10 Comments
User's avatar
Greg Steckler's avatar

Jeepers. Every time I read or listen to your conversations I have to stop and go look up words, meanings and even math (that's not a whine, its a thankyou). When you go off on a tangent...its like an asteroid bouncing off the stratosphere at 35k mph.

Expand full comment
Dan S.'s avatar

David -- Have you read The Library of Babel (short story by Jorge Luis Borges)? It is a fascinating exploration of this idea, where the universe exists as a vast (but not infinite!) library, containing only 400-page books of identical format with all possible combinations of every character of the alphabet (plus spaces, comma, and periods). Its inhabitants spend their entire lives wandering the library in search of a book with extrinsic meaning, even forming religions around this search for "Truth." Any one book pulled off the shelf at random is extraordinarily likely to be just gibberish. And yet somewhere in the library there exists every book ever written, and every book that will ever be written. A completely factually correct account of the course of human history, and every possible false one as well.

I have found my own experience using LLMs and other generative AI to be akin to this personal search for truth in the way you describe it here. I have become *obsessed* with Suno - to the point where I now listen to my catalog of generations more or less exclusively over human-recorded music. I would never argue that even the best of my Suno songs could hold a candle to the great works of recorded music. And yet, like you experienced, my Suno songs are among my all-time favorite songs because they exist in a space that is personal to me -- some small kernel of meaning found in a book pulled at random from the library shelf, which only I have read and only I will ever read. (E.g.: "What might "actuary trap" sound like?")

Expand full comment
Raymond Gross's avatar

This is refreshing information.

Expand full comment
Hillary Frasier Hays's avatar

Wonderful article, thank you! Yours is a brave and needed trailblazing voice. I struggle with impatience regarding negative perceptions of AI in creative communities. I aim to show some of the dazzling ways it can be engaged with collaboratively. But change, I suppose, can be challenging. From walking on foot to the invention of the wheel, from outdoor firepits to indoor fireplaces, from quill pens to printing presses, from paintbrushes to cameras, from orchestral instruments to polyphonic synthesizers, from eyeglasses to contact lenses, from encyclopedias to Internet connections, from landline telephones to video calls.

The thing is, as I see it, no one is taking anyone's walks, firepits, quill pens, paintbrushes, musical instruments, eyeglasses, encyclopedias, or landline telephones away from them. People are still free to create in whatever mediums they embrace. And, as you excellently show here, there are near-infinite creative works yet to be conceived of and manifested.

AI, which I feel needs a re-name because I don't perceive it to be all that artificial, simply gives us more ways to create, and allows people to engage in modes of creation they might not otherwise have had access to. I think that's a beautiful thing. I'm not a musician but I had a song to write. I'm not a singer, but I had a song to sing. And somewhere inside it all, thanks to these incredible technologies, I learned that maybe actually I am these things.

"Sea Glass" https://suno.com/song/8253b9ff-2afa-4543-ac00-09763e352cc2 Thank you again!

Expand full comment
victor szabo's avatar

Of music could be defined as organized sound, is it even possible to estimate the permutations? Could it be essentially infinite?

Expand full comment
David Shapiro's avatar

Yes it absolutely depends on how you define music. We stuck to typical songs, melody, rhythm, lyrics, Western scales, etc

Expand full comment
victor szabo's avatar

*if lol

Expand full comment
Mark L Devine's avatar

I'll be damned. The song rocks (ala David Draiman'ish voice).

Expand full comment
William's avatar

I appreciate reading your writing, if only that it gives me an opportunity to practice my vocabulary; not many people use "entropic" as just a usual adjective as you do. Whereas there's no doubt that the tools you use vastly make it easier to be creative, doubt exists that it won't all converge to random noise someday, as all these creative spaces you're alluding to likely have a maximum 'textual' density. If this is true, nothing for us to worry about for the next many, many millennia.

Expand full comment
Mikah C's avatar

this is a good but brief and honest piece, David. i always appreciate that. i like your study of archetypes these days. <3

Expand full comment