An interview with Artificial Intelligence

Yep, you read that correctly. Since Artificial Intelligence can’t really “think” I asked Chat GPT to create a playlist based on the playlist I had created for my conversation with Kevin Alexander a couple of weeks ago. Those songs were: * “Daniel” - Elton John * ”Somebody Get Me A Doctor” - Van Halen * ”Faithfully” - Journey * ”The Walls Came Down” - The Call * ”Steeltown Bluestown” - Broken Homes * ”Unsatisfied” - The Replacements * ”Doin’ the Things We Want To” - Lou Reed * ”Animal” - Pearl Jam * ”A Murder of One” - Counting Crows * ”More Like Them” - Lydia Loveless The AI generated playlist is included at the bottom of this post. Everything that you hear on this episode, except the music, is AI generated. I asked Chat GPT why certain songs were selected and was given the reasoning. In some cases, it was surprisingly sound. Check out why “Black” by Pearl Jam was chosen as a parallel to “A Murder of One” by Counting Crows - it’s shockingly cogent. I then used Eleven Labs to select a female voice (one I use for Abandoned Albums) and copied the AI’s reasoning into the app to produce the voice. Both the replies and my questions are voiced by AI. This was really just kind of a playful experiment to see what the result would be. Now, I don’t share the fear of Artificial Intelligence. I recognize the potentially damaging impact it can have, but I don’t think we’re at that stage yet. Certainly not at a commercial level. This technology is still new and it’s going to take some time for all the dust to settle. Remember, it took about ten years for the internet to stop being crazy… or at least to silo out its crazy. And yes, the job market is shit, I know this first hand, but that’s a result of corporate greed and not artificial intelligence (perhaps a discussion for another day). I use AI pretty regularly and can tell you that nine times out of ten, anything that it generates still needs some kind of human intervention to correct it or clean it up. There are obvious copyright issues, but those concerns are just beginning to make their way through the courts and will be settled eventually. Unfortunately, law and technology don’t move at the same pace. Hopefully, they won’t fuck it up like they did with music. And don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there is some kind of nefarious government application being explored. Is there cause for suspicion? Yes. Panic? I don’t think so, not at the moment. And I say that as a writer. In my opinion, the AI overthrow of humankind is greatly exaggerated.

With each new technological advance, there is always someone screaming that the sky is falling. People thought television would make radio and film irrelevant, it didn’t. People thought cable television would ruin broadcast television, it didn’t. People thought the internet was going to take over the world. Well, it kind of did, but the sky still didn’t fall. Artificial Intelligence is just another tool, that’s it. It’s not the anti-christ. Will it be exploited and/or abused? Probably. But few commercial things don’t get exploited and/or abused, that’s the way we practice capitalism (perhaps a discussion for another day). Do I think the robots will eventually take over the world? Yea… but that’s presuming we don’t fuck it up and ruin it beforehand. And on that issue, all bets are off. I probably could’ve used AI to generate this post, but I didn’t. However, I did use it to check and make sure what I wrote is relatively coherent. The simple fact is that this Artificial Intelligence ship has sailed; and for better or worse, it’s part of the culture now. It’s best to learn how to use it to your advantage. To paraphrase Bill Hicks, don’t be afraid, life is just a ride.

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