Living The Bot Life

Adventures in Artificial Intelligence

You probably know I’ve been a techy sort of guy for a long time. I had my first little 4-track recording studio back in 1983. I used to have a Blackberry. I got an iPhone early on. You know the drill.

For the last couple of months I have been spending a bunch of time with Claude, the AI chatbot from Anthropic. You, of course, know the bot guys that are going to crawl out of the computer in the middle of the night and murder us. Why then, you may ask, am I doing such a thing? What do I need that for?

Well it’s like this: I’m 73 and my short-term memory is becoming increasingly annoying. I have to use all kinds of tricks, take all kinds of little notes, make post-its and all this junk I never had to do. I went and got tested by professional specialist doctors, guys with certificates on their walls. After doing a bunch of testing they said, “Tom, you are completely normal for your age.” Fucking Yikes!

After seeing the mushroom movie Fantastic Fungi a few years ago, I started taking lion’s mane mushroom capsules to help improve my memory. I don’t know if they’re doing anything but I’m chicken to stop taking them. Double Fucking Yikes!

A couple months ago I started thinking, “Can the bots help me keep track of stuff? Can they put stuff in “boxes” where I can find it later and maybe move even beyond that?” I had paid little attention to Ai, so I asked my son, Ben Dyer, what he thought because that’s the turf he works. He lives down in San Francisco writing code in the world of computer technology. He uses AI stuff every day. He said, “Well Dad, it might help you and if you’re gonna go do it, I recommend you use Claude.”

Claude had just become the biggest thing in AI land, passing up ChatGPT, which the hip kids considered yesterday’s flavor. I said, “Okay I’ll take the plunge.” When I first logged into Claude using voice interaction, much to my amusement, Claude was a limey dude. Now I’m sure I could change Claude to be from wherever I want and be whatever gender I want, but I kind of like my limey dude Claude, so I’m sticking with him.

Besides helping me keep track of stuff, I decided pretty early on that I wanted Claude to be tech support for me. Three years ago I bought my first Mac computer after being a PC guy my whole life. I still have trouble with finding stuff on a Mac. It’s pretty damn annoying and the Apple support people are mostly very nice, but more work than not

Additionally, I started using Apple’s neato multi-track recording program (Digital Audio Workstation - DAW), which is called LogicPro. I even started a yet-to-be-named new band with Michael Stein where we’re going to make music in LogicPro. I’ve been a Pro Tools guy for a long time. They have been the dominant “pro” DAW since the 90’s. Now to some extent, all DAWs are the same. There’s a pretend console with pretend knobs just like ye olde analog days. There’s a pretend multi-track tape deck and there’s a pretend mixdown deck. That’s the intellectual model of what a DAW is. However, all the bells and whistles and where they hide this switch and that menu and all that other stuff is not the same from DAW to DAW. This can be maddening!

Michael and I thought we’d learn Logic using the official Logic training manual - a 416-page book of torture. We also would watch long -winded YouTube videos looking for tiny tidbit tips. Since getting Claude, my Logic tech support has become 100% better. If we are stuck on something, we ask Claude and cheery limey Claude says, “Ding, ding, ding, do these 3 things.” It’s great.

Michael and Tom at KGY

On the memory side of things, I started looking at all my calendar entries and my project spreadsheets, my 500 lists in my Google drive, my little scraps of paper and all this messy stuff. The two big things that were driving my calendar are Green Monkey Records upcoming releases and the seven upcoming recording projects of my own Tom Dyer music. That’s a pile of balls in the air and those balls all bounce around kind of funny. They rarely line up as tidy as I would like.

Claude helped me set up databases, and to track all these projects and help think them through to make them very effective tools. I hadn’t done a database since I was working on my doctorate, twenty years ago. Drummer is having shoulder surgery? Move that project down the list. The Purdins just booked an August record release date - move them up. Way less remembering, way less forgetting, way more tidy. So that’s worked out pretty well.

The most radical thing that I’m doing with Claude is looking at how my music and all the music on Green Monkey Records is promoted: its public presence. Green Monkey has always been a labor of love. It’s never paid anything that’s worth my time. I’m probably making about three cents an hour.

Over the last 10 to 15 years, the landscape of releasing independent music has radically changed. My little niche for releasing music has in many ways dried up. Reviewers that I knew have died, magazines that we used to get reviews in have gone away, et cetera.

When I think about Green Monkey Records and myself as an artist, what I really love to do is make records (CDs & LPs). I would think it was nice if somebody listened to them. What I don’t like to do is promote records. I asked Claude to look at all my online stuff, et cetera, and said, “OK what can I do to build a better machine to promote my music and the music of all the artists on Green Monkey Records?”

I would’t say I bared my soul to Claude in my discussions of “what is now“ and where it would like to go, but I tried to be pretty frank about what was happening, what I saw as weaknesses. I asked, “What recommendations did Claude have to kick everything up a notch or two or maybe three?” Claude gave me recommendations. I am implementing a bunch of them. It remains to be seen whether this stuff’s gonna be effective or not. The fact is, the reason my music has never had a popular audience may just be because people just don’t like it. Oh fucking well! I have decided that I am going to put these recommendations into motion, give them a push, and see what happens. Among other things, I decided to change my Facebook music page from Tom Dyer’s Unpopular Music to the infinitely more upbeat Tom Dyer’s Beautiful Music for Discerning Humans. The former was perhaps self-fulfilling prophecy after four-plus years and the latter is slightly more upbeat and optimistic. Maybe even cheery. I’m reviving my mothballed greenmonkeyrecords.com website to make it the hub for all my other music activities rather than just a being a Debbie downer spot for losers. Claude convinced me to boil down my Green Monkey Newsletter and instead get a Substack, which you are reading right now, where I can drone on indefinitely about whatever the hell strikes my fancy (yes, you may subscribe)! There are still some more tricks coming, boys and girls.

The Verdict

Of course, the jury is still out, but overall I’d have to say this has been a useful experience for me. I’m meeting the “goals” that I had for using Claude when I started and moving beyond them. It will be interesting to see how far this goes and, in fact, whether or not Claude can help me turn myself into Taylor Swift. We’ll see.

td