Old MacDonald Had a Song, A-I-A-I-O

The creative potential and ethical dilemmas surrounding the wild west of artificial intelligence. And how AI made me rediscover my love for Oasis.

a year in review - image by AI (or maybe a drunk dude name Al)

Everyone these days seems to be either talking about or creating with AI. Or both.

Artificial Intelligence. For those living under a rock. Or my luddite-living-in-cabin-in-the-woods followers.

Approximately 34 percent of all Substack newsletters are written about or by AI now.

Don’t quote me on that.

Maybe this newsletter was generated by ChatGPT.

No, I would never do that to you. Besides, my unique combination of earworm song exploration and confessional personal essay voice can’t be aped by a bot.

Can it? Can it?

Can ChatGPT go off on as many tangents as I do? I’m too scared to find out.

Substack Enters the AI Fray

You see that Brady Bunch grid of images above?

That’s what Substack’s new Image Generator created for me when I entered the phrase “A Year in Review” into its search field.

I’m not sure why all the options it gave me were grids of images. I may as well have just used something from their “Search” menu, which sources from the free image library available through Unsplash.

This was the best of the choices it gave me. It’s unclear to me what that red bar in the bottom left corner is supposed to be.

Maybe there’s a way to give my inquiry more parameters. A way to be more specific. I’ve only spent about 30 seconds playing with this new digital toy.

I’ll keep messing around and see what the Image Generator comes up with for future newsletters. And I will always tell you, dear reader, when my images are AI generated. Or did ChatGPT just type that?

Do I have qualms, ethically or artistically speaking, using AI images here?

A little. I’m quite ignorant in terms of understanding what art is being utilized and manipulated to create these AI images. Whether it’s coming from artists who did not consent to their work being repurposed.

But then again, I’ve not always used images from Creative Commons for these posts. I try to. I do look up images on their Openverse site and if nothing shows up, look on Unsplash and Pexels before resorting to any light borrowing.

So my ethical standards are wobbly at best.

I mean, I listen to music on Spotify and order half my life’s purchases on Amazon, so I’m clearly a soulless automaton with zero karma points.

Which is why I’m open to utilizing AI images. As long as it saves me time and effort. If there is a free tool I can use that offers images that are a good match for my stories and all I have to do is type in a couple of keywords? Um, yeah. I’ll be taking advantage of that.

But Substack’s Image Generator is not that. Not yet. The image above has no emotional or topical resonance for me. And I readily admit this lame image may be user error more than AI Error. It almost always is.

A Legal Grey (Album) Zone

oasis band - AI to the rescue

Okay. It’s now five minutes later and I’ve changed my tune.

Literally and figuratively.

The image right there? That was one of four AI pics that Image Generator created when I typed in “Oasis Band.” Did they take all the members of Oasis and blend their faces together into four brand new faces? The guy on the right kind of looks like a young Adam Goldberg (no relation).

Adam Goldberg, circa 1990-something. Image not created by AI.

I can tell I’m going to waste far too much time with this new toy.

Focus Steve. Focus.

Back in 2004, musician and producer Danger Mouse created The Grey Album.

He (Danger Mouse) took the music tracks from The Beatles’ 1968 classic, The White Album and mixed in rapper Jay-Z’s vocal tracks from The Black Album (2003), mashing them together using his magic morphy pixie-dust studio trickery to create The Grey Album.

According to Wikipedia:

The Grey Album gained notoriety when EMI attempted to halt its distribution despite approval of the project from Jay-Z and the two surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr.^[5]

Considered a masterpiece of sonic (de)construction, The Grey Album, like Beastie Boys’ sample-rich hip-hop classic Paul’s Boutique before it, alarmed the music industry and the blurred legal lines around fair use and copyright infringement.

The album is not available on Spotify (I first typed Spitify — I should have left it like that). But it is on YouTube. You can listen to it here:

Where was I again?

There are a plethora of AI generated songs out there, in the style and voice of many of the popular artists of the day. There’s a Drake AI song on YouTube that has garnered several million views and a good number of the commenters are saying that the AI version is better than anything Drake has ever recorded. That wouldn’t seem too difficult if you ask me.

Burn!

Creating AI music using the sounds and voices of artists that already exist might seem ethically, morally and criminally dubious. In a lot of cases I might agree.

But….

I recently heard the “new” aisis (oasis) album, The Lost Tapes. It’s not exactly an AI album — the songs were written and performed by the members of the band Breezer. It’s only the vocals that have been created artificially, in the style of Oasis lead singer, Liam Gallagher.

Apparently the guys in Breezer are huge Oasis fans and were tired of waiting for their favorite Manchester mop-tops to reunite. Being talented musicians themselves, but with a vocalist not in the same register as Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher, they decided to give AI a spin and see if it could handle the matter for them.

In my opinion, The Lost Tapes is fantastic. It’s not at the level of Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? But it’s not trying to be. It’s the “Lost Tapes.” The songs sound like strong almost-rans from the Oasis heyday. And at 8-tracks, it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

I’m assuming the members of Oasis approved of this project, giving it their blessing. And are maybe kicking themselves for not having written these songs themselves. It truly sounds like a lost Oasis album from their mid-‘90s heyday.

Well, sort of. Oasis incorporated more dynamics in their songwriting. The Lost Tapes is for the most part loud and rockin’, with the only “ballad” being the closing track, “Tonight.”

I decided to check if any of the Oasis dudes have commented on this project. Indeed they have.

Apparently Liam Gallagher is a fan of the album.

It appears this recent explosion of AI-generated music created to emulate popular artists and bands, is about to trigger a massive legal showdown that will make the “sampling” cases of the late ‘80s and ‘90s seem like a quaint disagreement.

And it’s not just music of course. Images, writing, films, animation, photography….any and all art forms are affected by artificial intelligence.

Right now AI is in its infancy. It’s like how the internet seemed when it first became accessible to the masses in the mid ‘90s to early aughts. Soon, the giant corporate overlords will find a way to control, limit and monetize it.

But hopefully soon is a long time away.

Until then, I will appreciate the AI creative works that take artistic expression to new levels.

What do you think about the potential, and potential pit-falls of AI, as it pertains to music, but also more generally?

What do you think of IASIS’ The Lost Tapes?

May 4th was my 1-year anniversary for Earworms and Song Loops. I had intended to write a recap piece, exploring what 52 weeks of earworms and personal essay writing has meant for me. But life has a way of throwing wrenches in the works so that will hopefully come next week. Fingers crossed.

As perhaps the only Y-chromosomed human to not give a shit about Star Wars and the whole Star Wars universe, the fact that I started Earworms and Song Loops on the 4th makes me giggle. I’ll explore this Star Wars apathy more in a later post. It deserves a full story.

May The Fourth Be With Me.

May year two of E&SL entertain and tug at your heartstrings.

Steve