David Jett Explains AI
Maybe I should have gotten AI to write this.
Chicago, IL has given birth to many things, two of which are me, and the melodic rock band Styx. In early 1983, Styx released their biggest concept album to date: Kilroy Was Here. This Terminator meets Tipper Gore tour-de-force was the brainchild of keyboardist/vocalist Dennis DeYoung, who seemed to have Broadway aspirations and probably would have preferred winning a Tony to a Grammy (he won neither.) I was a Styx fan and was excited to hear their new album. Luckily, the local rock station (which is what classic rock stations used to be called) had special Friday night programming in which they would play a new album in its entirety. And they were to feature Kilroy Was Here. None of these songs had been played on the radio yet. You couldn’t buy it at stores (obviously there was no such thing as streaming yet.) Rock 103 had gotten an advance copy and they were gonna play it for us!
I was def ready. Not only to hear their new songs for the first time, but to record the whole fucking thing! I had one of those console units that featured a radio and a tape deck built into the same unit which meant I could record shit off the radio. (People tried this all the time back then, but you had to contend with stuff like radio disc jockeys talking all through the intro to the song, not quite knowing when your favorite song was going to come up in rotation, and just the whole fat-fingering the clunky buttons on the tape deck and missing the whole thing.) This night, in a departure from their norm, the Rock 103 DJ decided to start with side two. Why? Because the James Young (guitarist/vocalist) penned song “Heavy Metal Poisoning,” a rock and fucking roll banger, was the first song on side two. The first song on side one? The Dennis DeYoung written “Mr. Roboto.” That poor Rock 103 dude just wanted to burn one and rock out! He wasn’t too thrilled starting out with a hokey rock opera about a rebel with a very nice head of hair running around in a robot helmet while trying to fight…other robots? I think. Maybe the Moral Majority, who were trying to censor rock albums at the time. Maybe he just liked cosplay. All I knew was I was capturing all of the songs about robots running things, all on my little cassette tape. Technology, bitches!
When cassette tapes were first introduced to the mass public, some musicians declared it to be the end of the music industry (not Led Zepplin’s Robert Plant who said, “You can't even imagine how it felt to have a cassette that you could take with you with a microphone so you could put down an idea and not have to hum it a million times to remember what it was.”) At the time, most musicians made their money primarily from album sales. Radio played songs to promote the album. Bands toured to promote the album. A ticket to see a band live often cost less than buying the album itself. Of course, today it’s almost the opposite. Bands want you to stream their album (from which they make almost no money unless you’re Taylor Swift) and then pay $1000 a seat to see them on tour.
If you are old enough, you’ve listened to (or bought) the same albums in a myriad of formats. Vinyl records, 8-track tapes, cassette tapes, cd’s, illegal streaming, legal streaming and back to vinyl records. As you can see from the things that come after cassette tapes in that list, cassette tapes didn’t kill the music industry. But that kind of rhetoric comes from idiots after any technological advance. “oh, that’s it, they just invented something new, we’re all gonna die!!” And that brings me to the topic of AI, artificial intelligence, specifically when it comes to creative endeavors.
My very first job was as a video editor. (I skipped the whole “teenager works at McDonalds” thing.) I was the night editor which meant I was doing the mundane work the daytime editor didn’t want to do. However, I was so creative that the video producers who worked there started scheduling their edit sessions at night so they could work with me. The daytime Senior Editor could operate the equipment. Hell, he knew the names and models and brands of every piece of video editing gear (which was before you could do it all on a single computer.) He was all “yeah, put that in the Grass Valley 5800 and swap over the Johnson Rods into the Sony TX-13001.” I couldn’t tell you what any of that shit was called because to me it was like knowing the brand name of a hammer you’re using to hang a picture on the wall. It was a tool.
No one with a decent amount of creative talent is going to be replaced by AI. It’s just not going to happen. Creative people will see it as just another tool to get done what they need to get done. The only people truly afraid of AI are the people whose ideas were never that good to begin with. When it comes to making a joke, humorous comment, or just being plain funny, do you think I’m worried that some AI is going to come up with something funnier than I would? Joe Rogan might be worried about that, but I’m not.
Side note: before I ended up using Joe Rogan as the example for this, I thought about using Matt Rife cause he seems like this generations Dane Cook. This was before I actually saw any Matt Rife. I just knew a lot of younger, not-that-well-seasoned-in- comedy people hold him up as their favorite comedian. He’s ripped, so obviously shallow gals love him. But before I used him as an example, I watched some of his stuff. He’s not that brilliant of a joke writer, but he does have a lot of charisma. And he’s got good timing and that’s about 80% of being funny. He also talks about things that young people will understand and relate to. So maybe he’s not Bob Newhart, but no one listening to him knows who Bob Newhart is anyway, so I’m leaving Matt Rife out of this.
There may be dangers to AI. Deep fakes, misinformation. But you can’t blame AI for that. There’s not some giant robot sitting around trying to figure out how to fuck with elections. Let’s suppose you lived in 1856. James Buchanan would eventually win the presidential election by defeating John C. Fremont.
John C. Fremont, “ok, listen up, team. This shit-head James Buchanan is ahead in the race. This is what I want you to do. Intercept all the letters he mails. Frank, you open those letters and figure out what kind of pen he uses. Edward, practice signing his name just like him. Clarence, find out where we can buy the same stationary he uses. Gentlemen, we are gonna deep fake this backwoods cow-fucker!”
I use Photoshop AI to create the lead pics in my essays. You start with a blank canvas. There’s a prompt box and you put in a written description of what you want your pic to look like. Then after around 30 variations and adjustments of the descriptive text, you get a half-way passable image. If David Jett Explains Things was a million dollar enterprise, I would pay an actual graphic artist to produce the images for me. It’s not, so I don’t. No one is losing work because I used AI because the work was never there at all. But it helps my site look a little nicer. Let me show you how Photoshop AI works and you’ll get a clearer idea of why you really shouldn’t be that worried unless someone has a whole hell of a lot of free time on their hands. (and that person is gonna fuck up people whether AI is there or not. It’s like the gun argument. Should there be common sense gun laws to prevent some of the killing? Yeah, of course. Obviously, if someone wants to kill someone, they are gonna kill someone even if they have to use a butter knife and a sock monkey. Should there be a few roadblocks for making it too easy? Yeah, probably. Should there be some common sense laws to protect people from some nutjob using AI in a malicious manner? Yeah, probably.)
Here's a pic I had AI create for me in Photoshop. I made AI do all of the work on this, which shows AI is actually just as dumb as the rest of us. I typed in “AI can lead to problems.” The result looks like a painting hanging in a LuluLemon sponsored yoga studio. Not very threatening
My next prompt, in which my brain did all of the heavy lifting, was “giant AI robots take over a city as people are running around in fear.”
Not so bad. You can see that AI can do things, but not on its own. It needs a creative human brain. (And a gazillion internet reference images.)
Let’s try “bald headed muscle man stands on a stage with a microphone not being funny.”
Goddamn, AI really captured that! (or did I? See what I’m saying. If I had typed in “Joe Rogan isn’t funny,” we would not have gotten this.)
I tried a lot of different prompts to get the image at the top of this essay. The one that finally produced that image was “cassette deck turns into an evil robot.” Before I put in the word evil, I got a lot of happy kids and happy robots and happy tape decks.
See, AI isn’t evil. It takes a person to do that. Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.
POSTSCRIPT: I’ve been playing around with an AI program called Donna, which does both music and lyrics based off of prompt, for a future post. Since I was messing around with it, I decided to do a David Jett Explains Things theme song. The prompt I put in was “David Jett Explains Things. He’s funny. Sometimes his joke are offensive.” That was it. The following is what Donna AI came up with. No one is losing a job over this. Well, unless you are the band Nerf Herder, who I actually like. Anywho, here’s my new theme song!