Danny Jones Podcast - #185 - ChatGPT & AI Drake Are Becoming a REAL Problem | Vernon Reid

Episode Date: May 14, 2023

Vernon Reid is a guitarist, songwriter, founder and primary songwriter of the rock band Living Colour. Vernon was named No. 66 on Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. EPISODE LINKS https://twitter.com/vurnt22 https://www.instagram.com/vurnt22 FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/jonesdanny https://twitter.com/jonesdanny JOIN OUR KULT: https://bit.ly/koncretepatreon OUTLINE 0:00 - Caribbean Race riots & growing up in Brooklyn 5:39 - Science-Fiction inspired tech 13:50 - Chat GPT 21:27 - Will artificial intelligence destroy art? / AI Drake 36:25 - Death & Consciousness 42:35 - Doing things for pleasure VS money 50:18 - Richard Prior & using pain as creative fuel 54:44 - How will AI manipulate humans? 1:02:10 - Technology & music 1:15:10 - Cloning 1:19:50 - Merging man & machine 1:29:49 - Simulation theory 1:40:36 - How artificial intelligence will better humanity 1:46:59 - AI photography & Midjourney 1:51:17 - Deep fakes & AI generated video 1:56:59 - The future of music Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

My parents are from the Caribbean. They're from Montserrat, which is by Antigua, all of that, 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, 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, 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, to the West Indies to help rebuild London because all of these cities have been blown up by the Blitz. So they brought people in and quickly there were a lot of resentment from people that are there. But they brought in folks to kind of, because, you know, the cities have been destroyed. And yeah, so it got, it got weird. So you guys got out of there and went to. My parents got out, my father said, you know what, I'm going to take a chance on America.

And first we lived in Harlem for, I don't know, it was 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. And 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 19th, when I was a little kid, you still saw cars from the 40s and 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, you know, the corvettes and seeing the Mustangs and the Cougars and things like that. It was a very dynamic time. A lot of change has 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, you know, I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV. What? Yeah, my parents, my parents, and my parents are young, you know. They were just in their earth. early 20s and what have you. And they said, that's the guy.

And he was being brought in for his arraignment. And my dad said, you know, 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, had a big impact on me. seeing civil rights, protests,

seeing Bull Connor, the dogs, the hoses, you know, that kind of really imprinted on me, you know, because I could,

I can see, I could see who the, 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 an amazing time. It was weird, cool things, you know, because also being exposed to things,

I don't, you know, I'm, a kid, right? But seeing King Kong and Dracula and you know, James Wales, Frankenstein you know, seeing all that stuff

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 was your first, the first music you got into, was it rock and roll? The 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, Stacks, 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 BB King, hearing early rock and roll. Because at that time, they were being played as almost.

they were being played as oldies, right? So, 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, that, you know, Burr-Backrock just passed. And hearing Dionne Warwick, you know, do you know the way to San Jose and anyone who had a heart and a 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, 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 been, we've had this kind of fascinating, with the idea of the supercomputer

Colossus, the Forbin project. Hal 9,000 from 2001. I mean, what was it, Night Rider, the car kit, you know, the car to talk to the, yeah, the car that talked, you know. You've had this fascination with it going, and I'm probably skipping a bunch of stuff, let me silent running, you know,

robotics, you know, the robot, you know, the robot from lost in space, you know, 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 a kind of see. sequencer. Right. You know, a player piano, you know, where the piano, where the piano seems to play itself. You have a role and it automates the keys. And that was like a huge craze to play a piano. In fact, there was a Mexican composer, Conlon Nuncaro. And he should, if you hear, if you get a chance, listen to Conlon Nuncaro's music. He did this thing where he took piano roles 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 just a pioneer of the idea of not exactly an electronic. 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, you know, 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 than computers were actually available, you know. So we've had this idea. And now, finally, we're getting to a place.

We're 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 be the 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 whole idea has been just a fascination. And to what end, to what, I mean, really to what, 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 watching movies earlier is this absolutely absolutely I mean again you know 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, for the Mercury, for the Space Capsule. Mm-hmm. I'm saying that wrong. Wow. But, and then, and then I learned about Ed Dwight, you know, Ed Dwight was in the Mercury program.

Ed Dwight was in the Mercury program. There's 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 like what is real, right? You think that when you watch something in some sort of crazy sci-fi film, people are going in space and going to different planets, that this is all based on something that could, that's 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. 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 the G forces have on the human body. You know, there, 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.

It's a problem. That's why the astronauts have to use treadmills. They 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, 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, you know, that's, going to be an issue. The idea of cryogenic change is going to be frozen and we're going to fly. It's going to be 100 years and you go one you and it's like you know, I don't know about that. I don't know if our tissues, I don't know freezing our tissues. I don't know how it's going to work. How's the defrost going to work? You know what I mean? You know how it is when

the when the fish defrosts at a you know what I mean? It's like it's 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, about, it's really language model, the 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 the people say, it's not

AI, 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 it is, what it does is it's really remarkable. And it's going to become more remarkable. See, we're, the thing about the controversy around it is really about our tendency to anthropomorphize.

We, that's what we do with our dogs and our cats. Like we project emotions onto domestic animals. all the time. We're the, we're going to, we're the ones that fill in the gap because we're interacting with, um, this model. And the model is predicting it, it hears input from us and has all, it has all of this, uh, uh, this huge data set. And it's drawing from remnants of other comotalities 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 model, I'll just say AI, because because it's blah, blah, blah. Right. And that's, it's AI shortcut for something that's not, it's really a modeling system. But our reactions are also training.

Everything that we, 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 chat GPT and other modelers. And our interactions are increasing its quote unquote intelligence in the sense that, oh, this is an option. Oh, this, oh, maybe, da, da, da, da, and it's picking and choose. 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 a list. And that's like the best line in the entire movie. That's the one line. Everybody bust out laughing because it says, okay, I got a bunch of options. and he scrolls down. And it kind of humanizes

that 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. It goes to, and that

in itself, it's 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, you asshole. And that's the, because we anthropomorphize. That's, we make, 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 would be funny. It goes down, you know, he 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 gpte 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 one there's a two there's three there's three point five and now there's four so the thing that's interesting is that chat gpt is actually

It's kind of siloed. Like chat GPT3 only had information up to 2021. Maybe chat GPT has 2022, but it's siloed. It's not totally running around. It's actually kind of contained. But it makes mistakes. It says off-the-cup 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? 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 makes stuff up. They don't know why it makes stuff up, but it does. The thing is, chat GPT4 is an order of magnitude more accurate than chat GPT3.5. I read something. It was like, okay,

So one of the things that they do is they have to take the model the AI take exams and Chat GPT 3 they had to take the bar exam and I think it failed. I think it didn't really Yeah, but chat GPT well three three point five did much better through four chat GPT four 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 3.4. 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, this is a very concerning thing. But really, chat GPT4 was the version and have everybody go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, 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 say, well, you know what? There's a limit to the levels of cognition that is 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 building its models based on external input, but it's also having conversations with that. 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. I'm sure you're familiar with.

Mid-Journey is 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. They're using GPT to create the most compelling headlines and titles of their stuff.

Tell you what? I mean, the art world, I 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 there was like an AI Drake that people were listening to. Oh, the AI Drake is like the big thing. And it was like more people were listening to it than the regular Drake for a while. Like it was creating bangers. Like Drake like, oh yeah.

Amazing music. It is a Drake. Uncanny. Yeah. It's very, it's very, and the weekend. It's, well, what's happening right now? Okay, when sampling came in, when sampling came in, when sampling, When the sampling first came in, like the Akai, S-900,

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 have been using tapes. Like the Melitron is basically a keyboard that plays recordings of violins and it's got this, 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 violence 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, I don't think, 1963 or whatever. He was like a kid. And it's this incredible moment of this 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 then it started to come out. Public Enemy, De La Sol, Delisole 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. Oh, a hauling notes and no, man, 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, you know, pushback. And that's when the whole thing about samples had to be cleared. And, you know, if you use a sample, you know, the sample's part of the hook, then the artist can say, you know, 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 artist, the arts who were 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 lot. Whereas an artist that's broke, a backpacker, can't clear that sample. Right. 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 years, a lot of, like, really popular hip-pop songs that have come out that have sampled some older songs. And they do, what they do is they, they, 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 him with the lawsuit. Exactly. And there's a whole thing about sample forensics, loop forensics. I mean, there's a whole cordy of people that, that's all they do, is that they listen to songs. I remember DJ Premier got really upset. There was a, 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 on there, you know, because, you know, people who are OCD hip hop fan is going to be like,

I know that break, that's their drumming, that's their drums from da-da-da-da-da. You know, that, oh, man, that's not stubble field, that's da-da-da-da, that's jabbo, and they'll go back and they'll say, no, this is the break, that's the break, use that. 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, da-da-da-da, this, that, Yeah. You know, so there's that. So this thing 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 and blah, blah, blah. What's happening with this with the voice modeling? Yeah. And taking the, the, the, fiend, I don't want to say the wrong word. not the um phonemes phonyms

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

talking to 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, based, named after the Lyra, Australian Liar Bird. And Liar Bird can imitate any sound.

It's not, it's not like a parrot. It can imitate, 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, you know, 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 thing. And they did the first deepfakes. They had 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's kind of almost like a robotic imitation of Obama. You're taking individual words and stringing them together. That now, that has moved so far ahead to the point where you can hear Drake and be convinced that it's Drake. And the other thing is, with a chat GPT4, 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 on, it's corny, that's whack, that's whack, that's whack, that's what, wait a minute, that one's good. Right. Because chat GPT 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 can't. It's, oh, it just will do it, right? As opposed to a human collect 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. Right. So each time you reject it, it's the almost exact opposite effect of dealing with a, human collaborator on a level. It's not, 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, so it's a, so this thing that's happening is, we have a fine, I say you wanted to,

say you wanted to do a Bob Dylan, a song to Bob Dylan, and never wrote, but you want to write a Bob Dylan lyric. You can say, well, you know what? I want to go from Highway 61 Revisited to Nashville Skyline. It'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 he 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. See, that's one of the things that's really weird. Because, see, 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 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 Bob.

It's not going at Bobby Fisher. It's not doing that. Yeah. What it's doing is, it's trial and erroring and going, oh, do that, 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 National Skyline, it can 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 got to 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, it's kind of, how can I put it? It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it doesn't, it doesn't care. It doesn't, it doesn't care. It doesn't care about that. Right.

The issue is when you go, yo, that's dope. That's where the issue is. Mm-hmm. The issue is when the, the, the thing that's going to go down with artificial artists, what have you it's not about when it's when it's cheesy it's about when it's dope it's about when it is actually moving years ago there was a there was a book of poet back in the age this has been going on a long time there was a a program called Ractor and Ractor was and this was like a a

Syntextual language it wasn't even a language model 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 didn't know, it didn't, it didn't, it wasn't contextualizing it at all. It was just, 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 it was like, okay, some of this is just abstract as nonsense. And then there's a poem in this book that almost brought me to tears. It was about loneliness. It was so, I was, I had to remind myself that this was just a program spitting out words randomly.

And it is nothing. This is the 80s. So this is nothing. I mean, chat GPT1 destroys it, right? But the thing is, as a 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, it's much greater, much greater. 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, or 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 can be the actor, 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 his 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 a character's really good when you can see the character's going to make a mistake right and you do you think we are just a primitive

version of what this AI is 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 um does anything just come out of the ether that has never been done before hmm You know what? I think saying 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 synchronicitities 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, 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, theorist, Tennis, Teres McKenna says, you know, that really is psychedelic mushroom. Like, the reason that we let forward is because of psychedelic mushrooms. Like, 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 dap theory?

A chimp-a-mashorea-muching and that kind of like hyper, advanced the evolution of the human brain? Yeah. Gives that forebrain where we can see time. Well, one of the things, you know, one of the ideas is that the actual original sin is consciousness. It's really self-awareness. That we suddenly were, oh, snap.

You know, it's kind of like when you're, 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 know where maybe it's your you lose a pet or you know some something happens to a parent or sibling or maybe it's not even that it's just you just are suddenly and you get creeped out and you go oh oh yeah And it hits you that you're mortal there. 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. 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, he, this thing is like, you know, we feel ourselves inside of our, 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 the disembod. 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, you know, the idea that the heart and our heart in 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. Yeah. So what is that difference though when you say, like when people describe like my heart's 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. You know when something's good.

You know in 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. They're happy just to make a note. They're happy just to, just to, 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 paying piano for some of the time they're three. It's not, it's, it's, their experience, their experience of playing that same chord is vastly different. Yeah.

It's vastly different. In fact, you know, You know, I mean, you think about the classical musicians and the nightmare of what they have to, 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, they expect it to be blah, blah, blah. So they're. Their experience of music is in another, it's a job. It's in another, it's in another. Right. 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 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 Jimmy Hendricks, 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't. 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 their people are short order cooks. And there are people who are like they, you know, if they do the, it's like when you go to a barista and the breester does an incredible poor, right? And it's got a curly cue and it's like, you know, they've done this. It looks like a castle. And it's like, oh my God. And our delight in that, well, that person, they do this a thousand times a day. They do this.

Right. And in a way, weirdly enough, whether somebody is still connected to the kid part of them or whether it's they become really jaded. Right. They're really jaded. And it's just, you know, 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 not, there's nothing to, there's no judgment about that. Like, there are people, um, they play well. And they're, they're playing for the reaction they get. Hmm. So they can play, 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. They don't care if people react or not. They don't care if people dig it 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, 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. 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, they're 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. People can be in the same squad, but for very different reasons. Like one person is like they're trying, they're trying to live out the thing that they 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 another person is like, I just, I love this game. Right. I love it. I love this game. And that's, that's what they bring to it. And we see that. We see that with people that, you know, that that's, they're, 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, you know, because they're not feeling it. No, their people are incredibly skilled and admirably skilled. And maybe the emotion, maybe they don't emote, but the emotion comes out of the notes what they play because that's that's what they do other people they don't know they couldn't tell you what the name of the core they couldn't tell you the mo they couldn't

tell you nothing but they their ear is like their ear they hear all the things they hear all the things and it's and it's and every every activity has multiple tiers of the same deal you know there people that like their voices from just this disembodied insane thing. Their singing is like that. But I've seen that where people are sing incredibly well, but it's like, you know, 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, they, some 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. You can look up for it on YouTube. It's Richard Pryor singing and 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 in your down and out. And he is hollering like little Jimmy Scott. Like he's really, first you go, first you hear it and go, oh, he could sing. You say he has nice voice. And then somewhere in the middle of it, you go, wait a minute. I have this moment, 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. Right. 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. There's something, maybe they made you sing, maybe you were made to sing and you were very,

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, he never imitated singers in his act. He never, he didn't do impressions of singers. he just didn't do it. And I was thinking,

this is an emotional space that he can, he had, Richard Pryor had a, I can't go there. And it's, 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? It must have been young. Wow. What a voice. That's incredible.

Where is this coming from? Unbelievable. Unething 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, then I had to go, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

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. 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. Clearly, there's something about singing that he could not. It was too much for him. And he just, or he may say, you know, man, don't want you taking me seriously.

But it's kind of shocking when you see that. And you go, you know, what it meant, what it meant to hear it was revelatory. But what it meant for him was something, there's something else going on that he was like, you know what, I'm not leaving that alone. I'm leaving, 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.

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 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 they're going to have, one of the things that's very interesting is how will they connect to us personally?

Right. You know, like how will they? Because right now, people, 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-called 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 for it's like general it has a lot of general knowledge you could ask you to do things it doesn't complain it'll do it these things like a John it's

like 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 that 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 soft. Well, they have multiple voices, don't they? They changed it. They changed it. Now they do. Yeah, they do. 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 talk to Syria. I'm calling all kinds of things. You get that way. I'm going to argue with it. And you feel ridiculous. I'm fighting with, I'm fighting with, 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. We're, 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. Is Blake Lemoyne? You're talking about? Yes. And he became convinced that the AI he was working with was alive. And 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. And 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, oh 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 say, okay, they dialed it back. They made it so you can't have a super long conversation. Kevin Kevin Ruth started getting getting male I said you killed you killed Sydney that people were mad at him I don't know if not leaving his wife for Sydney

I don't know it was crazy right because people had anthropomorphic they took her 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, the vast amount of data that thing can scan, not just writings and essays and research papers and so like that, but I think about like these podcasts. If you think about how many of these podcasts, like, 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. 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. It's really, really made me feel weird. Yeah.

Because they got permission from, I guess, his estate. But, you know, they are essentially rewriting his legacy. Mm-hmm. Well, you know, and Andy Warhol, remember, Andy Warhol famously said, everyone is going to be famous for 15 minutes. And, you know, we have people, you know, that it's, like media has kind of, it used to, when he said that, there were three networks when he said that. When did he say that?

Oh, like the 60s. Oh, the 60s, okay. 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 strangers. 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 people desperately cling on? You know, they're trying to get to their 20th minute. You put in human beings. That's what Marshall McCleman said,

the medium is the message. The medium itself. If you love diving into culture and comedy, like on Danny Jones podcast, playoff hockey is right up your alley. NHL on T&T has the best coverage, making every game feel intense and unpredictable. Playoff hockey is a different level.

Overtime, big hits, and no one coast. The studio crew with Paul Bissonette cracking jokes and Wayne Gretzky breaking things down makes it even more fun to watch. Every shift matters and the personalities keep things lively. Watch the Stanley

Cup playoffs on TNT, TBS, True TV, and HBO Max. Medium itself is the message. The medium is a message. The means of delivering the narrative is also a message. And the thing is, the thing is, these

language models, they know they, they are quite, I mean, they are aware of Marshall McClellan and how we react. That's the, that's the part of it. It's not just about your prompt or your, your request. The modeling is connected to all of this other, all of this other data. And that, and we don't know, we don't know how all of that is how the interactions, how, how, how, how, how, how, how, the model is making all the interactions happen. Like, put in another way, talk about technology and music. Well, we already have pedals that imitate amplifiers. You have pedals now.

I mean, a lot of bands that I've played or, you know, done tours and whatnot I've been on festivals. I mean, you know, I came from a generation, you know, amps, you know what I mean? You know, stack, right? Right, right. Right. You know what I mean? Boom, the power and the glory. You don't even feel the air move behind you, right?

There's a lot of folks. They have a Kemper. They have a Kemper. I have helix. They have helix. They have a helix. They have, you know, the neural network, you know. They got these things.

And there's even drum machines. Oh, man. There's like, I mean, there's DJs who sell out arenas that just have a laptop connected to speakers and they're just are sampling different things they mix together. Then nothing is necessarily original. It's just a mash-up 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 Louis Martinez and he has these apps and there's one called funk drummer, reggae drummer. He's got a tablop. 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 the thing about working with loops is loops go round and around and you can have a funky loop and you can kind of deal with it but it's like it's

like 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 high hat. And it's kind of, you know, and you can, and you can 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, he has an app called Jazz Drummer. It's a jazz drummer. He's playing with the brushes and, 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, you know, class doublefield who played funky drummer with James Brown. Wow. And he kind of plays a pattern. And it basically, you have, okay, you have, not just, you have a model

that's based on, applied stubble fields patterns and won't just play like repetitively will play with a certain feel and 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 going to mess with you know drummers you know it's not going to mess you know it's not going to met with De Anthony Parks or Nate 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. 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 But it's amazing

Like you know It's like it kind of You can have a tablet Have a tablet player play With the Kunga player 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-sufficient, 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? Right. 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, and original, quote-unquote, original rhyme. So you can 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 what, and that is, that has been, 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. Like that's what we're so uncomfortable with. Like we're not that uncomfortable with it creating loops and beats and music.

Because it's like you said that, you know, we all prescribe different meaning to things. Like even when we watch a movie, people or listen to a famous Hendricks 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 like forging a real person or like forging somebody's voice, that's when it becomes messy. And that's what we're uncomfortable with. Very messy. You can have, now you can have Jimmy Hendrix read your short story.

Right. Right. 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, and one Jimmy Hendrix's things. No, just have, you know, I want to have Jimmy Hendrix

read my kid a bedtime story. And Jimmy 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 think there's a certain, there's a certain, I don't necessarily want to problematize it, but we're dealing with the, 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. And in fact, when this technology becomes ubiquitous, when it could be on your phone, and you could call somebody up and speak to them.

And Richard Nixon's voice, just to mess with your boy, you call them 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. I'm going to have their dad's voice. Or I'm going to have their brother or their sister's voice. They say, 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.

I don't know, 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, it's. cute until it's not cute. Right. It's cute until it's not cute. And that's the thing because like if it's happening with famous people, and you know what? It could get very, very, very, go very, very sideways. Because the last time, 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, like seconds. 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.

Like, who's going to monetize it and who are we going to sue? That's the lowest hanging fruit with this whole thing. Well, yeah, man. There was a time when it was like everybody wanted to have Sam Jackson's voice on their, you know, on their garment, you know, 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 could turn really get very, very weird. Yeah. You know, 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. Mm-hmm. 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 and, like... Absolutely. That's the other thing too, right? That's how you're getting all those things with getting the stems, isolate. That was my favorite thing, too, about like,

about like some of the... my favorite hip hop artists like in the early 2000s they would release their mixtapes and they would also release like the acapella's 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 can get you can get Gucci man's voice but Gucci you can make Gucci man say whatever you want them 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 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 it's it's cool but it's the good the bad and the ugly yeah again right again but people are going to find a way to fight about it no matter what like it's it's it's it's amazing that it's it's possible right like it could be something that i would want to listen to all day long every day yeah yeah that 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 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? No, I don't know. I think they've done it there. I don't know if they done it. But there's a whole thing. How successful is... 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 whatever they're thinking it is, it's not going to be what they think it is. It's not, nobody's prepared for what that is. No. Nope. The cloning the pet thing is really important.

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 if you're if if the pet cloning thing is uh is like a is is that a thing like that it sounds like it would be a thing like it sounds like some some something some rich person would do dog dog cloning in the u.s through what is this a company that does it viogen can you zoom in on it. Dog cloning through Viogen pets presents 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 at Viagen pets,

many of us are loving dog owners ourselves and we understand the intimacy of nature of the relationship. ships. 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, you know, because that's like, that's a bold. Yeah. That's a bold. That's a boldish claim. That's a bodice claim. That's a bodacious claim. That's a bodice claim. Just type in pet cloning on Google images and see what comes up. Also, are there any like reaction, like owner, oh my God. No way. What?

Well, that's just Photoshop. That's got to be fun. Go to that one. That's photo. Pet cloning is getting more popular despite the cost, BBC. I wonder how much they charge. A hundred thousand dollars get your Yorkie cloned. That's...

About my wife. You're going to live to regret that. Oh my God. What are you going to, like, get your wife cloned back to when she was 21? Okay. Digg that hole. Go on now.

Go on now. Get the shovel. Get the shoveling. Keep on digging. You keep on digging. My wife doesn't listen to this podcast. Oh, my God. Clone original.

Wow. And you know what's funny about that? I wonder if you could pick the age. what, see, that's great. You know, that thing, you know, the guy, I'm sorry. But the two cats, like, you know, the clone just looks evil. But the original looks like super, you know, super warming. 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 ship? Well, that's far. That's far. That's far. I'll tell you what.

Or 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 Sky that has 18 quadrillion worlds in it. It's like 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, again, you're going to create addictive spaces, very addictive spaces, and the kind of worlds that people will get lost in.

If you have a model that's, I thought about this the other day. Some years ago, Sony made a robot dog called Ibo. I remember that. And Ibo, the things, if you've never seen an eyeball, 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 don't 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 really, really boosted CPU. And imagine an Ibo if you put a chat bot, like a chat, cheap E.

T5 is integrated into eyeball. 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 eyeball, this hot-rodded eyeball. And you buy it, get it for your kid. The kid's five years old. And the little eyeball that has is a tutor. The eyeball at that point could become a tutor.

the eyeball 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 robot, and it's, I think it's probably, with today's technology as it is, it's probably doable on a primitive level. But imagine your kids, It'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. So it's not giving the kid like Bezier curves when they find. 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 kids 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 it could also record everything your kid ever said did or thought and it could essentially make that kid that kid's consciousness immortal or it could say it could

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 this eyeball is like giving emotional support. What happened to you do that? Ibo goes, Ibo goes to the little, brings the dog to the little league and the kids play at first base or whatever. And afterwards, how did 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 and whatever they do.

Yeah, that's another thing, too. If you can afford hyper eyeball, right? And, honestly, what would you pay for your kid to have a companion, a tutor, someone that walks out for them, that's an early warning system that will alert you or something? Well, you know, 10K, 20K, and you get lifetime upgrades. They pay 100K to clone their pet, where they're going to pay to give their kid. You know what I mean?

And this companion gives your kid out. an absolute competitive advantage. Right. And it's wild. It's wild to think about. And it's not, and that's, and that's like, and that's not like a, that's not a, that's not a, when it's horrible nightmare some areas, that's actually, you know, kind of, uh, you could say it's a good thing, but it's, it's a weird, it's a weird thing that we don't know.

Right. What that would mean to an individual, you know, to an individual, you know, to an individual. individual psychology. It's, I mean, yeah, there's definitely, 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, you know. Unknown.

It's like, you know, have you ever, I'm sure you're familiar with the neurolink 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 like neurodegenerative diseases and like people that are paralyzed. I think it just actually got denied by the FDA. But, you know, the, you know, the, you know, you know, you. I just read a book about this, but about the U.S. government's like 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, 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's that is actual they want to we do it with the the motivation for this stuff is you have these scientists and these companies that are built with the by these scientists that are they're incentivized by billions of dollars and then you got the government funding it who's incentivized by controlling the world and being the dominant superpower it's all 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 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, 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, they want, you know, generalize, independent intelligence running around. One of the thing 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 it's not making right it's not making the phone call it's not like it's not like on your laptop sudden your laptop comes on and and you know we have to press a button

we have to we have to press the button right we have to swipe right in order for it's to happen and at the point of which the models are reaching out to people that's where that's where 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 like 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 chat GPT with video games, and you start to integrate this stuff with things like the Sims or that no-man 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 a 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 a, 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 we've been told that we keep putting carbon into the atmosphere if we keep doing what we're doing you know there's 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 fire is actually fire suppression is one of the problems fire is actually a natural event in a forest you know get to a certain point

dries out get hit with lightning and there's a burn right we anthropomorphize fire we're terrified of fire so fires 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 you know 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. Like kind of, 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...

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 were literally a shark-killing rampage. Right. 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, 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. In this reality, we have We have, we're finding smaller and smaller and 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, I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, right? But just actual, but actual stuff. You're not a UFO guy. 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 the thing, and then the other person gets it the thing, and that's the life cycle.

Does 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. 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, you get it, you get it from the feces and it gets it. It's weird. It gets into your brain. It's very, and it's very icky to, 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, it's like, and it's a weird thing because we just, oh, that lady's crazy. She said, no, no, she's actually been invested 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?

You know, we could Google that. Have you heard about, yeah, we could ask GPT5. 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, they 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 thing. 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 will 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 a very frustrating. A 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. 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 to get to, we want it to get to a point where we could tell us what's up. Right. Just tell us.

Right. You know, tell us what's up. Tell us what's happening. You know, is it, will it ever be possible? You know, I mean, there's things. There are hard limits, you know, like. Time seems linear, but you know, as you get away from the planet, time, that doesn't work. Right.

Right. It breaks down. The speed of light is a, is a hard limit. Is there a way to go past it? You know, we 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 have limited information. We make up all kinds of. and stuff because we want to break out or 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 ua p's now that these pilots are like yo uh we saw this thing and and and the government says yeah we saw we don't know what it is we don't know what they are we don't know what they are we don't know what they are

Right. The supposed tic-tacks 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-tac 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. Oh, sure. People have, like, 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 give 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. It's human nature. That's going with the, the, with the large language models. Because we hear chat cheap, chat GPT4 and really we kind of want, well, what's chat GPT6 going to be like? But there's a part of those, you know what?

You don't really want to do. that. You really don't want to have chat GPT6 because at a certain point, maybe chat GPT6 maybe it's not going to call us, but it's going to know us and remember

us and be able, 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

like chat gbt6 is not going to need robots it has us it has us and we and if we and it's talking to us and addressing us and in a way that we anthropomorphize it and make it personal then I mean then man yeah that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's that's a problem because, well, will it be into, is it totally independent out of our control? Is it influential? Because there are people that would love to get it and do whatever mischief they want to do. And that's, 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 I, you know, one of my biggest hopes for this thing is, is that we will, it will somehow enable us to see intentions in people. Hmm. 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 hopeful. 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, 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 could be coaching.

So, well, you know, whenever you lie, 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, AI. 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 almost, it's just like using an amp modeler. There's a character to it. Like, if you list, if you worked with a fractal, or line 6 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 the things, oh, that, 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 it can be, 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 be able to hear. Like writing can be very technical. See, technical boring writing, those people with those jobs, they're in a problem. Because technical boring writing, chat GPT4 can do that like, you know, like ridiculous. Like just like technical 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 GPT4 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? No, it's like,

it's, I think it's about a hundred bucks a year. You know, but the thing, but the thing, the thing about it is, is that if you do it, if you do, you can do it for free, but if you go for free,

you could be, you can wait for a long time, you can not actually get in for a while. If you pay, subscribe to it, you get it right away. You can leave it on, on your desktop and thus 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 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, you know, I would wind up saying, no, man, don't do, man, don't do that because don't, 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 you a question. I say, well, the reason that blah, blah, blah, 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 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, it has its limitations. It really does. And if you work with it for a while, you go, man, you know, it's, 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 is 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 got to give it the inputs. It's like a different way of creative. You still got to be creative, but you got to think, you got almost like a real. reverse it. There was a photographer who, 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 he was still enthusiastic about it. And he was still enthusiastic about it. And the interviewer said, so, so, 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 that did not come out of a camera or the real world. But the thing is, the reason of one is because he knows lighting. He described the exact lighting. Oh, wow. He described, he described the phone. He described the film. He described the lens that I want a shot with.

He literally, when he prompted it, he, because he's a photographer, a professional, he asked it to do all of these nuanced things. So when you see the image, the image, it's like, 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? What's his name? I can't remember his name, but he won black and white. He won a traditional

That's the image right there That one? That's the image Wow That looks like a real photograph Okay yeah it kind of does look like a painting though You can see like in a hand Well the other hand well the problem is It's the hand that's on the other shoulder

What the left shoulder? Yeah like the left shoulder Yeah that feels But you know a lot One of the big flaws With AI image is hands.

The hands are oftentimes are off. But the emotion, the way, you know, it looks like an old, a weathered photograph. Yeah. And, and. It's even got like a weird, like, lens flare in there. Yeah, yeah. Imperfections in there that you would think it would be part of a photo.

It's brilliant. It's really brilliant. And the thing is, where 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. 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 multimedia, you know? It's just so, 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 described, you know, in his prompt for the image. 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 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 an, it's a photograph from about the 1930s, I would say.

Yeah. and you know and it and it's yeah the only thing I mean the the only thing is the the left hand the left hand on the shoulder is is is that's the that's where that's the only um 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, it's the positioning of the, uh, the left hand. That's problematic. Right.

But they didn't, but they didn't pick up on it. They went, they went for it. That's so interesting, man. Yeah. So, yeah, so promptography is here. And, and the next thing, and, and this is where the freak out, the freak out will really come out is when, in the image. space when video yeah when you can describe video and describe i want a stop motion right of a coffee cup going across the thing and i want the table to be 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 like the deep fake thing shit is so convincing already it hasn't been able to do it hasn't 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 a shot with a film camera, I want to stop motion, and I want it da-da-da-da-da. And you're able to do that. and that can actually go down. Sure. 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. 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,

there's a place it has to go to first. There's a place it has to go. See, this is like, oh, damn it. 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, copyrighted 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. Right. So what boys 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 is 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. used for

model, for, you know, to train, to be legitimately used to train the AI without any copyright infringement problems. Particularly with photography, right? Since this stuff has been released to the public domain, it's being released to the public domain. Right.

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 this 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's copywritten images. And then, again, to go, to be able to go frame by, because there isn't that yet. But the day that there's a program or an app that lets you describe a scene, even 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 this whole conversation is going to be kicked into another orbit. Right. Absolutely. I agree. Wow, man. The ketchup's not going back

in the bottle. No, you're not going to get it back 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 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 this that we ain't thinking about it. When I'm thinking about it. Right. And we can't, we don't know what it's going to be because people are going to, people are going to be clever. And the person that could turn at just 45 degrees, you know, that person could be incredible boy, 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? Of course, yeah. What is your... Well, you know, playing with Living Club.

I just did, we were just in Memphis. We played the big Bill Street Festival. And the very next day, I went to Sam Phillips' recording and I produced a session. a friend of mine, Adam Rubinstein is making a film about the barquets. And the barcais 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 memory. There's a surviving member of the bass player James Alexander and he we did a they had this big tune in 67 sole finger this is this really cool instrumental thing and it's really cool tune and then I produced a version of it for the film for the documentary film oh that's amazing and Adam Rubinstein his cousin Ronnie Caldwell Ronnie Caldwell was the keyboard player for the barcase and he's the one white member of the barcais. 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 and it's kind of rabbit hole. And he's made, and it's, 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, 17 years old. you know and when odis redding heard them he just fell in love with them and these guys got to be my band you got to remember he was just in his 20s right right so it's uh 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 soul finger for the a new version of soul finger for the documentary and it Just so happened that he was making some interviews and then live in color.

We were going to be down there. So I stayed an extra day. And Mono Neon, an incredible lefty-based player, he's, you should check out Mono Neon's videos on YouTube. He's out of control. He's like Bootsie Collins 2.0. If you took Bootsie and Jocko, like he's crazy town. Wow. 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's the last surviving member of the barcase, bass player, is on this track with Mono Neon. Wow. 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 Sanfield 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 the summer, you know,

Living Color and the band Extreme, we're going out and doing shows, going out on tour. And at that, wrote a note, we're also going to be here in Florida, and we're going to be at Disney from 629 to the 2nd. Oh, no way.

Yeah. Oh, that's incredible. Yeah, so we're going to be, Living Color, we're going to do a little stand for Disney. What is your, like, range when it comes to like new music you'll listen to or experiment with. Like do you listen to new stuff that comes out? How many different genres do you dive into?

I'm one of those guys. Like I wish I was able to experiment with new music. Whereas 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. It's rare that I'll really like dive into some new album from some new band that I've rarely like a you mentioned you listen to you're listening to the new tool. Tool album a couple years ago. I saw you on your podcast. Fantastic. I was like, I listened to Tool a couple of 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, the, she's, she's, H-P, E, period, period R period her. Okay.

R&B artist, crypto, badass guitar player, too. She's really, she's like, she's kind of extraordinary because she's a singer-songwriter, but she's a multi-instrumentalist,

and 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 kind of wailing. I was like, what's up? Wow. Yeah, really talented. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's a good thing, you know. You're too young to have a 19-year-old, but... Yeah, I'm a little bit too young. My oldest is four. Well, you know what? Your kid's going to keep you connected. Keep you connected 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-princi, 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. Oh, no way.

Also named Steve Lacey. I was like, what you're talking about Steve Lacey? What you know? 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, the two bands that are kind of heavy is that thank you scientist, insane. It's very Prague. Very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very Prague band. And they're out of control. And what does that, what does that mean Prague? Prague.

You know, kind of, a lot of parts, pretty complicated. Okay. You know, and there's another band called Carbomb. 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 car bomb.

Okay. Yeah, you've got a wide variety. Yeah, a wide variety of things that I like. And I like older music. You know, obviously, I love working on the barcase thing. So I try to stay. I mean, I just think it. It's not even trying to stay.

I just dig it, you know. Right. I dig it. I dig it. Well, cool, man. Well, thank you again for coming. 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 Verk 22

on Instagram. I'm Verne 22 on Twitter. I'm Vernon Reed on Facebook. I'm Verne 22 on Mastodon. Also a great band, but it's an emergent. 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. And what else? I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I I think I'm going to mess with blue sky. You know, blue sky has just come out, you know. But I'm Verned V-U-R-N-T-2. That's me. Cool, man.

I'll make sure I link it all below for everyone who's watching and wants to follow. Fantastic. Thank you. I appreciate it, man. Appreciate you. Good night, world. Pace.