Oh Please, Not an AI Music Composer

A Hamilton player piano:
 an old-fashioned music machine.

Facebook just fed me an advertisement for an AI music composer -- an AI engine that will write music for you. Does nobody remember George Orwell's 1984? In that dystopian novel, all of the pop music was written by computers. It was glurge that appealed to the masses, and pacified them, but it was emphatically not high art.

So far, I'm not all that impressed with AI. I know it's "the future," and I know "the future is now," but frankly, the way most humans wield AI is clumsy and talentless. We are excited about the sloppy software, and B-grade graphics that people have generated using AI. And we've read story after story about people using AI to make resumes, term papers, book reports, newspaper articles, speeches, and even legal briefs -- all of them marred by sloppy logic, inaccurate "facts" and analyses, made-up references, and so on.

If AI music promises to be of the same quality as the rest of this garbage, then I will only listen to musc created before 2025, thankyouverymuch.

To be clear, ultimately it's not the AI engine or Large Language Model (LLM) that's the problem. The AI is just a tool. The problem lies with the human using the tool.

Most of you are too young to remember the original Apple Macintosh computer. It was released in 1984 -- gasp okay, that's ironic. Anyway, the Mac came with a suite of software including a desktop publishing program called Aldus PageMaker. This was really putting power in the hands of the people. Suddenly, any idiot could be a desktop publisher.

And do you know what? Every idiot became a desktop publisher. The world was papered with ugly, lousy, amateur posters and newsletters and banners. You could spot a PageMaker document a mile away, not because of any defects in the software, but because of the human who had used PageMaker with all the skill of a lefthanded troll to create such an ugly document.

Now we're seeing the same misuse of AI. We're already seeing the PageMaker-quality output in words, in images, and in video. Are you ready to hear it in music? With AI, any idiot can become a composer.

I read today that composer John Williams has just finished writing a piano concerto. The man is 93 years old. He has a lifetime of talent and experience behind him. AI music may be able to imitate his compositions, but it will never match his genius or the quality of his work. There is no shortcut to that kind of quality.

In Honor of Steve Jobs

Better writers than me have written better eulogies than this for Steve Jobs in the past 24 hours. I recommend the ones at Wired and NPR. I'm sure Time will have something worthwhile to read. Since I don't have anything new or exclusive to add, this entry will be short.

Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer on Wednesday, October 5, 2011. He was 56 years old. He left behind a wife and four children, whom he loved and whom he carefully kept out of the spotlight during his very public career. He also left behind a vibrant computer company, one that in its own way (and in his own way) defined consumer computing, leading the way for Microsoft and IBM, and later for Google, Motorola and all the other "me-too" companies.

What did he do?  Well, an automobile is a complex piece of machinery, and yet every single automobile in the world is controlled in exactly the same way, with a steering wheel, a gear shift, and two pedals.  Jobs did the same thing for computers and computing.  Outside of what he has left for his family, that may be his greatest legacy.

With the iPhone, he also reinvented the mobile telephone.  And with Pixar, he reinvented animated, feature-length, family movies.

 He is named as inventor or co-inventor on over 300 patents, covering computers, telephones, music, and more.  Steven Levy, in his eulogy in Wired, named Jobs' six biggest technical and business accomplishments:

• the Apple II computer
• the Macintosh computer
• Pixar Studios
• the iPod
• the iPhone
• the iPad

In the NPR story, Robert McNamee, a venture capitalist, called Jobs a modern-day "Thomas Edison."  Moviemaker Steven Spielberg (what is it with all these Stevens today?) echoed that sentiment.

Whether you own an Apple product or not, Steve Jobs has had a profound and lasting effect on your life.

Edit:  I added the picture.  Not sure what the original source was; I swiped it from FB.

What was once a "program" is now an "app"

Observe, with me, the interesting progression of terminology in the software industry.

(For those who are not computerly inclined, here's a quick definition of basic terms. Way back in the dawn of digital time, computers were composed of hardware and software. Hardware is all the tangible, physical parts of a computer: the metal case, the printed circuit board and all the little components on it, even the wires that connect everything together. Even soft plastic parts are still tangible, so we still call them "hard" ware.

Software is all the intangible stuff that makes computers run -- the programs. They're not tangible or physical, so they can't really be called "hard" ware. But since they're as essential to the computer's functioning as the hardware, they had to be called something -- hence, "soft" ware.)

Today we consider all the synonyms for "software":

• program
• software program
• firmware
• code
• suite
• application
• app

Back when computers were brand new, they used to run programs. A program was a series of instructions that the computer followed to complete a task. The earliest computers had to be programmed, or fed instructions, by flipping a series of switches on the front panel. (After flipping the switches hundreds of times just to enter one program, and still getting it wrong, engineers decided they needed to invent a different way to program a computer -- in a hurry. That's how we ended up with mass storage devices.)

Even in the early days of home computers, people called them programs. One program fit on one floppy disk, and to use the computer, users ran the program.

As computing tasks got more complicated, programmers started including other things on the disk: data files, libraries, configuration files, and additional programs to be run automatically by the main program. Since users weren't just running a single program anymore, programs began to be marketed as software -- an interesting, and not at all inappropriate, reuse of the generic term.

I still crack up when I see a marketing department or a magazine writer refer to these things as software programs. It's a hilarious redundancy.

Some software is critical enough to the computer's operation that it's stored in a memory chip inside the computer. Because this software is stored in hardware, it's neither hard nor soft, so the pros call it firmware.

We've come a long way from the days of flipping switches. Today you can use one programming tool on one machine to write programs in many different programming languages, for many different systems. This has led programmers to start referring to the stuff they produce as code. There's source code, object code, assembly code, byte code, high-level code, low-level code, compiled code, interpreted code, Mac code, Linux code, Windows code, ... and it's all just programs and programming.

Somewhere along the way, software vendors began to combine separate programs into agglomerations that were (supposed to be) more powerful than the individual programs. These were referred to as suites. For a while, everyone was selling an office suite. Adobe has a lock on the best graphics suite in the world. Other companies sell animation suites, CAD suites, audio/video production suites, gaming suites, and in a beautiful recursion, software development suites.

Also somewhere along the way, someone said, "We're not selling programs, we're selling applications." After that, what was formerly known as something else became known as an application -- still just a collection of programs and related software items.

With the introduction of very smart handheld devices such as the iPhone, someone said, "Since these devices are small, the term for the software they run should also be small." So an application became an app, as in "There's an app for that."

Ah, but the term app got away from its creators. First it spread to non-iPhone handhelds, and then to non-handheld hardware, and finally to browsers. Now any software that runs on any kind of computing device is an "app".

But when you distill it down to its essential parts, it's still just a program.