Music, Words, and ChatGPT

“What chatbots do is scrape the web, the library of texts already written, and learn from it how to add to the collection, which causes them to start scraping their own work in ever enlarging quantities, along with the texts produced by future humans. Both sets of documents will then degenerate. For as the adoption of A.I. relieves people of their verbal and mental powers and pushes them toward an echoing conformity, much as the mass adoption of map apps have abolished their senses of direction, the human writings from which the A.I. draws will decline in originality and quality along with their derivatives. Enmeshed, dependent, mutually enslaved, machine and man will unite their special weaknesses — lack of feeling and lack of sense — and spawn a thing of perfect lunacy, like the child of a psychopath and an idiot."

--Walter Kirn, "Goodbye to the Future"

Bad enough it's treated like a minor miracle. It's not. Worse, it's regarded as if it's in competition with humans, when absolutely everything it "knows" was human knowledge first. Worst of all, it's coming for the wrong people.

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I haven't played with ChatGPT myself -- less than zero interest -- but I have read the accounts of many who have, and seen enough of the bot's output that I can recognize it fairly easily. It's clean, accessible prose utterly devoid of character. It reminds me of nothing so much as what the majority of pop music has become: soulless, inhuman, and ultimately boring.

AI isn't widely writing music. Yet. Here it is generating a hip-hop song, and here it's 'writing' something that purports to be jazz. It's repetitive, trite, and even where it inserts something unexpected, as a composer and wide listener, I'm underwhelmed. However, I have little doubt that in a very short while, AI will be able to generate something Bach or the Beatles might have written -- and like as not it still won't sound human. But I guess that's okay, since the majority of music overproduced today doesn't sound human either. 

I could get into a long technical diatribe on exactly how today's pop may as well be the product of a bot. It boils down to perfection. Let's take a song towards the top of the pop charts today at random -- and I have never heard any of these tunes -- here we go. Kill Bill, by SZA (how in the hell do you pronounce that?) Ah, yes, this is perfect. Too perfect. Every note she sings is machined and pitch-corrected and, um, ARTIFICIAL. Let's compare this to Freddie Mercury, who had perfect pitch and who Brian May says "was a metronome with balls." Face It Alone. Listen to all the little effects Freddie puts into every note he sings: fades and swells, drops and raises, thinnings and fattenings of his tone. He's occasionally, and deliberately, a bit late on the beat.  No silicon con here.

Joni Mitchell, an artist whom I revere, has this to say about today's music industry: 

I heard someone from the music business saying they are no longer looking for talent, they want people with a certain look and a willingness to cooperate. I thought, that's interesting, because I believe a total unwillingness to cooperate is what is necessary to be an artist — not for perverse reasons, but to protect your vision. The considerations of a corporation, especially now, have nothing to do with art or music. That's why I spend my time now painting.

Notice that? "TO PROTECT YOUR VISION". AI doesn't have a vision.  We can teach it notes on a page. But music is a lot more than notes on a page.

We can teach it words on a page, too. It has all the words, all the pages. It can synthesize those words and those pages in novel, superficially interesting ways. But it'll never have the pizzazz, perspicacity, or passion of a person. 

There may come a point where, via some process we can't anticipate, something sparks and ChatGPT shows insight, creativity, imagination, something that is uniquely its own. I'm not sure that's possible, but I don't think anybody knows for sure. And at that point, if and when it comes, we will have to have a real discussion about subhuman, superhuman, and other than human, and what it all means. That point is not yet, and frankly may never come. In the meantime, I think it's very important to recognize that ChatGPT is mindless. It's no more than a colossal database and pattern recognition. It can turn out an A grade essay, but can't be said to "know" anything it writes. Why does this matter? Because it is a tool, not a god. As such, we ultimately control what it does and how it affects the world. Given how we've used other like tools, I'm not optimistic. What's more likely: 

AI will be used to remove all the drudgery and grudgery from our workaday existences, leaving us free to create art and derive meaning from it

OR

AI will be used to remove all the human-created art from our existences, leaving us free to be be cogs in the capitalist machine?

But Ken, AI will allow anyone to create anything, regardless of ability or dedication -- and what then becomes important to our senses of self, if we're not even allowed to be talented at something?

Hell, Google is even calling its ChatGPT rival "Bard". That chills my blood. 

Per Kirn's point above, too, the overall quality of all information will degrade as AI content swamps the web. Eventually, you're dealing with copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of... so fitting for this hellishly abstract world we've complexified beyond all hope of understanding. 

How do we combat it? Two ways. The first is to keep AI in its proper place: while it may look like a god we've created in our own image, it is merely a tool. The second is to create ourselves, as long and as hard as we can, even if AI eventually can outdraw us and sing circles around us. We will never lose the urge to create music, because music is hardwired into us.We will never lose the urge to use our words to make hearts soar. We must never concede our humanity to machines, no matter what promises they whisper in our ears.