Ya Know What I Was Thinking?

No Artificial Additives (Except Intelligence)

I don't like AI. I don't fear it, exactly, but I fear the increasing dependence on it. And I abhor being almost forced to use it; the Microsoft Copilot drives me effing nuts!

That having been said, there are some AI efforts I enjoy. I enjoy playing with pictures of my face now and then, seeing what I could look like as an old man. (Not a pretty sight, lemme tell ya.) Talk to the occasional AI character just to see if I can confuse it. And, while I never use it to write poetry or songs for me, I do use a program called Suno to put my own poetry and lyrics to music.

The thing about Suno is that you never get the same thing twice. You can have it use the same set of lyrics as its seed ten different times and come out with ten different songs. Which is kind of cool…unless you want to change just one little bit of a song, like adding a word, or changing the rhythm of a line just so.

Why does any of this matter? It just so happens I have recognized some great lines I've written for these songs (which, admittedly, are usually either very generic or downright throwaway, having been written for pure entertainment or just to experiment with a weird mixture of song styles). Here's one about a couple who has entered that stage of growing apart and not knowing what to do about it:

I'm standing at the bathroom counter
leaning on my hands, head down

It fit the rhythm and felt natural when I wrote it, but when I listen to it back, the visual is so realistic and so sad. It's such a vision of turmoil and resignation. "Did I write that?" Yes; yes I did.

And this from a song about the basic humanity of a prostitute:

If it's charity you want to give,
Just look me in the eye
And say hello.

These are some good statements, to me at least. But there's something wrong in each of the songs, one little flaw I wish I could correct to make it even better. But for all the I in AI, it can't repeat itself to give the same output more than once. And that makes me wonder happens if we ask AI the same question 100 times. Do we get 100 different answers? Different answers of the same shade and hue? For all that we rely on AI for, are we fooling ourselves when we take AI's word for something? Maybe our new deus ex machina is not the all-knowing deus we've sacrificed so much of our own personal learning as we thought. Not really intelligent; just artificial.

I don't know. AI can be fun sometimes. But it still has its flaws, even there. And it is certainly not the artist I wish to view in a painting, or read in a book, or listen to as the words to a song.

But oh well; that's the direction of things now, I guess, despite my random rambling rants against it. Guess I ought to wrap this entry up before Cop

[COPILOT HAS ENDED THIS SESSION. GOOD BYE.]