November 25, 2024

Meet you all the way

Two simple predictions about the generative AI economy that is already here, not yet equally distributed.

1. Living in the Moment

A few days ago, a music journalist, who I follow for breakdowns of classic songs, posted some music he’d made and then remade using AI.

He was delighted by what he heard and, frankly, so was I.

This Sunday morning, Ana left some 1970s music playing while we made breakfast and I was struck by the quiet parts of Toto’s Rosanna. The soft kick drum and bass in lockstep, the driving rhythm. I played them over and over again for our boys.

Like you, like anyone who has faced winter, I’ve long wanted to extend the parts of songs that are exquisite because they’re fleeting.

(Consider the haunting bridge in Do You Really Want To Hurt Me by Culture Club, which lays bare the roots music they… adapted.)

Music of course, is a conversation, and as such it’s always repetition. A repetition to master loss.¹

In the first half of the 1900s, in Jazz especially, it was popular to interpret and expand upon songs. (What is a “standard” if not a pretext for innovation.)

At the end of the 20th century, electromechanical and then digital tools made such improvisations more concrete through the use of samples.

It took me all of three minutes to register on Suno.com for free, feed its models two snippets of Rosanna’s Toto, write some bracingly dumb lyrics about “0’s and 1’s, and the dialogue that is music”, and then generate these… songs?

[I’ve starred ⭐️ the ones I recommend you hear.]

take 1

• song 01

• song 02 ⭐️

take 2

• song 03

• song 04

take 3

• song 05

• song 06 STARTING at 1m53s⭐️

I played these snippets for Ana and she said, “That’s insane.” And then she left the room, because other than marveling at the craftsmanship, there’s not much else to say.

Unless you’re feeling inspired.

In which case, you’ll write something new, something fresh, something that will in turn be fed back into the culture, now digitized, to be synthesized anew.²

What will happen to music when someone can generate a song in 10 seconds by describing what they want to hear?

Recorded songs will be less important.

Live shows will become more popular.

2. The Live Experience

I’ve spent the last few months (a happy and truly fortunate culmination of the last forty years) getting to make private, synthetic spaces for a computer platform that has not yet become mainstream.

People often ask me: what will happen when everyone is wearing these “focus” goggles, seeing something no one else can?

Without getting into the particulars of how these experiences will soon become consensual (from consentire – “felt together”) I simply reply:

People will want to spend more time in physical spaces experiencing live events.

The ephemeral will be just as valuable if not more. Because, as always, it will be scarce – fleeting – and if there’s something our organisms understand with very fibre of our being its scarcity.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DCw0nmtyTod/

Could a computer make this geometric pattern?

Of course.

But, as with “Adult coloring books”, the pleasure is in watching someone go through the gestures, if not doing them yourself.

Does the existence of great dancers make dancing less fun? lol. Go look on TikTok.

Monkey see, monkey do. Forever.

There will be more “documentaries” about how things are made.

3. Feedback loops

We live in an especially brittle time. Things that appear solid seem to come apart quickly.

Of course, their permanence was an illusion; the cracks were there. Contra Yeats, the center was not meant to hold!

It was balanced far to the right of human rights, etc. To borrow a different analogy, the weeds are overgrown and we have mistaken them for the flora that will feed our children.

Of course, the egotists, sociopaths and degenerates being paraded as victors by our reigning oligarchs are not going to engage in “controlled burns” any more than the NYC landlords who torched buildings for insurance money were invested in urban renewal.

The destruction that surely lies ahead can only lead to green shots if we understand how lasting things are made.

Institutions are built on habits as well as displays of power. (What are you willing to sacrifice to keep the rule of law alive in the USA is not an idle question.)

This weekend, I took our boys to their classmate’s bar mitzvah at a reformed temple. In the morning, they’d gone to their catechism.

In a sense, they spent most of their sábado (as in, the sabbath) repeating the gestures that kept the rule of law alive throughout thousands of years of savagery.

Most religious books are not especially peaceful. (You can smell the tripe of contemporary spiritualism by its avoidance of conflict, pain.³)

No matter how much of our future is intermediated, surveilled and plundered, we will always have the choice of how we live and die.

As Emiliano Zapata famously said “Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”

We must remind ourselves of that freedom, always, and make sure we act on it, every day.

Use it or lose it, as they say.

Meet you all the way,

jose

Postscript

Eight years ago, I quoted the following:

Political attitudes are most malleable when prevailing conditions threaten people’s economic or personal security and cause them to feel out of control… [I]ndividuals who feel they lack control are more likely to harbor beliefs in conspiracy theories.[4] According to these authors, individuals can overcome their lack of control by identifying illusory patterns, or conspiracies, in order to make sense of their environment. Elites can, then, take advantage of anxiety-producing events where people lose their sense of control by “fomenting suspicion and uncertainty and then proffering solutions by identifying a source of blame.

You should read the whole quote, at least.