Losing Ourselves In The AI Mirror

What do people who believe they are writing songs when they use Suno AI, YouTuber Hank Green, and Narcissus from Greek mythology all have in common?

Quite a lot, it turns out. And they can help us recognise a form of stuckness that’s becoming increasingly common as people’s relationship with generative AI begins to blur the boundary between ourselves and the technologies we use, making it more difficult to know where the human ends and the machine begins.

https://youtu.be/zSMwN0wKGlE

Getting Stuck in the Digital Image

Our relationship with technology and, in particular, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Suno poses a really interesting existential dilemma.

I’ve been fascinated to see how these are often sold as tools to overcome stuckness. While at the same time, they create a whole different form of stuckness when we become attached to them.

The demise of Narcissus came through an obsession with his own reflection. Perhaps the price of looking away from his reflection brought its own kind of departure and death. Maybe the image had become more real, perfect, and desirable than the human staring at it.

In this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, we consider how the reflection of ourselves in the machines we use can bend us out of shape and leave us uncertain of who we are and what we’re capable of.

What Does It Mean to Write a Song?

Fil Henley, AKA Wings of Pegasus, asked this simple question in a recent video. He analysed an advert from the AI music generation platform Suno, which features producers and songwriters using it to make songs.

Fil says, “If you don’t know what the song is going to sound like before you hear it, then you haven’t written the song.”

Platforms like Suno act like fruit machines. The output is based more on luck than judgement.

What makes them compelling and perhaps even addictive, is that the result is impossible for us to predict. It’s a surprise each time that feels exciting to reveal. And it can turn any old crap into something you might hear on the radio. As we see in the video.

More Than a Tool

This is what makes these services different from tools.

A tool reliably enables us to carry out a task without doing everything and more autonomously. So when the producer says that Suno is showing him stuff he never would have thought about, he is revealing the blurred boundary between us and these machines. It is more than a tool for songwriting. It’s generating the song itself.

Suno isn’t like a digital audio workstation (a tool), where a songwriter records, edits, and produces music they have written and performed. It goes further, making many of the creative decisions that normally require time, judgement, and consideration throughout the songwriting process. In other words, the user doesn’t need the skill required to produce the result.

Whose Ideas Are They?

So if YOU didn’t think of them, whose ideas are they? And if it’s outputting stuff based on something you haven’t thought of, what’s the point in you being there at all?

The song is found in the mirror as generative AI reflects back an image of a reality that doesn’t exist above the surface.

Creative Block as a Rite of Passage

In reality, human creativity emerges through the energy generated by those moments of friction, uncertainty, and obstacle.

By intervening early with generative AI before we have taken the opportunity to grapple with a block, we deprive ourselves of that bittersweet joy of finding something that comes to life THROUGH US.

Instead, a service like Suno short-circuits the block. It presents fully formed solutions that we “never would have thought about”.

Perhaps, we would have thought of something much better and more “us” if we had been patient and given ourselves time to grapple with the block.

The Allure of The Mirror

When you listen to these outputs, there is a professional sheen to them that feels sharp. It sounds just like stuff you hear on the radio. But it sounds like stuff you hea