ai is here but don't fear
i have a phd so listen to me
the safety issues can be resolved
before they evolve
we have smart people
the models won't eat us
(wrote this while listening to yet another ai timeline...)
last month at SPARC, we had a superlatives survey where people filled out "most likely to..."
to my surprise, i won the category for "most likely to not be replaced by ai"
i'm not quite sure exactly what about me gave that quality, but i feel really happy others think i have it.
maybe the defining quality of not being replaced by ai is simply lacking the fear of it happening, because you're still happy you're yourself either way.
anyways, some other crazy things happened at sparc this year.
like we wrote a musical.
yes a whole musical with six whole original songs. an opening number, a sad "i want song,” and more!
it's a satire about citadel, the quant company i like to make fun of.
i made a playbill (haha "paybill") and we casted students to perform it on the last day during the talent show.
to backtrack on why i was so adamant on writing a musical, last month when i was in new york, riley, one of the creators of the steakhouse sent a message in the mehran's steakhouse whatsapp group saying that some people at reputable musical writing workshop wrote a musical about the steakhouse. i knew i had to see it. i pushed my trip to new york back a few days to go and see this masterpiece.
i asked if i could film the behind the scenes and filmed an interview asking them about their process for writing the song and filmed the show. watching these crazy talented theater students materialize a musical from scratch gave me the confidence to do what they did. sitting on their fire escape, listening as they shared the secrets of musical writing, i realized i could do that, too.
backtrack some more, there was also i musical i reviewed for the cmu newspaper last year called emote performed by engineers (who were doing a vocal minors). the lyricist, tim, happened to be my downstairs neighbor. we went on a walk and i asked him how he wrote the musical. he told me he’s always loved watching them so he decided to jump in and do it for his final thesis. i realized then that the only real way to learn was by doing it.
fast forward to the first day of sparc, i met an amazing composer and friend of a friend, holden. meeting holden was like talking to a living version of mozart or beethoven. i've never met anyone who had the musical talent right before my eyes. the way holden creates and plays any piece of music felt like pure magic. i knew it was time. we had to write a musical.
over the next few days, we drafted lyrics and shared inside jokes. we rhymed and wrote with ai. we deleted and rewrote without ai. we banged our heads for inside jokes and sparc-themed pickup lines to add to our script.
in the end, we did it.
people laughed, people cried. people left comments on the recording.
if you want to watch the musical recordings (sparc and steakhouse) you may buy a ticket to watch them both here (and the behind-the-scenes) by buying a subscription ($7) to the substack.
i’ll also include some more personal reflections about it.
"it's not the role of artists to preach. the role of artists is to amaze people into changing their minds"
– timothy morton