Honk If You Love Goth Girls
Thank You for the AI Money, But It's Still a Scam
Mark Rushton’s Perseverance in the Arts is a weekly email on Substack where I talk about my ongoing work as a recording artist and visual artist.
This week’s topics:
Honk If You Love Goth Girls
Thank You for the AI Money, But It’s Still a Scam
Hermes 3000
Raw Chef
Honk If You Love Goth Girls
On Friday (October 4th), I attended the Iowa Business Analyst Development Day conference in West Des Moines, Iowa, and on the way home I saw this bumper sticker. I didn’t honk, but I honked in spirit.
The conference was very worthwhile for my day job, and I plan to implement some of the topics presented into the arts side of my life. I took a lot of notes and I also audio recorded the presentations. Even though I'm more on the technical BA side (business systems analyst), all BAs are easy to talk to and work with. They’re “my people”.
While I’m an art school dropout, I always felt that doing projects in art school prepared me for my career in tech, which has bounced along for 32 years between software testing and business analysis things. I did “BA work” long before anybody around me was called that.
Creating visual art and music, and getting it out there, has a lot of processes and requirements. And so does tech work. I’ll try to write more about the art processes in the future.
Thank You for the AI Money, But It’s Still a Scam
I like how that photo turned out. I was going for a short walk at work and had to back up and zoom in to get it.
On Thursday (October 3), out of the blue, I got a notification that I had new royalties from one of the licensing companies I feed so that other creatives can use my music, sound fx, and images in their projects. The royalties were because of the licensing of my recordings to companies working on "datasets", or LLMs - Large Language Models.
Yes, the dreaded “AI” thing.
How much money? "Gear money".
I was surprised at the amount, which was far more than I’ve previously earned on this platform. A lot of recording artists were sharing their numbers in forums. I could kick myself for not putting more of my catalog into this service, which is something that had been advised to me a while back, because I would have earned more. I have been adding more in the past month. Maybe in 6 months there will be another payout.
While it’s nice to get paid for licensing my music, that doesn't change my opinion on "Aye Eye". I still think it’s mostly a joke, but I'll take their funny money.
I’m not worried about AI taking over everything. Please read the late Fred Brooks’ paper No Silver Bullet - specifically, pages 7-8 - for more on this topic. Brooks was kind of a smart guy. He won a Turing.
If you want to learn more about heuristics, which Brooks references on pages 7-8, and which is something I’ve studied on my own over the years, start with George Polya’s book, “How to Solve It”.
The conformist techies always want to fight about it if you kick their AI baby. "It's just a tool," they say. No, you're the tool. You've been programmed. They don’t know anything about Fred Brooks, but they can repeat what the shiny person on the screen said to them.
At best, I think today’s “AI” is just another tech parlor trick like those VR headsets, NFTs, and saltwater Teslas. The thesaurus on ChatGarbage isn’t too bad, but I have a paper version here in my office that works fine, too. I’ll keep using the paper version after what Mira Murati said about artists.
I don’t think AI provides any value. As Ron Jeffries wrote, and I’m paraphrasing: it’s good at providing the wrong answers, but with authority.
But but but, didn’t companies lay people off because of AI? No, that’s BS. They laid people off due to BS, but blamed AI.
Q: Does it bother you that your music is being used to “train AI”?
A: No, I will license my music to pretty much anything that pays. My music has been licensed and used in some odd section of an app on the Apple Watch for almost three years now, and that’s been a sweet payout.
I’m not angry about AI. I mostly make fun of it. The whole thing is such an obvious coordinated scam to reverse the price crashes on major tech company stocks in 2022. It worked, didn’t it? Billionaires always need more money.
When you look at Enshittified Google and Enshittified Bing search results, fueled by Nuclear AI (aka “pay to play”), you can’t find anything these days. And I don’t mean that in a Yogi Berra way. I don’t need a Co-Pilot. I have mostly given up using traditional search engines. They don’t work like they did. Today they provide the wrong answers, but with authority. They no longer provide me value.
Hermes 3000
One device that never needs updating is this Hermes 3000 typewriter I bought in October 2013 for $50 via Craigslist. It was mint then and it’s mint today. It also has the metal lid and the original cleaning brushes.
I’ve been using the typewriter lately as the basis for some visual art projects. I did have a little trouble figuring out how to program the mechanical margins, but the terse “How to use your Hermes portable” booklet provided the correct answer on page 5. And with authority.
Hey, it’s just a tool.
Raw Chef
This week saw me digging into some playlists from 2021 and rediscovering the wonderfully quirky dub/electronic F.S. Blumm + Nils Frahm album 2X1=4.
My favorite track is Raw Chef. Here’s a link to it on Qobuz.
Wear good headphones. I like Grados.
Honk.