August 6ths

February 6ths

8/6/2001

 

 8/6/2005

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8/6/2012

Authenticity is just an evil trap.—Jack White            

Dynaxioms: All seeing is a random accident; It’s fun to be wrong together and conspire to be right.

8/6/2022

On AI being “beneficial” to the artist: Using cybernetics to create music can be interesting but in my experience, it has a short shelf-life. What you want is to have those forays feed back into your core values as an artist. If you are an artist who doesn’t have any musical skills, making music with computers can be enriching. I’ve used such procedures in the past, then came back to making music manually. But I still use electronic processes in tandem with acoustic music. The term “beneficial” can be applied when something is used in the general flow of creative output, such as when Bob Dylan “went electric”. AI will similarly have to “go electric” in some way. It wasn’t that Dylan stopped playing an acoustic, but there was a paradigm shift in culture.

[8/6/2025: AI is in the flow of what I do but it hasn't replaced what I used to do. It's not that I "cremated" all my work as John Baldassari did to make a new start. I can't imagine doing a bunch of musical nothing, which is what AI music is].

8/6/2025

There was a young kid about the age of 16 who was sitting on a bike in front of the library, and they were blasting Springsteen's Born to Run on their phone–someone who was essentially my age when I first heard it, and being captivated by it. That was 50 years ago. (Released 8/25/1975) 

 8/6/2026

Interesting: People actually like AI-generated literature, and they like it even more if they were fooled and told it was created by a human, or at least tweaked by an editor. People want to see a human in the loop because they can more easily "bond" with it. Similarly, in music, lyrics written by humans creates a similar reaction, although most listeners don't tune into the lyrics and they can be cryptic nonsense, a facet of pop music that has been baked in since the Beatles were doing that kind of thing. In performances of AI music, the presence of a human playing some part of the music, such as the guitar parts, or even the vocals would make it something people would go to see. People now like to generate their own music and don't necessarily need it to be a shared experience, but they can interact with it by singing along or dancing to it, so they themselves are the human in the loop. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2583065-most-people-prefer-stories-written-by-ai-and-cant-tell-it-apart-from-human-work/