Of Babies, Bathwater, and AI

A lot of people are saying a lot of things about AI to me, and in general.  Here I make a bit of effort to distinguish the baby from the bathwater.

There's a lot going on in the world, some of which I write about quite a bit, including in the form of lots of songs.  One of the things going on in the world that occupies my attention regularly aside from the actual events happening that I'm writing about is the method of communication I'm using much of the time in recent months to write about those events -- AI-driven music-generation platforms. 

This is not the best time in history to engage in nuanced discussion of pretty much anything.  It's an age where people with strong opinions put them out there in order to make money on creating viral ragebait.  An age where it's easier than ever to leave a snarky comment most anywhere you want to, without having to bother with herculean and arcane maneuvers like stuffing an envelope and putting a stamp on it.

But it is clear that there are a lot of people thinking about what to think and how to feel about AI.  I'm much more distracted with the possibility of World War 3 starting any minute now, but according to a lot of comments I get on the various platforms, while lots of people are enjoying my recent Ai Tsuno albums, people also express various concerns about AI in general, and using it to make music.

In support of the idea of nuanced thought, I thought I'd try to contribute to this discussion by looking at the various critiques of the technology that people often talk about, with some examination of each one.  I'll explore the following common themes, which we could divide up between:  AI slop, energy/water use, jobs, the Wall-E effect, theft, Big Tech is bad, the future of humanity.

You're making AI slop.  Why are you doing this?

I've noticed that the people telling me I'm making AI slop are not actually the ones listening to the songs.  They're referring to it as AI slop in principle, because AI is involved with the creation process.

The reason pretty much no one calls it slop who actually listens to it -- not to AI-assisted music in general, but specifically to the music I have made with Ai Tsuno -- is because it's clearly not slop, it's great music, with catchy hooks and melodies, inventive use of different sorts of styles, instruments, and cross-pollinations between various styles and instruments, and the production values are amazing.  That is, the clarity of the sound, how good it all sounds through big speakers or small ones, and things like that.

In short, I'm doing it because it's not slop, it's real music, and really good music.  The reason it's really good has a whole lot to do with my input -- it's a very collaborative process.  There's lots of stuff we can certainly call AI slop out there, being produced by all kinds of people who aren't yet very good at what they're trying to do.  You'll find exactly the same phenomenon among the realm of human musicians -- a lot of them are not very good.

AI requires all these data centers and they use a lot of energy and water.

This is true.  Also, if you drive a car you burn gas.  I have rarely if ever had someone tell me I should stop doing concert tours because of that.

When we're talking about energy use, this only makes sense if we're comparing it to something.  The amount of savings in unnecessary use of energy and creation of pollution represented by the transition to digital streaming would probably be hard to overstate.  The amount of plastic involved with the production of all those vinyl records and CDs, and plastic packaging they usually came with, along with shrink wrap, is staggering.  The amount of energy involved with doing a run of 1,000 CDs is thousands of times greater than the amount of energy involved with creating an album's worth of songs on Suno and distributing the album on music streaming platforms.

If you're recording an album in a music studio with a bunch of musicians, and you factor in the carbon footprint involved with them getting from their homes to the studio and back every day for a couple of weeks, once again, the energy and water use involved makes using AI music-generation platforms look very ecological.  The argument is probably one of the more bizarre ones I regularly encounter, because of the lack of the "compared to what" element in it.

Working with my AI band, putting in hours on a typical day for the past six months or so, I have produced more songs in top-quality recorded form than would otherwise be possible by any other means that I know of.  I'm not creating mindless content here, but real art.  If I burned a few gallons of gas in order to do that, I'm sorry they don't run their data centers on solar and wind like they all should and could, but I don't control that, unfortunately.

AI is going to take away everyone's jobs.

I think this is very true, and very disastrous, in so many different ways.  It's also very true in the realm of music.  Who is going to hire a chorus to record harmonies in a studio anymore?  Or anything else like that.  It's all going to become less and less common, and this is a very sad thing.

It's also going to happen regardless of whether some of us boycott new technologies that are not going anywhere.  We can dream about the days before automation of all kinds, but it's overwhelmingly obvious to a lot of people that this genie is not going back into the bottle, any more than technologies like the internet, TV, radio, or the printing press is going to go away.

People using AI to do various things are not the ones deciding that this is now how the world is operating.  Because we use this technology, we are not therefore then equally responsible for the job losses that will result.  To think this way is to have no understanding of how society under the rule of the billionaires, society under capitalism, actually works.  Capitalism needs to change, but it won't change depending on our lifestyle choices, like whether we use AI platforms, drive cars, or eat meat.  The changes required are structural in nature.

If we use AI like this we'll all forget how to play instruments and become like the people in Wall-E.

I think this is exactly what is going to happen to a lot of people.  Learning to play an instrument in the age of AI music generation will probably become more and more of an unusual thing to do.  I hope to avoid that happening to me.  I'm sad that it will probably happen to a lot of people, though, and sad that there will probably be fewer and fewer people making music with each other, just as there are already fewer and fewer people talking with each other, who aren't otherwise occupied with online activities, or getting therapy from their AI companions.  There are so many down sides to this and other technologies, but some of us not using them won't make them go away.

All of these AI platforms were trained on pirated material, for which the authors or composers or performers have not been consulted or compensated.

This is very true.  All of us content creators from throughout history have been robbed by Big Tech, and now we have these amazing tools to use, for which no one receives credit but the thieving corporations that trawled the internet for everything in it.

Like many other people, I hope humanity persists long enough for us to arrive at some way for everyone to at least be able to live comfortable lives, even though most of our jobs will have been replaced by AI that was created based on what they call piracy of intellectual property.

But until then, and after then, this technology now exists.  The platforms that are "ethically trained" are amazing, too.  The genie is out of the bottle.  No matter how these platforms are going to be done, there's no way they are going to compensate for the loss of the music industry jobs involved with Suno being able to do the things it can do.

Society has to find solutions to these very deep, society-wide problems, in terms of how to adapt to the new world of AI.  Those of us trying to avoid AI technology will in a few years be as anachronistic as the folks who didn't own a television by 1970 or so.  They were happier, overall, I'm sure.  More productive than many of their TV-owning neighbors, and probably less brainwashed.  But their choice not to own a TV didn't change society any more than those of us avoiding AI today are changing society.

These Big Tech corporations are so unbelievably rich, and out to rule the world.

It's so true, and so alarming.  But it is already and will become increasingly the case that avoiding AI technology is akin to trying to be a bicycle enthusiast in a country with no bike lanes and lots of highways, sports utility vehicles, and sprawling suburbs.  Some people will manage to do everything on a bicycle under such circumstances, but very, very few.

This is, again, a systemic problem.  Like other massively impactful technologies, AI is a double-edged sword.  It can do many amazing things, including making music, but also lots of other, destructive things which we've all heard lots of news stories about.  Other technologies that transformed society and were largely very destructive to it, also had uses that were impossible to avoid trying to engage with.

For example, if everyone is going to have a TV anyway, then those of us trying to communicate about important issues want to use that medium to reach people.  Same with radio, the internet, the printing press, etc.

When Artificial General Intelligence arrives, maybe AI will destroy humanity.

A lot of very smart people think this is the case, or they give it a 10% chance of happening.  That's very alarming to me, as it is for many others.  I wish I could make it all go away, and make all the corporations pouring trillions into developing the technology disappear.  But what I do as an individual with the technology will do very little to influence its development either way.  We can use it or not use it, but AGI is either coming or its not, and it'll destroy humanity or it won't.

I hope people who care can find a way to have agency in this whole question, but we won't do that by making individual lifestyle choices about trying to avoid the use of chatbots, any more than we will prevent the clearcutting of the Amazon by becoming vegans.  This kind of thinking was delivered to us by the capitalists themselves, because they know very well that that's not actually how the world works, under capitalism.

The Open Veins of Latin America, Revisited

Los Estados Unidos se creen -- the United States believes
el país elegido por Dios -- it's God's chosen country
para acabar con el mundo -- to end the world
en nombre de la Libertad -- in the name of freedom

So much has been happening so fast for so long that I hardly ever feel like I'm able to take time for much reflection anymore.  This has been true for a long time, but it keeps getting more true.

Sometimes things happen, like last weekend, that induce some of that reflection.  Events can bring a bunch of loose threads together like that, and veritably demand that I see if I can untangle this ball of yarn, and spin one.

It's very easy to romanticize pretty much the entirety of Latin America, and I do it every day.

I was twelve, and just starting to pay attention to global news through mostly very mainstream sources, but I was swept up in the excitement when the Sandinistas overthrew the US-backed dictator in Nicaragua.  Throughout the 1980's, during my teens and early twenties, I read with horror about the atrocities being committed by the death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala, and read with admiration about the brave souls in guerrilla armies like the FMLN who were fighting for a society that had room for people who didn't own a coffee plantation.

Along the way, by my later twenties and early thirties especially, after the Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico and with the rise of the global justice movement, I was meeting many more people from across Latin America in my travels.  Among other things, I was discovering the music that is in important ways the Spanish-language equivalent of the tradition represented in the US by artists like Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, or Hazel Dickens, which is broadly referred to as Nueva Canción music throughout Latin America (except in Cuba, where it's more often known as Nueva Trova).

I have never become a Spanish-speaker, sadly, but I have had some wonderful translators, and long ago fell in love with the music of artists like Silvio Rodriguez and Victor Jara, with the aid of people from various parts of the Spanish-speaking world who introduced me to the music they loved so much.

In 2004 I first went to a World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where so many of those gigantic international gatherings have taken place over the decades, particularly in the early aughts.  Hanging out in the Venezuela-Cuba Solidarity Tent was a wonderful, eye-opening experience, as I began to realize that there were probably at least as many people in Latin America who were trying to write, sing and play just like Silvio Rodriguez as there ever were people in the US who wanted to write like Bob Dylan.  Many of them even wore the same kind of glasses as Silvio did.

Whenever I have left the English-speaking world and traveled in Latin America and many other countries as well, one of the most refreshing things that becomes immediately obvious is outside of the Anglosphere -- as it once was within the Anglosphere as well -- music and art are central to society, to community, and to social movements.  Music and art is everywhere in Latin America, and it deeply permeates and sustains all of the social movements that have ever existed there, to my knowledge.

Among the hundred thousand people or so attending the World Social Forum, while they actively loved their musicians, they also loved their writers, poets, and intellectuals.  Tens of thousands of people came to hear Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez when he spoke at the gathering, and gigantic numbers of people also came to hear the Uruguayan author, Eduardo Galeano, when he spoke there.

I had been following the great accomplishments of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela closely, long before going to Porto Alegre and hearing Chavez speak there.  My first child was born in the largely Mexican city of Houston, and her mother grew up in Caracas, Venezuela.  I had also long been a fan of Eduardo Galeano's writing, especially his very popular history book, the Open Veins of Latin America.

It had become my main mission in life to try to bring the kind of spirit I've witnessed in Latin America back to the Anglo cultures -- to reintroduce us to our music.  Some form of the New Song/Nueva Canción movement there in the Cuba-Venezuela Solidarity Tent was what I always wanted to bring to the Anglosphere, or bring back to the Anglosphere, since we used to have this sort of movement, too, in a very big way, for a very long time.

Vicente Feliú never became quite as famous across the Spanish-speaking world as artists like Silvio Rodriguez, but, like Silvio, Vicente was a Cuban songwriter, and a founder of the Nueva Trova musical movement there in Cuba, and also a writer and player of beautiful, powerful songs.

I was overjoyed one day in 2015 to see on my Facebook page that I had a message from Silvio's friend and colleague, Feliú.  It was the beginning of an intermittent correspondence that went on for four years.

This morning I was revisiting our correspondence, which Facebook so helpfully has preserved for me there in my message inbox.

Vicente had first gotten in touch with me to thank me for writing "Song for Ana Belen Montes," and to let me know that he was singing my song for Ana at various events in Cuba.

For those who don't know, Ana Belen Montes is a woman from Puerto Rico who rose to very high levels within the Department of Defense in Washington, DC, all the while spying for Cuba.  After she was caught and sentenced to 25 years in prison, I wrote a song in appreciation for her efforts on behalf of that heavily-targeted country, and in appreciation for her opposition to US policies to terrorize the island.

Along the line during those years Vicente and I were corresponding, I shared an idea I had for a song we could write together.

I thought it would be cool to have a song with a Spanish-language chorus, but with verses in English, intended for a mostly English-speaking audience.  What I was thinking that would especially work well with this kind of format would be a song against US plans to invade Venezuela, and in general about the long and horrific history of US efforts to try to control every aspect of life for people throughout the region.

Vicente got back to me with a chorus, which was essentially a quote from José Martí.  Vicente said I was welcome to use however I wanted to, if I saw fit.  Which I did, but not until two years later, when I circled back to the idea, and wrote the song I had had in mind, with his chorus.  I called the song "In the Name of Freedom," and I recorded it on my 2021 album, May Day.

I wondered why I didn't hear back from Vicente, but it was also not at all unusual in the history of our correspondence for months to go by before he'd respond to a message, so I waited, and didn't dwell on it, because there was too much else happening that was dominating my attention, between touring, raising children, and being a news junky in a world that is getting more overwhelming to keep track of with each passing hour, for years.

I finally got around to doing an internet search for the man a couple months ago, to learn that he died in December, 2021.  Probably he never got the message from me about the song having been written and recorded.

What got me thinking of Vicente all of a sudden again, and that song we wrote together in particular, was the US's invasion of Venezuela over the weekend.

Where I was when hearing this news was Arizona, where I was staying for the weekend in a motel in the town of Douglas, a short walk from the Mexican border, and the Mexican town of Agua Prieta. 

The entirety of Arizona, along with so much of the rest of the western US, was stolen outright in a war of aggression against Mexico that the USA waged in the 1840's.  The US-led or US-financed wars of aggression against Mexico, and most other countries in Latin America, were just getting started back then though, as the US empire continually expanded its imperial horizons.

For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Douglas, Arizona, along with Bisbee and other towns, was all part of the copper mining industry.  It was mined in Bisbee and smelted in Douglas.  For most of the time the mines and smelters operated, there was a system in place that gave preference to Anglo (white American) workers both in terms of pay and housing, and openly discriminated against Mexican and other so-called immigrant workers.  (Mexicans, of course, being "immigrants" in the sense that "we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us.")

During the decades this apartheid labor system was in place, the US military was engaging in one adventure after another to take over other countries and profit through neocolonial relationships, systematically overthrowing democracies and putting in place dictatorships that would serve the interests of the corporations from the USA that had come to exploit their resources and their people, and generally leave behind deserts, lakes full of toxic waste, and unimaginable numbers of dead and maimed miners and other workers across the land of the open veins.

There have been many efforts to do away with the kind of rule that is based on exploitation of workers and the environment generally, with even more intense exploitation reserved for people of color and immigrants within the US, and for the people and lands of other countries.

In Arizona, the Industrial Workers of the World organized a multi-racial union that brought together the vast majority of the Anglo, Mexican, and other workers -- 85% of them -- in their efforts to break this apartheid labor system.  They were driven at gunpoint out of the state back in 1917.

Across Latin America, social movements of all kinds have also tried to throw off the boot of the United States, to oppose US-backed dictatorships in efforts to introduce, or re-introduce, free elections to their countries.  Across Latin America there have been movements aimed in one way or another at getting the Yankees to go home, and to stop trying to run the world.  Movements to take back the oil, gas, copper, and other resources that were for so long controlled by foreign interests, who took the lion's share of the profits, aside from the kickbacks to the dictator who kept the public in a state of terror on their behalf.

Walking around Douglas and Agua Prieta, looking at the massive iron wall that stretches on forever to the east and west, dividing these two countries, these two largely Spanish-speaking communities effectively cut off from each other, seeing the obvious poverty everywhere, the dilapidated housing more often than not, while listening to journalists interview one politician after another, from one western country after another, all seeking to justify the bombing of Venezuela and abduction of the country's president, I was struck by the starkly similar tone of the journalism today compared with a century ago.

In 1917, when the union was being broken in Arizona, the wealthy men raking in the profits from their copper-mining operations and the politicians shilling for them all said the union had to be broken because mining the copper was essential for security.

Therefore rather than, say, ending the apartheid labor system, paying everyone a fair wage, and improving safety in the mines, the union had to be crushed.  The union also had to be crushed because the union members were clearly sympathetic with the Bolsheviks, who had violently overthrown the Russian government, and therefore these workers and their union represented an imminent danger to the US government.  An insurrection, even.  Does any of this sound familiar?  

Now they would call them friends of Putin, rather than Bolsheviks.  "Communists" who don't want the US buying their elections.  "Authoritarians" who might dare to try to control disinformation campaigns aimed at swaying public opinion in their countries.

Immigrants from these countries are once again being called "enemies within."

Relationships with China or Russia are automatically seen as somehow threatening to US security -- just as they ever were, despite the US being the only country in the world with hundreds of military bases scattered all around it.  Despite the fact that the US has invaded both Russia and China -- never the other way around.

Like so many communities, this community I was walking around over the weekend on the US-Mexico border was a divided one.

As I was walking around it, the streets were completely bereft of the many people from all over Central America, Venezuela and elsewhere who were once claiming asylum, a couple years ago, back when the US was making at least a pretense of being interested in the concept of international law and human rights.  But not long ago, Pastor Mark Adams and other people around there who I met were part of a big team of dedicated people who organized themselves to look after thousands of people who were coming through for so long, needing food, water, shelter, and transportation to somewhere they had relatives or other connections.

No sign of migrants, volunteers helping them, or anyone opposing any of that on the streets now.  Hardly a US flag in sight, and no sign at all of anyone supporting Trump or opposing immigration.  No Trump flags, no MAGA hats anywhere.  But not long ago, two of the churches in Douglas were burned down, for the pastors being too radical, or just too gay.

Those kinds of divisions exist throughout Latin American societies as well.  That's why it has long been relatively easy for the empire to use its money and power to get certain segments of various countries to run authoritarian states to control the populations on behalf of the US, over the course of a very violent couple of centuries of US hegemony.

And then we are told all over the airwaves, minute after minute, by smooth-talking Venezuelan and Cuban expatriates and by "analysts" of one kind or another from the US, that the reign of Chavez and Maduro has been totally disastrous for the Venezuelan people, and the reign of the Communist Party in Cuba has been similarly disastrous for the Cuban people.

Never mind the statistics -- never mind the millions lifted out of poverty in both countries, never mind the average Cuban lifespan, never mind the health care systems or the productive collective farms.

And never mind the US sanctions that sabotaged industries in both countries, dependent on parts from companies they could no longer trade with.  Never mind the theft of billions of dollars of gold reserves from the Venezuelan Central Bank, or the imposition of what amount to naval blockades of both countries.

The economic problems they are having in Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, for that matter, are all supposed to be a result of corruption and mismanagement on the part of the leaders of these countries, despite all the blatantly obvious indications that it is the long-term project to undermine these societies by so many different means that has ultimately succeeded, to varying degrees, in causing serious problems for them.

And of course, now that a given nation's economy is in crisis and creating millions of refugees, somehow the US has the right to depose their leaders, overthrow their governments, install "business-friendly" dictatorships.

And Nicolás Maduro joins the ranks of other presidents of other countries deposed by force by the US and imprisoned, exiled, or assassinated.  He joins the ranks not only of the oft-mentioned Noriega, but also of Aristide, Allende, Arbenz, Roldós, Torrijos, Mossadegh, Lumumba, Gaddafi, and the damning list goes on and on.

We are living in a mind control experiment, it seems, where the allegedly liberal and the allegedly conservative media, apparently throughout most of the western world, is intent on telling us that war is peace, slavery is freedom, and democracy is dictatorship.

But if you want to understand the world, it helps a lot to see it, rather than fearing it.  If you want to understand people, it helps a lot to meet them, which can be hard to do if there's a massive metal wall between you.

And it most definitely helps to listen to Vicente Feliú and Silvio Rodriguez, and to read Eduardo Galeano.

In the meantime, we seem to be so far away from having the kind of social movement we so desperately need, if we're to have any hope of rising to this completely mad situation.  It was a long weekend, it's been a long century, and it shows no sign of ending.