If you ask Nick Cline, we live on the worst possible timeline. “The world of existence is the worst it’s been,” he says with a dose of zeal, sitting in his Franklin home surrounded by books about great American activists like Abbie Hoffman.
The 24-year-old musician and music manager definitely isn’t alone. Gen Z is famously hopeless, some might say for good reason. A stagnant job market, soaring prices on, well, everything — and then there’s the bottomless well of dread that is the fear of one’s entire existence being made irrelevant by artificial intelligence.
It’s that fear that Cline and a gaggle of fellow musicians are looking to alleviate with Chud Fest, a decidedly anti-AI music festival taking place at The Pit in Scott this weekend.
Originally from West Virginia, Cline has lived — and protested — in Louisiana since he was a kid, attending his first protest (gun reform) at only 12 years old.
Then, in 2024, he organized Eclipse Fest, a local music festival aimed at highlighting under-the-radar talent and fresh sounds in the Acadiana music scene.
With Chud Fest, his rebellious streak and experience playing and organizing live shows are coming together as a stand against the rise of generative AI in the art and music worlds.
“Humans and their art are the backbone of humanity, and the rise of generative AI is robbing humans of what makes us special,” says Cline.
Chud Fest is a two-day music festival, Nov. 13-14, that features 16 bands from across the state, including Okay Boomhauer, Goodbye Academy, Killing Bugs and Oak Knoll, to create a lineup spanning multiple genres from rock, metal, alternative emo to rap rock and grunge.
The AI overlords may want us to resign to our hopeless chud lives, but Cline and his comrades aren’t going down without a fight.
“You can’t replicate the human condition,” he says. “But you can replace it on a base level.” The question is: Should you want to?
“We’re human,” says Jacob Shaver, bassist of Baton Rouge alternative band Good Academy, which will be playing at the festival this weekend. “That is the point of it. We are supposed to experience strife, turmoil, happiness, joy.”
It’s what makes us human and what makes art, well, art, he says. “With AI the only thing that you are going to get out of that process is prompting, I mean you’re more of an art director than an artist at that point.”
And audiences want to experience art made by humans, no matter how imperfect it is, he adds. “People want the story. How was it made? What was the process? What were they writing about? What influenced them?”
Don’t know how to do something? Ask someone for help, Shaver says. “It’s about community.”
Building that community is what Cline hopes to do with Chud Fest, to bring people together at a time when the ever-expanding reach of technology has made many feel not just replaceable, but also alone.
“I want them to feel like they belong, and like everyone has a right to exist,” he says.
