Even Taylor Swift is Redundant

So I drove Uber and Lyft for a few years until I got deactivated (a long story for another day), and one of the ways I've made money since then is giving cash rides. These aren't a ride home from the bar, these are trips. I arranged them with people I met on Facebook, and one guy hired me twice.

The first time I took him from Overland Park, KS to Lincoln, NE; a few weeks later he texted me, could I bring him from Nebraska City to Shawnee this evening. Well, it's not really $200 for my trouble because I burned $40 worth of gas doing the trip, but that still makes an hourly rate I can live with for the round trip. I wouldn't have gone for much less, like I say, these are trips, another gent had me drop him off down in Arkansas.

Andrei, the repeat rider, is from Ukraine originally, and bases out of New York City, but somehow ends up traveling around the midwest a fair amount. As we chatted along the way back, the subject of the royal wedding between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce came up. We speculated about what the prenup was like, I mean, Travis has money, but his wife has truly reached critical mass. Her money is making more money than her husband is making.

What if the prenup had a provision that no breakup album can be produced if they divorce?

Andrei started dictating into his phone, "Write a breakup song about Travis Kelce in the style of Taylor Swift."

The AI he was using said it couldn't be quite like Taylor Swift but they could generate a song in a country-pop genre that was on-topic. Then it played.

It played a fucking Taylor Swift song. The voice even sounded like her, the backgrounds, the song said something about thinking she had a touchdown but the ring fell off. It really sounded like a Taylor Swift breakup song, right down to football references. It sounded fully produced, layers of synths and drums and all the rest, as if you'd brought in a dozen great studio musicians and spent a few days laying down tracks. All percolated through one of those villainous data centers and piped into Andrei's cell phone on demand.

He told me the name of the AI he was using but I've forgotten it. What I retained was the information that when it comes right down to it Taylor Swift has been automated out of her job. She doesn't have to write a breakup song for Travis, they can grow old together and she can let AI go through the breakup for her.

I guess when it comes to being relegated, I was part of the problem. My uncle, the one who built me my dream guitar, wasn't a luthier first, he was a journeyman typesetter in the Linotype days. VDT and desktop publishing pushed him out of the print shop. One guy (me) could do what required dozens of skilled craftsmen to pull off. All AI is, really, is the next generation of computerization. We think its different because we thought creative endeavors were simply too complex to be computerized and automated.

As someone who enjoys being creative, who really has that need, it's threatening. Of course it's threatening. Just like my friend Julie was appallled that I used so much stock photography in my work, I dealt with clients and accounts that couldn't afford to hire a photographer for their special project. But of course, even those who have the budget lean on the stock photo services. Even without AI, it's part of what drove Julie from photojournalism to radio work, there simply aren't jobs for photographers who don't want to shoot weddings and sports.