They are Trying to Sell you Anti-AI Spray
As some readers of this blog may know, or remember, I used to operate a pizza company that was sold in 2018. We had 14 units and did about 10,000 pizzas a week at our peak. 300 people. We knew what we were doing operationally. And I would say on the human resources side too, but that’s not what this post is about.
Since I was from the real estate world, and knew about that, and knew a bunch of people, I would get sent folks looking to get into the restaurant business--the restaurant curious.
I remember one super-young guy coming to see me, somewhat apologetically. He was as such because he was sure he was going to put me out of business. But needed my opinion on what he was doing.
He had proprietary technology for a pizza-making robot.
No sh*t.
This was the thing that was going to put me out of business.
Always willing to listen, I did just that. He talked me through his whole thing. The robot was really expensive and didn’t handle too much of the process (or anything). I don’t remember what it did, but I just remember it was the wrong part of the process.
Now, at that time, there was also a machine that sauced and cheesed a pizza. That I could get behind. And I was looking at possibly finding someone to make a raw pizza shell, which is pressed out, ready to go, cooked from raw in the oven. These all would have been huge money savers from a consistency standpoint. No "human capital" adjustment or savings. Anyhoo.
Shockingly, I never heard from this guy again, and he never opened his pizza robot restaurant.
But at that time, everyone in the industry was talking about how contraptions like his robot were going to put people out of work.
One thing you may not realize about pizza: it’s pretty much everybody’s first job. I didn’t know when I got into it that I’d be training the world’s workforce on how to work, and how to hold a job, and how to act at your job, etc.
I say all this because there are so many musicians screaming from the top of their lungs about AI. And the music that it makes, and making music, and Spotify, and all this kind of stuff.
And I hear it. I get it. I understand the arguments.
But I would say this.
When you’re writing a song and when you’re playing, you’ve got to summon the X, the other thing. I think as a writer, you know it when you've hit it. It’s like, 'aha, that is special. That made the hairs on my arm stand up, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.' This is the whole pay-off.
And to the people who are writing with whatever AI program they use, I don’t understand why you would write music without seeking this.
What is the point?
So I would just, as an argument, say there’s a way to write songs that really can’t be improved. I don’t know how you do better than sitting at a piano or sitting with an acoustic guitar. Turns out you can’t.
Or sitting with a synthesizer or tuba. Some person manually operating an instrument. Or a cappella, singing songs.
There’s no replacement for any of this.
Computers are not sentient. They act that way. They mimic it. Everyone knows AI is only like an assemblage of what has happened and what would be the thing of the thing they are trying to do.
So I look at it as our pizza robot from the past. And much like that, this will go away and people will still write and play songs.
Everyone enjoys, if not directly, an acoustic person with a guitar--if they’re good. Everyone enjoys a great band with a bass player in the pocket. These are things I know from experience.
Like songwriting, the reward is doing them--the things themselves.
And people are spending thousands of dollars on old Akai MPCs for mythical swing. The fact is, the machines and the programs can’t do it.
But what they do want you to do is be worried about it, engage, and fight about it. Because the longer you do, the more you stay on, the more they learn about you.
So they can market you anti-AI spray that keeps it all away.