People Are More Interesting Than LLMs

In the Land of the Living…

Having Nunavut

One week ago, at this same time, I was at a fancy gala in Ottawa having a very interesting conversation with a woman, originally from Argentina, about her current job, which has her flying to Nunavut monthly to help with the First Nations and Inuit communities who live there. In true Allie-form, I asked her a lot of questions. Maybe about 25% of my questions were questions that a normal person would ask, and the other 75% of my questions were things like, “What is the earth like up there?” and “Please compare and contrast the places you’ve been inside of the Arctic circle with the places you’ve been in Patagonia”. I could have come up with a thousand more questions to ask her, but luckily for her, there was a keynote speaker.

Languishing with disease

A few nights ago, I went for a walk. It’s normal for me to take a daily walk, and now that our days are more nights than they are days, I’m often taking those walks after dark. This particular evening, it was raining, and it was cold. But I had my Land’s End rain jacket and a beanie, so I didn’t feel particularly cold on my walk. But once I got home, I felt it: The Illness. It began its descent into each and every cell in my body; hastened, no doubt, by the cold and rainy conditions. I felt like a character from an 18th century novel who “caught cold”. The next morning, I was achey and never far from a Kleenex box. The day after that, I slept from 10am to 4pm. The day after that was yesterday, which was Thanksgiving, where our family descended on my mom’s house — much like that plague descended into my body (and I used every Kleenex she had in her house, thanks/sorry, Mom!).

But we weren’t the only one’s at my mom’s house for Thanksgiving. There were aunts, there was an uncle, there was a cousin, there was a second cousin, and there was a cousin-in-law. And do you know what else there was? Interesting conversation. We talked about Moby Dick (which I am now going to read!), shared updates about work, swapped stories about animals, and got into a deep and honest discussion about how in the world did we get ourselves into this current political hellscape and how can we possibly get ourselves out of it. I sneezed 400 times. The kids played pool, made up a variation of the game the-floor-is-lava, and sometimes joined our conversation to offer the perspective of today’s youth.

The skin on that turkey leg is, itself, a persuasive argument *for* vegetarianism, imo.

In This Brave New World…

Slop that slaps (and I hate it)

A couple weeks ago, it happened to me twice that I fell in love with a song (and even an EP) that turned out to be AI. The first was in the soul genre (which is sacrilege if you ask me), and the second was indie-folk (my wheelhouse). The indie-folk one even had some great production ideas that had me thinking, “man I wish I would have thought of that”. Both times, Spotify suggested these songs for me, and I listened to them in the car, then went to learn more about the artist, the songwriter, the producer, and the label as soon as I got home. Of course they don’t tell you it’s AI. You have to look for the telltale signs: it’s brand new, they put out a lot of music in the last month, little or no bio, little or no social media presence, no information about the artist online, no website, etc. It bothers me that this stuff exists, but what truly disturbed me was that I liked it, unawares. I’m a budding music producer — granted, I listened to these in the car so they didn’t get my most discerning ear — but they fooled me. I was duped by an LLM, what else am I missing in my mixes? Also, generative AI made this — will my profession become obsolete the nanosecond I enter it?

AI has been on my brain. Yes, because of Suno, Sora 2, Nano Banana and whatever other new stupid things there are. One person on the internet put it best when they said something along the lines of, “AI has ruined the last pure thing we had in this world: cat videos on the internet”. Because how do you know if that’s a real cat video you’re watching, or if it’s just really good AI? Maybe the “person on the internet” who made that comment about cat videos wasn’t even a real person! What even is real anymore, and how can we know for sure? And whyyyyy in the world are we okay with inventing a super sophisticated lying machine without having any regulations on it???

Tempest and pestilence

I’m telling this as a story, but I’m intentionally telling it out of sequence. Because right now, it’s Friday evening (Black Friday is today’s proper name), and as I sat down to write this post, I wasn’t thinking about the anxieties I have about job security, or societal collapse, or dead internet theory… I wasn’t thinking about artificial “intelligence” at all (I’ll make another post some day about why I think Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer…); I was thinking about the humans I love. I was thinking about our wonderful holiday, even though it was cut short because a blizzard is descending on our city *much like the plague descended into my body on that cold and wet evening walk*. (I am amusing myself.)

Sanitized Loot vs. Interesting Mess

What AI can offer you is a fully produced song in exchange for a few words in a prompt. It can mirror you back to yourself (read this whole thread about the myth of Narcissus and ChatGPT, I loved it); it can be a friend for you exactly when you need it, and it can go away exactly when you are done with it. It has soaked up (ahem, illegally) the sum of all great works of human thought and art over the course of millennia, and therefore, it can spout out some cool ideas (even some cool production ideas, dangit!!!) here and there. Sometimes it will lie to you. It’s not going to infect you with a plague that will make you plow through six boxes of Kleenexes in three days, it won’t pass your plague along to your loved ones (which hopefully I didn’t do either, please, Lord!), and it won’t ruin your holiday plans because of unsafe driving conditions.

But it can never offer you the same depth of relationship that a human can. I loved getting to hear my uncle talk about how much he loves Moby Dick — I didn’t even know he wrote his thesis on it until yesterday! AI can’t surprise me like that. Today, I played a card game with my mom and my kids that I used to play with extended family when I was a kid — even if AI could teach them this card game, it can’t poop out any string of zeros and ones that mimics how it feels to be connected to a family throughout generations like that.

The slow, hard work of being human

When my kids go back to school this week, hopefully this plague will depart from my cells once and for all, and I will continue to chip away at the songs that I’m writing, recording, and producing. I will continue to do the hard work of trial and error; I’ll continue to practice, and very, very slowly, I will get better at playing my instruments, and working with my DAW. It’s slower and messier than writing in a one sentence prompt, but I want to do it the human way, at the human pace. And yeah, I could have asked ChatGPT what the earth is like inside of the Arctic Circle, and it could have given me a concise list of similarities and differences between Nunavut and Patagonia. But it’s not the same as having a connection with a human who has actually been to both places; getting to see her eyes light up as she describes each place, watching her search for just the right word as she describes the mountains, or hearing her casually mention how much better you can see the Milky Way from Patagonia than you can from Nunavut.

Human intelligence wins over artificial “intelligence”. No contest.

…although this delirious post might be a persuasive argument to the contrary, haha. ;-)