Artificial intelligence (AI) has, within a few short years, found its way into the everyday lives of many, including me personally. I have used AI for numerous things, help with coding, summarizing long articles, and support me in the fight against boredom. I have found it to be a useful tool, with its limitations. Many of you will know that AI can help your coding, but will also completely transform it to its own (sometimes working) code, leaving nothing of your own (working) code behind. I think this subject is interesting, but has also been extensively discusses in every discussion about AI ever.
Besides its professional and academic applications, AI can help in a personal context as well, you would hope. Not too long ago I was practicing some songs with my band and I waned to rewrite a sax solo to a guitar solo. I gave ChatGPT the notes the sax solo and asked it to translate that to a guitar, an easy task for one of the most intelligent beings every created you would think.
ChatGPT started with giving me notes that were impossible to play on my guitar, being confronted with this fact, it did the same thing again, and again, and again. Once I finally got it to give me a playable version, it offered to give me a sample to listen to. Intrigued by the option, I decided to listen to the sound it generated from its own tabs, that looked decent. The sound created by ChatGPT was uneasy to listen to to say the least. In the end, we decided to play a different song.
This insignificant anecdote highlights the struggles of working with ChatGPT. The value of having a personal assistant at hand at all times is immeasurable, you just have to live with its issues, like hijacking your code, or making terribly awful music.
I really think it is interesting to read how you apply AI to your daily activities, especially since you mentioned it helps you through boredom. The fact that this AI is capable of being able to adjust itself, though not always smoothly or as neatly, to any context, is very impressive. Even to the point that it can fullfill a componist role. The only point I am trying to understand is related to the scenario where chat GPT would actually provide you with the notes that make up to a decent song, through your ears. Would you actually experience / approach that as music (you would use) or as created sounds left to regard as experiments? I personally would like to think that we should refrain from bringing AI into such creative and human-powered processes. Will you be willing to offer the human sounds and creativity for the pleasing sounds through a swift prompt created by non-human entities? It would mean that we are letting such entities define human experiences and willling to live with that. Maybe it is a good thing that we take time, in some cases very much, for certain processes, as long as it means we are on top of AI in our lives. Even when it means to start your new songwriting session over, and over, and over again. How do you think about this?
I can totally relate to your experience! Not everything that comes from AI is gold and shiny, and I think especially in the music field, AI still has a long way to go. Your story actually made me curious to test AI music myself, but I’m honestly glad we don’t have to depend on ChatGPT for making songs yet. Have you ever tried asking ChatGPT to write lyrics for an existing song/music? If so, how did that work out?
On the coding side, I’ve had very similar experiences. Sometimes ChatGPT nails the code: I once used it to help set up a financial reporting application, and it provided code that worked surprisingly well. But then there are the other times where the output can’t even be read by the system. You win some and lose some with ChatGPT.