u/happycomposer

TL;DR: the humanity being taken out of show design ruins the joy of creation and performance for me as an audience member, and the lack of transparency about its use makes it hard to get excited about productions anymore.

I’m finding it harder and harder to wholeheartedly get excited about show announcements because of the threat that large language models were used in the design process.

Now, there are glimmers of hope against machine use in the activity! FJM rejecting its use, for example, is a great sign. On the other hand, though, you have bad actors like Shane Gwaltney posturing “accessibility” with his shameless, lazy use of machines to do his work for him, in an endless pursuit of ease and money that makes athletic music look worse, to say nothing about his clients. This laziness, this greediness, sucks the joy out of any show announcement his clients make.

This is a great example of my point - Shane’s show for Music City, my home corps, is CONFIRMED to have used machines in its design: its visuals are certainly generated, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the concept was, too. How am I supposed to be excited for this? Where’s the humanity in this concept?

And with other corps, one can’t help but be suspicious. After initially crediting an artist in the comments of their announcement, the Spartans have disabled and hidden those comments on Instagram! Is that an admission of guilt? Who’s to say! I’d love to be proven wrong in saying that Academy’s graphics are machine-made - they’ve credited a designer, but maybe that designer is using LLMs in their process! Who knows! (Edit: we do, thanks to a commenter. No AI there! but to my point, I had to wonder). What’s clear enough is that few corps are so shameless that they’ll openly admit to allowing the use of LLMs, and they seem to understand how little the community cares for it, so it’s upsetting that they’re used at all.

This lack of transparency in the design process, for me, is killing the pre-season hype. These days, instead of being excited for what direction a corps might go, what they might do with the material, how they’ll translate the music and concept to the field, I feel the need to antagonize the announcements, because it’s IMPORTANT that anti-human, anti-creative machine use is uprooted and exposed. At the same time, though, it’s depressing, exhausting, and joyless. Show announcements used to be fun. Now it feels like fighting a battle for creativity and humanity, and against laziness and greed.

Athletic music is an art. It’s a beautiful crossroads of fields: a little bit creative, a little bit competitive, a little bit educational. It sees multiple people coming together to make a unique work that’s competitive with other works and balances challenge and achievability for young people. Because of that collaboration, because of those crossroads, large language models have no place here, and their use, confirmed or not, sucks the joy out of athletic music.

Corps designers, admin, directors, and staff: You are hurting your programs by allowing the use of machine generation to continue. You lose credibility and favor when there’s even SUSPICION of its use. The only right move is to credit your creatives, confirm that LLMs weren’t used in any part of the design process, and denounce the use of “AI” entirely. Otherwise, you hurt not only your corps, but the activity at large. Who would want to consume art made by a machine?

PS - Some background on me: I’m an alumni well removed from my marching days. I’m a music educator. I’m a composer and show designer. I’m also one of the most anti-LLM people out there - I refuse to call it “AI” or “artificial intelligence” because that has always been marketing language for something that is either insignificant in machine learning or not advanced enough to be traditional sci-fi-like AI (depending on your definition).