Rampage to Improve the World

I am intrigued by Textio and the idea of the automated real-time, in-flow generation of text. I can see how this can work in music as well, where the current bar fills in the next x-number of bars, then reacts in real-time to what you're playing in real-time. (This is essentially what musicians in a group ideally should be doing). But what stops me about anything that is automated in creative pursuits is that it blocks "soul". We intimately know what that is, and always will--just as you know the feel of your own fingers against an instrument. Instead of getting ideas and shaping the ideas generatively from seed ideas with real effort for the brain, the mind and soul will go to seed instead.

The side effect of automation is obvious: It's too easy to generate content and upload it to the network (as in animated GIFs). As Kevin Kelly said decades ago, "The internet is a big copy machine".

An Age is defined by its preeminent metaphor, e.g. the Jet Age and the Space Age inspired designers to put tail fins and rocket decoration on cars. It's doing virtually the same thing now with information by making it virtual (VR), augmented (AR), or mixed (MR). Tail fins only appeared on cars for about 5 years. One would think they would have continued on even past the first landing on the moon. But by 1970, tail fins were ancient history.

I'm also reminded of an Alan Watts video I watched recently about forced virtuosity, or anything done for the sake of itself to feed the idea of an ideal world, in which he jokes about a "pestiferous mass of a million saints":

"The reason why you want to be better is the reason why you aren't...We aren't better because we want to be".

I am still thinking about composing music with algorithms because that's what's supposed to be new in music. In some cases, I've already written music the old-school way and wanted to do a version made with algorithms. I can't even find an iota of motivation to do this because there's no soul there.

Don't try too hard to be the future.

 

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[10/20/2024: What I want for the Songday System is a custom LLM that will take a day’s entries and map them over a rhythm–for example, using the rhythm of the Alan Watts quote. This means finding all the words that properly map over the syllabic structure. After that’s done then I can tweak it. This is how I want to use AI. If AI doesn’t produce anything usable, then you’re back to manual creativity].