It’s a companion piece to this post about AI in education. AI slop and musical creativity by Dr. Ethan Hein are not the same thing Read on Substack
Tag Archives: AI
AI is harmful for learning which is why I’m banning it in my classes
I put up my course web site for History of 20th Century American Popular Music, which includes an assignment due the first day of class: read about Stephen Foster and “Old Folks at Home”, listen to recordings of the song by Al Jolson and Ray Charles, and write a one paragraph response. Within 24 hours of emailing the students that …
Continue reading “AI is harmful for learning which is why I’m banning it in my classes”
Teaching Pop Music Analysis for Non-Majors
I am teaching two new NYU classes this fall. One of them is History of 20th Century American Popular Music, which I wrote about recently. The other is Pop Music Analysis for Non-Majors. I enjoy teaching new classes, even though they require a lot more work than teaching an existing class. The history class takes …
Continue reading “Teaching Pop Music Analysis for Non-Majors”
I’m in this Adam Neely video about AI
I make a couple of brief appearances in Adam Neely’s latest video about generative AI music. Neither of us think it’s a good idea.
AI slop predates AI
One of my back burner writing projects is a book chapter about generative AI in music education and why I think it’s a Bad Thing. In preparation, I reread Ted Chiang’s New Yorker essay about why AI isn’t going to make art, which I completely agree with. To put ourselves in the right frame of mind …
AI transcription on MusicRadar
This week I wrote my first software review for MusicRadar, assessing a web app that promises to create sheet music from audio recordings. TL;DR it doesn’t do a great job.
AI slop and musical creativity
Next week, my NYU graduate seminar on technology in music education is supposed to start talking about AI: large language models, prompt-based generators, stem separation and so on. I am not feeling much enthusiasm for this unit, for a couple of reasons. First of all, we are currently talking about YouTube, which is a richly …