AI is here. Just ask your neighbors

“I’ve done 10 albums in the past year,” my across-the-street neighbor, Dietmar, told me Sunday morning as we stood in the street between our two houses catching up. He added that his wife, Sarah, had put out two collections of songs in the same time period, adding, “You know it’s all AI, right?”

It was a big reality check for me. You see, I have been using some AI tools to help me put together produced demos of songs I have written over the past few years. Here I thought I was somehow on the cutting edge as my neighbor tells me he is using similar tools to create a record in a few days and then send it out to all of the streaming services for consumption.

I was introduced to the tool I am using close to a year ago by a good friend of mine who we’ll call Tom. He is one of those Renaissance men who do a lot of different things. The fact that we are both that way probably explains why we have been close for four decades. In addition to being a university professor, he has started multiple magazines and still runs a company that sells prerecorded drum loops and he has been part of an award-winning country/pop band for probably 20 years now.

He is a primary songwriter for that band and had a pile of unfinished songs that he wanted to get done but was having some serious writer’s block. Because of his day job, he is well-versed in AI tools and turned to one to help him with that song-finishing task. When he played me a few things where he had collaborated with the machine, I was stunned at how good they were.

So I signed up and tried something a little different. I took a fully-written song that had never, in terms of production, gotten further than the bedroom demo stage and fed it to the AI and told it to create a cover version.

It was good enough that I actually released it. But then I kind of forgot about it for probably 10 months. And then, about a month ago, I went back to it. And this time I gave it a lot more to work with. The results were pretty crazy. To say that the tool has gotten orders of magnitude better in less than a year is an understatement of Olympian proportion.

I had written and recorded a song for the album I put out in ‘23 but didn’t include it for reasons that are not germane for this discussion. Later, I went in and added some ideas for a horn section part but it was just an outline and not well played.

And then, because my producer tells me that most of the songs I write are country (which I fight with him about), I directed the AI via the prompt to make it a country-rock song. In less than 30 seconds, it spit out a fully-produced song that sounds like it was done in a world-class studio with top-notch session players and a great singer. It is good enough that I am working on feeding everything from that album in and having the AI produce country versions which I’ll release as “The Country Remixes” in the next month or two.

At this point, the decision to have a band and work with real, human musicians is really about the ability to do live gigs. But when I played that song for a different producer and told him I wanted to remix it using a human singer, his response was, “Why? You can release this tonight.”

And my answer was about business, not art. I wanted to be able to promote it with a real human. But then, folks like my neighbor are just creating artists digitally. The AI tool I use gives me the ability to save a “persona” based on a song so that I can go back and do additional songs that will stay true in terms of style and overall sound as if it was an actual human recording artist.

It’s a little frightening, truth be told.

And, here’s the thing. If you want to really see the potential for any new technology, look to the creatives. We — you know, the weirdos — are, inevitably the ones in society who quickly glom on to new tools and figure out new ways of using them in order to actually produce the stuff we see or hear in our minds.

Ironically, there are many among us who also will fight to the death to keep doing things the way they were done 50 years ago or more and will fight tooth and nail to keep tech from “polluting” their art. Don’t believe me? Get two guitar players in a room and encourage them to have a debate about the relative value of an old tube amp versus a band new digital amp modeler.

I am one of those guys who straddles both camps. In the past 30 minutes, I downloaded a new virtual instrument that will allow me to play ethnic flutes using a guitar and a breath controller and a very powerful Mac. But right next to me on the desk is an old Fender amp made in 1962 and on the wall behind that more than a dozen guitars, basses and mandolins, most of which are between 25 and 60 years old.

I know there are people out there who hate even the term AI and want it all to just stop. But the genie does not go back into the bottle willingly and we are just starting to glimpse the abilities of this particular djinn.

It is going to make the emergence of the internet seem like something made for small children. It is going to change the way we do almost everything. It is going to destroy many, many jobs (including mine, at some point).

But, as I work with it and end up in my little bedroom studio with tracks that I could never hope to do as well on my own, I am realizing that AI is also going to allow me to do creative things that were just not on the table just six months ago.

If what you do to feed your soul involves any kind of creation including writing or visual arts you need to know about this stuff. If your job involves anything other than use of your hands, you need to know because the tech is coming for your job, too.

And if you really want to know, just ask your neighbor. You know, the artistic one up the street who everyone thinks is a weirdo. That is the one who is most likely to be on top of this stuff.