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.

The Stairway to Stardom

After I rewatched a few old SCTV videos and dear old John Daker last week, the algorithms decided to introduce me to Stairway to Stardom.  It's a New York city public access television show from the early 1980s, one in which eager unknowns performed in a "studio."  They sang, they danced, they did their routines, all with the hope that this show would be the first rung on the ladder to fortune.

It never, ever was.  Not once.

It's like America's Got Talent, only without all that much of the latter.  Nothing about it parses as professional, which makes the performances a little painful to watch.  "Cringe," as the kids used to say, but no longer do.  The mismatch between the desire for fame and artistry is a chasm as wide as the Grand Canyon, and as high as Olympus Mons.

There have always been folks who hunger for celebrity, who yearn for fame, who get caught up in the desperate grasping struggle to push their way into the public consciousness.

Back then, it meant shows like this one.  Now, it means TikTok and YouTube.

Because the height of fame means you're gonna live forever, and people will remember your name, as that old film and TV series once sang into the eager ears of a generation.  You shine like a star in the sky, and everyone thinks they know you, because they do, sort of.  

And fame gives you power.

Social influence is one of the most ancient forms of power, stretching back deep into human history.  If you are known, and you know people, those relationships translate into material success, which translates into more people knowing you, which translates into more power.  

In the era of social media and "going viral," that hunger has spread further and and further into our culture, as commodified sociality has been reinforced, over and over again.  You never know what moment might go viral, and that borderline subliminal awareness worms its way into our every relationship.   Ooh, here's a cute dog pic!  Here's me reacting to a thing I didn't make!   look at me Look At Me LOOK AT ME!  One needs no special talent, or any special skill at anything.  Just dumb luck and pathological self-promotion.  How else to explain Mr. Beast?

Filtered through the profit seeking lenses of corporate social media, our creative efforts stop being valuable in and of themselves, and become a parasocial means to an end.  For the owners of the media, our art and music becomes a thing to be scraped for data and used for marketing.  For us, it can...if we are not wary...mean our grasp of the point of art is drowned in a sea of grasping egotism.  

Every form of human creativity has intrinsic value, but the moment we cease to delight in the act of creation and sharing?  The moment we see it primarily in terms of Mammon's shine, of more and more and always more?  

We've lost our way.  

The Twilight of the Doodle

Over the last week or so, I've been taking a few hours here and there to whittle away at the amassed detritus of decades stored in our home.  Down in the unfinished area of our basement, the shelves that line the walls in the workroom and the utility room are packed full of the residue of life.  An entire box was packed high with stacks of daily preschool paintings produced by my now-adult sons.   Elsewhere were boxes going all the way back to my own childhood.  A drawing of my family that I made in fifth grade.  A painting I made in preschool.  Letters from high school friends, back when we wrote letters to one another that could be kept.  Letters from family members long passed.  That sort of thing.

As I sorted through and discarded well-worn high school papers and faded college course notebooks, I marveled at a time when such things were all done by hand.  When was the last time I wrote an entire page of text, actually wrote it, hand and pen to paper?  Or wrote a letter in my marginally legible cursive?  It's been a bit.

Even more striking than my now mostly unfamiliar penmanship were the margins, because the margins of class-notes and tests and letters alike were awash in doodles.  At a moment of distraction in class, which for scatter-brained-me there were many, I would draw.  There were geometric patterns and abstract sworls of texture.  There were faces, and scenes, and little cartoons drawn to amuse both myself and nearby classmates.  

When the mind wandered, it doodled.  It was just something that one did, and it was hardly idiosyncratic to my own modestly artistic self.  It was a common thing, a nearly universal thing, just part of being a student or a note-taker or a diarist in the late 20th century.  Interspersed in our class notes and our meeting minutes would be the images and patterns.  In that, we were carrying on a tradition that goes back as far as pen and paper, back to times medieval, when marginalia were an integral part of our thinking processes.

And I wondered: does anyone doodle anymore?  I don't, not really.

The shift in media form from notebooks to laptops completely changed the whole dynamic of writing.  I mean, sure, there are touch screens and drawing programs, but honestly?  It's an entirely different world.  If we're distracted, there are casual gaming apps to fill our time, or a bottomless stream of reels to scroll through mindlessly.  Through the "miracle" of bottomless connectivity, most of our fallow moments have been monetized and gamified into functional oblivion, as whimsy and creativity have been supplanted.

Some out there, no doubt, might bring a pad with them for the specific purpose of doodling.  Others have chosen to return to pen and paper, intentionally rediscovering handwriting as a mnemonic device.  But most of us do not.

As with so many of the tradeoffs in this brave new world, it feels like a lessening, as we forget a thing whose value we didn't recognize.

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.