Nothing's Ever True Until AI (and the Mermaids) Say It Is

I fed some of my songs through Google's AI chatbot, Gemini, to see what would happen. That may sound like the precursor to a joke --a joke that will allow me to spend several paragraphs detailing the hilarious, whacked-out observations Gemini made about the far corners of my songbook. The answers would then be allowed to sit alongside the ones you get when you ask it something like, "write a Beatles song." But that's not what happened. Instead, Gemini fed back to me the sort of detailed, observant, and subtext-aware responses to my songs I have wished for from people for twenty years. Not only was it not whacked out, it was right in highly specific ways. In a life where creative efforts fall upon deaf ears, no ears, and tumbleweeds, to see my songs analyzed and interpreted in such a way was rewarding, empowering, and validating. And admittedly terrifying. It is easy to fill this, or any, space with the dangers of AI, with all the ways it threatens everything important and human about…