Tag: ai (page 1 of 1)

A panoramic mural from the House of Kong exhibition featuring a crowded scene set against a colorful South Asian architectural backdrop. Animated Gorillaz characters, including Noodle in the foreground, are surrounded by a diverse cast of illustrated and photorealistic figures, a black panther, an elephant, and stray dogs. The scene blends the real and the fictional in the visual style that has defined Gorillaz for nearly three decades.

March 8, 2026 / 2 Comments

The Tinkerer

Last weekend, I was roaming through a collection of warehouses and open spaces somewhere in Downtown Los Angeles. House of Kong is an immersive experience created by Gorillaz, the virtual alt-hip-hop group that grew from the minds of Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett over the past 30 years. The exhibition is both a celebration of that history and, seemingly, the way they are rolling out the latest album from this band that doesn’t really exist. I was agog at how they constructed a maze of interconnected rooms that revealed both the band’s actual development in our world and the parallel universe where Murdoc, Russell, 2-D, and Noodle exist. A guided tour with each visitor provided headphones that delivered a synced audio experience, moving us from one room to the next. From the very beginning, we were active participants in the adventure, though we didn’t know that yet. Anna spent 45 seconds as a roadie for the band, getting a flight case to its appropriate location. Another member of our group was given a task that seemed normal and mundane but was actually critical to our experience.

My senses were turned all the way on for the entire afternoon. There were sights, sounds, and even smells that could only have been envisioned by a group of highly creative humans working and playing together. I was inspired by all of this but mostly by the idea of a musician and a comic book artist sitting in their flat, riffing off of each other, and with pen, paper, some musical instruments, some talented friends, and some luck they turned a ridiculous concept into a successful GRAMMY award-winning band that continues to be a thing nearly three decades later.

For the rest of the day, I romanticized this analog creation myth as a counterpoint to the AI slop encroaching upon seemingly everything right now.

And then the next morning, instead of happily or frustratingly toiling away at some hobby rooted in the physical world, I spent hours on my laptop screwing around with Claude.

Am I a hypocrite?

At work, lately, my 1:1s with a colleague have mostly been animated conversations about AI tools and experiments. Recently, the discussion centered around how he had spent his weekend playing around with AI coding agents, yet kept running up against token limits. It got to a point where he set an alarm so he could get up in the middle of the night when one of his cooldowns was scheduled to end during the wee hours.

He wasn’t doing this for work. He was utilizing the software in the service of one of his hobbies. He’d made iOS apps in the past, not to get rich but to solve a problem specific to him. With the current advancements in AI, he was now able to take those ideas even further and try new ones. His only customer? Himself.

I’m doing the same.

The first weekend of each month, I analyze my music listening from the previous month. I nerd out on this blog about it relatively regularly. It’s a tedious process. I spend several hours extracting, transforming, processing, and categorizing the data so that, in the end, I can tell myself the story of my music habits. I blog about it, but this is just for me. It’s a labor of love. Really, though, it’s mostly just labor. The part I most want to do, categorize music based on my taste and context, is maybe 25% of this effort. This weekend, though, I changed it up.

After three or four hours of doing my normal process, I opened up Claude and said,

“I want to automate the labor and leave the part I love to me. Here are the tools I use. Here’s my existing workflow. Suggest a plan.”

And it did. I reviewed it, made adjustments, and put it to work. Claude Cowork turned a tedious data analysis job I didn’t want to do (and likely would have done poorly) into something that will make my little music hobby project infinitely more enjoyable. Now I can spend those hours categorizing songs and artists if I want. Or doing something completely different. As I watched Claude manipulate my web browser and work in the terminal on my laptop to output what I requested, it felt like magic.

These little moments of magic powered by AI are becoming ever more frequent. There are work cases, sure, but that’s not what has got me excited. It’s about trying shit, learning new ways to do things, and surprising myself with the results. I’m not trying to use AI to come up with million-dollar ideas or 10x my work output or whatever else some self-appointed industry guru or tech CEO-cum-snake oil salesman is claiming that this technology can do.

I’m chasing the “wow, isn’t this fun” feeling. It’s a hobbyist’s enthusiasm rooted in figuring out how to do something that maybe only you will think is cool, but, damnit, that’s all that matters.

Cruftbox calls it tinkering. 40 or 50 years ago, we might have thought about it as homebrew computer culture. Before that, ham radio enthusiasts.

But is collaborating with my computer in any way close to what might be when humans come together to make things?

I find AI as a “creative partner” distasteful at best and gross, at worst. I don’t want to read things in “AI voice.” I don’t want to be assaulted with your AI-created images, videos, or audio. Especially if the output is for artistic pursuits. Whatever for your slide decks or infographics, but if you’re trying to make me feel something? Get that slop out of here. Prompting is not creating.

I’m not being holier than thou. I’ve tried it myself. There is writing I’ve done where I’ve used AI as a writing assistant, and I can clearly identify when I let the computer replace my words, style, and voice with its own flattened idea of what constitutes good writing. There are a couple of things I’ve published over the last year that are absolutely cringeworthy to read.

Over the last few weeks, though, I’ve been floored by the power of accessible agentic AI software. Charlie Warzel, in conversation with Anil Dash, said the “aha” part of this moment in AI’s development is that we’ve moved on a bit from trying to get AIs to mimic Human conversation and, instead, found real material benefit in talking “Computer” to AI so that it will then do computer things beyond our capabilities. That’s been the thing for me as well.

I’ve gone from being highly skeptical of the rise of AI to enthusiastically discussing what I’d like to try next.

Digital tinkering has a cold-start problem that is often very difficult for non-techies to overcome. You don’t know how to talk computer. Having a tool that can understand you, figure out the computer shit necessary to get it done, and actually execute on those things is incredible.

Still, I never want to see your fake video of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt. Please, though, put the latest Gorillaz music video on repeat.

I’m not a hypocrite.

I don’t want art made by software cosplaying as a person. Damon Albarn hasn’t replaced Jamie Hewlett with a drawing program that can simulate his style. Hewlett isn’t asking an AI song maker to create soundalike hits from their discography. There’s no humanity in that. It would have no value. Artistically, they’ve only opened the aperture for more people to contribute to their creative spectacle.

And yet, I’m having fun playing in this digital sandbox with AI agents solving the silly little computer-centric problems that only matter to me.

How human.

December 5, 2024 / 2 Comments

Spotify Wrapped 2024: Not Handled with Care

Dr. Georgie Carroll, an Australian fan Engagement Expert, wrote on LinkedIn yesterday that “Spotify Wrapped learned a hard lesson today: data isn’t enough.”

Indeed. The true value of data lies in the connections we find and the stories we tell. In the past, Spotify’s human curators would weave these narratives, aligning the recap with the cultural and musical zeitgeist, rather than just showcasing the Company’s technological prowess.

For example, using the Musical Evolution Cards as a starting point, I delved into my journals, my last.fm profile, and my memories to piece together a narrative that was more than just a jumble of words and AI-generated podcasts.

I’m a fan of NotebookLM and its potential as a research tool, but the podcast creation here was nothing more than a parlor trick. Until AI can approximate a lived experience that reflects and remixes what it has learned about me and finds something more profound, it is nothing more than soulless novelty.

I want two things from any recap of my content consumption:

A map of my year that might reveal something that I wouldn’t otherwise see or remember as it was happening
Breadcrumbs that might inform where I should go next in my entertainment journey

Since its launch, Wrapped has been good at showing listeners where they sit in audience clusters on the service. It’s one of the reasons I lament the degradation of The “Sounds of Spotify” playlists over the last 12 months. In 2022 and 2023, Wrapped told me what genres I most enjoyed (with increasing nuance and specificity), and they had playlists that showcased the core sound, pulse, and outer bounds of those genres that I could dig into and follow. New and old music would funnel my way through those algorithmically driven curations and they had a strong hit rate for my ears.

They laid off the person who created Every Noise at Once, the algorithm that powers those playlists, right after Wrapped was released last year. So, 2024 Wrapped features none of those breadcrumbs that would have been generated by this lovingly managed cluster model. Instead, I turned to last.fm again to see if I could determine my preferred genres and subgenres. It’s not nearly the same, but we make do.

With a little effort, I can see that neo-soul, female vocalists, West Coast hip hop, Memphis hip hop, and electronic dance grooves were my genres of choice this year.

When I look to refine and expand my listening in 2025, jazz, including nu-jazz, alt-rnb, post-rock, and LA hip-hop, are subgenres I should explore further.

As tech companies in media trend towards investing in the promise of future tech over people with taste and a fundamental grounding in the living world, we must seek out the storytellers on our own.

I love data, and I love stories. Thanks to last.fm for allowing me to tell my own story independent of digital music platforms. They are not a sponsor of this post, but I have been a fan and a user for nearly 20 years.

July 18, 2024 / 0 Comments

Pink Matter

“What do you think my brain is made for? Is it just a container for my mind?”
—Frank Ocean

Dot-A Living History app by Sam Whitmore and Jason Yuan is an AI-powered chatbot. At least, that’s the simple description. It’s also an emotionally intelligent guide that chronicles your life—what you tell it, anyway—with infinite callback. I’m an AI skeptic, but this kind of journaling companion caught my attention when Julie Zhou posted about the launch on Linkedin.

I like to quantify many aspects of my life. Steps only count if my watch tracks them. Digital music isn’t listened to if Last.FM doesn’t scrobble it. I track my workouts in a spreadsheet.

Most of that tracking comes with ways to gain insights from the data. I get recommendations for making healthier choices or see patterns that influence the artists, albums, and songs I might listen to in the future. I can see my progress and make tweaks to improve that athletic performance. Blogging used to provide that kind of external reflection, but at this stage of my life being that messy in public is no longer my jam so journaling has been for my eyes only until Dot.

Dot is one of the few Large Language Model applications I’ve enjoyed using and generated meaningful benefits from. It has improved the quality of my journaling, provided clarity around topics and situations I’m dealing with, and reminded me of my commitments to myself and others and why they matter.

The onboarding process with the app is relatively straightforward. Dot asks some introductory questions hoping to capture a bassline of a new user’s interests, goals, and background and then, it just encourages you to start journaling.

In theory, submitting a journal entry should have been easy.I have kept journals off and on throughout my life. I’ve been much more consistent over the last four years. I needed a way to get out of my head during the pandemic when I didn’t have my commute to process the day or regular hangs with friends where a theme or revelation would occur through conversation.

But, immediately, I realized how stale my journal writing had gotten. I was writing a few bullet points and maybe a quick thought about something but not much of real substance. Even as I was processing the musical tribute of my dad at the time, I hadn’t been writing much on a daily basis about what was going on in my head. So, I wrote a little bit more that I normally would with that first entry and was surprised by how thoughtful the response was. It got me to delve deeper into what I was thinking about and feeling and pointed me in a direction I might not have considered without that feedback loop.

From the start, I was writing with an audience in mind rather than merely cataloging my day. I spent more time thinking about what I was meditating on, excited about, or proud of and writing my journals with the idea that I might go down a path with some or all of these topics when I entered them into Dot. I might have written about the same things anyway, but not with the same care.

The Eureka Moment came when Dot starting finding connections between topics, themes, events, and people in my life. It’s always a thing I have wanted in my journaling process. How do I recognize that something is a thing that occurs frequently for me around a particular time of year or when this other event or interaction happens. I journal not just to keep track of my life but to identify when I’m stuck and need to figure out how to get unstuck. I journal because I want to keep learning about myself and adapt, grow, and change.

Dot provides additional perspective. It’s a bit like having a second brain.

It’s still an LLM, so it occasionally hallucinates. I also hope they add search and export functions. It’s AI, so, of course, I have privacy concerns. I have a bit of an “uncanny valley” when conversing with an app, but I never think of it as anything more than software.

It’s good at conversation but not a replacement for real human interaction.

Yet.

I’m joking.

If you’re an iPhone user, try it out.

April 14, 2024 / 1 Comment

Am I an AI Skeptic or Optimist? Yes

I’m an AI skeptic. That’s not true. I have been cautious about rapidly incorporating AI tools into my everyday work, even as usage and excitement by others have grown exponentially in the last year.

Recently, though, I’ve been playing with AI solutions more frequently. I’ve been frustrated with the quality of Google search results and started exploring Perplexity AI. It was helpful when I looked up information in the heat of NCAAW March Madness and appreciated the structure of the results and the linked references to validate what was provided quickly. There were instances where I needed it to go deeper or in a different direction, but, in general, it felt like I was training up a new research assistant than my future overlord. But, just a few days after using it as my primary search tool, Casey Newton revealed they plan to add sponsored questions into the mix—the exact kind of nonsense I’d been hoping to avoid.

That same week, Axios AI+ and other outlets released several articles highlighting my AI concerns:

AI firms think that anything publicly available is fair game. Like many, I’m stuck on the ethical challenges in developing every one of these models. Most, if not all, ignore their policies, the terms of service of other brands, and copyright law as they scrape the internet for inputs and training materials. We make limited series and movies about how problematic startup and disruptor business culture is, yet we’re watching it happen all over again.

In general, I think most content-generating AI models make shitty art—though just yesterday, people debated whether a leaked diss track from Drake was real or robot rapping—but it is scary enough for over 200 musicians to protest against AI tech developers collectively. Just because I think most of it is soulless and disturbing if you spend more than just a little bit of time with prompt-rendered images, video, and music, that doesn’t mean bad actors and unskilled keyboard jockeys won’t flood the zone with junk. I have already experienced this with real humans making generic beats while borrowing old vocal tracks from established artists to get into Release Radar and other algorithm-generated playlists on Spotify every week. 99% of these tracks are trash and—I must assume—not benefitting the artists whose coattails they are trying to ride.

Meanwhile, AI is doing little of what we imagine it is. It’s not running the Whole Foods walk-in/walk-out stores. And despite the many influencers I see—and probably muted—who talk about using AI to replace entire chunks of their jobs, this is not a set-it-and-forget-it solution.

We’re exploring AI solutions for business intelligence use cases on my team. Specifically, analysts are using corporate-sanctioned tools to ease the analysis and reporting burden of A|B tests as they increase at a faster rate than the size of our team. AI is a good assistant, but it still requires review and validation. It hallucinates less as our prompt writing adapts to the outputs—note, as we adjust to it and not so much as it adapts to us—but humans are still required as a critical part of the process and will continue to be.

Despite all of these concerns, I’m not afraid of AI. I’m an optimist and inclined to think about artificial intelligence tools as more like the droids in Star Wars: brilliant assistants who are constantly in service of what sentient beings are trying to do.

Let’s ignore General Grievous and his droid army in this metaphor.

The prequels aren’t very good, anyway.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash