Of Real Things and Fake Things
And Madison Avenue Cats
Good morning and Happy Caturday to all,
May we have a good weekend and enjoy the good stuff.
Lunacy abounds, I try not to dwell on it, yet still stay aware, how does one strike this balance? One tries, I suppose. I read this article yesterday -
Enjoy ‘AI slop’ summer. What’s coming next is worse
As AI-generated content crosses the uncanny valley, the ‘zero-trust’ internet comes into view.
- and I deem it worth sharing. Deep fakes, what a thing. They’re hardly “deep,” right? Deep seems a word best reserved for things of some quality, but I digress.
What a strange development in human society, this generative AI mayhem. A few years ago a colleague of mine joked that music created by humans using musical instruments will become known as “Craft Music” in the way we have Craft Beer and such. Well OK so maybe it’s no joke at all. Well, Berkeley Cat Records makes Craft Music, then.
I’ve never gotten used to the auto-tuned vocal sound, even, however prevalent it has been, for many years now, and I still don’t like it in most cases. It’s fine if it’s part of an artist’s intention - I mean, look at the synthesized voices Kraftwerk started creating fifty years ago, I find that quite beautiful, myself. But I find it sad that in certain genres, mainstream Pop or Country or R&B for examples, “perfect” vocal pitch is expected and routine, to the point where listeners may think that that’s what singing actually sounds like, or should. So here we are, way past that, and a “producer” or “content creator” (that term still kills me) can use generative AI programs to spill out music or video sewn together from bits of untold numbers of actual artists’ works. And why wouldn’t they try, right? I mean, me if I were a kid now, would be very curious about it. Hell, I have movie ideas sometimes but no energy to actually try to get a budget together and produce them, that’s a lot of work! Well the barrier of entry for creating audio and video “content” is obliterated, boom, there we are. Gets to the saying, “Just cos you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.”
What’ll be real or fake, anymore? What’ll be perceived as real in a world where all digital content is suspect? I sure don’t know. Man, I’ve wrestled with a lot of these subjects in my songs over the years. There’s one which stands out to me, This Place Isn't Here Anymore, composed and recorded in early Covid when the modern world seemed to stop suddenly. It’s real guitars, real drums, my voice, recorded digitally in two home studios, mine and the drummer’s, my fellow UpTones founder Thomas White, he used a real drum kit and recorded it with real microphones. Then I mixed it together using digital effects - reverb, echo and compression - so is it still real? I think so, because it was my artistic intention to create the thing, but did I write the software that I used for all of this? Why no, I wouldn’t know how, someone else did, lots of someones, and I benefit from their work. One amusing bit about that song - my voice - yes, the pitch goes up and down in some peculiar ways and that’s also intentional, I kept those tracks because I liked them that way. There’s this thing called Melodyne - the most common auto-tuning plugin - sitting right there, I could press that button and slam my vocals bang-on in tune, I just didn’t want to. You know the old saw, “In love with the sound of your own voice?” Well I am, actually! I think we all should be, in love with our voices. Why not? It’s a miracle of sorts to have them, and crushing the uniqueness out of our voices doesn’t seem wise or enjoyable to me.
So now, push-button song-making, push-button video-making, instant “content,” from anyone. Right now someone is making and uploading a new piece and claiming it as their own when in fact they didn’t make anything, in the time it takes me to just record the first basic track for a song. My process - I guess it’s archaic now, but I like it - is I record something first - drums or guitar - sometimes with a “click track” (metronome) sometimes not, then I add bass and other tracks one by one and then mix and master it. It’s fun, I marvel at the fact that I can do this on my own now, even the mastering part, which was the last process to finally be demystified for me, and made possible with software, all on my lil’ home computer. So all of that, and the fact that I compose most of my material, makes it all feel real to me, as opposed to fake. Even if the guitar amp I use for a lot of it is not an amp at all - it’s a digital model of an amp. Is that fake? I guess it depends on how one chooses to look at it.
A real cat is on my desk as I write this. It gives me great joy to know that he doesn’t know about all the fake music, fake videos, fake news and indeed fake audiences. That’s another fun part, right? Once these “artists” (I’m sorry, I have to put that in quotes) “create” (again with the quotes) a song, and upload it to streaming services, they sometimes send bots to spin the song, giving the appearance that someone listened to it, and if they succeed in their ploy, they get actual royalties. Apparently in the music biz, something like two billion dollars worth of fraudulent royalties get racked up in a year. Astonishing, no?
What’s it all for? All the fake stuff. You know, it takes real electrons to make digital stuff, real or fake, it takes energy and lots of it, to feed this madness. Huge banks of servers, massive computing power, bazillions in investments to AI companies and the same with cyber-currency, insane amounts of planet-heating energy expelled, for the creation of.. What? Nothing. Very little of any value. Nothing you can eat. Vast amounts of digital slop. Why?
As for going to outer space, we’re already in it. Folks, we’re on a great spaceship we could never invent, and we’re ruining her. Mars, my ass. Who wants to go there? Populate some fragile air-bubbles there with delusional tech-bro progeny? Sounds grim. We’ll “conquer” space never; We can realize with wonder and joy that we are there, here, among the stars, on a vessel which creates its own oxygen with living flora for us fauna to breathe and enjoy, we are astoundingly lucky and blessed, and our folly is our failure to know it.
Hmm. I’ll share some links below with some songs I’ve written and produced (real ones!) which address some of the matters I’ve mused about here this morning. Oh, AND! The occasional exception to my home recording - Eric Din & the FAVES cover of Madison Avenue Man by Greg Kihn Band - THAT! Was recorded at a proper studio in Oakland, the amazing 25th Street Recording, which is a certain time-machine, in that mostly people aren’t building facilities like that anymore. We rocked out, as a band, all at the same time, so like, it’s EXTRA real! What a treat it was, and what fun to see the song getting more adds and spins at actual (real) radio stations this week. Thanks to all making that happen, and y’all please share the song or this post on yer social gizmos.
This place may not be here anymore, but we are!
They're making music with artificial intelligence to be enjoyed by artificial life!
Junior, what do you want to be when you grow up?
I’m gonna be an influencer! Or a content creator!
And while sending a few doomed idiots to Mars while destroying the earth is the peak of stupid ideas, I assure you, there will always be an All Night Ska Disco at Area 51.
Have a marvelous (and real) weekend,
Eric Roy Dinwiddie
Berkeley Cat Records Ranter In Chief
