Thursday, July 06, 2023

A.I. is B.S.

What do I mean when I say AI all ready has failed?  Music is a shadow of its former self, because Big Tech thought music was disposable.  Freely if you can exchange music like marbles but with no tangible physical product, of course eventually it will be devalued.  I value my iTune music collection, but its contents are high fidelity AIFF audio files gingerly uploaded from my own CD collection.  They are not paltry MP3 files which are small enough to exchange like marbles.  If you want quality in your life, convenience does not always take precedence.  The blood, sweat, and tears once it took to produce lasting music has been forgotten.  Computer plug ins have replaced vintage instruments, and America's acoustical environment is a vast barren wasteland of sonic pollution, most of it in inaudible ranges such as ultra and infrasound.  If you are trying to find an earthy natural place to record your project such as Muscle Shoals, good luck.  The rail industry single handedly has ruined the music industry.  A few years back when I traveled to Nashville to record a friends jazz project, we had to stop recorded late in the evening, because the studio became plagued with an electrical arc.  I explained to them a train was passing with AC locomotives, and we would have to wait until it passed.  The refuse from AC traction is tangible, not monitored, unregulated and harmful to human health.  It continues to plague human existence in many ways including producing inciting infrasound which is responsible for violent tendencies in people susceptible to emotional influence.  Back to AI.  What is AI?  If you want to know the answer, then listen to any track produced by a novice music producer who fails to employ professionally trained musicians who actually play.  The Casio parlor organ probably was the first best example of AI trying to create humanistic rhythm.  Many of us know how square that sounds, because music is not metronomic.  Groove or time feel is a learned craft, and it has nothing to do with a computer sequencer.  If you want music to sound natural or to resemble music produced the hundreds of years before now, AI is not the way to go.  There is no way Artificial Intelligence can recreate an emotional and expressive musical performance.  Talented producers get closer than others, because they know the musical parameters.  For those with no musical training or sensibility, tracks basically are unlistenable.  We tired of them in a few seconds, because there is nothing to engage us.  It is noise.  Likewise expecting a camera to see with human perspective is ludicrous.  Everything on television to one extent or another suffers from this same ill.  Television directors don't even try to emulate human communication.  They think video game programming is the human model.  Kill, kill, kill.  Emulating human reaction to visual stimulus takes boatloads of technique and gear.  If you watch an old school television episode or film, the camera work is stellar, and every shot is understood and calculated down to the most minute detail.  Often there are dozens of different camera shots in just a few seconds of filming.  There is no substitute for this depth of understanding.  Anyone who thinks they can produce a show without studying the craft of film making is deluded.  Herky jerky camera movement and stiff artificial tracks is what AI produces, and we have lost touch with human communication, so there is no model.  Cancel Culture has seen to that.  If AI has failed to recreate live music and provide a natural rendering of human interaction on screen, then what do we believe it will do for us now?