Some of my readers may know I am a very late adopter of technology. I listen to music on Spotify now, but I still have a turntable and listen to vinyl albums occasionally. Some of you may also know that I am extremely resistant to letting AI write anything for me.
“I like writing and I don’t want some machine doing that for me,” (apologies to Denny Zager and his song “In the Year 2525”). I also write some songs, and I hope Denny still writes; I know he builds Zager Guitars now, which I can’t play well enough to invest in, but which many musicians I respect say are very “playable.”
My son Zac, an artist, frequently tells me, “Pop, AI’s just a tool. Use it as much as you want or not.” He asked Chat GPT to summarize my blogsite Wisdom from Unusual Places in the form of 1990s Gangsta Rap. You can read the result here.
Recently Zac sent me a song written by the Sonu AI music generator, which he instructed to write a song which summarized the blog in the form of Bob Dylan’s “I don’t wanna work on Maggie’s Farm no more.”
Here is the result.
It’s a Brave New World.
I appreciated the line about being resistant to letting AI write for you while still treating it as a tool. That balance comes through clearly here. The Dylan-style summary example is a good reminder that AI music gets more interesting when it extends a personal voice instead of replacing it.
Thanks
It’s a fun piece. I think it does an OK job as a summary of a summary of my blog site and it kind of sounds like Dylan. I haven’t really experimented with AI song writing in any serious way. Not sure I will, other than adding other instrumentation to something I write on guitar, not for publication but to see how it might sound.