Originally Posted by Mike Halloran
Originally Posted by JohnJohnJohn
The AI has gotten incredibly good indeed! But the question is, Do you want to write your songs yourself using tools like MasterWriter to assist or do you want AI to write them for you? Personally, I want AI to do more of my work so I have more time to do my art and hobbies.
Sounds nice, I suppose.

The last thing I want is for AI to help me write songs. I am not driven to produce content and only do so when I have something I like. I have a few hundred songs written over the last fifty-five years; if all I want to do is produce content, I’d start with those.

I do use AI a lot. ACE Studio lets me import MusicXML and assign voices that sing the words and music. Saves a lot of time making choral demos for myself and clients. I have a couple of other AI tools for this and that but none are used as part of my creative process.

I’ve had in mind a sprawling historic novel for a few decades. I was hoping that I could use AI to help me with the needed research. It’s generated so much misinformation—now we call it AI slop—that AI has proven absolutely useless for the task. Maybe it will get better but, for now, it’s not nearly ready for prime time.

An AI tool I would buy in a second is a music scanner that actually works—looks at a piece of printed music and knows the notes, rests, key changes, reads the words and clefs and gets it right. I have SmartScore, MusicToPDF, MuseScore and a few others. Sometimes they save some time but none of them are any damned good with the historical scores I use in my theater and church work. It’s often faster to just re-enter everything in Finale, one note at a time (my left arm is paralyzed from a stroke I suffered 17 years ago). Rearranging twenty pages of Gilbert and Sullivan this weekend for a show I’m conducting in August — looks horrible in SmartScore, dammit.
Yeah, if you re-read my comment you'll see I also want no AI writing any parts of my songs! I already feel guilty enough for using BIAB!

I've avoided AI for research where facts matter and I can't independently confirm what is presented. However, I had a fantastic recent AI experience that delighted and frightened me about the future!

I am a website developer by trade for the past 30 years. And I am a capable coder in many programming languages. Recently I've been hearing chatter about using AI to write code but I've been very skeptical. So a week ago I decided to give it a try. And I was blown away at how fast it was able to deliver a fully functional Wordpress plugin with only about an hour of back and forth "conversation"!

I will qualify the results by acknowledging that I had to provide very clear, informative prompts that wouldn't have been possible without my background. And when it made mistakes or generated code that could be a security risk I was able to catch and correct those issues. But it gave me exactly the code I needed in an hour that would have probably taken me a day or two to develop!

One caveat to this experience is, because I did NOT go through the specific learning experience for developing that piece of code, I didn't really add much to my personal knowledge. And a year from now that bit of code will be harder to support.

With that said, I bookmarked the "conversation" and I can rejoin it at any time to refresh my memory (unless/untill that bit gets erased!)