On AI, the Future & Reviews

The passage of time is much on my mind, these days. The first things are becoming the last things. Will an encore follow? Or will the house lights nudge us into the night without one last turn in the spotlight? Does it matter? I saw Kelsey Waldon and her crack band on Saturday; they didn’t exit the stage only to return a few minutes later. Rather, after their last song, they gathered at the foot of the stage and bowed in unison. It was a sweet end to what was a wonderful show. Maybe that’s the way to go.

It’s a weird world we live in. Social media has replaced not only the town square, but newspapers. No one walks around with ink-stained fingers, anymore, and—from where I sit—we’re the worse for it. The TV “news,” meanwhile, is now a mix of Evening Magazine-type fluff and the op-ed page. Most everyone who fills the screen is either an advocate or propagandist and less concerned with facts than emotion. Feelings flow unencumbered through the tubes that make up the internet, while truth clogs things up.

Artificial intelligence is trumpeted as a great thing. It erases the need for a large workforce—always a good thing within the C-suite. Why pay a person to toil over the written word when a machine can do it for free? On an individual level, why do it yourself, anyway? Save an hour or two or three. Let ChatGPT do it for you. 

To that end, over the past many months, my Facebook newsfeed has become awash in lengthy AI-penned essays about artists and albums, with a myriad of accounts relying on such fodder to attract followers and earn money from ads and whatnot. Most, because of the demographic I find myself in, are nostalgia-soaked. They’re cookie-cutter pages, really, with the only differences being their titles.

There have also been instances of AI-crafted articles and reviews, most notably in the Chicago Sun-Times a while back. (See this Guardian article for more on that.)  

As a result, a few weeks ago, after hours spent crafting my much-delayed take on Madison Hughes’ All That I Am, I asked Google’s Gemini to review it—for no reason other than curiosity. How would it compare? Twenty seconds later, I had a 500-word piece that delved into the album’s melodies, rhythms and rhymes…and, if I wasn’t familiar with the songs, I would have deemed it a fine, if somewhat staid, review. There weren’t any of my non-sequiturs, silly asides, flights of hyperbole or, aside from my request to equate her voice to a comfortable flannel shirt (as I did in my review), stretched metaphors—but some might think that a good thing, right? Reading is a chore and bore for some, with anything lasting longer than a hundred words causing them to click away.  

Here’s the thing, though: The All That I Am songs that Gemini referenced aren’t on the album. The style and sound? Again, wrong. It didn’t mention the smoky timbre of her voice or that her songs possess a twangy flavor. When I pointed out the errors in the next prompt, it admitted to using “placeholder song titles” and called her very real album “hypothetical.” Huh?! What?! 

I can imagine more and more overworked “managers” clicking “publish” on AI-generated articles, essays and reviews that are filled with incorrect facts. AI is artificial intelligence, after all, akin to the plastic fruit some folks use for decorative purposes. They look good, sure. But when you bite in…well, I don’t know what it tastes like, but it sure ain’t tasty.

We already live in a world where facts are questioned. Truth is dismissed as “fake news.” But what becomes of us when a seemingly innocuous internet prompt tells us that up is down? When reliable sources of accurate information no longer exist?