For example, I used a system of blended models for a ML cybersecurity contest sponsored by Microsoft back in 2019.

Wow, I guess I'm getting old if I really have 7 years of ML experience 🤣. But the point is that I think the "whole life" comment from Clown about AI is worth taking more seriously than some people might.

Also, when he tells it, "don't change my words," it shows that he's at least aware of the potential for authorship issues with LLMs/genAI and is trying to compensate and get output he's comfortable taking ownership of, even if his views on the boundaries of authorship are different from yours or mine.

Ironically, the tension between Clown and Corey Taylor on AI (although maybe oversimplified by other outlets) is actually an example of how there's friction when you make music in groups, something that I think we are at risk of missing out on if we all just make music alone on our frictionless setups. Making music as a group has always involved friction between people because of differing attitudes and behaviors towards artistic practice, creation, and more. And I think that friction and diversity helps make for better music. I assume Corey Taylor has some amount of leverage to prevent AI slop bullshit from making it onto a Slipknot record. Although it is a shame when bands break up, I think it will prevent worthwhile bands from going all in on AI. And to the extent that it becomes an even bigger issue, anti-AI artists will be able to find each other, hopefully.

Slop all the way down

I originally heard of this interview through an article on guitar.com (that I won't link to because it is crap and they don't deserve extra help) which referenced an interview with the Escapist. However, it took me to a different page on the Escapist about his Minecraft server. And several other pages on the first page of Google results for "Clown Slipknot AI" link to the same article. What gives?

It was bizarre. I spent some time listening to this interview on Youtube to figure out if this is what they meant (since the Escapist article I linked to above didn't actually seem to be the real source of the quote). And it didn't seem so when I watched the most obvious parts for him to start talking about AI.

Eventually I found the real original Escapist article that I linked to at the start of the article. That was clearly the article from them that should have been linked to, and yet all these platforms. Seems like an AI problem. But also, the most basic level of human editing or link testing seems to be lacking.

Clearly, Google is broken. Why should these junk articles that all publish the wrong link win out over the original source of information when I search "Clown Slipknot AI?" Meanwhile, for small, independent, human-authored sites (like this one), crawling and indexing from Google is a fairly finite resource. Honestly, as I'm writing this, not all articles on this site are indexed on Google. From my day job, I've seen that you can unseat incumbents in niches, but it takes time even if you have the content/data to make useful pages.

So, If you happen to have any sort of article-based website of your own, make sure you seek out the original sources of information. If you've ever used wikipedia, you are probably familiar with the idea of actually checking sources and verifying information is still available. Let's try to do our part to publish less slop out into the world and fight against it where possible.

And if you come across small, independent websites online that are doing their best to seek out verified information, know that it really helps them to share their articles on social media and with your friends. This isn't a matter of them (or me, for that matter) being greedy for clicks/attention, it's because clicks from many other sources totally dried up. So, I have accounts on Bluesky and X where you can follow me. I try to follow back and repost stuff on Bluesky. I also have an RSS feed you can follow for this site!

Anyway, I don't feel the need to go through the entire interview and react to here to everything Clown has said. There is definitely stuff that will raise eyebrows. But I also think there is more nuance there (including stuff that I agree with) than the haters would care to admit. It would be very interesting to ask him some questions! At least I have given you the real link (repeated again here) to check stuff out for yourself.

Image credits

Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons