The Music of the Machine

I have, of late, been struggling to keep a certain type of music out of my playlists.

The auto-generated "favorites"  that YouTube Music pitches me can get a little stale, as one overfamiliar song after another is served up.  Sure, they're songs I like, but algorithmic recommendations start feeling a little bit like the musical equivalent of Bread and Jam for Frances.  "Sweet Lord Jesus, this again?" I'll mutter, skipping to the next one.

Usually, new additions are welcome.  Only now, I find myself having to be warier and warier around new music, particularly if it feels a certain way.  More and more new music isn't produced by human beings at all, but is instead the result of a short prompt dumped into Suno or some other AI.  I created a few songs myself, back when it was unusual and felt like a fun thing to try.  But I'd rather not listen to it.

As every ad for Suno reinforces, that creation process requires exactly zero talent, as people who haven't the skill or won't put in the work are encouraged to pretend they've made something.  So when I hear a song that exactly matches a particular vibe, I'm on alert.  Machine music takes advantage of our distraction, engaging parasitically with the musical styles we enjoy and crowding out human voices and talents.

Like, say, my listening preferences when driving on a cool summer evening.   I drive with the windows down and the sunroof open at such times, letting the wind play through my hair.  I want stuff that's utterly relaxing, both mellow and sophisticated.   Give me a tree-lined country road paired with a sultry chanteuse purring over a tightly constructed jazz standard, and I'm as happy as a clam.  

If clams liked driving briskly whilst listening to jazz, that is.  It may or may not be a mollusk preference.

So the other day while driving home from church, I heard a new tune that landed perfectly.  Bubbly and playful, with lyrics that danced between English and Japanese, it was just one hundred and ten percent chill vibe.  "Little Sunny Moments," it was called, and I enjoyed it as it hummed away in the background.  But as it progressed seamlessly from verse to chorus and came to a quick and easily digestible conclusion, I began to wonder.

Is this a real song?  

It felt too tight, the vocalizations too sharply defined and breathless around the edges.  Each "Doo Doo Doo" didn't quite have the shape and form of a human utterance.  I'd not really paid attention to it, so I listened to it a second time, tending to the lyrics, trying to come to a determination as to its provenance.

[garbled] is shining in the light. Everything just feels so right. Tiny waves go up and down. Nothing special, nothing big. Little sunny day.

Doo doo doo. Drifting far away.

Doo doo doo. Come and stay. Seagulls dancing in the blue. I just sit and think of you. Clouds are floating like a dream.

If I laugh a little more,

will this day just last forever? Doo doo doo. Little sunny day. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Drifting far away. Doo doo doo. Come and stay.

The lyrics sort of made sense, but were more a feeling than anything coherent, and the garbling of some words and hyperprecision of others felt less organic and more generated. Odds of it being AI? Now at 90%.

And then came the final verse, sung to precisely the same tune as the rest of the song:

Smooth relaxing jazz Bossa Nova.

Similar mood to Quiet Glow.
Soft breathy female.
Soft Doo Doo Doo

Soft Breath Doo Doo Doo
Soft breathy female.
Smooth.

It. Was. The. Prompt.  O Lord have mercy, how perfect.  From behind the wheel, I cackled with delight.   

Somehow, the prompt used by a human to tell an AI what kind of song to make had been accidentally folded into the lyrics, and...this being a low effort sort of thing...they'd just burped the thing out without even noticing.  

"This," I thought to myself, "should be mandatory."  Meaning, at the end of every AI song, the final lyric must be the prompt.

Just so we know.  So it's clear how much effort was involved, and how little humanity.

Ice Water Baptism

I find myself, lately, wondering about the state of my playlists. Ever since adolescence, I’ve always enjoyed encountering new music, finding my way to a sound, a composer, or an artist that I’ve never encountered. Once, that came through the radio, as I’d twist that tuning knob to WCXR 105.9 or WHFS 102.3 on the FM dial. I reached back into the classic rock of the 1960s and 1970s, and into the world of alternative rock, and encountered the new.

There were mix tapes provided by friends, which soon became CDs, which became playlists. Then the playlists started getting different, curated not by the human beings around me, but by algorithms designed to show me what I already like. This can lead things to feeling a little stale, a little samey samey and ultraprocessed. I hear only what I want to hear, and that makes me feel like a stagnant pond.

In the last six months, there’s been a new shift in the approach to recommendation. Take, for instance, my recent tendency to listen to Parisian jazz. A sultry chanteuse singing wistfully of l’amour jazzie is chill enough to take the edge off of any commute, but…the algorithms being the algorithms…my lists were getting a bit stale. So I went looking for more, and from artists I didn’t know. What I found was dozens of new albums, all filled with voices I’d never heard. Like, say, Eva LaNuit, whose music filled my car on a recent drive. Je n’ai pas change, purred the voice beneath a guttural sax, and I thought, who is this? 

Her versions of old standards felt like slipping into a well worn shoe. Tight and interestingly constructed improvisationally, her sound was exactly what I was looking for, exactly. So I looked her up when I got home, and of course, she doesn’t exist. She’s an AI simulacrum, her voice and her tightly tasteful backup band all constructed from extant music and prompts from a user in Morocco, ones and zeros. She is not the droid I am looking for.

But many people are in this strange new age. The AI “band” Breaking Rust recently had the best selling streaming single in all of country music, with the unsettlingly good single Walk My Walk. An AI “artist” called Solomon Ray has repeatedly topped the Gospel charts, which is remarkable for a singer that literally has no soul. The songs are catchy, the songs work, and once you listen to one, the machine just keeps serving them up, over and over again. The cup of AI slop runneth over, and I want nothing more than to wash it all from my mind. It is a new thing, and there’s plenty of it.

There come times when societies fall into decadence, when they forget their purpose and what makes them good, and culture begins to rot. How, if one lives in such a time, do you restore your sense of self and sanity? How do you commit to reclaiming what was lost?

In first century Judah, you did that by being baptized. Baptism finds its spiritual foundation in the mikvah, an ancient Jewish practice of self-purification and cleansing. That practice literally washed away impurities of the flesh, allowing a person to return to connection with community. By the time of Jesus, baptism had become a way to renew one’s commitment to God’s covenant of faithfulness and justice, as the Temple in Jerusalem became more and more woven up with the greed and moral rot of the Herodian dynasty. Herod the Great and his incestuous brood were interested only in their own gain, and that corruption trickled down to the priesthood and the temple, an edifice wrapped in gold and ego.

Out in the desert wilderness, John the Baptist wasn’t just there because he liked the feel of camel hair and the satisfying crunch of protein rich locust chitin. He was there to share a message to a people who knew they had lost their way, who sensed that all around them had yielded to the siren song of greed and power, and who felt the loss of their identity as a covenant people.

And so the ritual of baptism became a way to recommit yourself to the faith of your people, symbolically representing the washing away of sin through the washing of the body.

In Christianity, that ancient sacred tradition was continued. It became the symbolic entry into the Way that Jesus taught, a sign that we have turned away from the way of life defined by mammon, domination, and brokenness, and instead turned ourselves in joy to the good news and the new life it proclaims.

New life, however, doesn’t mean the things we tend to think it means. It doesn’t mean more of the things that our society teaches us to view as success. It is explicitly and intentionally not that. There is nothing more dangerous to our souls than hearing only what you expect to hear. If we are walking the Way of Jesus, it means day after day recalling the purpose established in our baptism.

So what to do, when the songs around us are no longer truly human, and when the mediating structures that connect us no longer do so?

I wonder that, in my listening to the music that fills my hours. It’s not that AI-generated music is bad in the abstract. It is not, not any more, not like the amusingly incompetent bluegrass hymn I had an AI make in praise of Poolesville Presbyterian church a year ago. Just twelve months ago, the best AI could do worked for two verses, then descended into something that sounded like speaking in tongues, which isn’t particularly Presbyterian.

Now, it’s perfect, seamless, exactly what you want, exactly what you expect.

The easy Turkish-delight sweetness of it is as tempting as the songs that filled the ears of Odysseus with yearning as he strained against the mast.

So I attend to every new song I hear with care. If the images accompanying the music are all AI generated, that’s a marker. If the musician has no history, no story, and seems to have just popped into existence a month ago, that’s a marker. I ask myself, is this the real life, or is this just fantasy?

I scrub my playlists clean, and seek instead real human voices, in all our most beautiful variety and difference.

And I start considering my tendency to use AI for things that once would have been the realm of artists and photographers.  Those images were only there, after all, to market my writing, to create a visual splash on social media platforms I no longer use.  Why use them at all?  Perhaps now is the time to make that change.

Of Art and the Machine

When I listen to creatives raising the alarm about artificial intelligence, there's a consistent theme.  

Looking at what the LLMs (ChatGPT/Bard) can write, and the images produced by diffusion systems (Dall E/Midjourney), there's been a terrifying surge in machine capacity in the last five years.  We're now at full Turing compliance for Generative Transformers, meaning that we've blithely skipped over the threshold that twentieth century AI pioneer Alan Turing established for determining the presence of synthetic intelligence.  There is no reason that machines couldn't soon do every form of work requiring awareness, other than that we're restraining them.

As it so happens, the first place that seems to be having an impact is the arts.

It's to the point where writers have begun to feel that their livelihoods are threatened, because they are.  Machine intelligence is great at burping out new content, and can do so at a hundred times the pace of human writers.  Almost all of the writing for the internet content mills, with their lazy listicles and corporately sourced content?  They could be done by AI.  This is equally true of most of the derivative romance novels out there, and the plot of every film in the Fast and Furious franchise.

Commercial artists are doubly threatened, because you can produce an image in seconds, and refine it in minutes, replicating the hours of focused labor necessary to make a single finished piece of visual art.

The image that accompanies this post is flawed, sure, but it took me a single minute to produce.  Just one prompt to Dall E, then another, and then I was like, eh, sure.  That one'll do.  For a graphic designer, that'd take days.

If writers and artists think their livelihoods are threatened, it's only because they are.  In a capitalist economy, AI means artists and writers can no longer expect to make a living through their work.

Which, I think, is the point we creative souls are all missing.  Writers and artists are seeing this through the wrong lens, seeing it as we have been trained to see it. 

AI isn't the problem.  Capitalism is.

There's nothing about AI that prevents me from doing what I love, from creating and sharing what I create.  The joy of writing is a human joy, and while I am slower at it than a machine, I still love to write.  The act itself is part of who I am.  

But we have been taught to view art as a commodity, as part of a system of economic exchange, as something that derives value only insofar as it can be marketized.

That understanding won't survive an AI era.

But then again, neither may capitalism.

Innocent Chaos

It was, by all accounts, a mess of a Sunday.

I arrived an hour and a half before worship, and as I was doing my morning rounds to unlock doors and turn things on, I found the church utterly without heat. It was going to get pleasant later in the day, but the morning was cold, and so was the church. A quick trip to the boiler room and some futile twiddling of emergency override knobs yielded nothing. I put in an emergency call to our HVAC company...but there was no way they could get there before the service. Fiddle.

Right before the service began, our projector punked out. Which means no lyrics to praise songs, and no way to project the Keynote presentation that framed my message. Gah.

A small backup Dell portable projector was secured, but it didn't work quite as well. Nor did it want to be friendly to my MacBook Pro when I hooked it up. There's nothing like knowing you've got two minutes to resolve a hardware issue to focus the mind.

After worship, I encountered a member of my church and a member of our struggling Korean sister church talking in animated Korean over by our abandonware organ. Apparently, someone had hung a large painting from our unused high pulpit. No-one knew who was responsible for it. It was a bright melange of swirling simple shapes and colors on a decent sized canvas. I thought it was rather pleasant. The church folks seemed perturbed by it. Perhaps, one of them suggested, it might be...demonic. Sigh.

As the day wore down, and I prepared to run this month's food collection by the local food pantry, I encountered a young man wandering the church. When I asked him if I could help him, he said he'd like to "meet the owner." I told him I was the pastor, and we began to talk. He was a bit disheveled, but bright-eyed and smart as a tack. He was also clearly schizophrenic. I'm cool with that, as ministry with folks whose minds are wired waaay differently from the norm has been a major part of my life.

As I shared a little fellowship with C, he shared that the painting was his, and that Jehovah had told him to donate it to the church. Well, it wasn't a painting, said he. It was a spell. He had named the spell Innocent Chaos, and it represented the way in which everything is simultaneously distinct and yet interwoven and interconnected. "Things don't know they're working together, but they are," said C. He offered to help me carry our food donation to my car, and on the way we talked about art. He told me he thought all art requires us to make a leap of imagination, to open ourselves to seeing multiple meanings and other perspectives beyond our own preconceptions.

I told him that wasn't just an issue for appreciating art. It's the great problem most human beings have, our inability to see past ourselves and being able to view the world with another's eyes. "Yeah," said C. "Jehovah tells me that's the demon you're fighting with."

Not quite the way I'd have put it, but not really wrong, either.