Artifical Intelligence

The “Guild Concerns,” and mine, and yours, around Artificial Intelligence

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I hope the hardy, but smaller, summer readership here has enjoyed this diversion from our usual literary poetry combined with original music subjects. It’s been somewhat difficult to write. Why?

When I run across comments or longer-form writing about artificial intelligence – given my interests, mostly from folks in artistic fields – the feelings and cold convictions I read come in hot. AI gives me a lot of feels too: frustrations, fears, disgusts, distrusts, worries, even amusements at its fails. Yet, earlier in this series I’ve honestly talked about AI features I’ve tried. I wonder if I’m alone in these mixed feelings – if I’m just a wishy-washy old guy who won’t say it plain. For my final installment let me focus on those concerns.*

I’ve referred to some of those “guild concerns” earlier in this series. Let me expand on that. Let’s say you are a professional, semi-professional , or aspiring visual artist, voice talent, translator, editor, writer, composer, musician. AI claims it’s achieved parity with your field’s trades. “No!”  you reply to any such suggestion, for you are informed of all the small things that a master in your field provides that AI, as yet, can’t. But along with that comes the fear that most customers and many consumers of your art may judge as inessential elements you’ve learned to provide and appreciate, that your professional value-add may be judged dispensable. Capital’s royal decision makers may not hear your objections, give them any bottom-line weight. There’s an unavoidable term for a resulting outcome: enshittifacation. Everything then may drop to just above the level that would drive commoners to revolution.

And there’s a tsunami of salt to be poured into artist’s wounds from the use of Large Language Models in current AI. LLMs digest realms of work by artists, almost entirely without compensation to them, and apply pattern and categorization processes to this hoard to make it into reusable parts that can be recombined into other work – work whose ownership has been severed from artists and transferred in part to oligarchical corporations. This injury isn’t speculative. It’s already occurred in titanic amounts to create current LLMs, and ex post facto attempts to get paid for this seizing of work or to prevent future accumulations of scraped up art are being resisted by the AI industry who is seeking government protection for this reuse.**

So, where organized as unions, workers in the arts have attempted to counter this, concerned both as keepers of artistic excellence and as counter-forces seeking to protect incomes for their members. Will this succeed? Who am I to predict, watching ignorant beach-sand techbro armies sweep across the darkling plains amid alarms. But I understand the anger/fear of the artists, endorse it.

But I, myself, am an odd case. Poetry has low capital needs, a loaf of bread, a jug of iced-tea, and a roof, and I’m good to go there – and the renumeration market for poetry is scant. I used to inconstantly chase after giving readings with a couple dozen attendees, or the small paper presses aspiring to three-digit sales. I still admire those things and support them, I just don’t see them as precious scraps to struggle over at this point in my life. With the Parlando Project I most often use other people’s poetry, using and promoting work from dead and/or public domain poets or small excerpts of words from the living. With this Project I can aim for my hundreds of readers or listeners for a piece – a tiny audience in Internet stats, but an appreciable reward by poetry standards. With my music production and distribution here (aided by affordable computer technology) I find that I’m part capitalist and part worker-in-song. And there’s a conflict there.

I’ve already confessed in the series that I sometimes use what is called AI to extend the long-standing feature of computer music arpeggiators, programs that suggest and play patterns of notes on command. Honestly, I don’t feel good about using these – there’s shame mixed in there with the approval I find with my producer’s hat on from the effective results they bring to the finished musical piece.*** It’s not just breast-beating when I confess it feels fraudulent to me to use some computer aided line or expression played with an accomplished verve. A human should do that, and I can’t do that, and yet that part of the ensemble is  there – I’ve allowed it, and its level of success to some listener could be assigned to me. The alternate path I left some time ago was organizing bands of musicians to realize the music I create. I may wonder about that untaken path, but then I consider how dissatisfied those musicians might be at my non-commercial aims, how frustrated or dismayed they would be with my musical naivete, how stressful and ill-fitting it would be for the composer-hat-me to wear the bandleader-hat as well. Yet, those struggles, despite unfitness on my part, may be the necessary dues to engage in musical work. Guild concerns might hand down a harsh judgement on what I’ve done: “If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t do that  –  you’re taking away jobs from skilled tradesmen.”

In this I support the guild with one side of my heart, and yet I could be charged with working against its union shop.

A musical piece from a pair of DVDs issued decades ago that my child and I treasured when we both were younger. I don’t have details about how this music was produced, with what technology, but this is so much better than the trite AI slop illustrations I could have chosen to use instead. The Animusic web site is defunct, and I don’t know how you could still purchase this.

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Full-fledged AI music? The examples I provided in my last post satisfied my curiosity in my quick attempts to see what the current state of the art can do. Even more so than with my frustrations with AI illustrations I discussed in the first part of this series, I’m not tempted to continue to use that level of AI music creation. I don’t have to test my ethics in this: AI generated songs can’t get close enough to what I want, what I intend to communicate. I like playing instruments, and despite my not uncommon artists ability to procrastinate on getting down to composition of new work, once I’m into the process, I find it absorbing. If what results isn’t always a perfect realization of intent, so to it is with AI, and typing a few words into a prompt has no visceral rewards.

As I wrap up this series today, I’ve honestly tried to report my contradictions. If I’ve done anything, it’s my hope that you, my widely curious readership, will use what I’ve written to spur your own considerations of the challenges AI brings to art. I’ve used music as the main example, but literature and many other arts – as well as work that isn’t viewed as artistic – have like dangers, allied concerns.

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*Let me mention that I also share environmental concerns with the energy usage to provide AI. While earlier in this series I wrote that we likely don’t really know what those energy needs are with precision – and our existing general use of ubiquitous computers both saves and costs energy in some balance that’s hard to calculate.

An another issue: brevity keeps me from delving today into the important risk of extended capitalist and or authoritarian control of expression by ceding tools of production to oligarchs.

And lastly, there is a great deal of techbro hype around AI. In some ways it’s encouraging and scary how well it works, and in others it’s risible and scary how badly it works. I don’t mind so much laughing at its limitations in the world of musical art – like the satire in the last post where it created outrageous protest songs that can still sound sonically plausible – but the thought of non-analog safeguards in life-and-death contexts is concerning. It’s already hard enough to hold capital to account for grievous errors and oversights. Giving another level of kings-X granted to the passive voice of “computer error” worries me.

**As I was finishing a draft of this on Saturday I read an egregious example of AI theft from a musical artist. Emily Portman (and others, it appears from the linked news story) had their artistic presence on leading music streaming sites invaded by someone greedy enough to try to steal the widow’s mite that independent artists receive.

***If I was to play advocate in my defense, I could say that the uses I make of these tools are not the same as typing in a few generally descriptive words and having AI generate an entire song (or painting, or story, or essay) such as the song examples I supplied in the last post. I work iteratively with the specifications and adjustments for the patterns – though so do many who work on elaborate prompts for generating entire songs – but I’ve supplied them with the harmonic structure by playing or composing the chords or melodic centers of the resulting pattern to be generated. Those substantive contributions I supply make a case for these uses being collaborative extensions of the human.

I’ve so long used drum machines – and entire accepted genres of music are built around the expectations that they will be used – that using computers to play drumbeats in patterns seems more allowable to my inner ethicist. If I dig deeper, and acknowledge that I know and appreciate the musicianship and sound of a good percussionist, this is inconsistent, but this is my honest emotional report.

Summarizing and speaking here in guild specifics: the composer in myself may feel justified, while the internalized musician’s guild inside my soul still feels shame at my stooping to this.

AI music may be telling us something about how music works for listeners – and we might want to change that

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I had to catch myself editing the last post – as I discussed my use of virtual instruments in place of the actual instruments and the new plausibility of thoroughly AI music, I was tempted to overuse the word “verisimilitude.” Is that really something essential to the art of music? I like the cranky not-quite-real sound of the Mellotron after all. If musical art should be imagination, music itself certainly doesn’t care if the instruments are real – though musicians might, from legitimate guild concerns. Then we moved to having the computer play the instrument, and that too asks about human-displacement – and now we have AI creating songs outright from very generalized prompts. If you’re a composer, a musician, or a listener, this raises questions.

Let’s start by being honest with ourselves as listeners in avid or casual modes: as we pass through life, music becomes a sort of sonic homeplace – a location where something sounds similar to what we’ve heard before, with just enough difference to stave off boredom, just enough new to add the spice of novelty. Some musical ears live in homogenous towns, others in more diverse ones, but we go to music for the effects we’ve learned to appreciate.

Current entirely-AI music exploits this: taking what we know of form and sounds, following its predictability in a way listeners have been known to appreciate, and serving our aural expectations back to us. When they do that, the robots are telling us something about ourselves. As I ended my last post, if we object to AI music, it may be from the romantic feelings we retain for human artists. We want fellow humans to make these sounds with and for us, and our response may rise to disgust when we are tricked. And here’s a problem: it’s getting harder to say you won’t be tricked.

If this is so, what hopes do we have? One: imperfection, at least of a kind. Let me interject here that I’m not talking about the imperfections of boredom, of which there are many. I’m talking about music that may be a bit more haphazard and unpolished. If machines can precision-target our musical comfort-center receptors, then let us distrust that response at least in part.

Commenting reader rmichaelroman has already guessed that might be part of it, mentioning the performance, rough in recording quality and musical finesse, from the LYL Band at an Alternative Prom in someone’s basement years ago.  Even stored on honest recordings – live music, particularly live music that is truly live, with unplanned-out moments, with instruments reveling in their specific bodies, breaths, and vibrations – offers vivid imperfection.

Or too: voices with less talent than intent. I try to not over-burden my listeners with self-made excuses for my singing voice – but for all its limitations, it remains the one I have handy to realize the songs. Would AI be able to duplicate those imperfections? Perhaps, but it’s unlikely to want to.

When music practices and equipment reached points of greater mastery in the 20th century, reaction in the form of purposely avoiding those felicities arose. Midcentury pop music was opposed by the rising Folk revival and by early Rock’n’Roll. Then later, perfected Rock recording technology and improved musicianship found themselves met with Punk and Hip-Hop premised on the idea that a minimum of tech or muso-chops can still make an effective statement. By the way, I believe those technical hierarchies produced worthwhile music, but those that dispensed with them did so too.*

And when I wrote about voices with more intent than talent: for all the romantic imprecision of assigning internal motivation from a separated artistic product, what we believe we understand about why a piece of music was produced has importance. AI-music, however good it is at mimicking the technology and sound of music we like, presently offers only the weakest and least admirable answers to the question of why it was called into existence. To make some money? To make inoffensive sonic décor? To sell drinks to dancers? To show it can be done, as if that “verisimilitude” was the most significant thing about art? Some music I have liked was made for such mundane reasons, but in the future we may find intent more necessary to weigh.

I’ll leave with one more brief metaphor as AI-music reaches a level of musicological competence: we may have come to something analogous to painting’s role as photography entered the realm of visual representation. AI music in artistic hands may eventually seek out flagrantly subjective use of the technology – and music made by humans holding physical objects in real time will increasingly began to value qualities beyond sounding customary and “correct.”

If my energy holds out, there’s at least one more post in this AI series before I return to our regular combinations of literary poetry with original music, this one will address in more detail some of those music things I call “guild concerns.” If you miss the usual Parlando Project fare, there are over 800 examples of that here, so feel free to look around.


I wouldn’t want to call this performance imperfect, but there’s a human unexpectedness to it that satisfies me

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*The 1950’s-early ‘60s folk music revival had elements that I found closely mimicked by the Punk/Indie movement of following years: the DIY convictions, the gumption to form or transform venues and record labels, the opportunities for out-of-the mainstream ideas and sounds to sneak in between the more polished and “professional” acts. Similarly, Hip Hop followed the folk process: use what instruments were at hand, assertion before sounding “correct,” recombining shared culture materials (floating verses and borrowed tunes for the banjo brigades; turntables, cheap drum machines, and samples for Hip-Hop, contemporary social comment for either). Musicologist Ethan Hein said in a BlueSky post that helped spur me to write this series, “You can get across the essential elements of hip-hop and house with buckets (Hein here is referring to overturned buckets used as drums –FH)  and voices. Computers and sound systems are nice to have but inessential. Long after Spotify is gone, people rapping over beats will still be with us.”

Artificial Intelligence in Music: the last wall of the castle

~ Frank Hudson ~ 5 Comments

Just a note to readers coming here for the experience of literary poetry combined with the original music stuff we do – I’m still doing some “summer vacation” writing that breaks from that form this month. This post does deal with music – if from another angle – and I expect to fully return to our traditional presentations this Fall.

So, I’m at my frequent breakfast place on a fine August morning that has not yet reached the AQI-alert level of smoke. In an unplanned coincidence, Glenn walks in. We’d talked last week about, of all things, Herb Alpert, and his early 1960’s instrumental hits, particularly “A Taste of Honey”  which was a chart topper in our youth.*

Glenn has some Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass CDs, but like many he’s as likely to have a CD player as he is to have a way to play 78 rpm shellac records. He’s been trying to get their music onto his new Mac Mini, but his old USB Apple Super Drive won’t recognize a music disk.**  Somehow (likely my current preoccupation with finally writing about it) we got to talking about AI. I mentioned that I’ve been struggling to use my collection of Virtual Instruments (VIs) to realize recordings with brass instruments that capture the full level of articulation the real thing can produce.

We talked a little bit about the various ways these instruments can be controlled: little plastic keyboards, various guitar pickup schemes, even wind controllers. Glenn has a bit of engineering background – this had (I hoped) some mutual interest.

I have little or no guilt in using VIs here for the Parlando Project. Not only is a VI grand piano highly affordable, it takes up no space, requires no fancy mic’ing, and produces a pleasing sound. Given my musical eclecticism, I think of how much more cluttered my studio space would be if I continued to collect odd instruments that I would experiment with to add unusual colors to pieces. And though I can’t actually play a real cello or violin, I can use a MIDI guitar controller to add those sounds. I’m grateful for those options for realizing my music.

Then I told Glenn about the Mellotron – a pioneering virtual instrument before such a thing had a name and acronym. Rather than hard drive files containing databases of digital recordings of actual instruments playing a range of notes in different articulations like one of my computer VIs, this primitive mid-20th century machine used strips of analog tape recordings of an instrument playing a single note for each tape strip. When professional musicians (among them: The Beatles, the Moody Blues, King Crimson, The Zombies) started to use the Mellotron, some objected: could the Mellotron put real musicians out of work? When the Beatles and their producer George Martin wanted a high trumpet part on “Penny Lane,”  a real musician was contracted for and played that difficult and memorable part. But flip the “Penny Lane” 45 RPM record over and on “Strawberry Fields Forever”  Paul McCartney pressed a Mellotron’s keys to produce an eerie flute sound. Listening closely, it wasn’t quite like a real musician blowing into a real flute. It was maybe 80% there – but if it sounded a little fake to a discerning ear, one might think it was still an interesting sound, whatever its level of verisimilitude. But imagine you’re a flutist in 1967 – the Beatles could certainly afford to pay for your services. Though bands moved on to use more complex synthesizers and other devices, real instruments still retained a level of preference when their fully-authentic sound was called for.

Could I pay or otherwise record real musicians instead of using my computer VIs? It’s hard for me to imagine a cello or violin player that would accept my chaotic and self-imposed quick-turnaround schedule, naïve/inconsistent musicianship, my shifting moods, and my no-revenue-project budget.

In my defense, this human being may well be playing the instruments,  just as I play guitar: this note, here, this loud, this long. Other times I’m scoring the music the VIs play, writing or modifying the MIDI event data rather than on a music-staff leger.

Still, there are some gray (or even darker) areas. For me, that started with using arpeggiators: ways to tell a computer you want it to take a chord and play the notes within it in a rhythmic series. I can tell it what note-length to use, something about the order of the notes, but the precision is then all the computer’s – and arpeggiators will have presets to suggest, and I might agree to one. Numerically quantifying the level of plausibility of my own work is problematic, but VI technology is such that even with my limited musical-instrument-operator skills, I may approach 90% there – but my musicianship, with its intents, and also it’s limits, is still involved. I can’t help but think my brass VIs sound badly because they are so far from the families of instruments I have played in “the real world.”

But a greater temptation arrives: more sophisticated computer “players” that take a chord sequence and duration I supply – from composition or by my playing something – and augment them by playing those cadences musically in a style it supplies and I consent to. These “players” have multiple adjustments, I can (and often do) modify what they supply as defaults, but this further development bothers me. Am I still the composer? In a human-musician world the answer would be clear by well-established tradition: yes, they’d say, I’m still the composer. Professional musicians, working before computer algorithms, have long supplied “feels,” timbres, expression, and entire decorative lines. They might even revoice the chords or play extended harmonies. They will do all that (or more, or better) than my computer does for me. So why do I feel bad when I ask my computer to do this? Well, there’s the impersonality to it. I’ve worked with others who’ve made important musical contributions to work I’ve originated, and that doesn’t feel the same. While I think I would be problematic to impose this on human musicians for the rewards I can offer, there’s more to it than not offering them that opportunity. I can’t help but think I’m cheating, that these realizations are fraudulent.

Yet guilt hasn’t stopped me from using these computer functions, and you’ve heard some of the parts they’ve played sometimes in Parlando Project recordings. The term artificial intelligence is elastic, it’s become a marketing buzz-word, but these enhanced arpeggiators and play-with-this-feel-or-articulation variations could fairly be called AI – even when the same musical piece has my vocals of I-hope-for subjective-quality or my it’s-supposed-to-sound-like-that guitar playing.

That said, over breakfast, I tell Glenn about how far AI music generation has come in the past few months. Just by entering a prompt or making a menu selection, often made up of generalized summary words for genre or playing style, one can create an entire song including vocals and all the musical accompaniment. Earlier in this decade the results would’ve been overly simple or subject to embarrassing defects. Now, the results easily pass the “Turing Test” for casual listeners. If the Mellotron flute is 80% there, and my best VI violin might be 90% there, these entirely machine-generated songs are about 95% there in verisimilitude. Sure, human musicians, real composers, even avid music listeners, are forever aiming for that extra 5% of skill, originality, and listener appeal; but when I listen to these productions which can be produced endlessly in minutes of hands-off computation time, the “tells” are the thoroughly AI songs meh obsequiousness to genre musical tropes and the slight artificiality of the machine-made vocalists. And that’s a problem. Centuries of musical theorists from the days of music theory treatises written with a quill, and onward to the accretion of hardened commercial songwriting craft, have supplied all the steps in ink-stained longhand to create a coherent musical structure with predictable effects. The computer coders only have to apply a light dressing of adaptation to transfer this consensus for robotic mass-duplication. The singers would still have remained a challenge – except by a fateful choice: popular music has increasingly prized machine-aided polishing of human voices to remove the inexactness they are prone too. Ironically, what could have been the last rampart to be surmounted by AI was dismantled by meticulous vocal production and ubiquitous auto-tune before the tech-bro Visigoths arrived.

I said to Glenn over breakfast in the café “Here we are talking about a popular song released 60 years ago, one we both still remember. ‘A Taste of Honey’  didn’t have any vocals, and now AI could easily produce an entire album of other instrumental songs to surround it – and even listening carefully, I’m not sure we could tell AI from human-written and realized musical pieces.”

This is not a theoretical exercise. Streaming platforms and playlists care even less than casual music listeners about AI content standing in for human work. In some genres, the algorithm that supplies your next song playing may already be a robot suggesting robots playing robot-composed imitations of human music. The only thing holding off an overwhelming onslaught of AI slop is that we, the audience, are still invested in the erotic worship of flesh-and-blood young performers and some residual romantic veneration of the human artist. Those things may be illusionary, but even if so, those things may be our defense. Do I have any other hope to offer? Yes, there’s something else, that comes next post.

This is the author of the play “A Taste of Honey” for which
the tune was composed. Her play frankly portrays a whole range of working-class situations in ‘50’s Britain. A teenager when she wrote her play, she was 21-years-old when this cheeky interviewer interrogated her. What admireable self-confidence!

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*As vividly as I remembered the song, I knew nothing about its origin – and while I could distinctly recall the musical sound of Alpert’s recording in my head (trumpet, trombone, and that beating drum) I also heard in my mind vocals and a crooner singing. I tried to find the version with the sung lyrics I was remembering. I likely had heard the (somewhat unlikely) version of “A Taste of Honey”  done on the Beatles’ earliest LP, but I don’t think it was that one I was hearing in head.

**If you still own that ancient Apple artifact, the external Super Drive CD/DVD drive, you should know that it won’t work unless connected directly to one of your Mac’s USB ports. Even deluxe powered USB hubs or docks won’t work–  the drive will seem completely dead when connected through them.