The responses invoked by so-called Artificial Intelligence are a complex mix. Expressed feelings recently would include any of the following in any combination: disgust, fear, ridicule, outrage at theft of Intellectual Property, and charges of tech-bro over-valuing. Let me say at the outset that I have caught myself feeling all those feels too.

I’ve planned for some time to write a post about AI here, and this summer period when I feel free to take short holidays from our usual music/literary focus would be a good time for it. Then this morning I read this post by a blogger/teacher/musician Ethan Hein,* and I’ve been driven to start this long-delayed, provisional, and likely incomplete post on the subject.

What Hein wrote isn’t extraordinarily provocative. “I understand the impulse to decorate your newsletter with AI slop images but when I see that, it makes me assume that you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

If I’m not a proponent of AI, why would that motivate me?

Well, for one, I could be found guilty of the failing he uses as a marker of knowledge. And if my energy holds out, there’s more than that to say.

THE MATTER OF IMAGE

As the Parlando Project moves into its 10^th year, how I work and present things has been a learning experience for me. Some years back I noted that images in blog posts increase new visitors to this blog. Now, the Parlando Project is a poetry/varied music thing, and a great many of the casual visitors don’t become regular readers or listeners – but some  might.

Given that I’m an abysmal visual artist, I began using this way of finding images: public domain pictures or (I hoped) benign reuse of images found on the Internet. This is a more complex subject than I’ll go into today, and I know enough to know that as a courtesy or strict matter of rights, I’ve likely sinned in regards to crediting images. The Parlando Project isn’t even a non-profit organization at this point – my plan from the start was deliberately to be a non-revenue thing. I want to spread knowledge and outlooks and to promote other people’s art. I certainly don’t want to remove value from others’ art.

The original attempts at figurative AI illustrations that I saw were ludicrous. I knew there was this thing called DALL-E, and its warped and poorly detailed images others shared seemed to have come straight from the Island of Misfit Toys. But in 2022, I was made aware of a new option. I’m a long-time user of the Adobe Audition audio editing program, and Adobe had a new product offered for beta-testing called Firefly. Firefly claimed to produce better AI illustrations, and it also claimed this Unique Selling Proposition that, AFAIK, has remained unique: they said it was trained only on art whose creators had been compensated for.**

The very first image I used from Firefly actually pleased me. I did modify it, but it worked for illustrating the musical setting of the poem I was presenting, Hey, I could use something like this, I thought.

April 2023, I want to show William Carlos Williams dancing alone. My first use of Adobe Firefly to generate an image.

This acceptance of the tool was reinforced by my decision to present videos some times. While a blog post needed only a single illustration, having something germane to put up against the linear flow of a video asked for multiple images to fit different points in the song.***

I think this was the final Parlando Project use of AI-generated images to illustrate this very short Emily Dickinson poem’s “lyric video.”

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Over about two years, I continued to use Firefly. My experience was mixed. No matter how much care and detail I tried to put into the prompts I often couldn’t get anything like what I wanted. I’d resort to 20 or 30 tries to get one I could charitably use. Afterwards, I’d sometimes wince at what I accepted and included with Parlando work, but I have a policy here of leaving work up “warts and all.” But I did write “mixed.” Just like that initial image that I used of a purported dancing William Carlos Williams, some of the ones I got from Firefly pleased me, and I hope pleased audiences. Maybe someone now sees a poem in a different light, or checked out some music they otherwise wouldn’t have heard.

A combination of things turned me away from AI-generated illustrations. The amount of time to go through all those bad results to pick the sometimes barely acceptable one bugged me. I could use that time to read or research more on poets and poetry, or to make somewhat better recordings! And partway through my use I started to read the charges of extraordinary energy use by datacenters generating AI.****  While I didn’t make some hard and fast decision, my Firefly use just tailed off. Now in the past year, the outrage against AI has grown, particularly from artists in various fields. If my personal energy holds out and I continue to write on this, I’ll get into more detail on those concerns and theorizing around AI, but those concerns are genuine feelings about genuine threats.*****

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Which leads me to my personal concern, one I had reading Hein’s honest and informal opinion. I’m nearly willing to join the pitchfork and lit torch brigade marching on the AI castle, and I share their concerns. But for around two years I was up in my energy-dense lightning-powered lab twiddling the dials to generate this – well, yes it is, isn’t it – monster. Look, villagers, I didn’t intend to drown the little flower-picking girl – I was just trying to juice up my low-budget poetry/music blog. I actually had moments of pleasure when the monster grunted semi-intelligibly!

I made a short reply to Hein this morning, he clarified that his statement was more of a vibe thing. I understand – I make those suppositions too. This post is, in so many words, asking for mercy for using AI image generation. If posts on AI here continue, what I’ll write will get more complicated yet, but that’s enough for today.

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*Hein has a wonderful way of writing about the theory and practice of musical composition. I’m grateful for the things I, an untrained and largely naïve composer, have learned from what he’s written. His particular specialty is examining (with practical examples) the disconnect between the venerable Western/European musical tradition and the way music is realized here in modern America. Currently he seems to be pivoting to podcasting his information, but links to his work are here.

**Presumably, Firefly’s source material was Adobe’s stock art library.

***I sometimes ask myself why I don’t just do a single still image and leave it at that in my videos. After all, there are many YouTube videos that do only that for music-centric content. Despite my love for spare, concise poetry, I speculate I’m just a maximalist with the arts that I’m not knowledgeable about.

****My first thought reading those energy estimates was: what is the methodology to determine how much energy draw was due to AI? I’m an old IT guy. If one has full access to all the systems, and wished to log the amount of CPU and access time for each sub-process running on them that they knew pertained to AI, then one could make a reasonable estimate from that mass of information as a proportion of the total energy drain of the entire facility. I couldn’t imagine anyone writing about the astronomical AI heat and energy drain had such access. They might have some sense of the total for a particular facility, but I’m unaware of any facility that only  does AI processing. Facility A may use a whole lot of cooling and electricity, but how much is for transcoding cat videos, searches for what actor played who in that movie, and order processing for Labubu orders? Did someone use estimates from proposals? It would be easy to imagine that any engineer asked to create energy and heat needs for establishing AI at a site would be encouraged to spec high.

That said, total energy costs for our modern computerized world does seem to be increasing, and AI does seem, at this time, to be remarkably energy-demanding.

*****What did I do instead? I think I’ve had less weird or imaginative blog illustrations recently – that’s a loss, if a survivable one – and per Hein, the cheesiness of some of them might not have helped. For videos I’m subscribing to a product that offers a portion of a leading stock image library. My report: there are plenty of times when I hate a not-quite-right stock image as much as any AI fresh-off-the-slab monstrosity. And I worry that those stock image libraries may soon enough include AI-generated images.

If you are reading this post and think, “But he didn’t say this! That’s the key point.” I may yet get to that.