User:JMyles/The Algorithm and The Muse

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. The most obvious of these is the impetus to ascribe indelicacy and boorishness to any prompting of an AI model for the purposes of making a waveform that sounds like music. This is particularly germane in bluegrass, where a central notion of genre identity is the vibration of real, metal strings on real, wooden instruments, most acutely before a live audience.

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.