The Bluestocking, vol 313: Eclipse and AI Music

Namgyal is still very much alive, having self-mortified himself

Happy Friday!

And hello from Texas, where it is currently incredibly sunny and extremely un-British in every way. On Monday, I managed to see a full solar eclipse (ish, it was cloudy except for one moment where the clouds parted and everyone cheered). If you get a chance to do this, all I can say is: take it.

i’m not a conspiracy theorist but it is very weird that the moon is the exact correct size and distance from the earth to do this so perfectly

About an hour before totality, it starts getting colder and darker—which is right in the uncanny valley, because it’s like dusk but so much faster. Your lizard-brain can intuit that something is badly awry. You know I’m not one for having emotions, but I did feel a cold clutch of irrational fear at that point—what if the sun doesn’t come back?

Then came just under two minutes of totality. I had gone down to the south bank of the Colorado River, so I could look back across the Austin skyline, and I could see all the lights go on in the skyscrapers. It was eerie, and beautiful, and definitely better experienced in a crowd.

Helen

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how your email finds me

The second half of Helen Lewis Left The Chat dropped on Wednesday. (If you’re looking for it on a podcast app, you might be better off searching the strand title, “Influenced.”)

These three episodes tell the story of a woman who married a chatbot, a young airman who leaked military secrets on a chat forum named after a meme about asses, and the Russian billionaire behind the mysterious Telegram app.

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Music Has Just Changed For Ever And We Should Be Freaking Out More About It (Odds and Ends, paid Substack)

Imagine if after Oppenheimer successfully detonated the first atomic bomb, if the rest of the world had just shrugged its shoulders and carried on as normal.

Because that’s what seems to have just happened in the entire field of human culture known as “music”.

A couple of weeks ago, a company called Suno released a new version of its AI-generated music app to the public. It works much like ChatGPT: You type in a prompt describing the song you’d like… and it creates it.

The results are, in my view, absolutely astounding. So much so that I think it will be viewed by history as the end of one musical era, and the start of the next one. Just as The Bomb reshaped all of warfare, we’ve reached the point where AI is going to reshape all of music.

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James O’Malley is very excited (and maybe alarmed) about AI-generated music, and with good reason. I’ve played with Suno, and although it’s another “stochastic parrot”—i.e. it has been fed all human musical knowledge and can thus imitate it and remix it—the results are extraordinary. In under a minute, you too can write a blues song about the collapse of the Hapsburg empire, or a K-pop anthem about how there are too many podcasts.

I’ve been trying to calibrate my feelings towards generative AI, because I feel like there is a lot of hype (and money) swilling around, and that naturally makes me cynical. Where I have landed is here: AI is going to replace a lot of stuff because a lot of stuff is pretty crap already. Or perhaps: we keep asking if AI can be truly creative—as if that’s the test for it replacing books, or journalism, or music, or research papers, or university essays—when the truth is that quite a lot of that stuff is not creative already. Quite a lot of it is makework chum. And yes, that stuff is getting replaced (if it hasn’t been already). Students will hand in essays “co-written” by ChatGPT and they will be marked by ChatGPT. More and more clickbait articles will be AI generated off a few keywords. Covering letters for jobs will be AI-generated off the job description.

And, as James says, I can easily imagine Spotify being flooded with AI music that sounds like Green Day on a bad day, or a cheap Bob Dylan impersonator. I think AI will exacerbate an existing trend of hollowing out decently paid but often rote white-collar jobs, in the way that machines hollowed out manual work in the twentieth century.

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Quick Links

1. “I thought the story was remarkable, but it got even more interesting when a senior Bhutanese official casually told me that Ngawang Namgyal had also been informed about the elections. Namgyal was that first ruler of Bhutan I mentioned earlier who was meant to have died in 1650 and whose passing was hidden for 50 years. I asked them to explain in case I had misunderstood. It turned out that it is believed that Namgyal is still very much alive, having self-mortified himself in the ancient Buddhist tradition and now he resides in a monastery.” Ned Donovan on Bhutan, which is pretty much top of my bucket list (Terra Nullius, Substack)

2. I enjoyed watching very fabulous young Thai men finding out whether they had been called up for military service. Literally slay (Twitter).

3. By the time you read this, my snap reaction to the Cass report will have been published at The Atlantic. Grateful to write for a magazine that lets writers follow the evidence wherever it takes them.

4. Brian Klaas has turned his phone to black and white to make it less buzzy and appealing. I did this once, and it was surprising how well it worked (Garden of Forking Paths, Substack)

5. “Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.” This week’s American media beef is an NPR reporter who has written a piece for The Free Press about NPR being extremely Democrat-leaning, which is a mirror of many debates here about the BBC.

6. “Look, my 80-year life span occupies more than a third of our republic’s history. That means that our democracy is merely three ‘Goodwins’ long.” The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on how her 80-year-old husband, a speechwriter for JFK and others, finally decided to go through his archive (The Atlantic).

7. More Helen content: for my last guest hosting appearance on Blocked and Reported, I told Katie about an incredible documentary on facilitated communication, a now-debunked method of helping non-verbal disabled people gain a voice. It’s a heartbreaking story of good intentions leading to bad outcomes, which is the kind of story I like to explore: one where nobody has to be a villain for horrors to be perpetrated.

See you next time!