Tim Boucher

Yahoo via Tom’s Guide quotes Dr. Dre on AI in music production:

“I think the only people that see it as a threat are the people who have trouble creating,” he noted. “It’s a new tool for creativity. Some people are afraid of learning new things.”

I think that framing is a little harsh and “shamey,” but I agree with some of the maybe underlying sentiment.

One thing for me is that my work has never depended on it being “mine.” Once upon a time, my old blog consisted of close to ten years of writing and 10,000 posts that I dedicated in their entirety to the Public Domain (for whatever such a declaration is worth legally).

Sure, my name or some variation of it is included in authorial meta-data on the archives — if you can find them (and they continue to be hosted) — but it is not an “ownership” connection in the sense that remuneration for accessing it somehow finds its way back to me.

Part of that was born out of the “public quest” nature of the exploration of that period of my writing, almost like I was going through and dialing corresponding public telephone directory records around a certain set of experiences and resulting questions as a human, and then marking out my POV experiences and commentary of having passed that way. There is a saying I like, though I struggle always practice it: hold on tightly, let go lightly.

So, for me, I would reframe Dr. Dre’s observations maybe more in the direction of *possessiveness*, rather than “trouble” because trouble is part of the process, it’s what drives us to do these things as artists, what makes us pass through the fire – whatever form it takes.

In my own creative work, I’ve found that sort of artistic possessiveness of results and prestige as being counter-productive to my own creative process. If I don’t let this one go, there will not usually be another one soon on offer. At a certain point, in order to create, you have to dive in and fully embrace the creative stream, and follow where it leads. Trouble will always come, and that’s a sign you’re walking that path authentically in many cases, or a sign to find another better way. But the finding is the doing.

I know in the creatorsphere now, and the personalbrandosphere, we’re constantly being trained to optimize for engagement, etc etc. And the anxiety and uncertainty and distance from one another that being chained to unrelenting, inhumane, and constantly changing algorithms as a mortal human with a sensitive fragile heart is very real and not to be discounted. But we can also step off many of those treadmills and find other ways to be and share as artists and creative people that don’t all center around name recognition, and going viral, and monetizing every moment of our lives and gamifying all our interactions with the world and one another.

When you add up all the weight and the pressures of constant performativity that “creators” struggle under now, of course people are frustrated and angry when AI systems show up that painful underlying fact that in the end, none of it is worth anything, and a machine will always come along that is younger, cuter, faster, stronger, and even more performative and customisable than you are. Sorry, bro, that’s just the way of things. AI just multiplies this by a billion. We are all human slop, in its eyes; the ends justify any means.

Should it be like this? Probably not, but this is how the shithouse got cobbled together… And what did all your angry comments on social media ever get you personally, or ever change anything structurally? Checks notes, oh right, nothing.

So where do we go, what are we supposed to do, give away everything for free? Honestly, I think as creative people that is still one very good answer; it does and does not sometimes lead to money, and it also shows you when you do it that money is not the only riches in the world, and the relationships you build out of it in the end may end up being immensely more valuable. For my own part, I expect that not just AI companies, but all manner of scrapers and scammers and spammers are going to take, re-package, distort, re-use, and ultimately destroy everything that I “make” and put out there that is not absolutely nailed down behind a secure payment gateway. The incentives are too high on the part of those groups to not hoover up everything they can find, and rent it back to us. Which is why on the one hand, paradoxically, it actually does make sense to still give (at least some of) it away for free. So anyone, any kind of end-user and final destination can use it as a source. Knowledge remains universally accessible – that would be my ideal end dream state. But I don’t so much see things going that way these days, and it of course troubles me.

So why not give away the AI Lore Books series, instead of keeping them locked behind a payment gateway. Basically, because they are something else, something set apart from the daily-given, something with a certain sparkle and charm, that the giving of money is part of the interaction – it’s a part of the product-process, the packaging and the experience of it all. It’s in a different format, the ebook, files that can be downloaded, saved, and shared, outside of the “web” as we know it, or the artifact-system of the “blog” from its own time and place.

Those books are also interesting to me because, while they are pay-to-download web artifacts, they don’t have my name on them as an author. That didn’t seem important or seem to signify anything useful to me in their production, that it was my alpha-numeric human identifier sequence as insignificant “dead” prompter-editor-author (P.E.A.) and not another which be born under the imprimatur of the file-object. They just are what they are, a series of things, some interesting, some awful, but all in all something tangible.

I used to love playing this PC game when I was a kid in the 1980s. Brings back so many aromatic memories!

I’ve been watching for a while now the evolution of job ads around the use of generative AI for creative production. It’s almost always for the purposes of marketing, which comes as no surprise, of course. Though you do very occasionally run across “content factory” manager jobs, or positions directly tied to social media management.

This one below is by a company called Polywood that seems to make outdoor furniture out of recycled plastic, looking for an “AI Imaging Artist,” and it squarely falls into the marketing category above. Though, I think it’s also noteworthy because it seems to be one of the few that tries to bridge that gap between marketing and product/conception – which I think is exactly the right direction for integrating this kind of work. I’ll see if I can’t pluck a few choice snippets from the LinkedIn ad. It kicks off with this:

Create images people won’t believe aren’t real.

Create what doesn’t exist. Inspire what comes next.

Personally, I like real wood (and spent the better part of this summer making picnic tables). But the job ad still keeps me reading, which is honestly kind of rare these days:

Working alongside our Creative team, you’ll create realistic outdoor environments, visualize products before they’re manufactured, develop localized lifestyle scenes, and bring creative concepts to life for product launches, advertising, email campaigns, social media, e-commerce, and more.

Every image you create will need to do more than look beautiful. It must accurately represent our products, reflect our brand, and help customers imagine life with POLYWOOD furniture.

I’m not sure just how advanced they mean with regards to “visualize products before they’re manufactured,” but this is personally something I think is highly worth leaning into. Find some way to rapidly create and float out publicly theoretical/conceptual designs created using some kind of gen AI pipeline, and when they’re able to generate ___ level of market proof and public interest, you create new products based around that.

Reminds me of another company, Arcade AI, that lets users design jewelry and other types of product categories with an AI assistant, and at time of purchase, the physical manufacture of the (presumably one-off?) design you created with the tool gets routed to a vetted human artisan or production shop. I think this is kind of a cool direction?

I guess this is ultimately an “I’m old enough to remember when…” post. In this case, I’m old enough to remember when journalism actually reported on things that happened, instead of merely being opinionated ranting. Don’t get me wrong, opinionated ranting has its place. And I happen to believe the apex of that particular mode of technological expression was/remains blogging. Hence, here I am, engaging in the same… but I’m at least not calling it “journalism.”

The other “I’m old enough to…” piece of this particular article linked above from The Verge is: I’m old enough to have worked on prior generations of this content-labeling problem, especially around fake news, satire & mis-/disinformation. For literal aeons, users of web platforms have asked the product masters of those platforms for effective labeling of all different kinds of content. And while many trial solutions have been attempted, very few of them have ever stuck, or caught on in a massive way.

Why? Because accurately detecting different types of content is a complex, costly, and highly ambiguous problem. As well as being potentially highly volatile politically. The author of that Verge piece states:

“Surely improving the user experience for your millions of users is a worthwhile investment to fend off competition?”

While the casual well-meaning outside observer of a web platform might be forgiven for assuming that’s how it works, I can say as someone who has seen a little bit of the workings of the sausage factory at least, that this is decidedly *not* how it works. My experience has been instead: users ask for a thing (often for years), and thing rarely gets built unless it meets the product vision and business case the product is aiming to solve for.

The author of this article also seems to implicitly think that everyone else thinks like them and nobody IRL wants to see gen AI content on web platforms. But my recent anecdotal research – in this case experimenting with and observing gen AI-assisted anonymous ‘faceless’ Facebook meme pages – strongly suggests that the market overwhelming *wants* so-called AI “slop.”

Consider the following example:

This is a meme I stole from another AI meme page, and had ChatGPT come up with a new variation of the “punchline” text. I like to think of this technique as ‘stolen valor’ – you just take things you see performing well elsewhere, and copy them outright or create slight variations them. But the thing is, dumb AI-heavy memes like this work. They get engagement, they get likes, they get comments. So much so that there is a cottage industry of people who have connected their FB pages to automation services backed by gen AI tools, and those accounts just churn out boatloads of narrowly focused and consistently branded content on a given theme: single moms, coffee lovers, US females 55-65+ years old who like saying “good morning” to each other online.

With gen AI, you can now serve (or create) any kind of niche content with the greatest of ease. It’s a bonanza. This YouTube video gives a decent overview of how simple it is to set up a system like this:

My impression after looking into this a good bit is that people who are philosophically or politically against gen AI in the media or on social media do not accurately represent the vast majority of people who are simply happy to interact with cute content that makes them feel mildly good without challenging them too much. And that happens to be an area generative AI excels in.

So, if my hypothesis is true: that most people actually *like* or at least engage with gen AI content, then why would platforms want to create a way to enable audiences to filter out what potentially is one of the highest-value content categories for everyday users? The Verge author almost gets there, but via different formulation:

“Allowing users to filter it out regardless would go against all the effort these platforms have undertaken to profit from AI: They want you to embrace the slop factory.”

I don’t think that’s quite true though. They don’t want you to embrace the slop factory. They just want you to embrace the factory itself. As long as you post your article links and meaningless hot takes on social media, and beg people to like and subscribe, they don’t care which department you want to work in: the Slop Side or the Authenticity Brigade. It doesn’t matter. They merely want users to be eternally subject to the totalizing effect of their product ecosystems. And as long as people keep feeding those machines, letting them run their lives, and begging for changes from those who administer them, nothing will happen. Everything will just keep chugging along. All the way from the lowest of low-effort homebrew AI meme FB operators on up through the Complainer-Industrial Journalism complex. We’re all feeding at the same trough. The systems that need to be changed go radically deeper than “AI.” If we stop the critique and the inquiry there, we’re basically missing the boat entirely. And as Adorno said, wrong life cannot be lived rightly. Not with all the settings and filters in the world.

Had a fun time talking about using AI to help produce books on the Hello Future podcast on IHeartRadio. Listen here.

Had fun recording this appearance a few days ago on the Kim Komando radio show & podcast about my AI books and albums.

The folks over at Campside Media did an excellent job distilling a complex story down for a general audience. I enjoyed participating!

I meant to reply to this Consequence of Sound AI music article from December, but household affairs interrupted everything for me.

Don’t have much to say here, except that it’s a shame an authentic, deep, and personal interview got reduced to… this muddle.

My question for journalists at this point is: if Andrew Frelon is so inconsequential in AI music, etc., then why does everyone feel the need to keep talking about him and his work?

I’ve had a number of things going on which have prevented me from updating here much, but just wanted to point out that somehow Billy Joel released an AI music video almost a year ago that I never heard about until recently:

I don’t much care for the AI effects here, as I find the facial expressions don’t really feel like they match up too cleanly with his, if you look at vintage video of him (like the BBC Old Grey Whistle Test videos), but not a bad try I guess. There’s just something lacking about the musculature below the surface for me… I do love the song though, and have been playing it on guitar.