January 16ths

1/16/1999

Lyric line: No one ever woke up one day and said, “I'm glad I'm a star.”

 

 

 

 

Sent demo of Miles From Mars to 482 records. 

AI-generated versions with cherry-picked words as lyrics:

 

1/16/2003 
            
The Raelians have claimed they’ve cloned a human being. (Like Chuck Barris claims he was an FBI Hitman). [More]        

1/16/2005

Terrorism is like a cell phone number: It’s not connected to one physical place. It can be anywhere.

1/16/2006

On cell phone cinema: it will give us tolerance for shorter, exformed movies that we can watch privately, and spend some contemplative time with, like a snapshot in your wallet, like a short story or aphorisms that inspire us.

[1/16/2025: This seems to be a perennial wish: recently, the ReelShort app has been in development. It still has yet to be used in a serious way by filmmakers, except perhaps as a conceptual idea. The metaphor I’ve always used is as a “single”, sometimes with 2 “sides”].

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Film: The Final Cut, second viewing. Things I liked: what the eye sees (lens) and what the mind sees (film/developing) are not always the same. With the advent of photography, we’ve been wont to use the memory/film and dream metaphors.

[1/16/2026: What we experienced while watching the footage of the Renee Good shooting is an example of the mind seeing what it wants to see] 

Discuss delusion seeing, or believing things clearly refuted by evidence 

"Koro: An epidemic in West Africa where men and women believed their genitals were shrinking or being "snatched" by witchcraft, despite medical examinations showing the organs remained entirely intact." 

1/16/2025 

Brian Eno: “In my experience, the times [AI] works are when people are very careful about what goes in and very critical about what comes out.” That’s true. You can’t even remotely release just anything. I think you have to have some musical (or artistic) ability to make it work. An ear for music is all it ever took to become a musician. We got lost along the way thinking someone had to be taught the “right”way. I do like that “right” way however—just as a person who had advanced painting skills would continue working with those skills throughout a lifetime. It’s nice to know you’re skillful. It’s a pride, rather than the idea of deceit or becoming an imposter.
            
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RIP David Lynch. An absolute master of crypticism in film as if they were dream fragments or surrealist/conceptual artworks. He really knew how to work in the slippage between painting and film. One of my favorites—the cowboy in Mulholland Drive. The scene is didactic however you want to see it. Lynch was great at setting up those ambiguities.

1/16/2026

Current Book: (Another in my "dystopian non-fiction" category): If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies. I find LLMs very useful but you have to wrap your head around how they think. I liked this bit, which got me thinking again about how AI-generated "gaslights" us in music: 

"LLMs and humans are both sentence-producing machines, but they were shaped by different processes to do different work. Even if LLMs seem to behave like a human, that doesn’t mean they’re anything like a human inside. Training an Al to predict what friendly people say need not make it friendly, just like an actor who learns to mimic all the individual drunks in a tavern doesn’t end up drunk."

It's interesting to do a word-swap to further illuminate the metaphor:

LLMs and humans are both music-producing machines, but they were shaped by different processes to do different work. Even if LLMs seem to perform like a human, that doesn’t mean they’re anything like a human inside. Training an Al to write and perform music like humans does not make them musical, just like an actor doesn't possess the skills and talents of the person they're playing. [More]

I currently see it as both-and: I've been pleased with the results, and I don't feel my skills are at risk. 
I think it sucks at a lot of things, but so do we (It's terrible with pronunciations of certain words--like the word "isosceles":, and had to spell it "eye sossa leez". Both can improve in our own ways. LLMs (particularly music LLMs) are absurd in the sense that we have to generate 20 iterations in order to "compose" something, then choose one song, as opposed to using a piano or guitar with some lyrics. It's not a "patternized" process. My concern is that the more we use AI we will be thinking more like AI. If you live long enough in a place, you'll pick up the accent. Everyone will be using AI in some way. I use it as a musician and it seems mostly benign because it doesn't supplant my unique ways of thinking and creating. I'm not gaslighted by it. People might like my AI music more than my orchestrated pieces, but it doesn't vitiate my creativity, driven by my own unique ideas and processes.  Some AI music is very cool--and funny!

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Music video for Sacred Geometry (AI version in a bossa style). Someone said "geometry" was an unusual word for a lyric. It actually isn't and is a percussive word and can be sung on an upbeat or downbeat.