Don't Use AI To Write Your Artist Bio
This week I posted an easy framework for writing your own artist bio in six sentences.
A very nice and well-meaning man posted that you could feed my parameters into AI and have it write a bio for you. And I responded, sure. Because sure.
But actually, you shouldn’t and this is why.
Sure, AI will spit you out a totally competent bio. AI is good at putting words together that approximate meaning. But this is your music. And ChatGPT has never heard your music.
And while AI is good at constructing sentences, it’s not good at being a human who has heard music and had an honest reaction. I can already hear some of you saying, “well actually AI can hear music and have a reaction” and I’d like to say to you all:
Shut up. What on earth are you talking about.
AI can’t hear music and feel music and be moved by music. AI doesn’t know what’s important and resonant and sublime about the music it “hears”.
In the same way that I don’t care what Spotify recommends to me, no matter how well it approximates my tastes, people don’t get excited to check out music because of competent sentence structures and language that adequately mirrors other language in other artist bios.
They get excited to check out music because it means something to someone else. You can turn the “sincere” and “passionate” dials all the way up on ChatGPT and those words will never come together to describe your music in the way they would had they been written by someone who loves your music. Because AI doesn’t love your music and it never will.
I listened to an AI generated podcast yesterday (in a Substack post I no longer can find because Substack hasn’t figured that out yet). It was impressive. The “personalities” used all kinds of humanisms and everything. The “personalities” used anecdotes and emphasis and all kinds of affectations to approximate human emotion. And it was basically flat. Because the “personalities” were discussing an article that they’d read that discussed feelings they had never experienced.
Your AI generated bio won’t have the subtle clumsiness of someone trying to tell someone else about something they love.
I’m asking you to be brave enough to stand there, vulnerable, in your fragile, beautiful humanity, and explain to the world why you made the magic you made.
And seriously, I’m asking you all to write six sentences.
Cass
