What Else Is There To Do?

A big part of getting the answers you want is asking the good questions. Why do we need AI for this?

When ideas strike at the moment I’m improvising I have to attempt to capture them. That’s when things slow way down--because you’re in writing and/or production mode, and you tend to want to follow down that path. The initial questions (at least for me) are: what is the best tempo, and what is the rhythmic mapping? I may know the key already but is it the best key for any of the instruments that I might use on it?

You can have AI do this and present possible solutions, but that's just more delay--which is the enemy of spontaneity.

Musical examples aside, any scenario using AI has the potential to add lots of latency or displacement in the system--the very thing you wanted to resolve. Creative people never had a problem being creative so the fecklessness of AI is established from the get-go. You will always be presented with bottlenecks that you will need to resolve, which in some ways is one of the most satisfying things about creativity--at least in retrospect when you can take (most of ) the credit for how it eventually turned out.

I’d have to get really excited about the possibilities in AI assistants, as I have always had other ways of generating possibilities with the things I’ve always used. Anyone that works at a craft has their favorite tools, methods, and strategies. When I first started to compose, I marveled at how composers scored just using two tools: a piano and a pen or pencil. The only problem was to create x-minutes of music.

The point is not convenience: it’s a process whereby you arrive at the desired result that might seem convenient in retrospect, but convenience is not the objective.

What else is there to do besides doing the thing you wanted to do in the first place?