On Generative Music: Math is not love

Where is the magic in spending two years in the studio creating a doomcore metal dirge song about that time I shit my pants on the way home from the fart factory?

The magic is in the studio, that's where. I reject the idea that music generated by a computer is created. It's not. It's just bot-shit. It's just math.

I hate that I really like the AI-generated music. It's good. It's supposed to be. It has to be. I mean, how else could it be? A program fed the greatest songs of all time and then instructed to catalog the resulting math based on a description of what is pleasing to humans has to be good. It's designed to be good. It's math. It's the perfect execution of the commodification of creativity. Take a good thing, strip it down to pure math, compare it to other math, and output more math.

The problem is math sucks. I don't even feel bad saying that. Math-- at least at this point-- can't compute the soul. Math is not alive. It might be the fundamental element that arranges reality, but it can't love. Math is not love.

But if one compares an otherwise delightful generative instrumental in the style of Earth to an actual instrumental in the style of Earth, one can't help but understand that the output is only math.
But you don't have to take my word for it. Here, Listen:

A great song by the band Earth:

Generative math in the style of the band Earth:

There is no artistry behind the math. It has a soul. It's all technique. Who cares if math can slap together a bunch of numbers that people think is a blistering guitar solo?

I care. A blistering guitar solo is enjoyable, but it's not something you can enjoy in your heart if you know it's math deep down. And that's my main problem with LLMs: They are Math. And Math is terrible.

Is AI putting creatives out of work? Probably. Is it making YouTube into a botshit septic tank? Yes. Can you reasonably assume that a song you hear in a commercial is not botshit? No. You can't. This is terrible.

Don't use AI-- and if you do, have the decency to be ashamed. What you are really telling people is that you value math over soul. Ultimately, that makes you a love interest in a hallmark romance-- and you're better than that. I believe in you. You're not a cartoon villain. You're a good human, capeable of growing and learning and loving things.

You are so much better than math. You are so much better than this mathmatic description in the style of dirgecore about the time I shit my pants on the way home from the fart factory. You are better than this pop-rock mathmatic expression about farting in public. You are better. You deserve more.

Governance: the real problem with voting in the United States

It doesn’t matter how many of us vote or how much we talk about the power of a single ballot until we make sure that every single person has the ability to freely access and cast their ballot for a government that represents them. 

Voter suppression (and the ugly, racist, and classist motivations at its core) is a conversation we have to have before we change anything in America. You can’t have equality without equal access. And my state is currently so gerrymandered that I have a hard time believing that it can be fixed. It’s easy to see why voters get disenfranchised. 

But it must be fixed. It must. 

We simply cannot sit back and let our elected officials pretend that they are not pursuing racist policy, espousing racist ideas, and pantomime that they’ve been wronged.

Listen: Voting should be easy, convenient, and secure.

In the computing world, we’ve solved this problem. America’s economy is little more than a series of electronic bits and bytes that are (occasionally) secured by math and distributed by electrons.  America’s voting system is a physical piece of cardstock that, when scribbled on by the right kind of pencil, is converted into bits and bytes and secured by an octogenarian volunteer at a folding card table in the basement of the police station.  Secure voting from a computer or phone or through the mail is a solved problem -- it’s the governance of the voting that is the issue. It doesn’t matter how the votes are cast when the governance of the voting is insecure and done in secret. And we can’t fix that until we fix the racist policies that drive that governance. 

We must fix this problem. But we can’t fix it by refusing to play. We must be involved. 

Stand tall against racist policies and ideas. Play the game. Vote against racist policies and the politicians who support them -- take small steps and vote against the incumbency and for change. It is the only way. 

I used to think that it would take the end of the world to fix our broken republic. But that happened in March and April of this year; and, look at us, we’re still stuck. We’re stuck until voting is no longer a game and Scott Fitzgerald falls in a hole.

So many good musics.

Heres a thing for when I'm writing a lot, which is a thing that is happening right now.

I've got myself a membership at VideoHelper.com and it's amazing. So here's why you care:

1. It's an incredible collection of really good video production music.
2. You set a mood, and click play, and you're suddenly listening to 30-and 120-second scores built around that mood.
3. Also, mostly no dialogue-- so you don't end up including lyrics in your prose. I'm looking at you, The Hold Steady.
4. There is no Number 4. But this is a pretty good example of what's so great about this site. Amazing music with a goofy description that nails the tone of each piece.
5. The clips are pricey. But that's because they're good. But you can just stream them. You don't have to buy them. Unless you use them. Which you can totally do, if you have $500 sitting around for 15 seconds of unbranded internet content you want to score.

But if you're stuck and looking for inspiration, or just want to change the musical mood you're currently stewing in, VideoHelper is pretty great.

Grammarly: The grammar robot that works for you.

I am a professional writer.

I use Grammarly.

This is you:“WHAT? But you should have impeccable grammar and never make a single typo! What do you need Grammarly for?”

Well, let me disabuse you of the damage your terrible third-grade teacher did to you. It’s ok if you don’t have impeccable grammar and never make a single typo. Nobody does. Not even some of the finest proofreaders I’ve ever worked with can make this claim.

I get your apprehension, though. Grammarly’s advertisements make it look like Grammarly is just for dingdongs who use the wrong “their” on their OKCupid profiles, but it’s much more than that.

As a professional, (and as a former leader of a creative department of seven) I use Grammarly, and I encouraged my staff. And I encourage you, too.

Even if you don’t think you need to, Grammarly can show you just how wrong you are about what you think you know about your writing. You probably have no idea how often a passive phrasing, redundant word, or overused, meaningless modifier appears in your writing. But Grammarly does. And it takes great delight in pointing them out. And then you can decide to fix them. Or decide not to fix them.

See, that’s the part that most people forget about writing, and what your horrible third-grade teacher didn’t tell you. Writing is a series of choices. Each rule of grammar is a specific technique for expressing a thought or idea. It’s the writer who gets to make those choices. Do I want to end a sentence with a preposition? Do I want to use the word “really” as a modifier, even though I know it’s pointless? That’s all the part of writing that comes into what is narcoleptically called “prose stylistics.”

And this is where Grammarly can help. Grammarly identifies what and where you have the opportunity to make different choices with your writing—choices that maybe you’ve forgotten are choices. Grammarly gives you a chance to take a look at your writing and learn a little bit about yourself. And then adjust your habits, accordingly.

That will make you a better writer. And that is what I love so much about Grammarly.

And as a bonus, and this is my favorite part, Grammarly sends you a weekly update on how you’re doing.

I wrote a lot of words last week. And that's just the ones I put in @Grammarly. pic.twitter.com/JjS2RmTA3A

— heygabe (@heygabe) March 6, 2017

I also made a lot of corrections last week. And those are just the ones I put into @Grammarly pic.twitter.com/e0M6FxhUb0

— heygabe (@heygabe) March 6, 2017

I used a lot of words last week. But Not so many, really, when you think about it, @Grammarly pic.twitter.com/tE2hcn6rOj

— heygabe (@heygabe) March 6, 2017

Those are some of my favorite emails to get every week, because at the end of the day, what I’m getting out of Grammarly is a pretty great robot pal who tells me that I’m smart. And remember how I feel about robots? That’s pretty important to me.

The Parable is Me: Reflections on "The Stanley Parable"

I played a game called "The Stanley Parable" last night. It was pretty amazing. The graphics were nothing special, (although they were fine) but the game – the game was like playing an episode of the Twilight Zone.

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You play the part of Stanley, a boring office worker with a boring job that he loves. And suddenly one day, Stanley looks up from his computer as he realizes that his work cue is not filling. And lo—all his coworkers are gone. And so he roams around the office building looking for clues.

But here's the twist. Stanley's story is being narrated by a third person as he goes along. "Stanley walked along and wondered where all his coworkers are," says the narrator. And eventually, Stanley end up in a hallway where you have to make a choice. Do you go through the left door or the right door?

"Stanley goes through the left door," the narrator says.

Do you?

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That's it. That's the whole game. You either obey or disobey the narrator, and the interactions get deeper, weirder, and more meta. There are many endings. There are many surprises. There are strange little delights. In the version I played, you end up exploring a museum dedicated to how the game was made. It's won many awards.

This nihilistic, mind-bending take on the first person explorer genre was exactly the right fit for my mood at this time, so take my recommendation with a grain of salt. The game has won a lot of awards, so it's probably not just me.

But, for the most part, The Stanley Parable is a great experience that anyone with a touch of dark humor and ironic playfulness will enjoy. It is also that rare jewel of a game that is genuinely comedic. Intentionally. On purpose.

It’s the kind of an experience that can only be delivered by the language and convention of computer games. I don't even think this game would really work on a console. A novelization would not work.It would make a terrible movie. But because it's a game, where the player has agency and interacts with the fiction around them, the meta storytelling works. As a result, creators Galactic Café have made an artful expression that could not have been made in any other medium.

I think this debate has been over for a long time, but playing "The Stanley Parable" is one of the rare times I've experienced a game that is undeniably art.

** <!--This gallery, however, contains all kinds of spoilers. 

Comments in the code: Make them Chuckle

I wanting to show you guys a little bit of code I inserted into an online job application I filled out this morning:

<style="font-size:0px"  Hey, if you see this text, you should 
 know that I'm a pretty special candidate. Can you make sure 
 you let the hiring manager know? Anyway, shoot me an email if
 you see this, ok?>

I was surprised that I could edit the source code of the system's paste-in resume block-- but when I reloaded the page, the text was still in there. I'm hopeful that someone will at least see it and get a good chuckle.

Or, and more importantly, I also hope it will make the site's administrator aware of the potential security concern this creates. A few choice SQL commands dropped into this form would really mess up his day. And probably a lot of other people's. I did't do that because I'm not a jerk. But trust me, there are a lot of jerks out there.

I'll let update this post if I get an email from anyone about this. But I know I won't. Trust me, I've been on corporate teams that built this kind of garbage, and even if (and that's usually a pretty big if) someone on the team was well aware of the potential security risk, the rest of the team either downplayed it, didn't believe it, or blew it off.