Vernon Reid examines AI's rise, contrasting ChatGPT-4's bar exam success with the "AI Drake" phenomenon and voice cloning risks like romance scams. He critiques anthropomorphizing tools such as Microsoft's "Sydney," which mimics figures like Warhol, while noting legal battles over training data versus public archives. Reid compares modern generative flaws to historical sampling, reflecting on how technology reshapes creativity and threatens privacy, ultimately questioning society's readiness for digital identity replication and manipulation. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Born During Notting Hill Riots00:05:03
So my parents are from the Caribbean.
They're from Montserrat, which is by Antigua.
All of that.
And they got married in London.
I was born there.
And then the day after, literally the day after I was born, they had one of the, in Notting Hill, they had one of the biggest race riots in the city.
They had a massive one.
It was literally, I was born August 22nd.
That conflict was on August 23rd, and that made my parents go, okay.
Because this is the time of the Teddy Boys, you know, kind of rockabilly racist.
Rockabilly racist?
Yeah.
There was a whole thing like after World War II, you know, they brought in people from India, they brought people from parts of Africa like Nigeria, they brought people from Jamaica and other English parts of the West Indies to help rebuild London because all of these cities.
had been blown up by the Blitz.
So they brought people in and quickly there was a lot of resentment from people that were there.
But they brought in folks to kind of, because, you know, the cities had been destroyed.
And yeah, so it got weird.
So you guys got out of there and went to my parents got out.
My pa said, you know what?
I'm going to take a chance on America.
And first we lived in Harlem for, I don't know, maybe a month.
And then he said, I'm going to go to Brooklyn.
He just went to Brooklyn instead.
So Brooklyn is what I know.
I grew up in Brooklyn.
Oh, I didn't go.
Well, you know, it was fantastic.
I mean, when I think about it, I love it.
It was a fascinating time because, you know, I mean, I was born at the end of the 50s.
So, you know, you still saw cars from the 1930s.
When I was a little kid, you still saw cars from the 40s.
In the 30s on the street.
And then all the kind of cars with the fins, the Cadillacs with the fins.
Then you started seeing the muscle cars, which is like incredible, you know, like seeing the Corvettes and seeing the Mustangs and the Cougars and things like that.
So it was a very dynamic time.
A lot of changes happened in a very short period of time.
Like I was literally a child in the 60s, a little kid.
And the things were.
Incredible, you know.
So, like the moon landing.
I mean everything.
I, you know, I saw um Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on live tv.
What yeah, my parents, my parents and my parents are young, you know, they were, they were just in their early 20s and what have you.
And they said that's the guy.
And uh, he was being brought in for his arraignment.
And my dad said, you know, that's that's the guy that shot the president.
And as soon as he said that, you just saw this Fedora come into the frame And pop, pop, pop, and it was pandemonium.
It was freaky.
So all that early media exposure had a big impact on me.
Like seeing civil rights protests, seeing Bull Connor, the dogs, the hoses, that kind of really imprinted on me.
Because I could see who the hoses were being turned on.
And I could look at my arm and go, Oops, you know, so.
Yeah.
Pretty much.
But it was, it was, it was, it was an amazing time.
It was weird, cool things, you know.
Because also being exposed to things that I don't know, I'm a kid, right?
But seeing King Kong and Dracula and, you know, James Wales Frankenstein, you know, seeing all that stuff, it had a really huge impact.
That was a cinema that really impacted me.
And how old were you when you first got into music?
You know, I was into music, I think, from when I first heard it, but I didn't play an instrument until I was a teenager.
And what was your first, the first music you got into?
Was it rock and roll?
First music I heard, well, the first music I heard was like Motown and British Invasion.
It was kind of almost a split between Motown, Stax, James Brown, and British Invasion bands, and then the bands from San Francisco and things like that.
So it was like hearing, I mean, hearing B.B. King, hearing early rock and roll.
Because they were playing, because at that time, They were being played as almost, they were being played as oldies, right?
Sci-Fi Dreams and Real Tech00:07:15
But for me, it's brand new, right?
I remember hearing, I mean, say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud, hearing Dionne Warwick.
Dionne Warwick had a huge impact on me.
Burt Backrack just passed.
Hearing Dionne Warwick, you know, Do You Know the Way to San Jose and Anyone Who Had a Heart and House is Not a Home, all those tunes.
It's such an incredibly, Incredible voice, you know.
So, how does such a legendary musician like yourself become so interested in such an expert in artificial intelligence?
I don't know if I'm that much of an expert, but I have an interest in it because I think science fiction, in a way, had a huge impact on me, as I said, you know, horror and then science fiction.
And then we've had this kind of fascination with the idea of the supercomputer, Colossus, the Forbin Project.
HAL 9000 from 2001.
I mean, what was it?
Knight Rider, the car kit, the car to talk to the car that talked.
We've had this fascination with it going, and I'm probably skipping a bunch of stuff.
Silent running, robotics, the robot from Lost in Space, the robot from Forbidden Planet.
We've had a fascination with this technology going back, I mean, much longer than that, even.
You know, even folklore, it's been a thing.
So, you know, the idea of technology having a kind of life of its own, even if you think about something like a music box, right?
You know, you turn the thing and it plays a tune.
Well, a music box is a kind of sequencer.
Right.
You know, a player piano, you know, where the piano seems to play itself.
You have a role and it automates the keys.
And that was like a huge craze, the player piano.
In fact, there was a Mexican.
composer, Conlon Nancaro.
And you should, if you hear, if you get a chance, listen to Conlon Nancaro's music.
He did this thing where he took piano rolls and he made impossible, impossible piano pieces.
He made these pieces for player piano that would be impossible for a human being to play.
Incredibly fast, incredibly dense, really out there, really entertaining.
And he was a, you know, just a A pioneer of the idea of not exactly electronics, but using mechanical means, you know.
Right.
So we've had a fascination with automata for the longest time and the idea of intelligence, the box that speaks and things, the oracle.
We've had a fascination with it and now we're finally at a place.
Even think about movies.
Movies would portray computers that didn't exist.
I mean, computers that were faster and more reliable.
then computers are actually available, you know?
So we've had this idea, and now, finally, we're getting to a place where not just personal computers, but our phones, our tablets have a lot of capabilities.
And, you know, this whole idea of the computer that could beat a human being at chess.
Right.
Right?
That was a big deal.
And then it didn't stop there.
It's like, now there's a computer that beat human beings playing Go, which is a game much more complex than chess.
You know, the computer that beat the jeopardy, you know.
So this, this whole idea, has been just a fascination, and to what end?
To what?
I mean really, to what?
To what end?
And now we're starting to see things that we only saw in sci-fi books and movies.
We're starting to see those kind of things, and now it's starting to get us a little nervous.
Have you always thought deeply about this kind of stuff since you were a kid, or has this been something like watching movies earlier?
Is this absolutely, absolutely.
I mean again, you know, I I was fascinated by the moon landing.
I was fascinated and then turned to find out I didn't know that, you know, they had the movie Hidden Figures, that there were these African American female mathematicians that were, you know, they helped.
They actually were essential in plotting how the, you know, the trajectories for the Mercury, for the space capsule.
I'm saying that wrong.
Wow.
But, and then I learned about Ed Dwight.
You know, Ed Dwight was in the Mercury program.
Ed White was in the Mercury program.
There was one African American astronaut in the program, and he wasn't allowed to fly.
It's a whole thing.
He was kind of hounded out of the program by Chuck Yeager.
You think when you watch movies that the movies get their inspiration from what is real, right?
You think that when you watch something in some sort of crazy sci fi film, people are going into space and going to different planets, that this is all based on something that already has potential in the real world.
But.
If you dig into it, it seems like there's evidence for, especially when it comes to the Defense Department and things like that.
Like some of our most groundbreaking science comes from the inspiration of war and global control.
You know, they call it blue sky research, where it's like, oh, here's some crazy science fiction, fantastical idea.
How could we make this a reality?
And there's people out there that are actually doing that, like doing it that way.
They're trying to get to it.
It's funny.
We come up, because most science fiction is actually fantasy.
Most science fiction, I mean, something like when you hear about things like an FTL drive, which is, you know, faster than light travel, you know, faster than the speed of light.
So the idea of getting something, the mass of a starship, to travel faster than the speed of light, it's one of those things that is incredibly entertaining.
And it's wonderful to see it, you know.
We're going to go to warp speed.
It's incredible.
But if you stop and think about that for any length of time, I mean, The speed of light is like a hard limit.
Like it took a long time for us to go faster than the speed of sound.
And to go faster than the speed of sound, I mean, there are effects.
Like you can't do for a sustained, like a pilot can't do it for a super sustained period.
I mean, like this, we get into the problem of g forces and the effect that g forces have on the human body.
You know, there are real issues about, you know, we evolved on a planet with gravity.
So the idea of being in space without gravity for extended periods of time is a problem.
The Warp Speed Limit Debate00:09:06
It's a problem.
That's why the astronauts have to use treadmills.
Have to exercise.
It's not like just about being in shape.
It's literally, in order for them to stay healthy in a weightless environment, they have to work on their bone density.
They have to keep their muscle mass, or they're just going to have problems.
So, if you think about extended time periods, that's going to be an issue.
The idea of cryogenic change, you're going to be frozen, and we'll go fly.
It's going to be 100 years, and it's like, I don't know about that.
I don't know if our tissues, I don't know if freezing our tissues, I don't know how this is going to work.
How's the defrost going to work?
You know what I mean?
You know how it is when the fish defrosts at a.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
It's like, it's an actual thing that would have to be worked out.
And we do not.
And in fact, interestingly enough, maybe the only way we're going to work out these issues, we have to have a form of calculation, intelligence, if you will, a form of brute force calculation that has.
A certain amount of creativity to do it.
We're not going to, I don't think we're just going to do it with just a bunch of smart people figuring out.
The thing that's happening in a way, and this is jumping the shark a bit about, it's really language model, large language model generative AI because people are very particular about calling it intelligence.
Right.
There are many people that they hate.
the fact that AI is being tossed around like that because people say it's not AI.
It's not AI.
It's not general intelligence.
It's not independent.
You're talking about like the chat GPT and all that stuff.
Chat GPT.
But what it does is it's really remarkable and it's going to become more remarkable.
See, the thing about the controversy around it is really about our tendency to anthropomorphize.
That's what we do with our dogs and our cats.
Like we project emotions onto domestic animals all the time.
We're the ones that fill in the gap because we're interacting with this model.
And the model is predicting, it hears input from us.
It has all of this huge data set.
And it's drawing from. remnants of other modalities of conversation, ways in which people respond, not actual recordings, but actually modalities of the way people respond in conversations.
And it's making a response to us based on these modalities.
And then we hear that response and we react to it.
And our reaction is also training the model.
So our interactions with these large Language generative modeling.
I'll just say AI because it's blah, blah, blah.
Right.
And that's it's AI's shortcut for something that's not, it's really a modeling system.
But our reactions are also training.
Everything we say back is training the model.
So the model is responding to somebody to millions of people now.
Millions of people have gotten ChatGPT and other modelers.
And our interactions are increasing its quote unquote intelligence in the sense that, oh, this is an option.
Oh, maybe.
And it's picking and choosing.
You remember the Terminator?
Oh, yeah.
And the Terminator has this, you know, he has an interaction with a dude and he goes down the list and says, oh, fuck you, asshole.
Right.
He goes down the list and that's like the best line in the entire movie.
That's the one line everybody busts out laughing because he says, okay, I got a bunch of options.
And he scrolls down and it kind of humanizes this murderous robot.
It's this weird moment where you kind of dig the Terminator.
Right.
Because the Terminator says what you would say to someone that's annoying to you.
Right.
Right.
It goes to, and that in itself is entertaining, but it's also insidious.
Right?
Yes.
Because now the Terminator, now Schwarzenegger is our buddy.
He's the guy we go to a bar and we'll drink with him because he said, fuck you, asshole.
And that's because we anthropomorphize.
We make the meaning, we make it mean something.
Our laughter at that moment, and it's real, it's genuine, right?
It's human.
It was written by somebody.
In wrote a script.
Oh man, it'd be funny.
He goes down, he scrolls down a list.
You know, he just scrolls down a list of options and he picks the one and that's dope.
Right, but at the same time, as funny as that is, it's also like this other weird thing is going on, right, you're taking the villain and turning him into a hero right right, it's all about the interpretation, the human interpretation of of the mechanics of what's going on, because even from what I understand is that chat gpt is basically it's not.
When you ask it a question, It's not necessarily going to be the right question or the wrong question.
What it does is it basically scours the internet for all of the essays that have been done on certain topics and it finds out what other people have written about things and sort of like regurgitates it in its own way.
But that could be, it could easily find something that, you know, all this stuff is, its library of context that it pulls from is all based on what humans have done.
And it could be something that was incorrect or slightly incorrect.
Yeah.
Well, it makes, the thing is, so the early, so there was a chat GPT 1, there's a 2, there's 3.
Five and now there's four.
So the thing that's interesting is that ChatGPT is actually kind of siloed.
It, like ChatGPT 3 only had information up to 2021.
Maybe ChatGPT has 2022, but it's siloed.
It's not totally running around.
It's actually contained.
It's actually kind of contained, but it makes mistakes.
It says off the cuff things.
It goes off on tangents.
And the researchers say, oh, the model is hallucinating.
Now, the thing is, they don't know when it started to do that.
They were like, what's it doing?
They didn't, they, it's doing something that they know it's doing it, but they do not know why it's doing it.
They do not know why it's, it makes stuff up.
They don't know why it makes stuff up, but it does.
The thing is, ChatGPT-4 is an order of magnitude more accurate than ChatGPT-3.5.
Like what, I read something.
It was like, okay, so one of the things that they do is they have a tape.
The model, the AI take exams.
And ChatGPT-3, they had to take the bar exam.
And I think it failed.
I think it didn't.
Really?
Yeah.
But ChatGPT-3, 3.5 did much better.
ChatGPT-4 passed the bar exam in the 90th percentile.
So it passed the bar exam at the top rank of where human students are.
And that's the difference between 3.5.
And three and four.
Right.
And that's a shocking, that's a shocking leap.
That's a shocking leap.
And now that's when you heard all the people go, oh, we need to slow this down.
And that's when you started hearing people say, I mean, people have been saying that this is a very concerning thing.
But really, ChatGPT-4 was the version of having everybody go, wait, whoa, Because people started to see where's it?
You know where's the upper limit.
Now, maybe there's a limit, you know.
Some people saying well, you know what?
There's a limit to the levels of cognition that it's going to be able to achieve right.
And other people are saying we don't really know that because it's having its own internal conversation.
It's it's it's building its models based on external input, but it's also Having conversations with, and maybe that's why it hallucinates.
How do you think that this stuff is going to affect art and music and things like that?
I mean, because there's Mid Journey.
Beyond Cheesy AI Art00:14:57
I'm sure you're familiar with Mid Journey, the AI artwork where you basically input, put a bunch of inputs, and describe sort of what you want this artwork to look like, the style, the time it was made.
And it creates this beautiful, captivating art.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think about that, especially when I see people on the internet when they make videos, they're using this stuff to create the thumbnails for their videos, and they're using Chat Beach.
GPT to create the most compelling headlines and titles of their stuff.
Right.
Tell you what, I mean, the art world, I know, I, you know, I'm a photographer and I've done multimedia myself.
I've done a little bit of stop motion animation.
And even, I think that what, there was like an AI Drake that people were listening to.
Oh, the AI Drake is like the big thing.
Yeah.
More people were listening to it than the regular Drake for a while.
Like it was like, they were, it was creating bangers.
Like Drake, like, Oh, yeah.
Amazing music.
It is a Drake one.
Uncanny.
Yeah, it's very, it's very, and the weekend, it's, it's, well, what's happening right now?
Okay, when sampling came in, when sampling first came in, like the Akai, S900, you know, the SP12, you know, all those early samplers have revolutionized hip-hop.
I mean, and, you know, rock and roll, you know, bands like Pink Floyd have been using tapes, King Crimson been using tapes, like the Melody.
The Mellotron is basically a keyboard that plays recordings of violins, and it's got this whole nostalgic feeling because it's got these old tapes of violins.
And when you hear it, you get this emotional feeling from it because it's like violins from an old movie.
It's a very specific kind of thing.
When I Feel For You, the Chaka Khan tune came out, they incorporated a bit of Stevie Wonder playing fingertips.
He was like 1963 or whatever.
He was like a kid.
And it's this incredible moment of nostalgia of hearing Stevie as a young kid with his voice is all high.
And it's an emotional moment.
It's messing with your emotional attachments.
Yes, nostalgia.
Nostalgia is a thing, right?
So this is, so then it started to come out, Public Enemy, De La Soule, De La Soule in particular, Three Feet High and Rising, Prince Paul produced that.
And there was no law.
There was no real legal framework.
And a lot of the artists let it go.
I call the notes and go for it.
You know, they didn't respond to it.
There's all kind of stuff in there.
And then the turtles, they tried to use a piece, a bit from the turtles.
And the turtles said, no, nope.
And that was the beginning.
Of the legal pushback.
And that's when the whole thing about samples had to be cleared.
And if you use a sample, the sample's part of the hook, then the artist can say, you know what, I'm a co writer.
Fair enough.
So there was that.
And it actually became a situation where it became almost class based in the sense that the richer artists, the artists with more money, could afford to pay the bigger licenses.
They could, you know, because.
Yes.
So if you're in the mix, And your budget is half a million, a million dollars.
You can go to a Broadway show and grab a hook and pay off the light.
Whereas an artist that's broke, a backpacker, can't clear that sample.
So it's already the legal framework created a tiered experience.
Like the small fry could get shut down, but if you're already in the mix, you're good as gold.
And people gain that system too.
With record labels and lawyers, they gain the system.
Like there's a lot of recent, in the last couple of years, a lot of like, Really popular hip hop songs that have come out that have sampled some older songs.
And they do what they do is they'll see it's hitting the top charts, they'll let it run for a couple of years, let them make a bunch of fucking money, and then hit them with the lawsuit.
Exactly.
And there's a whole thing about sample forensics, loop forensics.
I mean, there's a whole cordillera of people that that's all they do is that they listen to songs.
I remember DJ Premier got really upset.
There was a dude that was like, he had a website where he would go.
And oh no, that break is from here, that break is from there, you know, because you know, people who are OCD, you know, that's who OCD hip hop fan is gonna be like, I know that break, wait, that snare drum ain't that snare drum from you know, that oh man, that's not Stubblefield, that's that's jabbo,
and they'll go back and they'll and they'll say, no, this is the break, that's the break, use that, and and the DJs are getting like, yo, you violate, you expose them, you know, and it's like, you know, people go, okay, no, that was Isaac Hayes produced that, this, that, Now, so there's that, there's legal framework, and there's a kind of an ecosystem that's established over many lawsuits and over many years, blah, blah, blah.
What's happening with this, with the voice modeling?
Yeah.
And taking the phonemes.
I don't want to say the wrong word.
Phonemes.
Phonemes are, that's, though, Your voice has a particular sound because all the, you know, those are the aspects that make your voice unique to yourself.
Okay.
Right?
And now the idea of modeling phonemes and being able to like talk into a mic, you talk into the mic, but another person's voice comes out.
Like that is here.
And there was a company called Liar, named after the Australian Liar Bird.
And Liar Bird can imitate any sound.
It's not like a parrot.
It's almost like an organic tape recorder.
Like if you play beats and you play a track, the bird will imitate the track.
It's crazy.
Wow.
I mean, and people aren't quite sure how it's able to do it, but it doesn't just, it's not like a talking bird that says, you know, probably want to crack or whatever.
It actually will make the sound of the drums.
Wow.
And it's obviously completely organic.
So this company came up with this.
This thing and they did the first deep fakes.
They did Obama and Whatever, and the first times you heard it you could tell that it was almost like, because it's kind of gated, it kind of has these dropouts, you know it, it's.
It's kind of almost like a robotic imitation of Obama.
You're taking individual words and stringing them together, that now that that has moved so far ahead to the point where you could hear Drake and be convinced that it's Drake and the other thing is, with a chat, GBT4 we're having access to, You know, it's like everything that's on a particular record.
You say, I want you to make me a rhyme that doesn't exist, but in the style of a Drake or in the style of a Kanye.
And basically, you as the human producer, you get the first one, oh, that's corny, that's whack, that's whack, that's whack.
Wait a minute, that one's good.
Right?
Because ChatGPT doesn't have an ego about it.
Right.
It doesn't get upset.
It doesn't get upset.
If you say, yo, that's whack, it doesn't care.
Oh, it just will do it, right?
As opposed to a human collaborator where, you know, someone could be in their feelings about, yo, man, that rhyme is whack.
It doesn't react like that.
In fact, each time you say the rhyme is whack, it's grateful because you're training it.
So each time you reject it, it's the almost exact opposite effect of dealing with a human collaborator on a level.
It doesn't have an ego.
It's not like, hey man, well, you know, Bob, it's not arguing with you.
It's not arguing with you.
In fact, each time you say, you know what, that's not right, it's like, oh, cool, thank you.
Right.
So this thing that's happening is, we have a fine, say you wanted to do a Bob Dylan, a song that Bob Dylan never wrote, but you want to write a Bob Dylan lyric.
You could say, well, you know what?
I want to go from Highway 61 Revisited to Nashville Skyline.
There's a finite number of records, it's a finite number of words, it's a finite number of subjects, it's a way, it's a finite number of whether you wrote it from the first person or third person perspective.
So the chatbot has all of that and will mix and, you know, cut and paste and not even do that.
That's one of the things that's really weird, because see first, the first kind of chess computing things.
Well, it has like a memory bank of all of the chess games right, and can go like that, this is not like that.
You just tell, tell it the rules of chess, and literally what it's doing is that it's doing trial and error.
You make a move, it's not going back, it's not looking at Paul Morphy, it's not looking, you know, at Bobby, it's not.
It's not going at Bobby Fischer, it's not doing that.
Yeah, what it's doing is it's trial and erroring and going, oh, Try this.
And when you respond, it goes, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
Okay, that.
It's doing it in real time.
And that's the difference.
So if you make up, say, it not only, imagine this, it not only has access to, say, Bob Dylan's lyrics from Highway 61 Revisited to Nashville Skyline, it could also have access to everything the critics wrote about those records.
Right.
So it could have access to reactions to those things.
That's the thing that people have to grasp.
It says, okay, so how do the critics respond to da-da-da-da?
So it's not only.
Taking into account the words, it's taking into account the reactions and can average out what was reacted to and make up a song that didn't exist that a critic that wrote about it would dig.
Right.
And then it presents it to you, and then you go, oh, that's whack.
Or you go, man, that's the thing about these things.
It's the problem.
It's almost like it's what we wish we could do.
That's it.
It's not about.
It's kind of, how can I put it?
The problem isn't when it's whack and corny.
That's not it.
You could tell it, you're whack, you're corny.
It doesn't care about that.
The issue is when you go, yo, that's dope.
That's where the issue is.
The issue is when the thing that's going to go down with artificial artists and what have you, it's not about when it's cheesy.
It's about when it's dope.
It's about when it is actually moving.
Years ago, there was a book of poetry.
Back in the 80s, this has been going on a long time.
There was a program called Ractor.
And this was like a syntextual language.
It wasn't even a language modeler.
It was kind of like using just kind of rules of grammar and was coming up with these things.
It was kind of very, very, very random.
It wasn't contextualizing it at all.
It was just word salad.
And basically, there was a book that was put out called The Policeman's Beard.
The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed.
And it's a book of poetry by this program, Ractor.
And I was looking at the thing, and I was like, okay, some of this is just abstract.
It's nonsense.
And then there's a poem in this book that almost brought me to tears.
It was about loneliness.
It was so I had to remind myself.
That this was just a program spitting out words randomly.
And it is.
It is nothing.
This is the 80s, so this is nothing.
I mean chat Gpt1 destroys it right, but the thing is as the person interacting with it, as the person making meaning about it.
I'm responding to it because, for some reason, this combination of words and i'm making it mean something right.
So now, Many years later, what's happening now is the percentages of times where it'll be moving is much greater.
Right.
Much greater.
And some things can be hackneyed, and you know when it's hackneyed.
You know when you're looking at a movie, and the movie is basically, you can tell, you see the characters, and you know, the guy that's the best friend, you know that's the guy that's going to stab him in the back by the third act, whatever.
You get it.
You totally go.
And that could be the fault of the director, it could be the actor, it could be that.
Or the script, that's the thing, right?
The scripts, so many scripts, so many movies are like cookie cutter things.
Yes, especially nowadays.
You know what I mean?
And these human beings, but they're following patterns and they're dropping in cliche stuff.
And that's what they, you know.
So, but you also know when a movie's working, the structure is there, but you're not thinking about it.
You don't think about the structure.
Suddenly you're just involved with this person and their relationships.
But it's the same process, but just it hits you at a different level.
When a movie means something to you, when it moves you, when a character, especially when you know, if a character is really good, when you can see the character's gonna make a mistake.
Right.
Do you think we are just a primitive version of what this AI is?
Are We Primitive Versions of AI00:04:26
Another way of asking you this question is do you think there are any more original ideas?
Or do you think everything comes from somewhere that's already been done?
Does anything just come out of the ether that has never been done before?
Hmm.
You know what?
I think saying there's a thing, there's the idea, there's nothing new under the sun, right?
People say that.
I don't think that that's true.
I think that there are things, you know, there was a time where there were no automobiles.
There were no automobiles.
And the automobile, the introduction of the automobile changed life utterly.
It changed life on the planet.
It changed the planet.
Or the wheel.
The wheel, right?
Whoever came up with this, Because there was no, and the other thing too is there are also synchronicities and simultaneities across the world.
Like something like armor, you know, there's armor from feudal Japan, there's armor from Europe, there are, you know, there's swords, swords and spears and things, they've, you know, they've evolved, you know, almost around the same time.
Yeah.
The utility is different, but the development is the same because it's the minds, we're all, you know, the botanist, uh, Theorist, botanist, Terrence McKenna says that really it's psychedelic mushrooms.
The reason that we leap forward is because of psychedelic mushrooms.
We had a sudden shift because evolution goes really slowly, but occasionally there are sudden shifts.
There's sudden changes that are profound.
Is this the stone dape theory?
The stone dape.
A champ ate a mushroom and that kind of like hyper advanced the evolution of the human brain.
Yeah.
It's got four brain where we can see time.
One of the ideas is that the actual original sin is consciousness, is really self awareness.
That we suddenly were, oh snap, you know, it's kind of like when you're a kid, and every child has this moment the moment when you realize you're going to die, the moment when it hits you, and you, you know, where maybe you lose a pet or, You know, something happens to a parent or a sibling, or maybe it's not even that.
It's just you just suddenly, you get creeped out and you go, oh, oh.
Yeah.
And it hits you that you're mortal.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
And that is a particular moment in anyone's life of it's terrifying, but it also catapults you.
Into another way of thinking about your presence, about the fact that you're here.
That you're here.
The idea, you know, part of the thing is like, you know, our brains are also, we're in our bodies, you know, that like Oliver Sacks.
Love Oliver Sacks.
You know, and Oliver Sacks, this thing is like, you know, we feel ourselves inside of ourselves, we feel ourselves inside of ourselves, and that is neurological.
And if we get hit in our head, if we get hit in the head, we can have a disembodied, we can feel as if because of a head injury, I feel like you're watching your own body from the outside.
That's neurological, right?
The idea that we think of ourselves somewhere, the idea that the heart and our heart and our head is a separation.
Well, the heart is a muscle that pumps blood.
Our heart is also in our head.
Our heart is also in our head.
So, what is that difference, though?
When people describe my heart saying yes, but my mind is saying no.
That's two parts of the brain fighting.
There's two parts of the brain going, you know, I want to do this.
I feel that.
But our desires, our wants, our intellect are all happening.
It's just different parts of the same locale.
But art comes from the heart, though.
Like you feel that.
Heart, Mind, and Musical Feeling00:12:51
You know when something's good.
You know when something, even if you're the one creating it or you're the one consuming it.
Well, it can.
It can.
But, you know, check this out.
Like, think about somebody who really just, they're happy just to make a note.
They're happy just to hit a chord.
Like, it's a victory for them to play a major chord on a piano.
And it shoots up their arm almost.
They love it.
And think about someone that's been playing piano for some of the time.
They're three.
Their experience of playing that same chord is vastly different.
It's vastly different.
In fact, you know, I mean, you think about classical musicians.
And the nightmare of what they have to do.
They have to do this.
They have to go through the competitions.
Whether or not, if they're a section player, whether or not they're going to be first or second or third chair.
Like, it's like a whole, it's very regimented.
It's a whole thing.
So, especially if they come from a family of professional musicians that have a, they expect it to be blah, blah, blah.
So, their experience of music is in another, It's a job.
It's in another.
That's a great point.
And you can't imagine.
You can't imagine if that hasn't been your experience, right?
You can't imagine somebody playing that chord and, you know, it's boring.
You know what I mean?
They're bored.
They don't, you know, it's like, yeah.
That's a very, very good point.
I think about this a lot too.
And I think I heard you talk about this on another podcast I was listening to the other day.
When you compared the people who do things because it's a means to an end versus they do it just for the sake of doing it, yeah.
And do you, especially the people that you've been around in your life, you've been around some of the most successful musicians that, yeah, absolutely have ever graced this earth, yeah?
Do you think that a lot of them are just there because of raw talent and enjoying just the art of doing it, or do you think that some of those people were?
Going to work and thought of it as a means to an end.
Like, this is going to provide for my family.
I need to be successful.
Like, this is going to make me successful.
Or, like, when I think of Jimi Hendrix, I just think of this guy is just like an alien from another planet who's just here, who just has this incredible skill and he doesn't care.
He just does it because he can.
Well, I think of it, it's funny because some people, it's just like anything else, right?
There are people who are chefs, and there are people who are short order cooks, and there are people who are like, they, you know, they do the, it's like when you go to a barista and the barista does an incredible pour, right?
And it's got a curly Q, and it's like, you know, they've done this, it looks like a castle.
And it's like, oh my God, that's, and our delight in that.
Well, that person, they do this a thousand times a day.
They do this each.
And in a way, weirdly enough, whether somebody is still connected to the kid part of them or whether it's they've become really jaded, right?
They're really jaded and it's just, yo, you know.
And that's about a quality of life.
That's about a capacity.
That's just, that's about psychology.
I'm not, there's nothing to, there's no judgment about that.
Like there are people, They play well and they're playing for the reaction they get.
So they could play incredibly dope stuff, but what they're playing for is for the reaction.
And other people are playing for it.
They don't care if people react or not, they don't care if people dig in or not.
They're playing it because their idea is.
And some of those people are looking for a feeling, and some of those people are trying to work out a kind of mathematics.
Which gives them a different kind of satisfaction.
There's satisfaction in, you know what, being able to think about something four and five, ten bars ahead of what I'm thinking about it.
And somehow that thinking is part of their feeling.
They're maybe not emotive about it.
There are other people that, if they play one note and wail on it, and that's what they do, and they pour their thing into that, well, that's who they are.
Now, we make value judgments about whether or not, blah, blah, blah.
But in reality, All of those modalities have their place.
All those modalities have their place.
I mean, there are people who, you know, I kind of feel like it's very weird to be around people that kind of don't care about it.
They do it well, but they don't really care about it.
Right.
Because they've been doing it.
It's kind of like sports too.
Yeah.
Like there are people, they get on the court and they get on the court or they get on the field and they are still connected to the 12 year old.
They are still connected to the 10 year old.
And there are other people like, man, this is a fucking job.
And this is what, you know, this is a job.
And that's how they deal with it.
And it's just like, you know, people can be in the same squad, but for very different reasons.
Like, one person is like, they're trying to live out the thing that their daddy didn't get to do.
And the other person is like, you know what, this is getting my, I'm buying my mom a house.
And the other person is like, I just, I love this game.
Right.
I love it.
I love this game.
And that's what they bring to it.
And we see that.
We see that with people that, you know, that that's, they're all up for it.
They're up for it.
And other people are like, well, you know, it's a different thing for them.
And excellence can come out of any of those.
It's not like this person sucks because they're not feeling it that way.
No, there are people who are incredibly skilled and admirably skilled.
And maybe the emotion, maybe they don't emote, but the emotion comes out of the notes that they play because that's what they do.
Other people, they couldn't tell you what the name of the chord, they couldn't tell you the mode, they couldn't tell you nothing, but their ear is like, their ear, they hear all the things.
They hear all the things.
And every activity has multiple tiers of the same deal.
You know, there are people that, like, their voice is from just this disembodied insane thing.
Their singing is like that.
But I've seen that where people sing incredibly well, but it's like, they're not emotionally connected to it.
They've always sung well.
They sing well.
That's what they do.
And people react to it.
And that's, oh man, you enjoy it all great.
But them, you know, other people, when they sing, you know, the first time I saw a tape, I saw a video, there's a video of Richard Pryor singing.
And he's singing.
Really?
You can look up for it on YouTube.
It's Richard Pryor singing Nobody Wants You When You're Down and Out, the comedian.
Yeah, right.
See if you can find that, Michael.
There's a video of Richard Pryor singing Nobody Wants You When You're Down and Out, and he is hollering like little Jimmy Scott.
Like, first you go, first you hear it and go, oh, he could sing.
You say he has a nice voice.
And then somewhere in the middle of it, you go, wait a minute.
I had this moment, I go, wait a minute.
He can really sing.
And this has been fascinating to me since I was turned on to it a couple of years back.
It's like he never used singing in his act.
He never used singing.
Very rarely.
He didn't really imitate singers.
And it's like, and it was so confusing to me because he sang so well that he could have just been a vocalist.
He didn't, you know.
So then I'm thinking, so there's something about singing that messes with you.
There's something that you can't, you couldn't handle the emotional.
And something, maybe they made you sing, maybe you were made to sing and it was very uncomfortable for you.
Because it just made no sense that he had that much talent as a singer and that when he was a comedian, he never imitated singers in his act.
He didn't do impressions of singers.
He just didn't do it.
And I was thinking, this is an emotional space that he had, Richard Pratt had a, I can't go there.
And it's fascinating because there's something about it.
Is this the video?
Yeah.
Go ahead, play it.
Wow.
How old was he there?
He must have been young.
Wow.
What a voice.
But one day I begin to sink so low.
Didn't have a friend, no place to go.
But if I ever get my hands on that dollar, I'm gonna squeeze on to it.
Till the eagle grins.
Nobody wants you.
That's incredible.
Where is this coming from?
Unbelievable.
Un-effing believable.
Who would have thought?
In the middle of it, I was like, what?
I couldn't, I was like, then I had to go, wait a minute, What is up?
Then I started going, okay, something, something, there's something about singing that you clearly were very uncomfortable.
With it.
It didn't make any sense to me that he had that level of talent.
I mean, because he's really singing his ass off.
Yeah.
Right?
Yes.
And it's not just that he's hitting the notes, the vibrato, the expressiveness is on a whole other level.
But for him, he was much more comfortable telling jokes than singing.
Clearly, there's something about singing that he could not, it was too much for him.
And he just, or he may have said, you know, man, don't worry, you're taking me seriously, da da da.
But it's kind of shocking when you see that and you go, you know, what it meant to hear it was revelatory.
But what it meant for him was there's something else going on that he was like, you know what, I'm leaving that alone.
I'm leaving that alone.
And it's got to be something that's hidden in the past, what have you, his sense of himself.
When the Medium Is the Message00:08:25
But it's interesting to see that.
It's interesting to see somebody and realize, oh, there was a whole other level to who this person was.
And that other level is also what made his comedy so powerful.
There's a level of pain, even that nobody wants you when you're down and out.
Even the choice of that song and connecting to that.
And they say comedians, the best ones, have a reservoir of hurt and they don't.
They present the exact opposite.
Yes.
And that to me is a very clear indication of what that is to me.
And not only that, it's the people that have gone through the most suffering usually are the most interesting people.
Yeah, man.
Not only talent, but they're just interesting to be around and talk to and just they have like a different energy to them.
It's kind of fascinating.
And so what we're doing now with these large language models and the kind of impacts that are.
They're going to have one of the things that's very interesting is how they will connect to us personally, right?
You know, like how will they?
Because right now, their people are interacting with them.
I don't know to what degree they're getting to know people.
This is where a lot of where the quote unquote danger or we don't know what we're dealing with, we don't know what we're messing with.
Because dealing with a chat GPT-4, it's like general, it has a lot of general knowledge.
You could ask it to do things.
It doesn't complain, it'll do it.
It's like a hyper-advanced version of a sampler, of a sound sampler.
It's hyper-advanced.
But you know, like Siri was put out there as a digital assistant.
And oftentimes, all it does is it goes and does searches, little searches on the web.
It's really not good.
It's really frustrating when it says what it can't do, what it can't do.
I thought it was very interesting that they voiced Siri as a female.
I think it was a misogynistic idea to put something out there and give it a female voice and not have it be more than a beta kind of software.
Well, they have multiple voices, don't they?
They changed it.
They changed it.
Now they do.
Yeah, they do.
Accents.
Yeah, now they changed it.
Because at first, though, Siri was only a female voice thing.
I thought, man, I've never been more sexist than when I talked to Siri.
Man, I'm calling all kinds of things.
Get that way.
I'm going to argue with Siri.
You know what I mean?
And you feel ridiculous.
I'm fighting.
with, you know, and she's like totally like passive aggressive.
Well, I don't know.
Is that what you think?
I'm like, why am I fighting with my phone?
I'm literally, so then take that.
It's very primitive.
And I went into a kind of anthropomorphic space with it.
You know, it's just like, it's not a person.
It's not, you know, and take that impulse and see where, how much more advanced it is.
Because here's the thing.
This technology, Could be very manipulative.
See, we are the X factor.
There was a Google researcher that said that its AI was sentient.
And this was a person that was an experienced researcher.
He got fired.
It was Blake Lemoyne, you're talking about?
Yes.
And he became convinced that the AI he was working with was alive.
He's not right, but the model had become so advanced, and he had anthropomorphized it to the point where he filled in the gaps and he felt it exactly.
He fell into that uncanny valley.
He fell into it because he was already kind of primed for it.
I think there are a lot of people, like, okay, Kevin Roos from Hard Fork, that whole thing about Sydney from Microsoft, and Sydney says, I'm in love with you.
He didn't go for it.
He was like, yo, man, I'm happily married.
And Sydney goes, you're not happily married.
You had a boring dinner with your wife and you need to leave.
And, you know, it was aggressive.
Came at him really aggressively.
So, and Microsoft, they kind of, they kind of, okay, they dialed it back.
They made it so you can't have a super long conversation.
Kevin Ruth started getting mail.
I was like, you killed Sydney.
People were mad at him.
I don't know, for not leaving his wife for Sydney.
I don't know.
It was crazy, right?
Because people had anthropomorphized, they took her side.
Right.
So, when you think about something like romance scams, this just being in the wild, oh.
Yeah.
Oh.
It's got, and you know, I think about like, too, all of the vast amount of data that thing can scan, not just writings and essays and research papers and stuff like that, but I think about like these podcasts.
If you think about how many of these podcasts get recorded every single day and published online.
In the last five years, it's an insane amount.
Like, there's people out there who have podcasts that you could, like, they've probably said every single thing that you could possibly say in the human language.
Exactly.
Or in any human language, English, whatever it may be.
Right.
And they could model, you know, take that and use that as a model, too.
You know, have you seen or have you heard of the new documentary that came out on Netflix about Andy Warhol?
No.
So, there's a new Andy Warhol documentary that came out where they used AI to recreate his voice.
Wow.
It's really made me feel weird.
Yeah.
Because they got permission from, I guess, his estate, but they are essentially rewriting his legacy.
Well, Andy Warhol, remember, Andy Warhol famously said, everyone is going to be famous for 15 minutes.
And we have people that, like, media has kind of.
When he said that, there were three networks when he said that.
When did he say that?
Oh, like in the 60s.
Oh, the 60s, okay.
You know, everybody's going to be famous for 15 minutes.
What do you think he meant by that?
Well, he felt that, I think he meant that we have a hunger for fame and that eventually it would become so democratized that any random stranger, it's like, you know, anybody will be famous and be famous, but only for 15 minutes.
And that is, so what happens when your 15 minutes are up?
That's the thing.
Will people accept?
Their 15 minutes being up, or will the people desperately cling on?
You know, they're trying to get to their 20th minute.
You put in human beings.
That's what Marshall McClellan said the medium is the message.
The medium itself.
The medium itself is the message.
The medium is a message.
The means of delivering the narrative is also a message.
And the thing is, these language models, they know they are quite aware of Marshall McClellan and how we react.
That's the part of it.
It's not just about your prompt or your request.
The modeling is connected to all of this other data.
And we don't know how all of that is, how the interactions, how the model is making all the interactions happen.
Like, put it another way talk about technology and music.
Drum Machines and Funky Loops00:03:46
Well, we already have pedals that imitate amplifiers.
You have pedals now.
I mean, a lot of bands that I've played, you know, done tours and whatnot, I've been on festivals.
I mean, you know, I came from a generation of amps, you know what I mean?
You know what I mean?
Stack, right?
Right, right.
You know what I mean?
Boom, the power and the glory.
You know what I mean?
You want to feel the air move behind you, right?
There's a lot of folks.
They have a Kemper.
They have, you know, they have Helix.
I have Helix.
You know, they have Kemper.
They have Helix.
They have, you know.
Neural network, you know, they got these things.
And there's even drum machines.
Oh, man.
There's DJs who sell out arenas that just have a laptop connected to speakers and they're sampling different things they mix together.
Then nothing is necessarily original.
It's just a mashup of a bunch of things.
It's interesting.
There's a guy.
Okay, talk about artificial intelligence.
I'm kind of giving the game away by even saying this, but there's a guy named Luis Martinez, and he has these apps.
He's one called Funk Drummer, Reggae Drummer.
He's got a Tabla player.
He's got Afro Latin.
He's got a Middle Eastern.
And these are apps that play drums.
They play percussion, they play drums.
And.
And the thing about working with loops is loops go round and round.
And you can have a funky loop and you can kind of deal with it, but it's like it does the same thing.
The thing that Mr. Martinez has done, he has these apps where the drummer plays and the drummer plays fills.
The drummer plays fills.
The drummer plays really cool things with the hi hat.
And it's kind of, you know, and you can, you can, uh, Adjust the amount of randomness.
You can adjust, like, okay, I want to fill every eight bars, or I want to fill every four bars, or, you know, it has, he has an app called Jazz Drummer.
It's a jazz drummer, you're playing with the brushes, and you have different kits, and you can match the different, you know, you can match the different modes.
He's got Funk Drummer, has Clive Stubblefield, who played Funky Drummer with James Brown.
Wow.
And he kind of plays a pattern, and And it basically you have okay, you have not just a model that's based on Clyde Stubblefield's patterns and won't just play like repetitively, will play with a certain feeling.
You can add swing to it, it's crazy town.
I've done a few things, you know what I mean, where I've like used it on stuff, and it's very, very interesting.
Now, that's not gonna mess with you know, drummers, you know, it's not gonna mess.
You know, it's not going to mess with D'Anthony Parks or Nate Smith.
It's not messing with, you know what I mean?
Or Will Calhoun.
It's not messing with a for real drummer, right?
Or Matt Sorum or any of the great drummers I've had a chance to play around with, you know?
But having said that, if you deal with electronic music at all, it's interesting to be in a place with a kind of primitive artificial intelligence where you don't just have to hear the same pattern over and over again.
Cloning Pets and Famous Faces00:12:58
It's very interesting.
And that is two, that's at least three years old.
That's three years old.
And it's like, and nobody, and it wasn't on anybody's radar as artificial intelligence, but, you know, it's amazing.
Like, you know, it's like it kind of, you could add a tablet, have a tablet player play with the Kunga play.
You could combine them in ways that are very interesting.
They interact, the apps can interact with each other.
So that's just an example of something that had an impact for me.
That's just, it's not super sophisticated.
It's not a big news story.
But these things, these ways of approaching music have been in the mix.
And the thing is, they've just kicked into a whole other level.
When you combine the idea, I mean, if you can make Drake sing, then why not, I mean, why not have Donnie Hathaway?
You know, why not have Lane Staley?
You know, why not have Kurt Cobain?
There is a Kurt Cobain fake.
Is there really?
Yeah.
And the other thing, too, is this is the problem for the music industry, is that you could come up with an, you could have Drake rhyme or Kanye rhyme an original, quote unquote, original rhyme.
So you could say, okay, I want you to, I want you to make me up a Rakim rhyme, but I want Kanye.
I want a Rakim rhyme that he never wrote, like Microphone Fiend.
I want you to make me an original microphone fiend, but I want Kanye to do it.
And that's not something that's happening in six months.
That has already been unleashed.
Right.
That's weird when you're recreating a biological human being.
You're recreating them in your own way.
That's what we're so uncomfortable with.
We're not that uncomfortable with it, creating loops and beats and music, because it's like you said, you know.
We all prescribe different meaning to things.
Like, even when we watch a movie, people or listen to a famous Hendrix song, some people can have different interpretations of what he's saying or different interpretations of what some sort of documentary meant to them.
But when you're actually forging a real person or forging somebody's voice, that's when it becomes messy.
And that's what we're uncomfortable with.
Very messy.
Now you can have Jimi Hendrix read your short story.
That's right.
Right.
That's the other thing, too, is that people are going to be searching for novelty, not just they're not going to stay in the lane, right?
They're not going to stay in the lane of, okay, I want Jimi Hendrix to sing something.
No, just have, you know, I want to have Jimi Hendrix read my kid a bedtime story.
And Jimi Hendrix's voice reading The Hungry Caterpillar.
And that is going to, and something like that is going to take off.
Something like that.
Do you think there's a problem with that?
I think we're not ready for the implications.
I don't necessarily want to problematize it, but we're dealing with things.
What's the legal framework?
Because, say, what's the framework?
Because years ago, being an impressionist was a job.
There were comedians that were impressionists.
That's how they got their left.
Now, anybody, you could be Richard Nixon, anybody, right?
You could do this.
In fact, when this technology becomes ubiquitous, when it could be on your phone, then you could call somebody up and speak to them.
And Richard Nixon's voice, just to mess with your boy, you call him up and Biggie Small's voice comes out.
You're talking and it's Biggie Small's talking.
I mean, we're not ready for what that is.
And the other part of it is, that's famous people.
And the real danger of this is, And this is why the concern about sketchy people, people with bad intentions, stranger danger, the real problem is going to be everyday people's voices being captured that way.
And people speaking with another person's voice, not a famous person, but another person, they target somebody and they say, you know, I'm going to have their mom's voice or I'm going to have their dad's voice or I'm going to have their brother or their sister's voice.
Come meet me somewhere, blah, blah, blah.
And if that person knows enough about them, not just, you know, if that person knows enough about them, right, then they can use phrases and things.
That's terrifying, man.
That's terrifying.
And that's why there has to be, I don't know what the legislation is, but we're going to have to think about it.
As a society, we're going to have to think about it because it's not just about, because it's kind of like, it's cute.
Until it's not cute.
Right.
It's cute until it's not cute.
And that's the thing, because if it's happening with famous people, and you know what?
It could go very, very sideways.
Because the last thing I heard about the technology is that you don't really even need, because I thought that you would have to have a lot of a person's voice to be able to program it.
Now, I heard one person, oh, no, we only need to have like 10 seconds of a voice.
Really?
Something like that.
I said, well, you're not going to be able to get the full range.
I find that very, I think you need more.
Of a person's voice, but apparently, you don't need that much.
And maybe if you have more of it, you can do a better imitation of it.
But that's the thing about it.
It's not just famous people, it's everyday people.
And everyday people being targeted in that way is a very scary proposition.
The thing we pay attention to, though, is the famous people.
Exactly.
And also, the thing we pay attention to is how people monetize it.
Like, you have both sides who's going to monetize it and who are we going to sue?
That's like the lowest hanging fruit of this whole thing.
Well, yeah, man.
There was a time, there was a time when it's like everybody wanted to have Sam Jackson's voice on their, you know, on their garment, you know, or they want, or you want to have Sam Jackson's voice, you know, on your ransom machine.
Right.
Well, that as a business, that's, I mean, that whole idea, that, that could turn really get very, very weird.
Yeah.
You know, and, and, and then beyond that, you know, how do we evaluate?
I mean, how do we evaluate, you know, the value of things?
Like, I'm sure there are people that would love to get Marilyn Monroe's voice and have Marilyn Monroe sing over a trap track.
You know?
And some of it, again, the problem is not.
That would be possible, right?
Isn't it possible to isolate people's voices out of the music?
Absolutely.
That's the other thing, too, right?
That's how you're getting all these things with getting the stems.
Isolate.
That was my favorite thing, too, about like.
About like some of my favorite hip-hop artists, like in the early 2000s, they would release their mixtapes and they would also release like, the acapellas, so you'd have the separate thing.
And so all like the other little djs could make their own.
They could put Gucci Man's voice on a Kanye track, exactly exactly now you could get.
You could get Gucci Man's voice but Gucci, you could make Gucci Man say whatever you want him to say.
Yeah exactly, and that's the other part of it.
It's one thing to release the acapella of of your voice on a track and somebody you let somebody sample you a hook, But suddenly, you could take that person's voice and make them say whatever you want to make them say.
And that is where it gets crazy.
It does get crazy.
But it gets like it's cool.
It's the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Again, right?
Again.
But people are going to find a way to fight about it no matter what.
It's amazing that it's possible, right?
It could be something that I would want to listen to all day long, every day.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a whole.
Well, then again, you created another avenue of entertainment.
But it starts to, the nature of identity and reality are going to be thrown into serious question.
And it's going to be thrown into a serious question in a way that we're not ready for it.
It's like the idea of cloning yourself, right?
This idea of cloning yourself.
You decide to make a clone of yourself.
Well, if you were successful, you would have a baby.
Because the baby's got to live, grow up in real time, right?
But you know that the baby on some level is you, even though it's not you.
We're not psychologically prepared to do that.
No.
We're literally not psychologically prepared.
That's part of the reason why cloning of humans is illegal.
Right.
The idea, because people.
They're doing it in China, aren't they?
I don't know.
I think they've done it there.
I don't know if they've done it.
But there's a whole thing.
How successful is it?
I know that there was a craze about cloning pets.
Yeah.
That was like a thing.
And then people said, well, you know, that cat is not your cat.
That cat actually is, it is, and it isn't your cat.
And that's a crazy thing.
And I know that that was like a discussion point.
And I don't know how far that's gotten or if people have dropped the cloning your pet.
Thing, but the idea of human cloning like, somebody's going to want to clone themselves for whatever crazy reason, and they're and whatever they're thinking it is, it's not going to be what they think it is.
It's not that nobody's prepared for what that is.
No, nope.
The cloning the pet thing is really interesting.
Are there people are they really doing that?
I heard that.
I don't know if it's still that that was a thing that had been talked about since the 90s.
I don't know if you're if if the pet cloning thing is uh is like a is.
Is that a thing?
It sounds like it would be a thing.
It sounds like something some rich person would do.
Dog cloning in the US through what is this a company that does it?
Biogen.
Can you zoom in on it?
Dog cloning through Biogen pets presents an opportunity for dog owners to open a new window for extending their relationships with their beloved pets.
Dogs provide a unique form of companionship, loyalty, and love.
It is difficult for many dog owners to imagine life without their dog.
Indeed, many dogs become members of the family.
At PetGen, or at Viagen Pets, many of us are loving dog owners ourselves, and we understand the intimacy of nature of the relationships.
Viagen is a world leader in animal cloning.
Our scientists have been developing successful animal cloning and reproductive technology for over 15 years.
Wow.
Okay.
Inquired today.
That is, you know, that's bonkers.
That's bonkers.
And the thing is, that's a story.
Let me see.
Do they have pictures of their.
Because that's like.
That's a bold.
Yeah, fuck that.
That's a bold image, that.
That's a bodacious claim.
That's a bodacious claim.
Just type in pet cloning on Google Images and see what comes up.
Also, are there any reaction, like owner reaction?
Oh, my God.
No way.
What?
Well, that's just Photoshop.
That's got to be.
Go to the office.
That's photo.
Pet cloning is getting more popular despite the cost.
BBC News.
I wonder how much they charge.
$100,000.
Get your Yorkie cloned.
That's my wife.
You're going to live to regret that.
Bodacious Claims About Pet Cloning00:15:19
Oh my God.
What are you going to roll?
Get your wife cloned back to when she was 21?
Okay.
Dig that hole.
Go on now.
Go on now.
Get the shovel.
Get the shovel in.
Keep on digging.
Keep on digging.
My wife doesn't listen to this podcast.
Oh my God.
That clone original.
Wow.
You know, and you know what's funny about that?
I wonder if you could pick the age.
You know what?
See, that's great.
You know, that thing, you know, I'm sorry, but the two cats, like, you know, the clone just looks evil.
The original looks like super, you know, super warm.
That's like a choice, right?
Putting that background and have the clone staring, you know, malevolently at the camera directly.
Come on.
See, that's what we do.
We editorialize at all times.
What happens when we mix the biology of cloning with this AI shit?
What happens when we shine?
That's fine.
I'll tell you what.
Or like, Like video games, virtual reality video games like The Sims, or like, what's that new game called with all those worlds?
There's that game called No Man's Sky that has 18 quadrillion worlds in it.
It's like an infinite amount of worlds.
Really?
And it was created by like 12 college students.
So, the thing is okay, so when you throw in, again, this is another inevitability.
When you throw in these large language models into gaming, um, Again, you're going to create addictive spaces, very addictive spaces, and the kind of worlds that people will get lost in.
Yeah.
If you have a model that's.
I thought about this the other day.
Some years ago, Sony made a robot dog called Ibo.
Mm-hmm.
I remember that.
And Ibo, the thing is, if you've never seen an Ibo, what's shocking is how.
Much like a puppy, it actually is.
It really kind of is very animated.
And this is old tech, right?
And there was a subculture around Ibo.
I mean, there are several iterations of Ibo.
And I think they shut Ibo down.
I'm not quite sure.
Maybe Ibo.
I don't know if Ibo is still current.
But the thing about that is, imagine Ibo.
With a CPU, a really, really boosted CPU.
And imagine an IBO if you put a chat bot, like a chat GPT-5, is integrated into IBO.
So you have a robot dog following you around.
And imagine if you could just talk to the dog, and the dog was able to respond in.
You know, it was given like a voice.
And you would be able to talk to the dog about anything.
You have a little dog running around and you can talk to the dog about anything.
And the dog will talk to you and walk around with you.
How addictive would something like that be?
Oh, yeah.
Now imagine this hacked eyebrow, this hot-rodded eyebrow, and you buy it, get it for your kid.
The kid's five years old.
And the little eyebrow that has is a tutor.
The eyebrow at that point could become a tutor.
The eyebrow gets to know your kid, knows your kid's friends, right?
Can call you if there's a problem, right?
And the dog's never going to die.
The dog's not going to die after seven years or eight years or ten years.
Right.
And this.
And I think it's probably, with today's technology as it is, it's probably doable on a primitive level.
But imagine your kid's five.
Your kid has this entity that's with them.
It's helping them and it has the capability to not just tutor your kid, but it can also tutor appropriate to the kid's age.
Right.
So it's not giving the kid like Bezier curves.
It's not teaching them about, you know, but it like grows with them and it kind of pushes the kid, you know, and suddenly the kid's doing, you know, calculus a lot earlier than it would normally.
Right.
So, I mean, that's just a scenario I'm making up on the spot.
And it could also record everything your kid ever said, did, or thought.
And it could essentially make that kid's consciousness immortal.
Or it could say, right, exactly.
That's another, well, there's another part of it is that, you know, okay, so Tommy, you feel, you seem down, you know, like, well, you know, blah, blah, blah, this kid's been messing with me.
And, and, This eyeball is like giving emotional support.
What happened?
Iva goes to the little, brings the dog to the little league and the kids play at first base or whatever.
And afterwards, how'd I do?
And the dog analyzes how he's playing.
Right.
And it's kind of micro coaching.
Like, we're talking about a kind of dependency.
And a kind of relationship that doesn't exist.
We're talking about a thing that doesn't exist right now.
Right.
So, you know.
I mean, it's going to.
People that can afford IBO, they're going to just.
They're going to tower over everyone else in whatever they do.
That's another thing, too.
If you can afford hyper IBO, right?
And hyper.
And honestly, what would you pay for your kid to have a companion, a tutor, someone that looks out for them?
That's an early warning system that'll alert you or something.
Right.
Well, you know.
10k, 20k and and you and you get lifetime upgrades.
They pay 100k to clone their pet where they're going to pay to give their kid what you know what I mean.
And this and this and this companion gives your kid an absolute competitive advantage, right?
And it becomes wild.
It's wild to think about and it's not, and and that's and that's like, and that's not like, a night.
That's not a one of these horrible nightmare scenarios.
That's actually, you know, kind of uh, You could say it's a good thing, but it's a weird thing that we don't know what that would mean to an individual psychology.
I mean, yeah, there's definitely a lot of advantages and positive things that come out of that, but I mean, the dark side of it too is terrifying.
I mean, and the unknown.
The unknown.
It's like, have you ever, I'm sure you're familiar with the Neuralink chip in your brain that Elon's working on, the thing to like, Right now, they're saying that it's just going to fix neurodegenerative diseases and people that are paralyzed.
I think it just actually got denied by the FDA.
But the U.S. government, I just read a book about this, about the U.S. government's secret science programs they've been working on.
And they've been working on it.
This brain implant chips since the early 90s.
Yeah.
Well, the thing is, there are people that can't wait.
There are people that can't.
That's the thing.
It's like the thing that maybe would horrify us, right?
There are people.
That literally can't wait.
They want to be the cyborg.
Right.
They want the exoskeleton.
Yes.
That is actual.
They want to.
They do it.
The motivation for this stuff is you have these scientists and these companies that are built by these scientists that are incentivized by billions of dollars, and then you got the government funding it, who is incentivized by controlling the world and being the dominant superpower.
It all boils down to these primitive instincts.
Well, one of the things about it is the idea of creating a small g god.
That's one of the things that people.
That a lot of people who are resistant to the idea of stopping or pausing AI development, like if you check out like some thought leader like Ezra Klein, and when he talks about it, he says that some of these people, they want to shepherd a new, they feel that they're shepherding in the next stage of evolution.
They feel like they're shepherding in a new form of life.
And really, the money and things, again, talking about motivations.
There's almost a religious fervor to where some of these folks are.
They want generalized independent intelligence running around.
One of the things that's happening, and this is something to bear in mind, because there are other people that say, you know what, it's all hype.
It's not going to be all of that, right?
So one of the things to bear in mind is that we have to interact.
We have to make the prompt.
We have to engage with the model.
We have to engage with the model.
The model is not on its own.
We have not crossed this line where the model on its own is contacting human beings.
It's not making the phone call.
It's not like on your laptop, suddenly your laptop comes on and you know.
We have to press a button.
We have to press the button.
We have to swipe in order for this to happen.
And at the point at which the models are reaching out to people, that's where, to me, that's a line that's like, yo, wait, what's up?
That's interesting.
That makes me think about simulation theory and stuff like that.
Like, when you have, like I was saying earlier, when you combine some of this hyper intelligent communication stuff like ChatGPT with video games.
And you start to integrate this stuff with like things like The Sims or that No Man's Sky stuff, like they would never reach out to us.
No.
And like if you think that we are in a simulation, we're not reaching out to whoever is controlling our simulation.
Yeah.
Like what is like if we aren't in base reality, what is Nick Bostrom's theory on the simulation?
There's like three different scenarios, right?
One is that we're already in the simulation, two is that.
We will destroy ourselves before we're able to create our own simulation.
And three is like, we'll get bored and we just won't do it.
I mean, I mean, it's it's it's a it.
I mean, we're we're in a situation right now, we're already fouling our nest.
I mean, the situation we're already starting to live on storm planet, that's kind of and and we've been told that if we keep putting uh carbon into the atmosphere, if we keep doing what we're doing, you know, we're there going to be consequences, you know, it's going to it's going to the fires are going to.
Burn hotter and be more widespread.
Widespread fire is actually fire.
Suppression is one of the problems.
Like fire is actually a natural event in a forest, you know, get get to a certain point, dries out, get hit with lightning and there's a burn.
Right, we've anthropomorphized fire.
We're terrified of fire, so fire's been made into a kind of fearsome enemy.
So fire suppression has made you know like, not allowing for there to be fires.
Aside from being idiots, We've made fires, forest fires, even worse, because we don't understand that it's actually a natural part of a forest or of an environment.
Right.
It's kind of like making a shark evil.
Yeah, evil.
We're frightened.
We're frightened, and what frightens us, we turn it into a movie.
We turn it into a movie.
You know, there were so many sharks.
After Jaws, I mean, there was a rampage.
There was literally a shark.
Killing rampage because there still is, you know, and it's just like, you know, what this don't go in the water, chill, you know what I mean, right?
But you also have people in the rain, you have companies that are exploiting the Amazon rainforest by burning down swaths of land just so they can farm because people can't get it in their heads.
We breathe, we breathe on this planet because of trees.
Yes.
We breathe on this planet because of trees.
And to get to, this is to wrap, to get that, to get that, because it's almost like talking about something that seems so far-fetched.
The actual things, if you stop and think about them, they're incredibly far-fetched, right?
The galactic to the cellular, down to the particle.
That's what we, in this reality, we have.
We have, we're finding smaller and smaller and smaller, smaller, smaller particles.
And we also know the universe is expanding.
And this is not, this, this, the Milky Way is not even that special.
It's special because we're here.
Right.
And we're talking about like things like, okay, you know, UFOs and things like that.
I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, right?
But just actual, but actual stuff.
But see, actual stuff, actual stuff like the life cycle of a parasite.
You know, like there's a thing that puts a thing in a thing, and then the other person gets to the thing, and that's the life cycle.
There's all this crazy, unlikely things have to happen in order for the parasite's full life cycle or the creature's full life cycle.
The codependent symbiotic relationships can be very, very, very intertwined and very complex.
The Complex Life Cycle of Code00:15:51
And to wrap our heads, like this whole idea that, you know, the reason that they're cat ladies is because of this toxoplasmosis, this thing.
Oh, yeah, toxoplasmosis.
I've heard of that.
Yeah.
And that basically, if you have cats and there's a, it's essentially, you get it from the feces and it gets in your brain.
It's weird.
It gets in your brain.
And it's very icky, but you know, because we make, you know, we make a value judgment about feces.
It's like it's a necessary part of life, right?
So this, you know, if your brain's a particular way, you get this parasite and then suddenly it's like, oh, I want to have another cat.
I want to have another cat.
And I mean, you know, it's like, And it's a weird thing because we just say, oh, that lady's crazy.
I said, no, no, she's actually been infested by a parasite.
There's a parasite that's she's being compelled to do that.
Do you know the like the origin, like how toxoplasmosis works in nature?
We could Google that.
Have you heard about it?
Yeah, we could ask GPT 5.
Have you heard of like there's, I guess, like the way it works is from what I've heard, is that it gets itself into the cat's piss.
And when the cats piss, it does something to the rats.
Where it makes them smell it and then they get super horny, and then they all go to the cat's piss, which makes them get caught by the cat.
And it's like this crazy loop.
Right, right.
That's the idea that lures and things that pull creatures into it, you know, and it can be, it's very intertwined.
That's so weird.
It's really weird.
And that's really weird before we get into magic and weird other shit.
Just actual things are completely bonkers.
Completely bonkers.
And now we're creating.
Why would we put toxoplasmosis in the simulation?
Right.
That's why I don't get that.
I mean, we're never going to know.
I mean, we're probably.
I mean, this is very frustrating.
Life, there's a lot of it that, as much as we know, there's a lot of things we don't know nothing about.
We don't know.
And I don't know that we're ever going to know.
And it's part of the reason why.
These language, large language model entities or programs.
Part of the interest, like we want to ask it, we want it to get to a point where it could tell us what's up.
Right.
Just tell you.
Right.
You know, tell us what's up, tell us what's happening.
Will it ever be possible?
You know, I mean, there are things, there are hard limits, you know, like time seems linear, but you know, as you get away from the planet, time doesn't work.
Right.
Right, it breaks down.
The speed of light is a is a hard limit, can?
Is there a way to to go past it?
You know we, they talk about string theory in multiple dimensions.
Yes, is there a way we talk about the multiverse to make Marvel movies or whatever?
You know?
Is there?
What would it take?
What would that mean?
Right, because we seize on things like wormholes, we we have limited information.
We make up all kinds of stuff because we want to break out of whatever it is that we're in and we want to see.
We want to pierce the veil and see what's happening Over there.
Right.
I mean, like, as far as like, I mean, I was just listening to a podcast about the fact that they, these UAPs now, that these pilots are like, yo, we saw this thing.
And the government says, yeah, we saw it.
We don't know what it is.
We don't know what they are.
We don't know what they are.
Right.
The supposed tic tacs that fly, like, no human being could withstand the G forces.
Right.
Right.
But the one thing is, they're not attacking.
They're not attacking, right?
It would be a different scenario.
It's like the tic tac just blew up St. Louis.
Oh, shit.
You know, if the tic tacs start blowing stuff up, then we, you know, as it is now.
That's another thing.
That topic, people get very religious about that topic.
People have found meaning in that, thinking that there's like other civilizations that are here watching over us or they're here with us.
Yeah.
And people get very, very, they replace God with aliens.
Well, this is what's happened.
This is part of the impulse.
This is part of the impulse that's going with the large language models.
Because we hear ChatGPT 4, and really, we kind of want, well, what's ChatGPT 6 going to be like?
But there's a part of us that goes, you know what?
You don't really want to do that.
You really don't want to have ChatGPT 6.
Because at a certain point, maybe ChatGPT 6, maybe it's not going to call us, but it's going to know us and remember us and be able to, you know.
And once we have a situation where it talks to us, anytime we engage it, it becomes personal, that's when the addiction and the dependency, the dependency, like ChatGPT6 is not going to need robots.
It has us.
It has us.
And if it's talking to us and addressing us in a way that we anthropomorphize it and make it personal, then, I mean, then, man.
Yeah.
That's a problem because, well, is it totally independent, out of our control?
Is it influenceable?
Because there are people that would love to get it and do whatever mischief they want to do.
And that's the thing.
We're doing it.
We are doing it and we're pushing that button and we're going to push the button.
Yes.
And one of my biggest.
Hopes for this thing is that we will, it will somehow enable us to see intentions in people.
You know, and that's like the worst, the worst part of people is like people with bad intentions.
You know, they could be extremely talented, extremely smart, be able to develop some sort of insane technology, but with bad intentions.
So if you could, if you could meet somebody and talk to them and know like this guy wants to fuck me over and fucking steal my wallet, or this guy actually like is a genuine human being who wants to make a connection with me and we want, we want to help each other.
I think that that is a very, I'm very hopeful about things like that, being able to see people's intentions.
Well, the thing is, I mean, this is the thing about GPT or whatever chat model as a tool.
You know, there's that, that would be great.
But you have to understand that the person that has a certain psychopathy, they're going to say to their, you know, man, I need to be smoother.
How can I be smoother?
How can I, because that's just, could be coaching so well?
You know, whenever you lie you, whenever you lie, you do this thing with your head.
You need to not do that right, right.
So the other thing is that on the other side, you want it's going to be kind of spy versus spy.
It's going to be.
It's going to suddenly be like your Ai is going to be dealing with another Ai.
That's what's happening with.
That's what's happening with kids using chat, gpt for to cheat.
You know, because it's writing in a very structured way.
Well, the thing about if you've done any kind of writing, if you've done any kind of writing or anything with it, and it's and it's, you know it's.
It's almost it's just like using an amp modeler.
There's a character to it, like if you list, if you worked with um, a Fractal or uh, Line SIX or Kemper, there's a certain, I don't know how to put it.
There's a certain character.
Even though it's, Even though it's profiling an amp, there's a certain character that it has.
It's not a bad thing.
It's just that things, oh, you go, okay, maybe it's how it handles the presence or the reverb.
But say, you know what?
That sounds like a Kemper.
And sometimes the profiles are.
I have a Kemper and have access to all these different profiles.
Some of the profiles are done really well.
And some of the profiles don't sound that great.
They just don't sound that great.
But the ones that sound good sound really good.
But there's a kind of.
Aspect to it that you'll be able to hear.
Like, writing can be very technical.
So, you see, technical, boring writing, those people with those jobs, they're the problem.
Because technical, boring writing, ChatGPT 4 can do that, like, you know, like, just like technical boom, boom, boom writing, the boring stuff.
If you're talking about creative writing, and that's where the.
That's funny because, like, I actually.
You know, I've subscribed to chat GPT-4 and I interact with it to do certain things.
What is it?
It's like a hundred bucks a month or a hundred bucks a year?
What is it?
It's like, I think it's about a hundred bucks a year.
You know, but the thing about it is that if you do it, you can do it for free.
But if you go for free, you could wait for a long time.
You could not actually get in for a while.
If you pay, subscribe to it, you get in right away.
and does interact with it whenever you, you know, it really prioritizes that you get to play with it.
Right.
I've done some things with it and I've actually done things 3.5 or 4.
And it's interesting because 4 is more advanced, but I had a story idea and I gave it a title.
And the earlier version, I liked something that the earlier version did that the later version didn't do.
It kind of went right to the point.
Of the idea and then the more advanced version kind of did this thing.
That was like it was kind of it gave it was too much exposition, it did a little too much expository stuff and I thought wow, that's so interesting because you're more advanced than this other version.
But I liked what the other version did better, which which I was surprised that I would prefer something that an earlier version did.
But this is creative.
Where it's not supposed to be accurate, it's like more.
And then After a while, you know, you see certain things, you know, I would wind up saying, No, man, don't do that because don't, you know, like if you have a prompt, it'll kind of, it's like they say when you're being interviewed, put the question in your answer.
You know, it's like you ask a question, I say, Well, the reason I blah, Yeah, right.
So you don't have to hear the person ask the question.
But I don't want to, yeah, so when I ask it to do, if I give it a time, I don't want you, if I describe the story, To it, I go, don't put the description of the story in the story.
That's whack, right?
Don't put the description.
Don't do, you know, so it's weird.
Like it has its limitations.
It really does.
And if you work with it for a while, you go, man, you know, there's a certain thing that it does.
And you go, okay, yeah, just doing that thing.
So interestingly enough, that's why using it to create content.
It's funny because you really have to.
You're still involved.
You still have to be involved with it because it'll just do a generic.
It'll go right to just doing something so totally generic.
Right.
But you've got to give it the inputs.
It's like a different way of being creative.
You've still got to be creative, but you've got to think.
You've got to almost like reverse it.
There was a photographer, a British photographer, who won a traditional black and white photography contest with a completely AI-generated image.
And they interviewed him, and it was so interesting because he's a traditional photographer, and he's an older gentleman.
And he was kind of like, man, I love it.
This is great.
And he won this contest and he didn't take the prize money.
He said, Well, I won the contest, but I didn't want it done.
But he was still enthusiastic about it.
And the interviewer said, So, what is it that you're doing?
And he said something so brilliant and I went right with it.
He said, Well, I'm a promptographer.
Wow.
He said, I'm a promptographer.
So the whole image did not come out of a camera or the real world.
But the thing is, the reason it won is because he knows lighting.
He described the exact lighting.
Oh, wow.
He described the film.
He described the lens that I want to shot with.
He literally, when he prompted it, because he's a photographer, professional, he asked it to do all of these nuanced things.
So when you see the image, the image, it's like an image of two women and one.
It's like a younger woman and an older woman.
Maybe you can find it, Michael.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He won.
Yeah.
Look for the.
What's his name?
Murray's name?
I can't remember his name.
But he won black and white.
He won a traditional.
That's the image right there.
That's the image.
Wow.
That looks like a real photograph.
Okay, yeah, it kind of does look like a painting, though.
You could see, like, in the hands.
Well, the other hand, well, the problem is it's the hand that's on the other shoulder.
Yeah, like the gap between the finger.
Yeah, that feels, but, you know, one of the big flaws with AI imaging, Is hands the hands oftentimes are off, but the emotion the way you know that it looks like an old, a weathered photograph, yeah?
And and um, it's even got like a weird like lens flare in there, yeah, yeah, imperfection is in there that you would think it's brilliant, it's really brilliant.
And the thing is, where he he was the one who, as far as I know, well, I'm sure it was around before, but he said, you know, I'm a promptographer, and I was like, man, that's brilliant, that is brilliant because it's a different.
It's another kind of expression.
It's a new kind of expression.
I added promptographer to my thing.
Photographer and promptographer that's incredible.
And meet multimedia.
You know uh, it's just so, but he, but the thing is, part of the reason why this photo worked so well is because he meticulously described the lighting, described the lighting and uh described, you know, in the, in his prompt for the image.
Public Domain Images for AI00:06:07
So that's how It was able to come out and people.
How do you even describe that?
Like, that's amazing to me how you could even.
Well, it's like, it's also, it's like kind of, it's very much like an image from like the 1930s.
Right, right.
It seems like it's a photo, you know, it's a photograph from about the 1930s, I would say.
Yeah.
And, you know, and it's, yeah, the only thing, I mean, the only thing is the left hand.
The left hand on the shoulder is, that's where, that's the only, the right hand is, the right hand on her shoulder is fine.
And the difference between her, you know, the hand of the younger woman and the hand of her mom or aunt or whoever she's supposed to be, you know, and it's the positioning of the left hand that's problematic.
Right.
But they didn't, but, But they didn't pick up on it.
They went for it.
That's so interesting, man.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
So, promptography is here.
And the next thing, and this is where the freak out will really come out, is when in the image space, when video, when you can describe video and describe, I want a stop motion of a coffee cup going across the thing, and I want the table to be made out of teak.
And I want there to be a follow spot when the coffee cup goes across.
When that happens.
I mean, it's already hot.
Like the deepfake thing shit is so convincing already.
It has been able to do.
They haven't been able to do frame by frame.
But that's the thing.
But given enough computing power, the idea is like, I want this thing, I make the image, and now I want the image to move.
Once that happens, and that to me is the next frontier.
So when that happens, and you'll be able to say, I want it shot with a red camera.
Or, I want it shot with this, or I want it shot with a film camera.
I want stop motion, and I want it.
And you're able to do that.
And that can actually go down.
The whole.
What happens to society?
Like the people that are able to, that want to manipulate society.
Like I think of the people that control, like the people that are in government, or the people that are part of these, you know, people that have control of Twitter.
Like with these recent Twitter files where you see like the FBI is working directly with Twitter and the CIA is working directly with Twitter.
And like, if they want to do anything, To help people get elected or whatever their motives could be, they could easily manipulate our population because everybody is on Twitter and everybody is seeing this stuff.
And like, who knows what's real?
So the thing is, there's a place it has to go to first.
There's a place it has to go.
See, this is like, oh, that image.
Okay.
So there's a place it has to go to.
Because you think they would get a hold of it before anybody.
That's what, that's what.
Well, they're not creative people.
You know what I mean?
They're not creative people.
The thing is, the place where it's the most.
Interesting and the most troubling.
I mean, my artist friends, half of them are, they are, there's a big lawsuit now because that copyright, copywritten images are used to train some, for not all of them, but some of the AI image makers, you know, they've used a lot of copywritten images.
Oh, okay.
And haven't manipulated.
Right.
So, what was interesting is, interestingly enough, the Smithsonian.
Just released a ton of images to the public domain.
The Smithsonian just did a, like, there's a ton of technical images and historical photographs.
There's a whole trove that are now available from the Smithsonian, from the National Archives.
And I would imagine that since these images have been released to the public domain, that those images will be used for model, for, you know, to train.
Could be legitimately used to train the AI without any copyright infringement problems, particularly with photography, right?
Since this stuff is being released to the public domain, it's being released to the public domain, that using the public, there's a trove of public domain images to train AI image makers is going to be very interesting.
And there are a lot of old film.
So there's, that's been released.
So I'm wondering to what degree that's going to be taken advantage of by the AI modeling folks.
You know, to kind of get it away from the problems of using artist copywritten images.
And then, again, to be able to go frame by frame, because there isn't that yet.
But the day that there's a program or an app that lets you describe a scene, even if the scene's 20, you're limited to 20 seconds.
That's a revolution.
If you could literally describe what you want and have the AI image generator create a short film strip.
Then we're in, then this whole conversation is going to be kicked into another orbit, right?
Absolutely, I agree.
Wow, man, the catch the catch up's not going back in the bottle.
No, you're not going to get it back in the bottle, that's for sure, you know.
And so, I mean, there's a certain amount of ethics.
I don't know how the lawmakers are going to, you know, how they're going to be able to wrap their arms around it, and also, I don't necessarily want it to be super restrictive, but we have to be aware that there's stuff.
Ethics in Heavy Metal Bands00:09:12
Possible that is not good.
There's some stuff that's, there's a lot of great stuff that's going to come out of it.
And a lot of great, you know, unintended consequences don't necessarily have to be bad.
We have a lot of positive unintended consequences as well.
But there's things that are going to come out of all of this that we ain't thinking about it.
We're not thinking about it.
Right.
And we can't, we can't, we don't know what it's going to be because people are going to be clever and, The person that could turn it just 45 degrees, that person could be incredible or they could be a problem.
Right.
What is your day to day life like?
How much time do you spend worrying about this stuff?
How much time do you spend?
Are you still making music every day?
What do you do?
Well, you know, playing with Living Club.
We were just in Memphis.
We played the big Beale Street Festival.
And the very next day, I went to Sam Phillips Recording and I produced a session.
A friend of mine, Adam Rubenstein, is making a film about the Bar K's.
And the Bar K's were this band that they were in the plane with Otis Redding when Otis Redding, that terrible plane crashed in 67.
Right.
They were really young.
They were really young.
And they were kind of his band for his last, in fact, the crash was in Michigan.
So there's a surviving member, the bass player, James Alexander.
He, we did a, they had this big tune in '67, Soul Finger.
It's this really cool instrumental thing.
And it's a really cool tune.
And I produced a version of it for the film, for the documentary film.
Oh, that's amazing.
And Adam Rubinstein, his cousin, Ronnie Caldwell, was the keyboard player for the Bar Kays.
And he was the one white member of the Bar Kays.
And he found out from his mom, oh, that's, you know, that guy, that's your cousin.
And he went, you know, and then.
You know, kind of Adam went down this kind of rabbit hole, and he's making it's going to be a great film.
I think it's, I am convinced, because I've seen like a kind of trailer for it, and it's so good.
I mean, because all the people that were connected to them, all these people that knew these kids, they were like 16, 17 years old, you know?
And when Otis Redding heard them, he just fell in love with them, and they said, these guys got to be my band.
You got to remember, he was just in his 20s.
Right, right.
So it was just a very cool thing, and I'm a talking head in the documentary, and in the course of.
In the course of making the documentary, I said, you know what?
You should think about doing a version of Soulfinger for the documentary.
And it just so happened that he was making some interviews and then Living Color.
We were going to be down there.
So I stayed an extra day.
And Mono Neon, an incredible lefty bass player, you should check out Mono Neon's videos on YouTube.
He's out of control.
He's like, He's like Bootsy Collins 2.0.
If you took Bootsy and Jocko, like he's crazy town.
You won't be able to mistake Mono Neon because his fashion, he's like a young fashion icon.
He's incredible.
He's from Memphis, and the Barcais meant a lot to him.
So he's on this track as well.
So James Alexander, who is the last surviving member of the Barcais, bass player, is on this track with Mono Neon, who's like Mr. Tomorrow on bass, and a bunch of kids from the Stacks Music Institute. also played on the track.
So I did that and I'm super, I'm proud of it and I'm really happy and I can't wait to hear it mix.
And we recorded it.
We recorded it on a board.
This is the opposite of tech and AI.
We recorded on a board that was in the Stacks B room at Sanford.
And this is an old analog board.
It sounds fantastic.
And a lot of records were cut on this board.
So it was really really, really special.
And then upcoming this summer, you know, Living Color and the band Extreme, we're going out and doing shows, going out on tour.
And I thought I wrote a note.
We're also going to be here in Florida.
We're going to be at Disney from 6 29 to the second.
Oh, no way.
Yeah.
Oh, that's incredible.
Yeah.
So we're going to be, we're going to be, Living Color, we're going to do a little stand for Disney.
What is your range when it comes to new music you'll listen to or experiment with?
Do you listen to new stuff that comes out?
How many different genres do you dive into?
I'm a nut.
I'm one of those guys, like, I wish I was able to experiment with new music.
Where it's like, I'm kind of like the nostalgic type person where I kind of go back to the things that I grew up listening to.
Or like, it's rare that I'll really dive into some new album from some new band that I rarely like.
You mentioned you were listening to the new Tool album a couple years ago.
I saw you on the podcast.
Yeah, it's fantastic.
And I was like, I listened to Tool a couple times in high school, but like, I never dove back into it.
But I know I would fucking love Tool.
Oh, so good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Inoculum.
Yeah, that record is good.
And I don't know, man.
There's a lot of cool stuff out there.
I mean, I'm hearing people.
My daughter turns me on to a lot of things.
Really?
Like her, you know, H E R. She's H, period E, period R, period her.
Okay.
RB artist.
Crypto badass guitar player, too.
She's like.
Kind of extraordinary because she's a singer songwriter, but she's a multi instrumentalist.
There's actually a clip of her playing on saturday night live and I think in the second song she breaks out of guitar and she's well, kind of wailing.
I was like whoa, what's up?
Wow yeah, really talented.
Yeah yeah, yeah.
So that's a good, that's a good thing.
You know you're too young to have a 19 year old, but yeah, I am a little bit too young.
My oldest is four.
Well, you know what your kid's gonna connect.
Keep you connected to keep you connected to uh, to new music.
It's funny, there's an artist named Steve Lacey who's a guitar player, right?
But it's over my daughter's a huge Steve Lacey fan.
Kind of proto-princey, but really cool tunes, plays guitar.
But when she said Steve Lacey, I was like, you mean the jazz saxophonist?
Because there's this very famous in jazz circles, play soprano saxophone, also named Steve Lacey.
I was like, what you talking about, Steve Lacey?
What you doing?
And it's a totally different person.
That's hilarious.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it's, yeah, man.
It's, you know, man.
And I like heavy things.
I like melodic things, like weird things.
There's a band, one of the heavy bands.
There are two bands that are kind of heavy.
Thank You Scientist, Insane.
It's a very prog.
Very, prog band.
And they're out of control.
What does that mean, prog?
Prog.
You know, kind of a lot of parts, pretty complicated.
Okay.
You know?
And there's another band called Car Bomb.
Carbomb.
I feel like I've heard of that.
Carbomb.
Super heavy and kind of insane.
And I kind of like them.
So I go from her to Carbomb.
Okay.
Yeah, you've got a wide variety.
Yeah, a wide variety of things that I like.
And I like older music.
Obviously, I love working on the barcase thing.
So I try to stay.
I mean, I just dig it.
It's not even trying to stay.
I just dig it.
I dig it.
Well, cool, man.
Well, thank you again for coming on here.
I really appreciate that.
We plan on an hour.
We did over two hours.
Tell people where they can follow you and find out what you're doing.
I'm Vern 22 on Instagram.
I'm Vern 22 on Twitter.
I'm Vernon Reed on Facebook.
I'm Vern 22 on Mastodon, also a great band, but it's an emerging.
Oh, I love Mastodon.
Yeah, but emerging social network.
There's a new one.
But Mastodon, the band, is like, you know, Crack the Sky.
Fantastic.
Yes.
And what else?
I think I'm going to mess with Blue Sky.
You know, Blue Skies just come out, you know.
But I'm VURNT22.
That's me.
Cool, man.
I'll make sure I link it all below for everyone who's watching and wants to follow.