NVDT RANDOM – The Gobbledygook Series

I would’ve written it myself but (insert litany of justifications here)

I was going to give AI a walk since I feel it’s all hype and no “intelligence”, merely rapid computing based on large data sets. But as I am a cross curriculum person, I couldn’t help noticing some similarities in snake oil sales pitches from the writing and music sides. If you’re into something else don’t worry, they’re out there for almost any creative endeavor from cooking to taxidermy. Their basic pitch goes something like this-

Wouldn’t you like to swing on my star

Carry contracts and trophies home in a jar

Be better off than you are

Or would you rather be a dud?

Because without the product being pitched you are surely destined to be a failure. A dud. With a capital D.

Joseph Michael claims his AI driven approach to retentive use of Scrivener, or idea gathering, or getting “AI” to suggest a plot based on an uploaded graphic will solve all your writing problems. How? Because you aren’t writing anymore!

The music biz is fraught with these same types. The most flagrant offender is Unison Audio. From “AI” driven products like Drum Monkey (I’m not sure if that’s racist or not) to software plugins and drag and drop “proven successful” chord progressions all guaranteed to make anything you crank out a chart-topping success.

Here’s an aside, and what prompted this in the first place. I used to follow a guy who wrote well, and I enjoyed some of his stuff. Not all of it’s for me, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is he worked at it. Not long ago he posted that he used his AI assistant to write a song for him so that he had some lyrics that “wouldn’t step on anyone’s toes” when he published them in his latest WIP. Meaning something “original” that wouldn’t bring down the wrath of a published, copyright holding song owner. Was he too lazy? Was it a hassle to do his job as a writer and write? Is pushing your creativity to get better at your craft obsolete? Seriously. How hard can it be to write a knock off song?

Those questions shouldn’t be asked if you’ve chosen to write. Writing is writing. Like painting is painting, dancing is dancing, cake decorating is cake decorating and playing an instrument is, well, playing an instrument. You might get a product like Chat GPT or Drum Monkey to cop a groove for you, but if it’s real, it’s yours. Good, bad or indifferent. I use this example; you pay $200+ for a good seat at a concert and a computer sits center stage because (insert artist and type of event) decided it was too much trouble and phoned it in. Or, and this is eerily possible, there was no artist used or hurt in the material’s creation at all.

What this all comes down to, for me, is if you can’t imagine it, it’s going to be obvious, regardless.

I did synthesizer/electronic instrument clinics going back forty-plus years. I made a habit of keeping things simple. By that I mean keep it fun. I gave the people with the plastic pocket liners who cared about AD/DA resolution, knob to data linearity, laddering, processing delay, buffering blah blah blah all their time at the end. For everyone else, Hey, if I can do this, anybody can. Which was true, but only to a point. There were always those unhappy people in the crowd who spent money because of the demos like Joseph and Unison (and me) and got less than satisfactory results. The problem was almost always down to that empty distance between tools and desire, and output. Invariably they had no skill, or maybe they were brilliant technically but had zero familiarity with assembling an arrangement. The line I had for those people, and it wasn’t very supportive but I delivered it with as much empathy as possible – “I can teach you how to use the hardware (or software.) I can’t teach you how a song goes.”

Sadly, we have reached a point with certain artistic endeavors where skill, conceptual understanding and craftsmanship don’t matter.

I still believe the difference will be obvious on some level because all the gimmicks in the world won’t help if you don’t have a creative thought, or understand the basic process of constructing a (insert result of craftsmanship).

Some will say, “Sure, but so-and-so has a research assistant.” I’m not talking about research, I’m talking about abdicating our responsibilities as creators. “Alexa, give me the names of the most popular cars in 1982 and who won the Superbowl the same year” is no different than Googling. Asking ChatGPT or similar to write you a song, or dropping a chord set into a DAW or asking DallE to paint you a picture you can blow up and print is not creating.

Further on the author who wouldn’t/couldn’t write his own song, I quit on him because I couldn’t help wondering what else he can’t be bothered to write?

I wonder if he ever asked himself where do songs come from? The people who do it best say the song is out there, it’s our job to hear it. The same with writing. The story is there, waiting. Michelangelo said that the statue was already in the block of stone waiting to come out. Why would you hand off that gift of creating from the muse for expediency?

Any answer to that question besides “you wouldn’t” is bullshit.

We should learn to do what we’re doing, get better at it. Because, as I read in a book blurb from the same Story Empire group as this no name author, no amount of “AI” checking your work will weed-whack redundancies in your content. Will it tell you in a report that you used a word repeatedly? Yes. Will it stop you from elliptically repeating the same content or notify you of poor paragraph architecture? No.

As I publish this, I see where a gaggle of musicians are looking for legislative protection from AI that is cloning their voices and styles. Imitation is the highest form of flattery, right? Not where $ is concerned. I can hear the robots now – “So sue me.” In pick your movie star’s voice.

Come on, people. Write and perform your own stuff. No copycat ever added anything to the creative lexicon and let’s face it, “AI” only knows what’s been done. Let’s do our own homework and stop calling data manipulation intelligent. Because it ain’t.