today’s audio is brought to you by… chatGPT and the rain falling on my studio roof. just for kicks, i asked the now very popular, much written about artificial intelligence powered chat bot to “write me an erin mckeown song”. the results of that query are the lyrics you just heard.
but there’s more to the story than just the party trick of weird, bad lyrics. let’s dig in.
it seems that everywhere you look, people are talking about AI, as if it were a new song by drake. oh wait, it is. or as if it were the new office assistant everyone has an opinion about at the water cooler. oh wait, it is. or as if it were the latest savior or villain of civilization. which it definitely is. the sheer volume of think pieces about AI, headlines about AI, podcasts (ahem) about AI is enough to make you wish for an alien invasion to make it stop.
the sneaky trick is that AI is not new. we’ve been living with versions of it in our email programs, ad servers, music algorithms and much much more for at least a decade. it’s just that now it’s gotten accessible, in vogue and visible, like a fungus that has been growing unseen below the forest floor and suddenly seems everywhere after an impetuous rain storm.
as a quick reminder - here’s how AI works: an AI program is given access to the internet with the instruction to “scrape”, essentially to copy and categorize all available information. within this vast data set and categories, it looks for patterns and commonalities. when directed via a prompt or search term, the user then rates the quality of the result. the more opportunities AI has to get something right (or wrong), it then “learns” the correct answer. its like a pandora for information, thumbs up or thumbs down. in short: astute imitation. advanced integration of available information. am i doing this right?
AI doesn’t create new information per se, but through the sheer breadth of its knowledge base and astoundingly infinite computing power, it can generate common answers to even the most specific questions. need to write a letter to your boss asking for more money? wonder what the pope would look like wearing a fashionable puffy coat?
for me this “new world of AI” feels like a bit like the old spotify battles of the early 2010s. by the time the anxiety, think pieces, and government subcommittees arrive, the horse is long out of the barn. AI is here to stay, for better or for worse, and it is already on an irrevocable path fueled by capitalism. like streaming, so much of what it does is too easy, too cheap, and too good to be stopped, damn the consequences. once again musicians were the canaries in the coal mine.
if you can’t tell, i am a combination of skeptical, cynical, and dismissive of AI. spoiler alert: by the end of this essay i will not have changed my mind. it was only after numerous friends (mostly educators) encouraged me to explore its capabilities (hey chatGPT: write me a k-12 curriculum for special needs teachers in training! done!) and with my customary sense of playfulness, i decide to engage.
hey yall! just popping in for some real-talk: a friend recently sent me the substacks of couple of fantastic singer-songwriters i consider my peers. i made the mistake of looking at their subscriber counts, twice and ten times as many as mine. i thought we were doing well over here!! ugh. it would be great if you could encourage a friend or work colleague to check out Fax of Life, especially if you know it’s up their alley.
that’s it. that’s the break for today.
oh actually one more thing - i still need merch help in charleston, tampa, and jacksonville on my november tour. drop me a line (erin@erinmckeown.com) if you’d like to join me!
i have never considered myself “famous” enough to be imitated but i suppose if you’ve been on the internet long enough, then there is grist for the mill. occasionally, i see a younger artist who reminds me of myself. sometimes friends send me artists that they think sound like me. it’s always a mixed feeling. while it is flattering to feel that i have influenced someone’s work, there’s also a shade of discomfort - that’s what you think i sound like? or the style i have spent years discovering and honing, that feels as personal to me as my skin, can be put on by someone else? anyone else?
given the prompt, “write me an erin mckeown song”, it took chatGPT almost no time at all to come up with the set of lyrics you heard in today’s audio. in fact, i prompted it three times, and it came up with three entirely different sets of lyrics.
i chose to use the first set of lyrics exactly as is, but highlights of the others include the following:
With every strum of her guitar,
Erin's words heal every scar,
In her music, I find solace deep,
A refuge where my heart can weep.
In the silence of an empty room,
Erin's voice breaks through the gloom,
Her lyrics paint pictures in my mind,
A symphony of emotions, intertwined.
all three “songs” had the same structure: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus, outro, labeled as such. if you know my music, you know this is a predictable (and frankly unwieldy) structure i actively try to subvert. in fact i have never used it.
likewise, all three “songs” used an AABB rhyme scheme with irregular line lengths. if you know my music, you know that i have never used this rhyme scheme, ever. and the triple syllable words chatGPT chose strike my ear as deeply unmusical.
on a positive note, all three “songs” seem to describe a person and music who is uplifting, bright, and inspiring. i’ll take that.
so given the instruction: “write me an erin mckeown song” - chatGPT interpreted that as “write a set of words that resemble a song describing how the concept of erin mckeown makes a first person pronoun feel”.
as a side note, the line “fusion of folk jazz and soul” is from my earliest press material, where i described myself as a “funk folk blues jazz fusion”. this is a clear example of chatGPT showing its work and being, if i may say, a little thirsty and obvious.
and of course, all of this leaves out… the music. i did ask chatGPT to “write me an erin mckeown chord progression”, to which it responded it didn’t have enough information to do so. as a writing prompt for myself, i asked it to write me “a complicated chord progression” and “a complex chord progression in the key of D”. in both cases the bot responded with a list of chords that made some sense, but didn’t contain measure counts or a time signature. the instruction “write me an erin mckeown melody” resulted in a long interval of “thinking” and then a program crash.
in the end, to finish this “song” i did something i loathe to do - set a pre-written group of lyrics. i did my best to imagine the most “erin mckeown” guitar riff i could think of and then tried to fit these awkward words into that. it was a profoundly weird and dissatisfying experience. and the resulting song isn’t much of a song. i’m so sorry you have to experience it.
this whole journey reminds me of another moment in a favorite book of mine i often reference, the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy.
in it, displaced earthling (and brit) arthur dent spends much of his time wandering around the universe in search of a cup of tea. he eventually encounters a machine called the Nutri-Matic. he asks it to make him a cup of tea:
The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed, it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism, and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject’s brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
i’m also reminded that being a musician with a public life has always been an exercise in surrender and a profoundly strange experience of slippage. to wit: a colleague recently spoke to a former student of theirs. in the course of catching them up, he mentioned that he was working with me on a new musical. to which his former student responded enthusiastically:
“Yes! I saw her in concert with Ani DiFranco in New Hampshire. I think she was playing the banjo. I bought her CD after the concert and loved it!”
my friends, i can’t tell you how often i have heard this exact, untrue sentence. it is always new hampshire, and it is always the banjo! despite having played over 100 shows with ani in the early 2000s, i have never played with her in new hampshire. and while i posed with a banjo on the album art of my first CD, i have never played a banjo onstage.
this person had a nearly correct memory of me. a close copy of an experience we both shared. a slightly blurred slippage of facts that felt true enough and possible enough to everyone to be plausible (the person remembering, my colleague) but not… plausible to me.
the memory was almost, but not quite entirely, unlike the truth. the song chatGPT write was almost, but not quite entirely, unlike any of my songs.
i recently read both a book and a new yorker article about how scientists are using AI to try to talk to whales. this i am interested in. the aforementioned infallible pope in the puffy coat continues to delight. these are uses of AI i might be amusingly interested in. i’m sure there are others.
but asking AI to write a song, mine or anyone else’s, is of anti-interest to this artiste independent. i still enjoy doing that for myself way too much to give it up.
technology is neither good nor bad, but humans make it so (although i do think we should take away the guns). but what i really want to know is… can AI stop pickleballers? if it can do that, then i am all in.
x erin
ps - here is your requisite carl content.
not AI generated. carl is actually on a boat at sunset on the connecticut river.
¡ME GUSTA! : SOME OF MY FAVORITE THINGS!
for no other reason than listening to this song will make your day better
in case you really want to make your day better by playing along
it was only a matter of time until people began to bend their songwriting to better fit the streaming ecosystem
I LOVE MINIATURE THINGS. ESPECIALLY THESE!!
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