Human Connection Will Always Win

I'm a fan of Charles Cornell, a music educator on YouTube.

He recently posted the video above, discussing the potential impacts of AI on music and music education.

I don't know the answers, obviously, but I hope my comment on his video, reproduced here, at least puts in a glimmer of hope:

I've come into your channel a bit unconventionally. It might have been your video on "Pure Imagination" that came across my feed. But I'm not a music educator. I'm not a musician. I can carry a tune, but I don't sight read, I don't play an instrument, nor do I really comprehend about half of the stuff you say in your videos (musicians use a looney moon-man language). However, I do enjoy music eclectically. I'll start a YouTube mix going at night as I'm drifting off to sleep. I watch your videos and see parallels between writing music and writing words (my niche, where we also use a lot of looney moon-man language).

I guess my point is this: Yeah, real creators on YouTube might lose people to audiences that do not care that what they're consuming is AI-generated. AI might get good enough to do the kinds of things you describe, and for maybe the majority of people, that'll be fine. I think this is already true for people who turn to the internet for quick answers or instant gratification, no matter what they're looking for, and it's likely you're already not reaching these people.

But I firmly believe there are and will continue to be plenty of people out there who want that "human" element that we only find in meat-space, or at least in meat-adjacent space like your videos. Your videos have helped me make connections to things I want to learn, things I already know, and things I want to create not because some algorithm created your content and fed it to me when I asked for it but because of the stuff I have in my head connecting with the stuff you have in your head making a connection through your channel.

I'll admit that when I look for content and I get a whiff of AI, I resent it. I'm in that minority he talks about. That's not to say everything AI is terrible. I am growing to appreciate the AI summaries that come up in my searches, but I definitely take it with a grain of salt, much as we used to do with Wikipedia. This is particularly true on social media. On YouTube, I've yet to run into much content that's AI-generated, and for that I'm grateful. But I guess only the ether knows what'll happen in the future.