Listener Challenge
Make your own random song or poem using dice, not AI.
Show Notes
AI is good at being average, terrible at being random. Probably uses too much water and will ultimately make us all dumb. But it’s never going to go away so we have to learn to live with it.
Bo Burnham’s most-watched video
The Most Perfect Album Ever Made
Some AI song services you can f*** with:
Song.do (made us showtunes)
Suno.com (made French Bjork from the 60s)
Aisong.org (put the prompt as spoken text over music, with applause at the end)
Transcript
[00:00] Misha:
Do you know what an API is?
Damon:
Um, an automatic penis injector .
Misha:
I’m talking about a tech API.
Damon:
Yes, I know what an API is
Misha:
but for the sake of listeners who don’t know what an API is, you can, like, this is a narrative device where we explain what an API is.
Damon:
Oh, it’s the back door to make your program access the program at a program level.
[00:21] Misha:
Right? So like Google Maps has an API that, for instance, Yelp can use. I think Yelp has their own map, but somebody who needs a map in their software or database can pay Google to access the API. Right? So the Google
[00:35] Damon:
Map, a PIA lot of people using database to lot of people.
[00:40] Misha:
Yep. There you go. So it’s an access point. Um, and they can be very simple. Like you could have an API that’s just like, give me a list of all the Pokemon characters and all the episodes of Pokemon that that character was in or something. You know, like database stuff. Um, you can have a very, very simple one that just delivers a random word, for instance.
[01:01] Misha:
Mm-hmm . So on ya quest slash tools, we have a random word generator. And I don’t know if you ever thought to wonder how that guy works or if our listeners have ever thought how that works. I
[01:13] Damon:
Mean, I genuinely assume that anything that you do is lazy and thereby there’s an API that you ,
Misha:
right? You are. However, recently, like a couple weeks ago that API stopped working and I don’t know why. My guess would be that it probably got too expensive for the person who was doing it as a hobby to keep paying for it. And he just like cut off outside ook, but there was no announcement or like, it just stopped working. Mm-hmm . I found it by, ’cause I don’t know about you guys out there, but I go to my random word, uh, generator several times a week to get random words. Okay? This is a big part of my life. And I went to get a random word and I click the button and nothing, nothing happens. I’m like, what the hell? So I started investigating and I found out that the API is broken.
[01:59] Damon:
And it’s not, it’s not something I’ve done wrong. It’s just like this API doesn’t serve cross browser anymore. So then I started looking for an alternate and I, I found one alternate. Of course it’s free ’cause I’m a cheap skate. I’m, oh, yeah, yeah. I already paid for pod being, I’m not paying anymore for this podcast. Okay, so . Um, so the API didn’t work. I found one other alternative that was free and it worked, but it has like, pretty much every word in the unabridged OED in it.
[02:28] Damon:
The Oxford English dictionary. That’s too much, right? So like, I have it here now. Like, you can generate a word. Let me tell you some of the words, because I got more words that I had never heard before than words that I knew. Isn’t that better? Jorn? Jorn. Y-O-U-R-N. Pavers. What? What, what does jorn mean? I don’t know.
[02:49] Damon:
It, it’s not a dictionary, it’s just a random word generator. But you gotta look it up now. Jorn, pre verse Tetraethyl X Oh, oh, that’s a sentence. Yarn, pre verse detrimental. Man. There’s biologic feeds. Cat plasm. What’s a cat? Plasm. That’s when your cat turns into plasm. Oh, . Uh, so anyhow, fate.
[03:11] Damon:
Hes, I got sick of these crazy wor ass words. I love these words. I want to know what they all mean. Well, I will. Okay, so should I put another tool listeners? If, if even one listener emails me and says, put the crazy under bridge dictionary random generator on there. I will do it emailing now. But not from you .
[03:33] Damon:
What I did instead was I’m cracking my knuckles. But you can’t hear it. Uh, I made my own. I made my own API. Ooh. Yes sir. I made an API that serves a random word from a dictionary that I chose and cultivated so that it didn’t have these crazy ass freaking OED.
[03:54] Damon:
So it was like a caveman diction ate No, it’s just regular words. Those are, those are regular words. Those aren’t yarn. What are you gonna do with yarn if you I don’t, if I knew what I meant, I’d probably use it every day. It’s probably like southern, it’s a regional or archaic form of yours. Oh. Oh, look, M cows and you milk yearn. I like it.
[04:16] Damon:
I will use it from now on. Great. . I can’t wait. So you take the wind outta my sails a little bit here. I was so proud of myself for making my own a PII am very proud of you. I I’m very proud of you. I just also like the words with my own cultivated list of 10,000 words. I mean, they should be modern words for sure. Like, like Well, let me, you want to hear some of our words?
[04:39] Damon:
Sure. Because you’re, you’re part of this podcast was your API too. Oh, cool. And, uh, get a random word, pilgrim. We all know what that means. Connective, right? Do DEW or DUE. Oh, um, disloyal. Unfamiliar bar. We know these words. We don’t know cata plasm.
[04:59] Damon:
I wanna know what cata plasm means right now. Alright. Cata Plasm means a soft, moist, and often heated medical dressing, commonly known as a poltus or plaster. Oh, CATA plasm. I’m sure there’s somebody out there that as soon as I said Cata plasm we’re like, oh, you mean like a poltus? But for most of us, that is an unfamiliar word.
[05:19] Damon:
And anyhow, the point of this whole thing is that now on Ya Quest slash tools, we have a random war generator that is a unique tool that you can’t get anywhere else. But a and it’s yarn good call. You know what isn’t, you know what isn’t random though? What? Ai,
[05:50] Speaker 3:
Your alien toric reality.
[05:53] Misha:
So I had some thoughts about ai. Uh, yeah. Um, and it’s like, like it’s, I I, I’ve mixed feelings even about having an episode about ai because AI is so everything and everywhere and everybody feels like they have to weigh in on ai. Um, but there’s some more directly relevant stuff that we’ll get to later. But what I found about AI that’s relevant to our show is that it is really bad at being random.
[06:17] Misha:
Mm-hmm . That is the opposite of random. Yeah. If you say, like, if you directly say to an ai, give me a random number from one to 20, it can do that. It knows how to access a random number generator, give you a random number, fine. Right. But if you say, give me a story in which every element is generated randomly, every plot vice, every prop, every character is randomly generated, it will give you a very coherent story with a theme.
[06:42] Misha:
No matter how much you try to coach it . And it’s like, it, it will, it will have like a couple very blaringly, like a parrot flew through the wall, and then it will go back to its own normal coherent story. So I guess what I have to say about that so far, what you said Yeah. Is that what I love about AI is that it’s not random.
[07:02] Misha:
It’s absolutely predictive, right? Mm-hmm . Given the information that it has, it predicts the thing that comes next. Yes. Okay. That’s what it does. And literally the next word, it doesn’t divine the next thing. It predicts it based on patterns and that it has learned from, given the topics. I know from what you told me and what everyone in the internet has ever said about that topic.
[07:28] Misha:
And based on what I’ve said so far, what is the next word? And it’s, it’s just an algorithm that calculates, what’s the next word? And the, A algorithm has gotten incredibly complex mm-hmm . But still functionally AI chatbots are just constructing the next word based on an algorithm.
[07:49] Misha:
But what I was gonna say is, the thing that I love about AI is when you intentionally don’t give it the right pieces of information mm-hmm . It tries to predict and does a horrible job. Uhhuh . And like, for example, this sculpture that I showed you the other day where I took a picture of my old band and I put it in and AI could not figure out what the fuck was going on in this photo, and it, it added feet all over the place.
[08:15] Misha:
There are set except for Damon, it took one away. I have one leg with a club foot, the, the table. But Eddie has a couple disembodied feet. Yep. Well, his is backwards. One of his feet is backwards for reasons. Um, and the table has five feet Uhhuh with shoes on them. I’m not, not table feet, but, so I, I think what I really enjoy is, is when you, you box, when you put baby in a corner mm-hmm .
[08:44] Misha:
I like putting AI in the corner and seeing what it does . Well, the thing that you get from AI is overwhelmingly averageness because it’s taking mm-hmm . Everything that’s ever been said and averaging it. That’s Yes. Absolutely. Its whole role. Which, which is why, like, for things like gimme meeting notes, give me a summary of this chapter, it is really good at those kind of tasks.
[09:07] Misha:
Yep. But if you’re like, write a song or write a play, it’s gonna be the most banal drl you’ve ever read. I don’t know. I remember this one song that I heard that I had it write about you and your best friend Satan. It was, it was pedestrian though, the song that musically it was not, it was beautiful musically.
[09:27] Misha:
It was pedestrian, it was just, it was pretty. Yeah. So, but no, but now, when I made the Ninja Nate song, I found that to be quite more creative than I anticipated. It was almost clever. Did you give it the lyrics? No, I gave it a topic. I just gave it, I tried to keep my sentences as abrupt and, and small and succinct, like the minimum amount of information mm-hmm .
[09:51] Misha:
To get to a goal. And that’s when I have the most fun with ai. Okay. I, I still think that AI is very lagging behind humans and creativity because Yeah. If, if you say, yeah, uh, make me a song, you know, give me like a heavy metal song about Misha, it’ll do that and it will sound like it, it will, it will be like the production will be high quality.
[10:16] Misha:
Mm-hmm . It will, you know, it’ll have chord changes and it will be, it will be a song, but it, there, it is never going to be innovative. It’s never gonna stretch. It’s never gonna be like, whoa, it’s blows my mind. Unless it’s just like background music, you know? But what about all the ai? So there’s a lot of, I actually listen to a lot of AI music. Um, that one guy, guy who does the seventies soul covers of nineties bands.
[10:39] Misha:
Uhhuh . Now, is that ai? Yeah. Okay. I’m, I’m sure it’s but heavily curated. Well, let, let me tell you this too. You’re, you’re, we’re talking about creativity here and you’re saying take an existing song and redo it in an existing style. That’s not creativity, that’s just technician. But the way it does it, the, some of the, some of the things that it does where it’ll take a piece of the guitar lick and make it a horn part, you know?
[11:03] Misha:
Right. ’cause it No, ’cause it understands the genre. There are, there are, I, I’m not dis I don’t disagree with you, but I do think this is curated more than that. And I, I, I think that I, let me, let me, let me, here’s what I think about ai. Okay. Because I have this conversation all the time, and I, I kinda wanna start with my thesis statement on ai.
[11:23] Misha:
Right. I think AI is a wonderful tool. It is a great search engine that doesn’t try to sell you anything. Mm-hmm . Yeah. That is it’s primary use for me. Mm-hmm . Because every other fucking, I mean, Google, it’s just ads. Every result you get is an ad. I mean, there’s sponsored results at the top. No, but it’s all, their entire algorithm is based off of, off of selling you things.
[11:46] Misha:
Hmm. And you don’t get good results. Like you, I mean, if you remember what Gulu used to be like mm-hmm . You used to get really good results. And it’s not because the internet changed, it’s because the algorithm changed. Mm. Because I would say there’s, there’s far less content on the web than ever less content now than in the past.
[12:06] Misha:
Like, like unique interesting places that, that where people are making contributions. It, it’s pretty much just Reddit now. , right? I mean that you get that result a lot because it’s, because it’s prolific. Well, but I’m, but I’m, it’s large. I’m comparing it to like the s mm-hmm . Where, you know, like something awful. And you had like, I mean, there’s just all these different gathering places online where fun things were happening.
[12:31] Misha:
Yeah. But it’s not, it’s not like, it’s not like real estate and there was an earthquake or something like the, the internet just grows and grows and grows and grows. But it, but, but it doesn’t grow in the same way it used to. So for example, I used to be able to hack anything. Okay. And any device, I had somebody cracked it and put something up online where I could download a thing and hack that software mm-hmm .
[12:53] Misha:
And I would love to reload the fucking crap that they put on my tv. Uhhuh with something generic and Linux-based or so, or whatever, you know, something else. Right? But the, but the, but nobody does that anymore. People do it. They just have better ways of locking it down. Now I don’t buy that. Why? Because I don’t think, I think I think less people are participating in that kind of stuff.
[13:14] Misha:
Nobody gives anything away for free anymore. I disagree with that. Oh, I, I, I see it all. We give away free random services at yard.quest/tools. We do, but we’re stupid . No, but I’m saying everything. It, it, it, the tendency of the internet at the, at 20 years ago was to be free and provide services that enhanced your life.
[13:36] Misha:
Well, yeah. Yes. So you went from, so you went from skateboard punks that were hackers making this better tomorrow full of all the information available to humankind for free. And then those people found out that there were business people who would throw millions of dollars at them to make them websites.
[13:57] Misha:
And those people aged and got old and became billionaires. And then they’re like, oh, how can I consolidate my power now? Right. And that’s where we are. Well, I, I think a lot of it has to do with the Fear Index. So the internet has been tuned. I agree to monetization. And part of that is selling the dream of monetization to everybody.
[14:21] Misha:
Because monetization doesn’t work for everybody. No. It works for almost nobody. It’s like when, if you’re an influencer who is living on monetization, you basically won the lottery. Yes. You got super lucky, or you started early. But almost every high school student thinks that that is a viable career option for them.
[14:41] Misha:
No. Oh, I could be an influencer and I can get paid to like, talk about products. Well, guess what? If you and all of your peers are trying to get paid to talk about products, nobody’s paying for products placements on TikTok anymore because the map market’s saturated. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so AI is a tool. Um, there are things that I have done with AI that people have frowned upon, like using AI to generate artwork.
[15:06] Misha:
Um, but some of the things, I can always go back and replace that artwork. Mm-hmm . If, if something becomes financially viable, I can redo it and pay an artist to redo all the art. Right. Which you should. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Mm-hmm . But if the difference between me doing a thing and not doing a thing is this moral decision about whether or not to use ai.
[15:32] Misha:
I don’t think people are saying it’s unethical for, you know, skateboard, punk to use AI to make a picture for his. I think they’re saying like, if you’re a publisher mm-hmm . You better be hiring artists to do your book covers and not using ai. Right? No. Right. There’s there’s a difference in scale that it’s, you know, what, what you’re doing.
[15:52] Misha:
Like you are not a game manufacturer with, you know, accounts with Target and, but I don’t know. Walmart also, to be quite honest, in the past, I have tried to do projects where I can sign artists and every single time I got ripped off, not with the stickers. Well, I I did that. You didn’t do that. Right.
[16:13] Misha:
But I’m saying in my personal experience, I, I paid money for something I never got. Well, that ain’t cool. No, no, it’s not. And maybe I should choose better in the future, . Um, but well, it’s, it’s interesting that where that you, where you took this because, uh, the meat of what I have to present today is some AI songs about this podcast that I generated.
[16:39] Misha:
Oh, great. Okay. And I’m, uh, I didn’t pay for any of these, so I’m using these under assumption of fair use, which is why I’m not gonna play the whole thing. I’ll play a little bit of it to give you an idea in the context of we’re reviewing these services. Okay. So the first service I tried is, um, song, do you heard of song?
[17:00] Misha:
Do mm-hmm . So Song Do is a service that you would type in a prompt, make me a song about a podcast, about randomness. We’ll, see, here’s what I did is I said, make the note choices randomly generated. Make the chord structures randomly generated. Don’t follow any convention of music. That’s what I said. And you’ll, you tell me how well they did.
[17:20] Misha:
You know who tried that? Who? Pink Floyd. They didn’t have ai. I know, but they tried to, to make you without convention of music. So did Lindsay Buckingham when he was coming off of the hit album Rumors, and they were like, make us another chain. And he’s like, no, I’m gonna get a marching band to play in a stadium while we all just like chant.
[17:40] Misha:
Well, pink Floyd, I, I actually read about this again recently. I was looking up something about, about the album Metal, and it was part of the metal sessions. That’s M-E-D-D-L-E for those of you listening. Um, also the original cover for that album was Baboon’s ass. Um, . I’m not kidding. I learned all this stuff about that album. I don’t know why.
[18:00] Misha:
Yeah, that’s a great album. Useless Knowledge. But one of the things they were, they were sick of conventional music and they decided they were going to make, they were gonna spend a bunch of time in the studio trying to make an album that used no instruments, and they had a bunch of kitchen utensils, , and some bands have a cocaine budget. Pink Floyd had a kitchen utensil budget.
[18:20] Misha:
I guess , I I still wasted money. Anyway, go on. Sorry. Until, until Was it a producer or was it the band themselves that realized that it was going nowhere and then it was actually the band themselves. That’s good. Yeah. I don’t think anybody at that time was telling Pink Floyd what to do, nor were they telling Lindsay Buckingham what to do after Rumors. Yeah. They were like, you need to hire Dodger Stadium and the UCLA mark, or, you know, it was USC marching band.
[18:42] Misha:
Here’s a million dollars. Oh God Imagine. Go said to him after he wrote Holiday Road. I know, right? Oh my God. You have it in for that song. I love that song. Anyhow, , here’s, uh, option one from Songdo,
[18:57] Speaker 4:
Your Alien. Toric Reality is a podcast about randomness. We invite you to take chance and make real life decisions
[19:17] Misha:
That makes my asshole CLINs. So, so, show tune . Uh, did you, did you hear a lot of random melody in there? No. Did you hear a lot of breaking musical conventions? No. No. It made a show tune. It wasn’t even a show tune. It was like that. Um, that one guy that did all that music during the pandemic and then came out with the show about it.
[19:38] Misha:
Wig in The Angry Inch? No, no, no, no, no. That was earlier one. The one who like, I, I can’t remember his name, but he wrote a lot. It sounded, reminded me of him. Nevermind, uh, Tim mentioned, I, I don’t even, I have no idea what the guy is. Oh, all right. Well, but there was like, it was like, he was alone during the pandemic, and he just made all this music and like all this single camera comedy things, and then it came out and everybody thought he was wonderful and then he went away.
[20:00] Misha:
I wonder where he is right now. I don’t know. Hey, that guy, if you’re out there, come on the show. We’ll revive your career. This is number two from Song Do
[20:10] Speaker 4:
Your Toric
[20:11] Speaker 5:
Reality is a podcast about randomness and its uses, we invite you to take a chance and make real life decisions by rolling.
[20:27] Misha:
It’s very similar. It’s essentially the same song. They just changed the instrumentation a little bit. Or the, the rhythm. The the, oh yeah. I, I get it. Well, here, here’s, listen to some more of that. One.
[20:37] Speaker 5:
Random reality makes anything better by introducing unpredictability and taking away your analysis paralysis.
[20:47] Speaker 6:
Let go Take a chance. Okay. So I did not like song. Do I don’t think that they, did you give it any, any kind of textual context for the lyrics or, I gave it the lyrics. Oh, you did? Okay. Yeah. So I gave it, those are lyrics that I wrote, but I, I literally told it to make up the notes randomly.
[21:07] Speaker 6:
The chords randomly tempo, don’t follow any conventions, and it gave me show tunes. Gotcha. Um, sorry. It’s song Do Not Song Do one Word. It’s song. Do. Um, and if you, if hey, if you’re writing a musical, but you can’t write music, song do might be your choice.
[21:27] Speaker 6:
Right. Um, okay, so the next dev, uh, Bo Burnham. Bo Burnham. Yeah. I know the name, but I don’t know him as That’s the guy I was talking about. Okay. That’s all. I don’t think he needs our help. No, I just wanted to, to answer your question. Oh, okay. All right. So the next one I tried is Suno. And you do know Suno, right? Have you used Suno? Mm-hmm.
[21:47] Speaker 6:
You’ve heard of it? I have not explored this. This. Oh, okay. Uh, so there’s this service called Suno, where you, once again, you type in a prompt, gimme a reggae song about Billy Joel or whatever. Okay. Whatever it is. Um, and then it comes up with a song. So I once again gave it the lyrics, but doesn’t that already exist? Well, Billy Joel did a reggae song, Badly on Turnstiles.
[22:11] Speaker 6:
He was just trying to be like Eric Clapton, I guess. When did Eric Clapton do a reggae song? I shot the Sheriff. Isn’t that the first recording of reggae by a white guy? Is that reggae? It’s a Bob Marley song. Yeah. Now when he does it . Oh, okay. Well then maybe it’s then maybe it’s the Police. You mean that CIA operative band?
[22:32] Speaker 6:
You have not heard that conspiracy theory. I haven’t. You think the police are CIA operatives? I don’t think they are. They’re British. First of all, Stuart Copeland’s dad was a high level CIA person. Isn’t he British though? I I don’t know if it was CI, whatever. There, there were intelligence ties. Am I five? I don’t know. No, I think it was CIA Like I don’t think Stewart Copeland is, I think his father’s American.
[22:56] Speaker 6:
’cause he grew up in like India and shit. Stuart Copeland is the son of Miles Copeland Jr. A prominent founding member of the CIA. He was raised in the Middle East. His father worked as a spy in the Cold War. And the band was managed by Stewart’s brother, miles Copeland iii, who also founded IRS Records, which published, uh, the Gogos.
[23:17] Speaker 6:
Mm-hmm . Among other, many other, I love this Alex the Seal song. Alex the Seal is one of my favorites. . Anyway, nevermind. Um, well that’s listener. You can do a deep dive on that if you wanna find out more about how Sting got roped into doing American government work. But I don’t know that Sting was necessarily involved.
[23:37] Speaker 6:
He Oh, he was just the pretty face. I need to form a band to do some covert American government work. I need a pretty face to sing the songs. And now I’m gonna go bury the tapes in the backyard while everybody’s asleep. . So here’s option one from Suno. Okay. Sorry, I’m tangential. Today
[24:01] Speaker 7:
Is a podcast. I
[24:02] Misha:
Think it sounds like it’s French from the sixties. Yeah.
[24:09] Speaker 7:
We invite you to take a chance.
[24:11] Misha:
It’s just scales. It’s very Ethereum. It’s real. Yeah. It’s different. It’s different, but it’s different. It wasn’t different. It wasn’t random. There was nothing random about that. There was nothing random about it. No, no. Uh, and then here’s the second because, uh, most of these services, they’ll give you two. Like, yeah, here’s a prompt. Here’s two versions of what we did with that prompt.
[24:31] Misha:
So here’s the second one from Suno. It’s gonna be the same voice. Spoiler alert.
[24:47] Speaker 8:
It’s Pretty, it’s more random. It’s not random at all. It is, is it feels less canned.
[25:06] Speaker 7:
You make
[25:10] Misha:
Not bad. You know, I, I’ve, for a minute I considered, Hey, maybe we should make that our new theme song. I don’t know. But I’m kind of against using AI for that purpose. I think it should go to human creatives. If every time you make something creatively that’s outside of your wheelhouse, you have to pay somebody to do it.
[25:31] Misha:
You can’t have a hobby that is, that does that, I mean, the, the thing I like about AI is it allows you to spread your wings out a little bit more as a tool. Well, for proof of concept or for prototypes, or for first drafts or whatever. But if you’re gonna have artwork in your project, it’s, if it’s a commercial project, I’m saying mm-hmm .
[25:52] Misha:
I don’t know. I mean, I’ve, I’ve also been on the other side of this argument where I’ve said like, you know, oh yeah, artists don’t like ai. Well, Ned Lud didn’t like Automated Looms either. Like, it’s not going away. Yeah, right. I just, I just, I don’t know. I just, I just don’t think it’s high enough quality to replace humans yet. I liked what I did with Loo. Alright, then there’s a service called AI Song.
[26:15] Misha:
And also, what if you spend a tremendous amount of time getting AI to create something, if you curate it, I dunno, ai song.org, um, did one and, and strangely, so this one, I don’t know if there was a setting I missed or something, I don’t think there was. But this one put the prompt into the vocals.
[26:36] Misha:
So here’s the first one from AI song, a totally
[26:40] Speaker 9:
Random song in which the instruments, chords, notes, and phrasings are chosen completely at random without a respect to any key style or other convention of music with lyrics that say your A Toric reality is a podcast about randomness and its use. So
[26:58] Misha:
This, I feel like this, this is a tool that’s designed for you to type in a prompt and make a song Uhhuh. That’s just a guy saying what I typed into the box. I actually, it’s the one I like the most. Really? I mean, it’s, it’s different. And it just sounds like it’s, it’s somebody’s sitting on a piano. It’s the least conventional of them. But if you, if you notice, like if you compare that to the other ones, because I use basically the same prompt for all of them where it says like, without respect to Key, or like all of those other songs are in a key.
[27:28] Misha:
Yeah. You know, they didn’t, they didn’t pick chords randomly at all. This one didn’t even have chords. It was just, it was just kind of noodling. And then here’s . So the, and this is the only one that did a different voice for the second option. Here it comes
[27:44] Speaker 9:
A totally random song in which the instruments, chords, notes, and phrasings are chosen completely at random without respect to any key style or other convention of music with lyrics that say your toric reality as a podcast about randomness and its uses, we invite you to take a chance and make real life
[28:04] Misha:
Decisions. It was like walking into Shatner, had a kid by
[28:07] Speaker 9:
Rolling . So that’s why, um, I had a, I had an offer recently for someone to do free editing of our podcast. And I, I sometimes people do this where they’re like, I I wanna build a portfolio. I’m willing to do some editing for free.
[28:27] Speaker 9:
And this one particular person was like, I’ll do editing and I can also do music if you want, like, background music or something. So that’s where I was like, Hey, could you make a theme song using the, this string of random notes? And, uh, hope he said he is gonna do it. So hopefully I will get my wish. Okay. I will have. ’cause when we did in episode one, was it in episode one or two where we issued the challenge two?
[28:49] Speaker 9:
Yeah. ’cause we rolled for the theme song and we issued a challenge, which has still not been attempted by anyone to my knowledge. Did you give it to ai, those notes? Yeah. I don’t know that you can tell it to use a particular string of notes. Did you try I didn’t try do it. I said use random notes. Yeah, but give it those notes and see what it comes to those notes. All right. I’m gonna do that offline.
[29:09] Speaker 9:
Um, unless you want me to do it right now. I mean, yeah, just do it right now. Try it if you have it handy. Which one should I do? What do you mean? Oh, any of them. I don’t care which service. Where is it? It’s, um, yeah, he said he or she. I don’t know that it’s a he, he or she said, may I ask, how did you come up with the notes for the melody? Because I just said, Hey, can you make a song using these?
[29:30] Speaker 9:
And they know the name of the, of the show because, because they haven’t listened to you. They introduced themselves by saying, I’m randomly offering free audio editing. So they were trying to tie into the, a random idea. But then when I said, can you use these notes? They didn’t catch on that they were, because they didn’t listen to the podcast. Random, obviously it’s obviously a pyramid scheme work calls. So I do have the notes here.
[29:51] Speaker 9:
EDCG, sharp, D sharp, FACD, sharp. A G. Just take that with no other context. Put it into the prompt. Okay. Just nothing else. I’ll try, I’ll try. Suno. I just use Gemini. I didn’t have any luck getting a song on, on Gemini. It said it couldn’t, it couldn’t generate a sound file. I’ve done it multiple times. Do you pay for Gemini then?
[30:13] Speaker 9:
Uh, Gemini was gaslighting me. You might have to go not through the, the chat bot though. Mm. Yeah, dude. Right on Gemini. Daymond, where should we start? There’s a Create music book. Okay. You do it. Send me, send me that, that string. I’m not a robot. Isn’t that the whole point of what we’re talking about here? I’m not a robot. Okay. I put in write a song using continuously random notes, instrumentation and style as a theme song for the podcast.
[30:40] Speaker 9:
Quote Your Atory Reality. All right, let’s see what it does. And it’s reminding me that it is AI and it can make mistakes. Yeah. Yeah. So the prompt I used on song do, ’cause they, they say what you did last time. Um, the only fields they have are lyrics and then style of music.
[31:00] Speaker 9:
And you can put in a title. Okay. So under Style of music, I put an atory or all toric song in which the instruments, chords, notes, and phrasings are chosen totally at random without respect to genre, key tempo, or any other musical convention. You ready? That’s not what we got. Your theme song for your all toric reality is Ready.
[31:20] Speaker 9:
I’ve composed a track titled Probability Skin, which leans heavily into the experimental glitch genre to capture that sense of chance and randomness you requested. It features a disorienting blend of shifting instrumentation, unpredictable rhythms, and a three voice composite robotic whispered and distorted to reflect a reality that is constantly recalibrating.
[31:40] Speaker 9:
You can listen to the track directly in our chat. Enjoy the chaos . Oh yeah. Random reality in the house.
[31:59] Speaker 10:
The axis fails. The axis fails. Walk.
[32:08] Misha:
Nice
[32:12] Speaker 10:
Random walk. Entropy is the only constant ally doric pulse.
[32:35] Misha:
This sounds a little bit like ICP. Why is it pronouncing good?
[32:41] Speaker 8:
Right?
[32:46] Misha:
I’m digging this.
[32:47] Speaker 8:
I am too .
[32:56] Misha:
We can’t play the whole thing. ’cause then they’re gonna make us pay a licensing fee. Why? It’s not, it’s just AI world
[33:01] Speaker 8:
From, It’s not attribution Dice.
[33:04] Misha:
Really? Yeah, there are on all these other ones that I used on this one.
[33:08] Speaker 8:
Zero correlation. Can you download it? Yeah. All Right. And I guess that’s the winner. No, Cause except that it’s mispronouncing all toric. I like that. . It’s random. Ric, This really sounds like ICP to me. Does Gemini know that it’s that we’re related to Morton’s list?
[33:31] Speaker 8:
No. Somehow, I don’t know. Maybe, maybe. Who knows what It knows. Weird. It is a little long for a theme song though. Okay, we’ll see, I mean, you need to download that so I can put it in the episode. Oh, don’t play it on loop. Oh, okay.
[33:52] Speaker 8:
I’m gonna say, I think what we learn is that if you want your song to sound normal, use one of the song services. If you want your sound to sound abnormal, use Gemini. And if you wanna not have to pay for it, use Gemini and probably make it less conventional. And 30 seconds. Alright, let’s see what happens.
[34:12] Speaker 8:
30 seconds is still pretty long for a podcast theme song. Gotta have some room. If it’s dope, people will just download the podcast to listen to that. If you want to have a hit, you gotta make it fit. So they cut it down to 3 0 5. I wish I had a gun with me. Oh wait, Jesus , you’ve got your video game. I can be Phil Spector now , gimme a wall Of Sound.
[34:35] Speaker 8:
Wow. This is a little frightening. Yeah. Do you like that? Yeah. Damon has this, uh, giant like handheld, but it looks like, I mean, it looks like a video game gun. ’cause it is, it’s like sort of handgun shape, but like, as long as a shotgun. And he, it is the, and it looks very realistic and he pointed it directly at my head. . It is the anvil with an extended barrel from the video game recruit.
[34:59] Speaker 8:
I’ve had loaded real guns pointed at me twice on purpose. And this was not one of those times. Yes. Not by my purpose. Yeah. I’m still practicing my editing music skills, but I’ve worked on making the theme even less conventional and condensing it into 30 seconds. I’ve taken a shot at capturing that purely alienator spirit for your alienator reality with more erratic instrumentation and a fragmented structure.
[35:22] Speaker 8:
I’ve created the music you requested. You can play it now in our chat. And it’s two minutes 30 seconds long. . Well, we know that it doesn’t always get, it is ai, it can make mistakes.
[35:36] Speaker 11:
The Axis
[35:41] Misha:
, that was like more nine inch Nails. Ah, one of my favorite bands. I’m not gonna complain.
[35:48] Speaker 11:
Npe is the only Con. It’s not that different though, Ali.
[35:53] Misha:
Oh, she said Ali Toric instead of IO Now she said Ali Toric. It’s not that different. So now I’ve taken the string of those notes, Uhhuh, and I’m going to reply to this with just the string of notes. All right. This is, this is how I interact with the ai. Fuck with it. I didn’t tell it what to do.
[36:13] Misha:
I just gave it those notes. Well, we’ll see what it says. Interpreting a musical request. And I always turn on, um, like the, you have the option to look at like how it came to its conclusions. Uhhuh and like the, the instructions that it wrote for itself. It’s fascinating. Yeah. So ultimately whether you’re forward or against it is irrelevant because it’s not going away.
[36:37] Misha:
No, it’s never gonna go away. So play with it. Right? I mean, have fun with it. Learn to use it. Learn not to rely. The biggest thing I worry about is we already don’t know anybody’s phone number. Right. Because we have it in our phone. Mm-hmm . And now if we never have to think about anything at all, well then, I mean, so one of the ways I used AI really well recently was I was writing my performance review for the year.
[37:01] Misha:
Mm-hmm . I wrote my thing up and then I just put it in AI and it just made it better. Make it better. Sure. You know, but then like, ooh, uh, oh, what happened? I’m still practicing my music editing skills, but I’ve worked on it integrating the specific note sequence and then it lists the notes into your podcast theme. I’ve taken a shot at weaving those notes into a 32nd avant-garde electronic track that maintains that glitchy all toric feel.
[37:25] Misha:
I’ve created the music you requested. You can play it now on our chat. And then it gives me the lyrics. Let’s hear it
[37:34] Speaker 11:
Walk from the dice. Zero correlation. No. Cause just a fact.
[37:45] Misha:
It’s not doing those notes. At least not in the order that we gave . Yeah. I I’m Like, it’s kind of cool, But it’s kinda like in that vim, it’s kinda like in that Vim vendors movie when, uh, everybody, there’s a, it’s kinda like that Vim Vendors movie where people can record their dreams and everybody just gets addicted to watching their dreams.
[38:11] Misha:
Oh yeah. During the day. Um, and like, like, ’cause anybody can put anything in and get this polished piece of work and then you wanna listen to it and you’re like, oh, this is cool. But it’s like, is it any cooler than the hundred things? Everybody in a three block radius just did in the past five minutes. Right. And everybody was just like, I made this cool thing, I made this cool thing.
[38:32] Misha:
And I worry that there’s only two outcomes possible from all of this. One, we have Eloy and Morlocks except the Morlocks are the machines instead of actual people that evolve to be these little tech gremlins. Uh, or we end up with a world that’s just full of robots going around trying to convince each other that they’re humans and the humans are gone.
[38:54] Misha:
There’s a third option. Tell me. We run out of water and the humans and the machines. Pot machines are dead, potable, potable water. The humans and the machines are all dead. Uh, I’m starting to lean towards that might be the best possible outcome. I mean, that is one thing. They share a dependency on water. Right. Right. Okay. So now I just pasted in that sequence of notes again with no other context, no other anything.
[39:19] Misha:
To see how far up your own ass you can go Uhhuh . So let’s see if it’s, if it, if it got the order right this time. Alright. Okay. Nope. Now I’m going to say in that, or now it’s sequencing the notes.
[39:40] Misha:
Oh. But yeah, minimal instruction is when I think AI comes with the neatest stuff. If you, if you really try to hone in on a thing, it, it fails every fucking time. Right. It’s gonna give you what it decides or just can’t let something like it’s, there’s, I’ve seriously had problems where like, it’ll put a thumb coming out of the middle of someone’s hand and I’ll be like, get that fucking thumb out of there.
[40:03] Misha:
And it keeps putting the thumb back. . Yeah. Well that’s, I I tried a couple iterations of like, no, give me ra like literally pick random notes. Mm-hmm . Literally pick random chords. Literally change style three times. Mm-hmm . It wouldn’t do it. No it doesn’t. Unless you tell it in this style for 15 seconds in this style for, I don’t think that’ll work.
[40:26] Misha:
You just told Gemini to make a 32nd song and I made two and a half minutes. Okay. Let’s try it last time. Ready? Yep.
[40:33] Speaker 11:
The Xs fails.
[40:40] Misha:
I just typed fail in all caps. Yeah. All right. Well I guess what we learned is, uh, AI is good at coming up with stuff, but it’s not good at taking notes. Nope. It doesn’t, it doesn’t do, it does. It gets stuck in things. It gets worse. Yeah. Like you try to, you try to tweak it to an improvement and it gets worse.
[41:01] Misha:
Now I’m only got it in thinking. I mean, there’s a, there’s another advanced, but thinking should be fine. I don’t have it in fast, so. Alright. Well there you have it. Inconclusive. Take take, take what you want. Do what you want. ’cause you will anyway. I mean, it was definitely better than the crap that you came up with. Some I, a couple of us were catchy. They weren’t random.
[41:23] Misha:
They weren’t at all random. No, no. As far as randomness. Well, really it was a little better with making it kind of unconventional or like the show tunes were The show tunes were very weird. That was very weird. Yeah. Well, we need a listener challenge. Do something creative with ai. It has to be random. How do we, how do we get random to do something randomly? Oh, it came back. Can we give it one more shot?
[41:44] Misha:
Let’s give it a listen. All right. It’s changed the title, big news,
[41:50] Speaker 11:
The Axis Only.
[42:01] Misha:
So Unconventional . This is terrible. So definitely the first one was the best. I mean, the only, the thing the things I like about it are that I like probability skin .
[42:21] Misha:
I like that . I like that they, they say random walk because that’s a topic that we haven’t even done yet. So it’s like predicting where we might go. That’s pretty cool. Um, but as far as like hitting like what I think of as Alia Toric music and like random notes and, and like random element. No, maybe that’s the mistake.
[42:41] Misha:
Maybe we need to ask it to make it in the style of alien toric music. Well, we didn’t try, I guess we didn’t try that with Gemini, but I tried that with Did you some of these, well, didn’t you hear what I said? I was like, when it put, it said style of music. I said an all to or all toric song in which the instruments, chorus, notes, et cetera are random. It’s so too, it’s too conceptual though.
[43:02] Misha:
I mean, it’s not a real style, you know, it’s, I mean it it, it has access to all the knowledge on the internet. It should have a ability to find out what all toric music is. But I don’t think it’s dedicated. Like, I definitely feel like AI has evolved to be, to have process constraints. So it can only go so far for you. You know what I mean?
[43:24] Misha:
I guess I, especially, especially at the free level. Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Well, I think, I actually think the listener challenge should be the opposite. It should be do something real on your own. Write a poem, write a song, draw a picture in which the top, the notes or the subject of the drawing or the topic of the poem or whatever are you.
[43:46] Misha:
Come up with options and roll for it and send us your shit. We’ll play it on the air. We’ll post it on our website. We’ll post it on our social media. That’s your mission listener. Should you choose to accept it. I hope you do. Sounds like fun. All right, cool. Gimme a Wall of Sound
[44:07] Speaker 7:
Is a podcast. We you to
[44:35] Speaker 10:
The axis Fails. Fails Random Walk, walk,
[44:45] Speaker 12:
Walk.
[44:51] Speaker 10:
Entropy is the only constant. Ali Doric Pulse a world from the dice.
[45:37] Speaker 10:
Zero correlation. No cause just effect. I
[46:20] Speaker 12:
Reality, Glitching reality and of.
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