This Is What You'll Pay For

About a year ago, an artist called "Jaime Brooks" uploaded music to Spotify for the first time. Their debut release was a forty-six second instrumental composition called "Martin Luther King Conservatory." It would be misleading to describe the piece as "music." In practical terms, it sounds like short clips of many different violin performances chopped up and re-arranged at random. There's no arc, no sense of movement, and no tension or release. Listening to it feels like waiting for a video to buffer, or trying to read a glitchy social media feed that keeps yanking posts away the second your eyes begin to settle on them. You start to crave something more focused and intentional, like the sound of a CD skipping or a kitten walking haphazardly across a set of piano keys.

During Jaime's first year on the platform, the project managed to attract a respectable following of nearly seven hundred monthly listeners. Artist pages on Spotify feature a section called "Discovered On," which can help give us some idea of how Jaime was able to accomplish this with such functionally unlistenable output. When you reach the end of a playlist or album on Spotify, the recommendation algorithm kicks in and begins playing songs it thinks you'll tolerate based on what you were just listening to. An artist page's "Discovered On" section shows us which albums or playlists users were listening to when that particular artist's music was served up to them. When I first discovered Jaime's artist page, the “Discovered On” box informed me that "Martin Luther King Conservatory" was recommended to listeners of classical music albums. Specifically, classical music albums intended to be listened to by babies.

It's probably just a coincidence that "Jaime Brooks" has the same name I do. The project's artwork, song titles, and audio all have the feel of "generative" assets created with machine learning tools like DALL-E and ChatGPT. It's commonplace for these products to be described as "artificial intelligence," which I think is stupid. Obfuscating the real-world shortcomings of new products by framing them as science fiction made real has long been standard operating procedure for the tech industry. We have nothing to gain by going along with it.

I would describe ChatGPT as a "generator." It generates content. Have you tried to look up a recipe on contemporary search engines at any point in the last several years? If so,