"Your blog's changed over the past 12 months. It used to be more personal, more honest... a lot of woe-is-me whinging, yeah, but it felt like it was being written by an actual human being with hopes and fears, aspirations and... feelings. Lately though, it's just a bunch of lists linking to some cool tunes with feeble jokes and forced bonhomie."
Ironically, the latter is what I set out to create when I started My Top Ten (maybe with less feeble jokes and more genuine bonhomie). My old blog, Sunset Over Slawit, was very personal and open and honest... and I'd grown tired of sharing that side of myself with the world, so I devised MTT as purely a music list blog, because I thought that's all I wanted to write. Look back at the first couple of years of posts here, and that's all it is. Gradually though, the personal side took control again until MTT had basically become what SOS was 12 years ago... with arguably better tunes.
So why have I gone full circle? If I'm being brutally honest, the answer is depression. There. I said it. Here's a track from the excellent Cherry Red compilation Revolt Into Style 1979 which sums it up better than any amount of my piffle can...
Andy Arthurs & The Rock Along Combo - I Feel Flat
"You're depressed? Join the fucking club, mate. If it's that bad, why don't you do something about it?"
What do you suggest? I went to the doctor about anxiety a couple of years back and all they did was put me on cognitive behavioural therapy. Via an app. I'm too cynical for CBT, you need a certain proclivity for tree-hugging, I believe... and on app? I understand that the NHS is at breaking point... I work in the NHS now!... so I know why I'm on an app rather than speaking to a real person... especially considering some of the people I work with who are on a waiting list for face-to-face CBT and have a much greater need than I ever will. There comes a point where you have to put your own "illness" into perspective and realise that it's mild enough to not bother the NHS with. Besides, if CBT is out... what am I left with?
Half Man Half Biscuit - Depressed Beyond Tablets
So what's getting me so down? Well, beyond bereavement and the ongoing mid-life crisis, The World itself is top of the list. I've posted a few excerpts from Dave Eggers' novel The Every recently, all of which paint a depressing picture of a world where technology has robbed us of freedom, individuality, creativity and joy. And then last week, this happened...
I'm sorry, but this really is the End Times as far as I'm concerned. This comes in the same week as I heard about schoolkids using AI to do their homework, while a number of pioneers in the field warn that the end is nigh. In a rage, I shared my concerns with Ben...
Rol: End times.
Ben: Not really, just a reorientation of the labour process.
The spinning jenny, the combustion engine, even the printing press saw large modifications to labour.
This is now a quantification of the individual
Terrifying in it's direction, yes. But... "End times"? Only when the revolution comes, comrade!
I have a problem when technology interferes with art. Making a speech is on a similar level to art or music or writing. The fact that we now have AI attempting (and dictating how we should do) these things based on shitty algorithms... either human beings are really no longer needed, or we're just becoming so fucking lazy that our relevance is at an end. There's a distinction between replacing a boring and laborious mechanical process... and replacing creativity.
That's part of the restructuring of the labour process. Creativity was distinctly only an option for the ruling class until the 20th century and this will see to it going back to that
The de-skilling of labour through technology is something inherent to the capitalist mode of production, and it has found a way to penetrate the arts
And that really is the end times.
(You see now why I don't let Ben come round here as much as I used to? He's even more depressing than I am!)
We've reached a tipping point, and there's no going back from this. We've already got AI art generators, AI story and poetry generators, we've even got AI writing songs and recording new tunes from long defunct bands. I used to tell myself that when I retired, I would start writing stories again... but really, what's the point? By then, the computers will be doing all that for us. It'll be terrible, but we'll have lost the critical faculties that enable us to tell the difference.
When I started writing blogs in 2006, the medium still felt relatively fresh and innovative. Blogs are old hat nowadays though, and most people who still write them are the wrong side of 40. But with an increasing amount of AI-generated content on the internet (and everywhere else), the weeds will soon choke out the flowers.
And you wonder why I'm depressed... at least I can still rely on good, old-fashioned music to cheer me up.
7ebra are two sisters from Sweden, following in the steps of First Aid Kit, but with more of an Wet Leg vibe. As far as I can tell, they wrote all their own songs, play their own instruments, and use their own voices to sing with. In other words, no AI was used in the production of this wonderful tune...
Oh Rol, thanks for articulating everything the way you do - I just don't have the the energy any more to put it into written words (I just rant about it all at home!) but agree wholeheartedly. At least when all the creativity and individuality and nuance and purpose has been sucked out of our existence humans will still be able to breed, eat and kill each other. What a fun world!
ReplyDeleteI'm waiting for the AI to start killing us, C, just like Terminator predicted...
DeleteBad enough they have robots judging your lessons, but the chirpy "Way to go!" would push me into apoplectic rage I think.
ReplyDeleteSorry to hear you're not feeling at your splendid best. Hope it lifts soon.
That was pretty much my first response, Ernie.
DeleteAs often happens, Rol, you have articulated exactly how I feel, just much better than I ever manage to.
ReplyDeleteI sometimes think about my blog, and blogging in general, in the same way as I felt on recently seeing a video of myself dancing. In my head it's great, but the reality is just an old bloke doing something irrelevant, and doing it badly.
As for AI, we are all doomed. Every day a new story of something seemingly creative and special that turns out to be the work of AI. At the recent Sleeper gig I went to, guitarist Jon (who also teaches at a uni in Brighton) told the tale of a final-year degree student who submitted an essay and was awarded 85% for it. The student was heading for a first. It only later became apparent that the essay was the work of ChatGPT.
There are places for AI, I think. I recently offered to help someone write a codicil for their will, and in the end I just asked ChatGPT what to say. Job done. But in the creative world? Gah... I share all your concerns.
One interesting thing about blogging; at times, it helps to keep me sane. I certainly recognise the depression you describe. In years gone by, I would talk to my mates (well, two of them), and that would be the therapy I needed. These days, I very rarely see those mates; new friends and acquaintances are not the same, so blogging is sometimes the only way I get to have my half of the conversation. Having said that, New Amusements is grinding to a halt, so what will I do then?
Speaker Coach can do one, I'm afraid. I'd be disabling that, if I could, and, if not, I'd be deliberately triggering it by falling into the tropes it identifies. I'd poke the bear, in other words, not that it would do me any good, of course. That said, it sounds like a terrible indie band name, as in, "I saw Speaker Coach support The Fall in '91..."
Well look at that - I've written more in a comment here than in the vast majority of posts over at my own place. You must have struck a chord.
Like that 7ebra track too.
Speaker Coach were on just before Menswear, if I remember rightly.
DeleteAs C says below, Martin, please keep plugging on. We have to keep raging against the dying of the light.
Reading this again, and Martin's comment, I really do appreciate reading the personal and the honest discussion side of blogging (as well as the music stuff), perhaps more than ever at the moment - it really helps to offset things to know that others feel the same. Please don't either of you stop and please feel free to express more like this, it's helping to keep me grounded too - god knows we need some of that.
ReplyDeleteHi Rol, I'm sorry to read that you're struggling at the moment.
ReplyDeleteI was interested about the AI feedback for the lesson, and my initial reaction was , well, not outrage, but certainly an anger. Then I read the comments again and thought about my experience when observed as a teacher, and the feedback given: the AI advice is as anodyne and generalised as I believe I received from actual teachers. Yes, there was criticism, valid criticism, but as for genuinely helpful advice, I think very very little (excepting when I was doing my PGCSE). Of course, there's a great deal of arrogance in that comment, and I would never claim that I was a very good teacher, but those observations were never useful, I was given much more help from the now defunct teams of Local Authority advisers.
It reminded me of similar critiques I had from the "Quality" Dept at my old college, George. Then again, most of the people who worked in that department were robots who had read too many Oftsted reports. "Quality"... my arse.
Deletethat 7ebra album is at bandcamp for a mere €5.
ReplyDeleteMoney well spent.
DeleteRol
ReplyDeleteYou need a holiday!
Joking aside please take care and use this place to vent your spleen in your own inimitable style
I tried to book one, but they'd all been fully booked... by you!
DeleteVery sorry to hear that you're struggling at the moment Rol. I hope the fog lifts soon.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, I'm with with Ernie; 'Way to Go!' and 'Nailed It!' would've taken me to the verge of chucking the screen out of the window.
"Empathy for the win!" was the one that finished me off.
DeleteAI can't pull me a pint or smile warmly or tell me a funny joke. I'm with all the others when I wish you safe mental health and if at anytime you feel the wheels coming off then ask for help. We blogger friends are not only words n the page - we are real people. I know, because I've met most of the people who've left comments above and I know they are all thinking of you right now.
DeleteJM x
Thanks, John. And everyone. I thought long and hard about this post because I didn't want it to seem like either a cry for help or a yell for attention. Sometimes it just helps to put a name to something though.
DeleteI'm not stopping ranting or moaning, Alyson... I just find more comfort in compiling mindless lists at the moment. It may be burying my head in the sand, but it takes my mind off everything else... and helps me indulge in more of my sorrow-drowning drug of choice: music.
ReplyDeleteSorry to hear you're struggling Rol, and hoping you find a coping mechanism and way through.
ReplyDelete(If I know one thing, saying "What worked for me ..." is of no flipping help)
Share your concern with AI - I insist on saying Please and Thank You to Alexa because if AI is learning all the time it needs teaching the social niceties of the world.
I received a first (I'm assuming) AI written Job Application letter last week - parts of it were efectively a copy and paste from various website sources, other parts read like the "It is not raining here also" line in Tony Hancock's The Radio Ham.
Fine tune by the way