Why This Exists

Ask not what AI can do for you. Ask what only you can do with AI.

I used to write at brownphantom.blogspot.com. Then Twitter arrived, and video after it, and the audience left for shorter things. I was too lazy to follow them and too lazy to fight back, so I abandoned the blog and made my peace with that. It was a comfortable peace. I recommend it.

In 2023 I started testing AI image generators, and the easiest test material was my own old posts. I fed them in to see what came back. Then came the music tools, Suno first and Mureka after it, and with them a stray thought.

In 2012 I had written a post about my jazz album. The album did not exist. Had these tools been around then, I could have simply made it. So I made it now, fourteen years late, with a video to go with it, purely for fun.

That opened the floodgates again. Nothing stands between me and an idea any more except the idea itself.

I could call the results art. They are certainly creation of some sort. AI is very good at craft and not yet good at art. I suspect most of the opposition comes from craftsmen who thought they were artists. I say this as someone who had neither, and now suddenly has one.

What is happening now is beautiful. For two years it has been a steady source of joy and fun. I feel something close to gratitude, even reverence, for these new wings, new wheels and new fins.

This website is where I will share that joy, until AI makes something that makes me abandon the process all over again.

And even if (when?) AI gets truly great at art, I take some solace in this. It will never be moved by these lines the way I was the first time I read them.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear: Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.