I’d like to preface this post by saying I’d rather write about pretty much anything else. But right now it’s pretty hard for me to write anything about Lindy Hop, because I’m pretty discouraged by the widening void I’m shouting into by doing so. Hopefully by getting this out of my brain, I’ll be able to write something else.

A year or so ago, a swing dance venue posted a carousel with the premise: “I asked ChatGPT to roast 10 popular Lindy Hop moves…” The post that followed was what one would expect: vapid nonsense written by an app that exists to put out vapid nonsense. As sometimes happens with Lindy Hop Posts of the Day, I couldn’t open my Instagram stories without seeing this thing like five times in a row.

And that got on my nerves! For one, it’s lazy content creation. Further, it wasn’t funny, which is to me perhaps a greater sin. So I got on my Instagram and said as much. 

I got blocked, which is the appropriate response to someone being rude (which I was!). I take no issue with that, and I stand by my opinion: it’s lazy to use ChatGPT to write your post and almost universally it creates bland content because a real brain didn’t make it.

I thought nothing of it at the time, and figured we were the kind of niche hobby where there would be little use for generative AI. Very naive of me, I know. Now, like basically every other industry in the world, we’re inundated with it in places no one seemed to have any need for it in the past: International festivals use it to cute-ify their instructor lineups or (most infamously) create a song for their real-life instructor demos; instructors use it to post information about their upcoming schedules, accompanied by AI-generated “swing” music; local events and regional festivals dabble in the style I saw a meme call “reggaeton monster truck show.” Swing dance “influencers” use it to write their thoughtful Instagram captions and to fill out their carousel listicles, sometimes unaware the AI has introduced a factual inaccuracy and uncaring when it’s pointed out. At least one prominent organization has built their entire website, including almost all of the images on it, with AI.

These are all real examples that I am not linking to because, I don’t know, it feels like a kindness not to do so. But it’s not hard to guess who they are. And frankly, I thought about linking to them, because if they’re not ashamed of their AI usage, why should I be ashamed on their behalf?

Whatever one might use AI for in their personal life, I’d like to keep this focused on what this does to our community. I’m talking about a real degradation in quality of media and communication in our global scene, suddenly and immediately, due to AI.

I’ll quickly run through some of the reasons why I think this sucks, though again, the people using it don’t care. Before this technology existed, which was basically yesterday, events and festivals were able to make their own flyers. Certainly they were able to get photos for their websites or posts. Yes, it took more effort, but the world didn’t end. And frankly, there’s no way the designers making the logos and branding for events were charging that much because everyone knows there’s no money to be made in this scene doing anything. There are iconic logos for festivals that the designer was probably paid five dollars or nothing for. So I don’t think anyone can claim they’re saving meaningful money on labor by stripping their branding of identity.

Jazz dance is a creative hobby, an art form, so how someone treats other creative aspects of their work does matter. And to me, AI usage erodes trust in the person or organization using it. If the organizer, dancer, etc. can’t be bothered to take some time and draft their own post/commission their own logo/open up Canva and use a template/select a real jazz song among the millions of jazz songs for their routine/post, why should I trust that they are careful about who they hire, that they are correctly attributing moves they claim they came up with, that they adequately compensate their staff or volunteers? If they put so little thought into this aspect, why should I expect them to care about anything else?

This isn’t even touching the charlatans who run these companies, the neighborhoods these data centers intrude upon, the precarious position this industry puts the economy in, and the mental health impact this has been shown to have on vulnerable people. All of this is stuff Lindy Hoppers ought to care about, in my opinion, as practitioners of a dance rooted in the struggle of the underprivileged and oppressed.

I’m not writing to change minds. Again, I don’t think I’ll reach anyone doing this who sees no problem with it already. My question is this: what is to be done about it?

Nicholas Tapia, a bal (mostly) dancer, posted about this a while ago, suggesting that people who use AI at least edit it to give it a personal touch. I think he’s onto something, because the AI writing style is particularly grating once you know what it sounds like, and a lot of annoyances would be fixed by simply putting some of one’s own identity into it. But frankly, I don’t see many people doing that, or rather, I see way more people not doing that on a daily basis than I see people doing it.

So how are those of us who object to this thoughtless usage supposed to respond when we see this content? The thing about Lindy Hoppers is we all know each other. Every person who posts something like this is someone we might feasibly meet one day. Despite my earlier anecdote, I don’t want to be an asshole about this if there’s another option!

Of course, in our own lives, we can keep making our own shit, producing our own work for our events and communities. Outside of that, we can post stories all we want about how we think events that do this are untrustworthy, but are we willing to tell those organizers to their face? Are we willing to actually not go because of it? If we regularly staff events, should there be a stipulation in our contracts? Do we just have a whisper network about it to let off some steam and subject our eyes and brains to ugly, vapid content forever?

I have no idea what the answer is. But I really hope there are ways to make this less incentivized in our little corner of the world, and we can really only think of those ways together, as people.

I’d like to thank Tom Yi and Lauren Alvarez for helping me shape and edit this post! Lauren is a great critic of AI usage in creative fields and Tom helped me shape the ending (and in general is someone I blow off steam with about this a lot).