Generative AI is the Sax-A-Boom

Have you ever seen Jack Black perform with a Sax-A-Boom? It’s an old Tenacious D bit that he’s been doing since the late 90s.

The Sax-A-Boom is a toy for children 5+ released in 1998 that resembles a saxophone. It plays seven preloaded rockin’ sax licks and is part of Kawasaki’s Boom Jam line of toy instruments.

As a palate cleanser during Tenacious D shows, Jack Black sometimes brings out the Sax-A-Boom as if it is a serious, virtuosic instrument. A roadie will come out and place it on his neck, and Jack goes full on rock star with it.

There are a bunch of videos online of him performing with the Sax-A-Boom throughout the years, including in front of 85,000 people at Rock am Ring in Germany in 2012. The one of him on The Tonight Show has like 100 million views.

The popularity of this joke has made the Sax-A-Boom a collector’s item and it’ll cost you over $600 to get a used one off eBay. A new one in-box is currently listed for $4,999.00 USD. It has also spawned a legion of weirdos making ripoff videos in their garage. Like this person who has posted themselves doing the Sax-A-Boom routine 447 days in a row.

What’s lost in these desperate, sauceless recreations is that the Sax-A-Boom is not the joke. Jack Black hasn’t gotten 25 years of milage out of this toy because he’s stumbled upon some artifact of musical genius. Tenacious D is a satire of classic rock bands and their elaborate, self serious antics. Trotting out the Sax-A-Boom at Bonnaroo is rooted in the themes of their overall act. Without that context you’re just a dude filming yourself with a child’s toy for a year and a half hoping for online attention.

The same is true for generative AI and its use in filmmaking. It’s not some groundbreaking tool that is going to disrupt the industry and put us all out of work. It’s a toy with no inherent value. Can toys be used to entertain people? Sure, babies love them. Can a toy be used to make art? Sometimes, with the right amount of talent, context, or dedication. There are going to be a handful of artists who manage to use generative AI in interesting ways, and I have seen one or two examples, but most people when given a toy are going to create slop.

Will low talent grifters use it to stay relevant and extend what otherwise would be a dead career? Yes. But only in the same way that a couple of these Sax-A-Boom ripoff videos managed to break through and find an audience, like this one that gamed the algorithm into a million views. The internet rewards slop, so some people are going to get rewarded by going to the slop machine.

There is going to be one in every billion people that can entertain the masses with seven preloaded sax licks. But most of the people with an OpenAI account are not artists anymore than a dude in his garage with a toy saxophone is Jack Black. 99% of generative AI is fake and bad and giving more people access to it is only going flood the zone with more slop. Framing generative AI as a job killer is doing free marketing for Big AI. It’s a message rooted in intimidation meant to destabilize artists, it does not reflect any actual technological reality.

Before we give away the ball game, we need to call the art emerging from this technology what it is, and thus far, all of the high profile uses of generative AI in music videos, from the Washed Out video to the Wu-Tang video, have been slop. Suggesting these are signs of a our jobs being in danger is signaling to Big AI that their slop is as good as our art.

If we want to be worried about Big Tech and their influence on the music video industry, our attention would be much better focused on the platforms that have a far more direct impact. From startups like Nova implementing pay-to-play models for blue collar workers, or big tech companies like YouTube prioritizing UGC over highly produced videos, these actions pose a much bigger threat to the industry than the generative AI bubble. These are the fights we should be having, and we should stop allowing ourselves to get distracted by the Sax-A-Boom.