How's it going America,
Check out our latest episode of The Pod Millennial! I sit down with Jennifer Sey — former athlete, Levi's exec, and founder of XX-XY Athletics — to talk about why she gave up her career to stand up for female athletes, what really happened at Levi's, and the ideology erasing women from their own sports. Brand new episodes drop every Tuesday! Listen, rate (5 stars, of course!), and subscribe!
Let's get into it:
"I refuse, I patently refuse, to use AI in my music creation," said Smashing Pumpkins lead Billy Corgan. "Because to me it's a deal with the devil, simple."
He called AI “the demon on the other side of the room.”
And as he talks about how to make art, you can hear how he came to it as a kid and I remembered how I came to it as a kid and I’m damned glad that I had a pen, a paper, a typewriter, to get my ideas down and not some machine learning tool that put together something in 10 seconds that was passable, but not the stuff of my heart.
The temptation to discard your own talent in favor of the ease of AI would be so great that it would be hard to turn it down if you didn’t know any better. AI creates work that’s just good enough without actually stirring the depths of our souls. It gives the illusion of spirit without having a spirit at all. The realness, the ephemera, the whatness of our humanity cannot be reduced to a prompt.
“You know,” he told Ross Golan on the And the Writer Is... podcast, “whether it’s the Promethean fire myth or whatever, to me it is, you’re literally leaning into the thing that will destroy you, period. So that’s why I’m not going to mess with it, because the pressure, the inspiration, the soul searching, the ‘I’m not sure I got anything else to say,’ that’s all part of the journey that the songwriter needs to go to, okay.
“Now, if it was the guy in my band, or somebody I met through my friend, Shooter Jennings, or whatever, and we’re writing songs together, that’s a real person with real feelings and real blood coursing through their veins, and maybe someday we’re going to argue about a publishing split, okay, but if we’re arguing means there’s something of value that we’re arguing over. If my new buddy, my new running buddy, is pick your app or app to still be made. Okay, that shits never gonna end.
“I’m saying it’s good that a songwriter has a doubt, it’s good that a songwriter’s not sure they have anything left to say, it’s good that a songwriter has to think of a new chord they haven’t thought of. That’s where the magic comes from, and until that is proven otherwise, I’m sticking with the game I’m in.”
Later in the interview, he said, “Songwriting is still a capitalistic business,” he said. “Don’t care where you come from, we’re gonna run with it because it’s gonna make people some money. The publishing, the whole business, is still predicated on who writes those songs. That’s it. Now you want to be one of those stars with like 27 writers. You do what you have to do. Like people are asking me about Suno and all this stuff.
“I got a Suno in my brain. I don’t need Suno to write my songs.”
Just as God does not think we supersede or surpass him, we cannot come to think that our Frankensteinian creation is better at creation than we are.
Had a great time talking to Rep Randy Fine on Timcast last night, you can check it out here!
Libby