A.I. Set to Music.

There's a great bit from one of Robert Frost's greatest poems, "The Mending Wall," that I wish more people would consider and think about. It ain't about mending and it ain't about walls. 

It's about life itself. About thinking about what you're doing before you do it.

Here's the entirety of the poem, with the passage I'm writing about today highlighted. If you aren't running to yet another meaningless meeting, you can take one-hundred and fifty-two seconds and hear Frost himself recite this masterpiece. It's a long way from O-O-O-Ozempic!

I bring up the highlighted lines above, "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out," because as the entire world blindly gushes about and embraces the trillion-dollar propaganda of the cocksure AI-future, no one is asking what we are keeping in or keeping out. No one's asking what we're giving up.

I had a email conversation with my friend, the Soul Captain, Karl Westman, early last week. In addition to being a mensch, Karl is the best music guy I ever worked with. He's probably scored more commercials than Carter has little liver pills, and elevated every one of them. He's also a recording artist in his own right. You can find Karl on Spotify, if you look.

In any event, I asked Karl last week about the Coltrane I posted above.

Something important and meaningful happens in those :52 seconds. Coltrane thinks. He asks to know what score he is following and why he should. He alters Rogers' original score and adds to it the trill and the flourish and the spark of unique. The stuff that genius is made of.

In short, and speaking of AI, Coltrane "doesn't follow the prompt." He doesn't play "My Favorite Things" by Richard Rogers, he makes the "standard" un-standard.

Listen.

You might also like to listen to my favorite two-minutes and thirty-two seconds of Thelonious Sphere Monk, his rendition of "Dinah, Take Two."

Monk is also, like 'Trane, defying, not following the prompt. He is asking to know what he is walling in or walling out. Of course, Monk could hit every piano key perfectly. He doesn't. He makes "Dinah" unique, different, his. Worthy of standing out among nineteen trillion other pop songs.

In about two minutes scrolling on LinkedIn, you'll see probably fifty posts on the splendiferousness of AI. Of automation. Of "generative-ness," of whatever the current forces of technology totalitarianism tells us to think. 

What's more, if you find your ChatGPT, or Claude mechanism, you can probably tell it to "write a song like Coltrane or Monk," and it will do a decent job.

But it will be missing the why.
It will be missing the ask.
It will be missing the rule-breaking.
The 'I never would have done that.'
Those are the essence of us.
Or people a human.

We're no longer asking why.
We're following the prompt.

That's not living.
That's not being.
We are being fed, in Latin, "Dronito ergo, sum."

I drone, therefore I am.