March 4ths

In the spirit of the diary remix idea, I ran an experiment where I used just the entries from March 4ths, created a lyric, and then created some music for it.  I randomly selected words and phrases until I had a verse idea, then formulated a query in ChatGPT to flesh it out--most of which was cliche junk.

For associated images I used an AI image generator with various queries drawn from the 3/4 text, e.g. "Anne Frank and Martha Stewart in 2046" and Frank Gehry buildings on Mars" which generated some interesting and funny images, which could be used as an album cover. But for the most part, it felt like a waste of time. Anything that involves sorting through infinite permutations feels inundating. Some of the images are creepy and scary. I'm not looking for creepy and scary. What I'm interested in are things on the periphery of the uncanny valley, where it's slightly skewed in compelling ways. That's difficult to find when you have to weed through hundreds of mostly unusable images.

The March 4 diary entries one of which is one of the fictitious characters, Neone from my Reset short story. The red text is the lines from the ChatGPT generation--and became the title.

3/4/1943 

(Diary of Anne Frank) 

"A veritable thunderstorm of words came crashing down on me again this morning. The air flashed with so many coarse  expressions that my ears were ringing with "Anne's bad this" and "van  Daans" good that." Fire and brimstone!"

3/4/2004 

Martha Stewart convicted. She could do up to 20 years in prison.

3/4/2046 

(Neone's Diary) 

Lunch with Ramona at Fahrenheit Cafe, but Ramona's on a fast for the Mars mission. She talks about it constantly, as well as trying to assuage my doubt about the immortality treatments.

A thunderstorm of words
Crashing down on me
Lunch with Ramona at the Fahrenheit Cafe
She's fasting for Mars and immortality
Symphonic music in a spectacle space
Designed by a starchitect
Crafting futures with design
Echoes of a diary's pages
The artistry of home and creation
Ripples through the ages

 

3/4/2025

Reading David Hajdu's new book The Uncanny Muse. Excellent. The way I look at AI authorship is that if you made or designed some kind of a seed that drives the whole work, then you were at least a co-writer. But who are the other people writing the actual music, who are the people that performed on it, who are the people that recorded it, what recording studio was it done at, and so on? What you have to realize about the realm of AI-generated art and music, is that it's all a fungible OEM product. It's like going down to the grain elevator, getting some grain, processing it, packaging it, then marketing it as your own. For now, everybody has free access to that grain and no one is stopping them from taking the grain that they want. But that's probably going to change in the future with higher fees and less indemnity by the people who run the LLMs. Who knows, it's just the Wild West everywhere. I like the riposte by the Obvious coders: it didn't matter to them whether people liked it or not but the point was is that no one was indifferent, where they would just glance at it and say nothing, or completely ignore it.