User:JMyles/The Algorithm and The Muse

The two ways that bluegrassers use AI

There are two distinguishable modes of engagement with AI emerging; in fact, they've already both achieved near-ubiquity among many musicians.

The first is the prompt-based interaction - we craft a thought or assertion specifically for the stimulation of a pretrained transformer or diffusion model or other generative AI. This seems to be, as of my brother's 2026 birthday (the day coming to a close as I write this), the type of interaction referred to most often when someone uses phrases like, "I used AI for that" or "that looks like AI to me."

This pattern of interaction currently has several layers of taboo surrounding it. This is particularly true in the case of making audio: we often ascribe indelicacy and boorishness to any prompting of an AI model for the purposes of making a waveform that sounds like music.

The second is the interaction in service of "the algorithm" - we conceive, create, edit, and post content in times, places, and manners that we suppose will result in our content being "boosted" (which is to say, shown to other people without their needing to seek it out). This is, with vanishingly few exceptions, an approximation (and often anthropomorphosis) stemming from attempts to discern patterns from opaque, closed-source, centralized services - most typically owned by two corporations: Meta and Google.

Of these two, the algorithm is rarely discussed as an AI phenomenon; musicians seeking "success" (sometimes without even fully considering what "success" is or what role it plays in the evolution of our music or our community) make all sorts of changes to their appearance, habits, lifestyle, and even their music in order to satisfy its apparent palate, but do so without saying (or even thinking), "I'm using the AI to dispense my music." In this sense, the algorithm represents a comparatively dark pattern of AI compared to the prompt.

Who is the customer and who is the product

In the age we have just departed - we can perhaps call it the "...as a service" age, with internet apps primarily being divided into categories like software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, self-hosted, etc., we seemed to achieve near consensus on the following adage:

“If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”

The specific phrasing I've used here is apparently from a Digg post in 2010, though the sentiment in various forms apparently began in the TV era.

However, I think we can recognize an evolution to this adage unfolding. Now, it's more like: when you are crafting the prompt, you are the creator; when you are responding to the prompt, you are the product.

I have replaced "if" with "when" here, because I think we invariably find ourselves playing both roles at various times in the first mode.