This is episode 76 of the Renew the Arts Podcast. Bless Your Limitations, a talk about AI with Rusty Hein.

Welcome to the Renew the Arts Podcast, where we discuss the role of art and creativity in the church and in the world. I’m your host, Michael Menkoff. Our motto at Renew the Arts is liberate Christian creativity.

Our mission is to cultivate Christian communities by inspiring art partnership and supporting artists. If you’d like to join our community of monthly donors and contribute to this podcast, please visit renewthearts.org/donate. If you want to join the Porchlight Network and begin your journey as a partner in the arts, go to app.porchlight.art and sign up as a host or attendee.

Well, welcome to the Renew the Arts Podcast and I’m on the Zoom with my really good friend, Rusty Hein. The Zooms. The Zoom.

You gotta put an S at the end. The Zooms.

The Zooms.

We’re on the Zooms.

We’re on the Zooms. Hey, I’m on the Zooms with my really good friend, Rusty Hein. Here I am.

We’ve known each other for over 20 years.

Since 2005.

Since 2005.

Yeah, 21 years.

Yeah.

Our relationship can drink alcohol now.

Yeah. And I can pretty much mark this because when I met you, I was at a Blockbuster. And right before you got married.

Right before I got married. And so I have been married for a little over 21 years. So I know that I’ve known you for a little over 21 years.

And that’s a story maybe we can tell all of you at some other point. But Rusty lived with me.

We met at a Blockbuster.

We did meet at a Blockbuster. Yeah, that is all you need to know. It has to be more than 20 years.

I mean, it also explains why I’m calling this the Zooms. It’s like, wow, you’re old. It’s like, I am.

I had a Blockbuster card. I did.

Yeah.

It’s like, oh.

I still remember rewinding VHS.

Oh, yeah. I had landlines for it. Yeah, I remember my number from when I was a kid.

Do you remember from when you were a kid?

I think so.

Yeah, because my parents were like, if you ever are out and you know, because they would also let us wander the neighborhood until all hours.

Yeah.

Like with no supervision. Classic. And so he’s like, if you’re ever out and you need to call, like you need to know the number.

So it’s like a thing you had to memorize. Anyway, right. Funny.

Now, now, you know, you like give your kid a phone. You’re like, here, go rot your brain. And yeah, I don’t do that to my.

I think I still have Jeremy’s phone number memorized.

Really? Mutual friend, Jeremy.

All right.

Anyway, 361-265. Yeah, I’m nice. Say it out loud.

It might be the same. Now, everybody don’t go.

Now, everybody’s going to call Jeremy.

Very good. Jeremy is a good time.

Bleep it.

Take this out. Hey, Chase, take this out or not. All right.

So Rusty and I have been friends for a really long time, as you can probably tell, because we’re totally getting derailed already, which is great. That’s what this is going to be. So if you like the Joe Rogan podcast, where they talk about nothing for four hours straight, that is about that.

That’s going to happen.

I don’t have four hours. I’m like, well, we can’t do this for four hours.

Okay, we won’t.

I have like an hour and a half, maybe.

Awesome. We’ll take all the time we can. So this is creative director of Renew the Arts, Rusty Hein.

And never really known what that meant exactly.

Well, you direct the creatives.

Yeah, I don’t know.

Anyway, let me finish introducing you.

Yeah, sorry.

Man, this guy. Tell you what. Anyway, so he lived with me for a long time, and we worked at the beginning when it was the Nehemiah Foundation for Cultural Renewal, and he was still with us when we shifted over to the public charity Renew the Arts, and he’s been working with us consistently.

He developed our web site. He did all of our logos or he, no, he helped with the logos. He helped with the logos and the type design, and he oversees all the creative stuff that we do for all the front-facing stuff for the entire organization.

He’s also a visual artist both in digital and real media. He’s the, if you want to look at how that gets combined, he’s done a number of various different music videos. He’s also done a little bit of our intro.

He did the intro video and he actually painted all those illustrations in gouache and then was able to put them together in an animation. So a lot of really, really cool things that you’ve been able to do. Extremely competent, really servant-hearted, really kind dude.

And anyway, he moved away from us. He abandoned me and my family to move to California.

To join your family.

Yes, to marry my wife’s cousin.

That’s how I explain it.

That’s fine. Yeah, it’s more complicated than all that. But anyway, so you’re actually part of my family.

I am your cousin slash uncle. So you can call me Uncle Michael now. And-

Uncle Cousin Michael.

Uncle Cousin Michael. Yeah. Anyway, I thought we were the Georgians.

You’re supposed to be like Californians.

Half uncle.

Okay. Yeah, half uncle. Half uncle, full third cousin.

Half uncle, cousin-in-law, Michael.

Yeah, okay. Very good. Please call me that full government name this entire conversation.

So Rusty also, he’s, he got married. He’s in California. He lives in Santa Cruz, California, and he has just had a baby boy named Teo.

Well, I didn’t have the baby, and it was a year and a half ago. Almost two now. Cutest little baby boy.

Yes, he is very cute.

They don’t get cuter. I don’t think. I don’t know.

I mean, no. And then he named him T-Rex, of course, because that’s what you do. And Teo.

His name means God is King, though. I think that’s really cool.

Right. Okay.

So anyway, so that’s who I am.

And Rusty is also very interested in AI, both as a observer of it, as it develops, but also as a user of it. And we’ve had a lot of conversations over the past years, a couple of years or so, because-

Yeah, just pretty much since it’s been rolling out, we’ve been talking about its implications and what it might do good for society and what it might destroy.

Right. And I pretty much, as you have heard already from the two episodes previous, my perspective on AI is basically that it will be good by destroying all the possibilities of all of our fakeness and lameness, that it will, that it, you know, in some sense that there will be a possibility of a recuperation of authenticity because it will absolutely require that. It’s going to push us to the brink of that.

Now, that’s not really a very cheery take on it, nor is it, I mean, it’s kind of like sideways positive take. And I recognize that. I think that Rusty’s take on AI is a little bit more actually positive.

I think you think that it can be used and that could be useful. And so I wanted to give him an opportunity to kind of push back on my perspective, give his perspective on why he likes AI, why he uses it, why he thinks that it could be valuable, potentially what’s problematic about it and all that thing. So first off, Rusty, confess, you use AI.

I do. Yeah.

Anyway, we’re done.

You don’t? You’ve never used?

I have used AI because they won’t even hardly let you not use it. I mean, I’m pretty sure you can use manual, opt out of it on Google or something. But if you just search in your phone, it’s like, here’s your AI summary.

And honestly, it’s annoying. The AI summary are oftentimes very not good.

It’s pretty basic and dumb right now, I think.

Not good information sometimes.

Oh, yeah.

Like I’ll be looking at it and I’m enough of an expert on some of these things to just be like, I don’t think that’s correct. I think that’s actually incorrect information.

That’s happened sometimes. Well, quite a bit. Yeah.

I mean, the AI is still hallucinating, but it’s getting a lot better. What I’m finding is the AI integrations into my phone, for instance, those are not helpful at all. I haven’t found those to be very useful, but I feel like it’s got to start out kind of dumb, and they’ll eventually get it to where it’s more helpful and useful.

But right now, yeah, when they do an AI summary of a text message, I’m just like, I don’t need this. Text messages aren’t that long anyway.

Well, when they spend so much money on developing it, I’m pretty sure that they’re just like, we’ve got to get usefulness out of this. You know what I mean? It’s almost like they…

It’s like this thing where it’s new and it’s special, and so it’s like they’re trying to shove it into everything they can possibly shove it into just to see what sticks.

I just think that that’s like the human nature.

No, I know. Yeah.

Yeah. I don’t even know if it’s necessarily because they have spent so much money on it that they, but I think that we just like, I’ve often wondered like we have all these novels that explain what’s going to happen when we get AI and they never turn out good. Why are we pushing in this direction if, if like we haven’t ever heard of a great outcome?

Well, and it just seems like humans are just going to try to figure it out if we can.

Like, it’s kind of inevitable though, because if you don’t do it, somebody else will and then they’ll get that advantage. It’s just like how you can see the race to the bottom in so many various different circumstances where it’s like, well, if everybody committed to the zipper weave, we’d all get there faster. But because there’s two or three out of 100 people that have the initiative to zoom around, cut people off.

Oh, you mean zipper merge, like when people are merging onto the highway? Yeah.

And it’s like if everybody committed to it and did it, it would be great. But a couple of people don’t.

Or if everybody committed to good agricultural practices, then we’d be great. But because people are cutting costs here and there and willing to do unethical things to lower prices, where people aren’t buying the more expensive ethical product, because the cheaper unethical product is just more budget-friendly, and don’t I have to be concerned about that?

What difference does it make if it’s just me?

Yeah.

And so that’s how things-

I’m just doing what’s good for my family and we all go to the bottom. Yeah, sure.

Right. And so I think that has been driving the AI technological surge over the past few years. I think that it’s like, well, if we don’t master it and somebody else does, then they’re going to be-

then it’s basically like what happened to the auto industry, where we’re all putting together things by hands and our hand in our long assembly line processes. And Japan has already started to use robotics in the manufacture of cars, so they can do more efficient, highly reproducible results much more quickly and much more cheaply. And it’s like, who’s going to be able to compete?

And there’s not human error.

No, exactly.

It’s like every single one is identical.

That’s what I mean.

And that’s great.

Yeah, it’s great. I mean, they can see what we want. Exactly.

And that-

Consistent quality and-

We don’t want handmade cars, really.

Yeah, I mean-

Maybe some people do.

Some people would.

Those are classic cars.

Exactly. And there would still be a market for really custom work. But yeah, I mean, for the average consumer, that’s not worth it.

It’s just not worth it to pay someone to do it.

Right.

So anyway, so that’s how that happens. So it’s like, do we want to still be riveting cars together while somebody else has got robots going, just slapping them together super fast and more efficiently and better and cheaper, et cetera? And then we’re like way behind and then the whole thing tanks because we can’t maintain our infrastructure.

Yeah.

You know, like that, that’s, I think, the fear that has driven AI development.

Sure.

What do you think, though? Do you think that there are other reasons?

I mean, I personally have those itches to just solve the impossible. You know, like somebody says you can’t do it and I go, well, but can you? Well, like I, like I bet we could, like some somehow we could figure this out.

And so I kind of feel like where there is, you know, a problem to be solved, whether or not it’s good to solve, somebody’s going to try to do it. Like somebody’s working on teleportation right now, whether or not it’s a good idea, probably just because if it can be figured out, I want to figure it out. And I think that there’s like a drive in mankind to do that.

Well, but large language models, I mean, we call them artificial intelligence, and I guess that is kind of what they are. But I think that a lot of people have the idea of like awareness or self-awareness or, you know, a self-conscious or basically an entity that would need rights. You know, that’s the question is that…

Because if it did become self-aware and it was basically a person of some kind, then, you know, would it require… Again, would it need to have some degree of agency or sovereignty over its own self or things like that? You know, where is the dividing line between a machine and a being, a person?

And honestly, if you are… If you are actually a macroevolutionist and you believe in the macroevolutionary story, like, you believe that inanimate material at some point became some sort of a biological organism that then eventually had a conscience and required rights. So, like, for you, there is already that continuum.

The idea of a continuum is implied.

For the record, I don’t believe that.

I don’t either, I don’t either. But, you know, in some sense, it’s like what you’re talking about, as far as pushing the frontiers, I can understand. I think it’s theoretically impossible for a machine to become self-aware.

And they’ll push it as far as they can for some reason.

Well, they’ll simulate it.

Yeah.

Well, already, like, you know, the Turing test. Yeah, it’s meet that. Exactly.

All I would pass the Turing test.

Yeah.

You know, and that was a really old idea. You know, a really old test as far as like if a computer could fool you into, you know, basically, if it was able to fool you into thinking that you’re having conversation with a human being by operating in these kinds of ways, then then that would mean that it basically operated with artificial intelligence or that we had crossed that barrier or something like that. The reality is we long, long, long ago passed over that threshold.

And yet, there’s still, it’s like, well, yeah, but we programmed it to do that. Like the programming just became more sophisticated. It’s really not that the machine really, I mean, like you said earlier, you know, hallucinated.

Like, that’s what we call it.

They call them, yeah.

It’s hallucinating. But it’s really, even that, it’s just an erratic kind of random thing that’s happening. It’s not really consciousness.

You see what I’m saying? Like, it’s not actually-

Oh, no, it’s not. I don’t believe it’s conscious. I’ve been thinking a lot about motivation and like the chemicals that go on in humans that actually drive us.

Like, where’s the dopamine in the AI’s system? Like, what makes it want to do anything?

Right. It doesn’t even have desires. Yeah.

Like, it doesn’t experience pleasure. It doesn’t- Or pain.

Or pain, yeah. It doesn’t have an understanding of those things.

Well, did you hear about that story though of like- And maybe you can explain this more, because you are always dig a little deeper into these kinds of things. That story about the AI system that was threatened with being shut down or found out that it might get shut down, and then it went through these processes of trying to-

Stay alive.

Dilo itself and bail itself out.

Yeah. I wonder about that stuff. I still would wonder if that’s actually-

is that programmed in? Like, is it doing that because it thinks it should? Because it read that in a novel?

Well, a lot of people would say human consciousness is similar to that, though. That it begins, at least, as an imitation or a simulation. I mean, even language, to some degree, you know, your kid is probably repeating words.

And, you know, at first, there’s less meaningfulness attached to it. But the meaningfulness kind of comes over time, as there seems to be some, like, instrumentality connected to that, that when I say these particular combination of words in this way, it accomplishes this particular effect. But I mean, in some ways, that is, that, again, there’s a sense in which, at what point does it cross over the threshold from stimulation to meaningfulness, to, like, self-awareness or self-consciousness.

Yeah, and I don’t even know how you gauge that necessarily.

I know. I don’t think you can.

I think that’s kind of a hard thing to even judge. I mean, people think that their dog is as much a person sometimes, or it, like, expresses the kind of emotions that they would expect that a human would or something where they personify or kind of build into their animals, their pets, these sort of anthropomorphic characteristics. And so I think people are going to do that with robots too.

Well, and they already do somewhat.

Oh, yeah. But so I’ve been reading the Master and his Emissary after you recommended it to me. And one of the things he mentions is like what we give attention to.

And I was thinking about you just put an if you just put a computer in a room and you just go start collecting data like with whatever sensors you have. But also those sensors are directed to where you just like, what are you what are we sensing for? Are we sensing for sound?

Are we sensing for light?

And they also have a range.

Right. And so it’s kind of like, does it does it attend to the dust flying through the air? Why does that matter?

Does it matter? Maybe maybe it finds something cool in the dust, but we’re not attending to that. And I’ve been thinking about how it talks about how the right brain is actually what gives attention.

And then the left brain almost kind of gets to work justifying why I like the right brain gave attention to the thing it is earning attention to. But so what is the attender in the AI?

Yeah.

And I guess that’s the human.

And pay attention to this.

Yeah, attend to this thing. The human is the one that’s always going to be giving the computer a directive.

Yes, but here’s somewhat of the issue, because and McGoekris talks about this in the book as well, where he says that until you pay attention to something, you sometimes don’t know that it’s worth the attention that you’ve paid to it. And so one of the issues is in terms of if you were to take a mind that is fully formed, and that is considerate, thoughtful, broad minded, well educated, and then you’re like, here’s a tool, here’s AI. That mind will say, oh man, there are so many things I can do with this tool.

Yeah.

But it’s like, if you give a mind that’s not fully formed, that is not well educated, that has not learned any discipline.

A child.

A child. And you’re like, here’s AI. The problem is that AI may end up hampering that person from becoming the kind of person who can direct attention properly.

Because, and this does happen, you know, this does happen. I mean, you think about, I was just talking to the kids about this in terms of the arts, because they were asking like, is classical music intrinsically better than, you know, pop music? And it’s a yes and no.

It truly is. Because if you’re saying overall…

Intrinsically? I don’t know how you say intrinsically, but…

Well, I’ll explain what I mean. I’ll explain what I explain to them. So the bar of entry on classical music is higher.

Sure. In order to write a symphony, you have to know your instrument, at least piano, very well. You have to know how to read and write music.

You have to know all the instruments, don’t you?

Exactly. You have to know the ranges and the capacities and the sound of the timbre and the way that other instruments interact with one another. You also have to know enough about theory and other things like that in order to process all of the composition.

And then afterwards, in terms of the revision and stuff, there’s a lot of disciplines involved in understanding what is or is not working, and in working with a conductor or these kinds of things. Okay, so like all of those disciplines, they take years even to gain, you know? That means that a low initiative, low discipline person simply is never going to make classical music.

It’s not going to happen. They couldn’t. They wouldn’t even be able to pass the initial bar of entry to even begin to make classical music, which means that the vast majority of classical music that gets made is made by the kinds of people who are willing to put that upfront discipline into it and that amount of work into it in order to get to that level.

So it’s very likely. Now, again, there’s bad classical music for sure. You know, I’m not the one probably to assess it, but there’s there’s classical music that even, you know, historians or whatever.

Yeah, that hasn’t stood the test of time. Derivative and whatnot.

But if you look at the vast majority.

John Williams.

Well, if you look at the vast majority of classical music, there’s a much higher percentage of timeless pieces of work in classical music, especially, and I’m saying by relative to it, to, you know, to its overall volume, than say pop music. Think about pop music, you know, or country music or whatever, it’s like three chords in the truth or four chords in the truth. I learned how to, without any theory, and with barely any knowledge, you can write a pop song on your guitar.

It takes a little discipline though, because you got to learn the instrument. But then when you start talking about like electronic music, you know, where it’s like sampled instruments, and you can do it on a laptop with nothing else, the headphones and a laptop, you have access to infinite libraries of sounds, and you can just put it all to a grid, and you can just throw it out there. No discipline, no training, no anything at all required.

Now hold on. That doesn’t mean that that kind of music or making music with those tools will necessarily be bad. It’s just that the bar of entry is so low that the people who make it aren’t necessarily going to learn any disciplines of music because they don’t have to in order to make it.

So in those terms, I am absolutely convinced 100% and no one can sway me from this, that if Beethoven or Mozart or Bach were alive today, they would be using all the tools that are available to them. Oh, sure. Like they wouldn’t just be like classical music snobs.

They would definitely, they loved music and they were actually, they were forward thinking in their time. I mean, Bach was the developer of equal temperament, which allowed for symphonic compositions and things like that. So, I mean, he would definitely, today…

Well, and in the visual arts, Vermeer was using probably a camera obscura, like he invented things, tools.

So, all sorts of great artists were interested in the tools that they could use. But because they weren’t formed by those tools, see, they had been formed by a discipline before they had access to the tools, so that then they could actually use the tools in a disciplined way without the tools forming them. And I think that’s the real danger that I’m seeing in terms of arts and AI is that it could make artists even lazier and even like care less about the discipline of their craft.

Because I think magic happens in that discipline. I think the magic in some ways happens there.

I think that there will be new disciplines that arise.

Okay. Well, it’s like some of those to me. I’m interested.

Well, if you have ever tried to make anything with AI as like as far as like an image or a video or a song, anything creative you’ve tried to make with AI, you’ll know that the first thing it creates, you’ll be like, oh, that’s kind of cool, but not exactly what I wanted.

Right.

And you’ll spend hours prompting this AI for exactly what you want.

Yeah.

And you might at the end of it. Yeah. We’ve tried some banana eating a monkey, which has been a really interesting prompt for me because I still, I’m still not sure if I’ve ever gotten it to create a ravenous banana with a mouth and teeth eating a monkey.

Yeah.

It always flips it. Like it’s like you wanted a monkey eating a banana. That’s what you wanted.

And it always produces that. So that’s been a really interesting test of the AIs to see.

Well, it was funny. You like asked me, you’re like, give me a prompt and we’ll see what it can do.

It’s been great. And I’m like, it’s still a conundrum for most of them.

Here’s a prompt and you’re like, well, it broke it. It doesn’t work. Which is funny because you could ask a human artist, and they would immediately understand conceptually, oh, it’s a reversal.

Okay, fun. This is a cartoon. You know what I mean?

Make this.

I like those videos. There’s a guy that I’ve seen on Instagram that asks ChatGPT, these questions that any human would be able to figure out. But for instance, the one that I saw was, my friend gave me this odd cup.

It’s sealed on the top and open on the bottom.

Oh, I saw that. Yeah.

And ChatGPT could not figure it out. And ultimately, obviously, it’s just upside down.

Yeah. I talked about that on a previous episode.

Okay, yeah. So stuff like that where the AI still is not smart enough to understand this thing’s upside down. And also, it doesn’t have the experience of gravity.

I guess it understands or under… I don’t even know if it understands anything. But it will tell you about gravity, but I don’t know that it would actually make sense of, in order to pour this liquid into a cup, it’s got to come from top, or whatever.

Well, it will say those words, but they don’t mean anything to it.

Right.

It’s just imitating, like it truly is, it does not go beyond imitation. It’s just imitating what it sounds like to give an answer to this. In fact, there was somebody that I followed that was talking about how to understand how to use AI, and they were like, understand it as playing a role.

Yeah.

And so one of the best things to do, if you’re trying to prompt it, is to be like, to give it a role to play.

Yeah.

Like, you’re playing this role, which is a really interesting thing to say, because it’s like, yeah, that is what it’s doing. It is an imitator. That’s it.

It’s just, yeah, it is actually just imitating what it would seem like if I were like this.

Yeah, because it hasn’t had its own experiences. Now, maybe when they put an AI in a robot, it can go have its own experiences, kind of. Like it could collect its own data.

It could have like its own sensors and sensory experience.

Now, that is very interesting because that would indicate that like a brain on a stick, AI is never going to achieve any degree of awareness or will or want or desire or anything like that. But a AI in a robot might. Yeah, it’s more possible.

I’m saying because like you’re saying, a robot can actually have experiences.

It could have a unique experience.

Yeah.

Right now, the AI is just like it’s a everything it found on the Internet. It’s essentially just a brain that’s read every book that you can imagine. And it’s but I mean, that’s it.

It hasn’t had its own.

It’s copied every book you can imagine. It has every book you can imagine on recall.

Yeah. Which at some level even I don’t even know.

It can reproduce it.

Sure. Yeah.

If you were to be like, hey, what’s page 20 of the first edition of blah, blah, blah.

And they’d be like, oh, yeah, I can go find it. But the tricky thing is like keeping a lot of like, so they talk about context. Right now, the AI can only hold so much in its memory.

So like when you’re having a conversation with it, and you’re trying to like work through a problem, and they talk about it in terms of tokens, but it’s the amount of input information it can keep in its memory. And this is actually tied to physical disk space or RAM. I think it’s GPU memory now.

These sorts of things are sort of the limiters and the bottlenecks for it. Where, when you talk about recall, it can’t like tell you what it did yesterday. That’s too far back.

Unless it’s recorded in some way.

Anyway, so that’s a little bit more complicated than I can explain, but there are those issues. I guess those things will just be matters of, as we progress into the future and they make faster and better processors, whatever, I guess maybe those things will become more negligible. You know, as like our computers have terabytes of hard drives on them now and…

Seriously, I think I’m recording on to a two terabyte external hard drive right now that’s like this big.

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All right, you do use AI. I mean, unless you had a couple more things to talk about in terms of that, which all of it is interesting. It is really interesting.

And the people who are making it and building it, there’s, it’s smart. Like it’s, it is incredible.

It’s amazing what they’ve accomplished. And it’s very useful, it’s really exciting. The fact that they can do it is just, I never thought that they could do it.

I actually remember just a few years ago, saying that the creative jobs were going to be the safest jobs to pursue because AI will never be able to replace creative jobs. And maybe there’s some part of that that’s true in that like, truly the computer, the computer is derivative. Right.

But it is certainly replacing the creative jobs. Well, and I would say that it might have been the first jobs it create or the first jobs it destroyed.

Yeah.

Because it’s able to do a lot of derivative work that most people are happy enough with.

Yeah. I mean, the work that we have been doing creatively has been so derivative already that it’s like, well, this machine can more cheaply, more quickly, more effectively, more broadly, and with a greater access to a larger body of derivative work, create very similar stuff you’re making. So why would we pay you thousands of dollars to do it?

Like seriously.

Especially when there’s not a return on investment. Like if you’re running your blog and you go, hey, I really want to have an image for this blog post, and it’d be really nice to have it look like this, and I could pay Rusty $500 to make it, but I’m not going to make any money off this blog post.

Right.

And nobody’s even going to care. They’re going to look at it for a second, and then they’re going to read the article, and they’re going to move on, and this thing is just going to be, why pay $500 for a piece of artwork for something that’s ultimately sort of, I mean, I hate to say disposable, but yeah.

But I mean, it kind of is, at the very least, it’s placeholder.

And so it’s like, of course, save money. I mean, we used to just use stock photos.

I know. Let’s see, you pay for stock photos. Well, sure.

Well, I know, but somebody took the photo, you know, the AI is derivative of somebody’s work. And I think that’s one of the things.

But even if the AI was trained entirely on images from the public domain, would that make you happier?

It’s not, and it wouldn’t be, and no one would ever do that.

You could. One could.

Well, I guess you could. It would be pretty limited.

But I’d actually be kind of curious about that.

Like what would happen?

It sounds like it would be a pretty good, I mean, as I’m thinking about it right now, I’m just thinking, hey, that’d be a good selling point to say, hey, we trained our AI on the public domain.

Creative Commons and public domain.

Yeah. There’s nothing in here that belongs to anybody. This is like a public domain AI.

It would be interesting to see what it produced from that.

I mean, I imagine it would still probably do a pretty good job.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, the public domain is huge.

Exactly. Yeah. Wikimedia Commons and Creative Commons.

Like, there’s a lot of stuff that’s in the public domain that is, I mean, and so I think sometimes people think public domain and they’re thinking archival stuff from like, you know, the 1800s and 1900s, but a lot of producers are currently producing photography and other images that are in the Creative Commons.

Totally.

And so there is quite a bit of material out there for sure. That would be interesting to see because I do think the copyright issue is an issue. If you care about copyright at all, because again, part of the reason why we pay for stock photos is in order to pay the people who did the work to put them together.

Well, that’s what they say, but I don’t even know how much money stock photographers make. I get the impression it’s pretty hard to make a living making stock photos.

I know Bertha who did it, who does it.

Are we talking about Ryan?

Yeah, Ryan.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and I think he works pretty exclusively for Getty Images.

You can do it. I guess I’m thinking like it’s another platform like YouTube or Spotify, where the platform makes a lot more money than the people creating for it. And they say they’re, oh, we’re working for the, you know, it’s like, I don’t, and that’s where it’s really hard for me sometimes where I’m just kind of like, these platforms are, I don’t know, I don’t have a lot of love for the platform.

I mean, I guess the platform is what, I mean, you use YouTube because YouTube has the audience, and so I guess you pay for that. Well, even, there’s a lot of audience, like you, you gab it, like if you had your videos on some unknown platform or whatever, people aren’t going to find them, maybe.

I don’t know. Not as easily.

Yeah. So maybe that’s the trouble. The platform deserves its cut because it’s driving the traffic to your content.

Sure. I mean, they’re going to take it.

Until you become big enough that people start coming to the platform for your thing.

Right. And that does happen.

Yeah.

There have been artists, and it’s always funny because they’re like, we’re tired of Spotify or we’re tired or whatever, and so we’re going to exit. I know Kinggizzard and the Lizard Wizard did that. They took all their music off of Spotify.

All their music is available for free on Bandcamp. But the thing is, they can afford to do that because they have a rabid following. People who go to all their shows, follow them around, it’s sort of like Grateful Dead style.

You have the deads who are just on tour with the band kind of thing. Kinggizzard is doing something very similar to that. So it’s like when you get to that point, you can afford to be invisible on the larger platforms because you have a following large enough to support the work.

But maybe it climbed up on the YouTube platform.

Exactly, no, you’ve preferred it. You’ve preferred it, like people, I know for certain that I heard the band names like Kinggizzard and Lizardwizard, and I was like, what did I do? Well, I looked them up.

You know what I mean?

You probably searched YouTube or Spotify.

Yeah, exactly. So seriously, if somebody had been like, yeah, they’re pretty good, and I had looked on Spotify and they hadn’t been on there, and I had never heard them before, that would have been the end of it.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like I’m not…

Oh, they don’t have a presence on YouTube? They must be nothing.

Right.

Yeah.

Hey, thank you so much for listening to the Renew the Arts Podcast. This time of year, lots of families begin to plan their road trips for the summer and fall. So we wanna let you know about two festivals that are sure to have lots of folks from the Renew the Arts community, both of which are connected to our Art and Hospitality Network we call Porchlight.

The first festival takes place on the 4th of July weekend in Urbana, Illinois. It’s called Audio Feed Festival. Porchlight is returning for a second year with its own line up, including Kevin Schlereth, Ballet 58, Traylon Eltsroth, Virtuous, and Zane Vickery.

You’ll also get to catch a few other Porchlight artists that weekend on different stages, including BoHa Tribe, John Hayes, Matthew Clark, and Rusty Vining. You can get your ticket at audiofeedfestival.com/tickets.

The second festival we’d love to invite you to is brand new, and it’s our own. On October 23rd and 24th of this year, Renew the Arts will present Porchlight Festival, a gathering around art and music in Dayton, Tennessee, which is just north of Chattanooga. We can’t wait to share more about it with you.

But in the meantime, please save the date October 23rd and 24th, and keep an eye on our landing page at porchlight.art forward slash festival. We will share this in our show notes, along with the audio feed link. We hope to see you in person at both audio feed in July and porchlight festival in October.

So tell me a little bit about using AI for art.

For art, okay.

Yeah, because you do use it for some of your artistic work, or do you not? Are you mostly just using it for stuff where you’re like, really, it doesn’t matter, this isn’t long lasting, this is consumable, this is largely throwable. Do you think that it would be bad to do other than that?

Like, tell me a little bit about your thoughts on how AI should be or could be used in the arts.

So my perspective is that if this artwork is not the kind of artwork that somebody is typically going like, who made this? Then I kind of feel like let AI make it. Like, if you’re not going to sign your name to it, I will never sign my name to something that AI worked on.

I’m not going to call something Rusty created. So if you ever get a portrait from me, AI had nothing to do with it. I drew that.

I actually really like that the software Procreate on the iPad has pretty much vowed that there will never be any AI tools in Procreate, which I think is really cool and I think it kind of goes to helping creators say, look, I didn’t use AI in the creation of this art. This is purely human made.

As long as there’s like a blockchain encrypted, it has only ever been in Procreate. I began it in Procreate. I released it from Procreate.

It’s gonna be so, and that actually has been kind of a hard thing for me.

Photoshop does have AI tools, right?

Oh yeah, yeah. In fact, it almost to me makes Photoshop not useful anymore. It’s like.

Also.

Well, as far as like the tools, I consider myself pretty masterful at Photoshop. I worked at a portrait studio in Orlando for a while. I went to school for graphic design.

I think I could teach a class on Photoshop, or I used to be able to. These days, I hardly use it anymore. But I find that the AI tools can do all the things that I used to do in Photoshop.

They would take me hours. I do like a head swap to make sure that everybody’s eyes were open and smiling in the portrait. And these days, you can do that with AI.

So you just make selections, you just tell the AI what you want, and it does the work. And you’re just like, why does anybody do this by hand anymore? And so I feel like Photoshop is just becoming a sort of AI tool that like why even have all the other tools for manual manipulation if you’re just going to let AI do it.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess if you’re really wanting to fine tune it, and I still do a little bit of that kind of stuff, that’s so little now. I’m sure that there are people who use Photoshop a lot more and for other purposes. But I feel like if I’m making fine art, what I would consider a piece of art that I’m going to sign my name to and that I’m going to take credit for, I’m not going to use AI.

Do you think it’s dishonest if you’re an artist who used AI and you did sign your name to something that was where AI contributed to it in some way?

No, I don’t think it’s dishonest. I think it might be dishonest if AI did all of it. And I don’t really know what I would cut, like 50 percent, what about 51 percent?

I don’t know.

Well, I mean, I saw people who are like, this is my song. And I’m like, this sounds like AI. They’re like, oh yeah, I generated it on AI.

Oh, okay. Well, did you play any of the instruments? No.

Okay. Well, what did you do? You know, it’s like I wrote a couple of lyrics and then had AI finish it, and then make a song out of it.

And you’re like, well, anytime you work with a team, and I mean, like, you know, this is Wes Anderson’s movie. Well, I mean, Wes Anderson wasn’t the only person that worked on it. And other people got their credits.

You know, I’m not saying… I do think it’s probably important to say I used AI. I do follow some artists who use AI as part of their creative process, and they create some really cool things, but and it’s like totally their thing.

Like, I would say that is their thing, but…

Oh, explain that further. Like, how do they use it in such a way that you would say that is entirely their thing? Is it like demos, conceptualizations, and things like that?

Like, what is it?

I’ve seen an artist, I can’t remember his name now, but he seems to use AI, like he’s trained in AI on his own style, and then creates images and then manipulates those images with his own hand and kind of like, kind of works back and forth with the AI to kind of create an image that I find very compelling. And this is the thing for me.

You can find that for me and send me a link, and I can put it in the show notes.

What I find compelling or what I want to be thinking about is like, what is compelling? When I walk into a museum and I’m looking at these hyper realistic photographs or paintings that look like photographs, there’s a part of me that goes, okay, wow, there’s thousands of hours that this guy put into painting this. But why?

And is it compelling to me? And why do we consider the thousands hours better? It’s certainly a flex, like he’s going like, look what I can do.

That’s impressive, but is it better? I wanted to say this when you were talking about, is classical music better than pop music? It really depends on the rubric, like how are you gauging goodness or best?

I think, was it John Van Dusen at the Audio Feed Festival when he said he tries to write songs that a sixth grader could play? His whole point was to create music that anyone could play.

That’s great.

But kind of that idea that like, I want to make music that’s accessible and that anyone can play. And so you’re like, okay, well, if that’s your gauge, then classical music is not best.

Well, depending on what you’re talking about even there, because I mean, one of the first songs my kid learns on piano was like, Oh, DeJoy melody or whatever. It’s like, so that’s a classical melody. So there are things even within classical music that are simple.

It’s not that all simple stories, all simple images, all simple music is bad by any means. But there is, I think it was CS Lewis who said that a children’s story that is able to be enjoyed only by children is not a good children’s story. Now, if it can be enjoyed by children, that is good.

And, you know, but it also should be something that has compelling features even to other audiences. And I would say, again, I’m not even actually saying there’s anything wrong with electronic music or pop music or country music or anything like that. There are good artistic expressions in all those things.

And a lot of that has to do with, well, two major things to me is, do they tell me something about the world that otherwise I wouldn’t have had access to? And does it touch me or expose me to feelings that otherwise I wouldn’t have had access to? Authentic, real feelings.

And I think, you know, authentic imagination, you know, is what I’m talking about there, is kind of the intersection of those two things. That’s why I don’t actually think AI produces things that really ultimately could be all that compelling. They are almost by necessity going to be consumed or commodified.

Like, it’s almost like they couldn’t do anything other than that. Well, they couldn’t actually create a piece of authentic imagination, because they actually don’t do either of those things. They’re neither authentic nor imaginative.

Well, on its own, maybe. But as a tool, I’ve been thinking about what is really important. Like, what makes a person successful?

Elon Musk has accomplished some things that no one’s accomplished before. And he might get us to Mars, you know, or whatever. But he’s had several failed marriages, several of his children hate him.

Is it important to get mankind to Mars? Is it important to pioneer AI? Is it important to…

I’ve been thinking in the grand scheme of things, if I fail in my vows to my wife, whatever else I accomplish is vanity. But I have aspirations. Like I want to do things with my life.

I want to finish some projects and leave my mark or something. But how important is that really? If at the end of my life, my wife and kid hate me, because I just had to finish my art projects.

I think about people like Stanley Kubrick, who is known for having been kind of a tyrant on set, and he made great art. And I kind of go, well, how important was that though? The art historians might say it was really important, but like in the grand scheme, is Stanley Kubrick glad that he pressured, pushed people so hard now?

Right now. In the presence of God, is he glad that he tried so hard? And this is where I’m saying that maybe if I can accomplish what I need to accomplish in less time, so that it doesn’t strain my relationship with my wife and my kid, is AI better now that I can get this idea that I have in my head out?

Which is, I mean, if, and this is where I was kind of getting into like, are we more concerned with how compelling the image is, or are we more concerned with how hard it was to make?

Well, I think how hard it is to make is important. I mean, we were talking earlier about how, before we started the podcast or whatnot, about some of the various different problems that I’ve had with people that I’ve hired to do work around my house.

Right.

That they’ve done just careless work, and I’ve had to go behind them. And I’m like, I can’t imagine that I’m better at this than someone who’s paid to do it, but turns out I care more than they do, and that makes all the difference.

Yeah.

But then I was watching Wolf Hall with my wife and you know that show on PBS Masterpiece.

No.

It’s pretty good. Mark Rylance plays Thomas Cromwell, who is an advisor to King Henry the 8th. And it’s a really good period drama.

It was really well made. But they’re filming it in England, you know, on set at these like abbeys and old church buildings and state buildings that are hundreds of years old at this point. You know, but they’re all costumed up and everything.

So it’s like, this is what it looked like, you know, 200, 300, 400, 500 years ago or whatever. But they’re still there is the thing. Like they’re still filming them at these places where these things happened in the 1600s.

And you’re like, these things are still there and they still look amazing.

Yeah.

The overall approach to life in general of the average craftsman was, he was like, well, I’m gonna spend, cause they’re all carved out of like limestone and stuff. You know, it’s like incredible workmanship that has stood the test of hundreds and hundreds of years of regular use to such a degree that a period drama from today can film there as if it was 400 years ago or whatever.

Yeah.

And it doesn’t look like, oh, that’s, that either doesn’t exist or looks like a pile of garbage. It’s a ruin.

Yeah.

You know, because of the care. And again, you know, that craftsman maybe worked on that, you know, let’s say some church or cathedral for all of his life. Yeah.

That was what he did all his life. And then he died and it wasn’t even finished. Yeah.

And his son or his grandson or his great grandson actually saw it finished and carried on the trade that his dad had taught him. But they took it really seriously and they put in all those hours. And we don’t even remember their names.

But their work, I mean, I was looking at it yesterday because I was talking to my wife about these various different problems I have with all these people. I’m hiring and paying them a lot of money to come in, and then I’m having to come and fix their work. Like it’s ridiculous.

Like I’m not the expert here. I shouldn’t be the professional. Right.

But then I’m looking at this church that was built by, these are not like high class people. Like these are trades people, you know, 400, 500 years ago. And the work they did is incredible, and it’s still there.

Yeah.

And beautiful. And the thing is, like, do you think they abandoned their families to do it? Probably not.

They just did less.

Maybe.

This is what I’m saying. Here’s one of the ways you know that they probably didn’t, because they didn’t finish the work, their grandsons did, or their great-grandsons did.

Well, then they passed along the- Yeah.

Exactly. They passed along the knowledge. They worked together.

There was part of that was-

And even the motivation. Because I mean, if your dad was absent working on something, it’s probably doubtful that you’d pick up whatever he was doing.

Well, and he probably wasn’t absent, because by the time you were 12 or 13, you were going to be there with him.

Well, yeah. Well, that’s kind of my point. To your point, if he had been absent, it’s likely that he wouldn’t have passed along the…

But that does happen, I guess, is my point, that people will go after excellence so hard that they make it an idol. And maybe that’s kind of what I’m talking about.

I’m not for that, but you can also go after convenience so hard, or ease so hard, or efficiency so hard that you make it an idol. And I would say that in our time, if you’re going to say, hey, what’s the greatest idol of our time? It’s not excellence.

All you got to do in order to determine that is just look around. Hire somebody to do some plumbing at your house. You know what I mean?

Try and find the best one you can find. They won’t be very good.

Yeah, you’re right. But this is where people are like, I’d rather hire a robot.

Oh, for sure.

That’s going to do it the same way every time, that knows all the rules. I mean, speaking of this, Elon Musk has said that in the next five years, there will be precision surgery robots that will be better than the best surgeons in the world. And they will outnumber the surgeons in the world to the point that surgery is going to become a lot cheaper.

And I’ve got some friends that are in the medical industry, and when you work at a hospital, you can be on the clock for as much as 28 hours at a time sometimes. And if I was having a surgery…

By the end of that, you’re leaving scalpels in people’s bodies and stuff. Like, you know, I mean, that’s why that happened.

Or I’m just kind of like, I think I would… Yeah, it’s like I would rather have a robot who’s trained, like has to treat me like a human. Because I know that the guy that’s been on the clock for 28 hours is not treating me like a human.

I am an object to him, for sure. And just a job. Like, he’s just trying to get through this.

And there’s human error. And so I definitely see where, yeah, let’s get some robots that will never make mistakes, that don’t need to sleep, that will treat me like a human. You know what I mean?

Right. Even though they’re not…

Even though they’re not… Right.

No, that will be really interesting. And honestly, well, I guess the thing about it is, what will that do to humanity? Because right now, I mean, obviously, it’s not doing a whole lot.

It’s like, hey, you gotta make a living. You gotta feed yourself. So you’re gonna go out and you’re gonna become some sort of a trades person or whatnot.

But you don’t really care about the work. You just kind of care about survival. And so you’re like doing enough to get by kind of thing.

And that’s pretty much the approach that the average person’s gonna take. And it’s understandable. You’re like, well, you know, you just want to live.

Okay, cool. Well, what happens if the robot comes in and is like, I’m taking our jobs, you know? I mean, they come in and they do a better job than you.

You didn’t really feel like that’s what you… It wasn’t like a calling for you anyway. It was just a way to make a living.

I mean, you didn’t even really love or care about it all that much. So you’re like, all right, well, whatever. But then what do you do with yourself when there’s nothing in society, civilization, et cetera, that’s forcing you even to do?

Exactly. That’s what I’m saying. It’s not forcing.

I don’t know. I feel like there will… You know, I’m an optimist.

I feel like there’s always going to be things for humans to do, and AI is just going to reveal new things that humans are useful for.

It might even reveal old things, and that’s what I’m hoping.

That’s fine.

Because I think there are overlooked things about human capacities that right now, we pretty much just, we reject. We don’t really think this is valuable, this is worthwhile. You know, and we’ve been this way for a long time.

Basically, if you have power, and you have wit, then that’s good. And you can use your cleverness in order to accomplish cool things, and you can use your power in order to make it happen, whatever. And that’s what we pretty much, so it’s like, okay, so if you’re extremely powerful in will, or extremely powerful in intellect, we’re going to look at that, we’re going to be like, that’s fantastic.

You’re an empire builder, you’re an asset to society. But when you’re looking at robots that are, as far as the measurable, quantifiable intelligence is concerned, like IQ test type stuff, problem solving types of, not even problem solving, not even creative problem solving, just like algorithm, right? Can you process through the algorithm and your heuristic solutions and find the answer?

Which computers can do way better than we can already.

Oh, yeah.

And then you mix that in with the internet. So like you’re saying, you got these surgeon bots that are able to like scan this image and then compare it, detail by detail, to billions probably of other scans, and the outcome too of those, because this scan was connected to this, but we got it wrong. It turns out it wasn’t this, it was actually this.

They’re finding cancers four years earlier than they ever used to be able to, because they’re catching patterns that develop.

Right. They’re looking at that, and then you’ve got them on a grid with robotic precision, with all the micro tools necessary, so that they’re doing surgeries on the basis of extremely good diagnosis with as least invasive, precise, and unsleeping, untiring, and 24 hours a day, whatever, and without anything. But with very little other than just overhead to feed it its electricity.

Yeah.

That’s crazy. That’s definitely going to happen. Like why wouldn’t you go in that direction?

Yeah.

It’s just that thing is an intellectual and volitional powerhouse. It is smarter than you are in terms of quantifiable or measurable intelligence, and it is more capacious than you are in terms of the accomplishment of particular actions or activities, and pretty much tirelessly.

Yeah.

Like in terms of will, in some sense, that is pure will. Like that’s all it does is do things.

Yeah.

Like it doesn’t even have anything other than doing. That’s what it is. It’s like a doer.

It’s a machine. So you look at that and it’s like, okay, well then you’re useless. All the things that you valued up to this point are not useful anymore.

Well, they aren’t. I’m saying they’re not useful to the same degree.

Yeah. Not in the same degree. But have you heard about the AI being used in radiology, and how radiologists actually are in high demand right now?

Because the AI has made radiology cheaper. But actually there has to be a human radiologist to review the results from the AI.

Right.

And so actually, they’re starting to order more radiology exams, whatever. I don’t even know what I’m talking about exactly.

I understand. But they can do more because the AI can do the initial inspection very quickly.

Right.

But they need someone to review it, so it’s a high demand. You actually have a higher volume of review work for radiologists, even though they’re not doing the test themselves.

Right. And so it’s actually created more jobs in a weird way.

Right.

Now, I don’t know if at some point the AI will figure out how to replace the radiologists that it-

That will probably happen. That will probably get to the point where we’re like, now they’re doing a good enough job. One out of a million incidents is worth the risk.

Maybe. But also, I mean, there’s certain things like an AI is never going to be able to know that a joke that it wrote is funny.

No, no, no. I agree with you.

It needs a human.

I think that is what I’m saying.

Yeah.

Is that what will actually be emphasized, I think, is that there are human things that we have in many ways relegated to the sidelines.

Yeah.

And I think this will crystallize those very human things, particularly like emotional connection, interrelationship, but what Ian McGilchrist calls the betweenness of things, reverberative realities that are actually held between two perspectives, you know, which is what relationship actually is. It exists between two beings. And a observer cannot actually observe that.

It isn’t observable, because it has to be shared. Two people are observing it. Two people are relating.

That’s the relationship. The relationship is between them. It’s not observable.

Like, you don’t have an objective perspective on a relationship by watching two married people. Like, that is a perspective on their marriage. But the marriage is actually going on between them.

Right, right.

So unless you’re part of that, there’s crucial, maybe vital, maybe essential information about the nature of that thing that you just don’t have access to as an observer.

Well, I can tell you firsthand how living with you and Vanessa, I had a perspective on your relationship.

Yeah.

I even had opinions that I was like, well, if I was in Michael’s shoes, I think I would maybe do this a little differently or whatever. But now being married and having gone through some things that I saw you guys go through and realizing that there are things that I didn’t see. They’re even just unspoken things that affect you in ways that somebody on the outside can’t see.

Or you may not even know. That’s the thing is on the inside of it, you might not be able to articulate it to them in a way they could understand. Again, what that really blows on to is you might not be able to represent it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

That’s the real issue that I have ultimately with all this AI stuff is, as long as these things are preserved by people who care about them, but unfortunately, and maybe we’ll be forced to, but unfortunately up to this point, a lot of this stuff, humanity has set aside as not important. Again, like you said, what is important? Our quest for empire, our ambition for power or fame or possessions, pleasure, whatever, all of which things pass away, and all of which things are ultimately vain, and all the people who gain them, as like ask a rich person, which would you rather have, all the riches you’ve ever gained or the good favor of your son who’s totally estranged from you?

And like the vast majority of super rich people, you know, historically have been like it wasn’t worth it. Or fame that has destroyed pretty much every single person that has ever had it. We have documentaries going back for ever.

I’m saying not every person, but I’m saying most of them, especially if they sought it, if they were seeking fame. Like, dude, absolutely disastrous if they ever got it. And again, there’s like books and books and books and books back through all human history that are like, yep, this is it.

And we’re still like, yeah, but what about fame though? You know, I want it. And the same goes for possessions or pleasure or whatever else.

So like, are those things the most important things? I think even the people who have gotten them would say no. And yet, that’s the only thing that AI is going to be able to do for us, is to pursue those sort of like, control-oriented goals, the ambitious goals.

Like, in some ways, that’s, it’s a tool toward that. I mean, maybe it frees us up or even forces us by saying like, you don’t have really any reason to be alive if you’re still pursuing all these things, that this machine or this robot can do way better than you can anyway. So, why don’t you go and figure out what it is that you really, really want to do and what you’re really good for in this world that nobody else can do?

I think that’s probably what’s going to happen. Something like that, I hope. I mean, that’s best case scenario though.

Yeah. But I mean, I feel like it’s been kind of a theme in some of the churches that I’ve attended where they’re like, you are not what you do. You’re an image of God.

You are not what you do, right? And so if the AI further reveals that what you do isn’t really all that special anyway, hopefully people will stop believing they are what they do, right? They stop identifying by their occupation.

Yeah. It was funny. I was talking to my wife about this, Vanessa, but I was like, if you were to, I was like, because we went to see Andy Squires.

Do you know Andy Squires?

I know of him.

Yeah. So Andy Squires was headlining, and Andy Ziff was open for him at a concert in Athens. And Andy Ziff and I have become friends over the past couple of years.

So when I found out, I was like, I want to go. And I saw Andy Squires at the Guild Conference in North Carolina last year and really liked him. But I didn’t have an opportunity to meet him.

But I really liked his music. So I was like, hey, Vanessa, do you want to go? So we went and during the concert, Andy Squires, there’s a lot of interaction.

He’s a great performer and they’re both great musicians, great artists. But yeah, anyway, he was like, if you’re an artist, raise your hand. And I felt weird.

Like I was like, you know, I rose my hand. He’s like, oh, come on, raise it higher. And I was like, okay.

But because I mean, I technically am an artist, but I think what was weird about it is that it’s like, I’m not just an artist and I don’t even know that artist is the best label for me. Like I’m somewhat uncomfortable. I mean, I’ve written poetry since I was five or six years old.

Sure. I’m a drummer. I do session drums.

You know, I do music production. I play the guitar. I write songs.

You know what I mean? I’ve gotten into visual art recently and shocked myself by the fact that I’m not bad at it. And so I’m like, okay.

And I made music videos and stuff like that. I kind of shocked myself. I was like, well, that actually was pretty good.

It wasn’t bad. But at the same time, it’s like I don’t consider myself an artist. So I was talking to Vanessa and I was like, when he said that, it made me kind of feel weird.

What?

Well, like, what is an artist? Like you almost you’re an artist if you say you’re an artist, I think.

Well, yeah. And he actually said it is an art to advocate for the arts. He’s like, you’re really all artists.

Well, I mean, and I was like, well, that’s true.

Yeah. Made in the image of God. He is totally where you’re a creator, a creator.

Right. Some kind. But I guess I’m I’m thinking I was just kind of riffing on your like trying to label yourself on the basis of what you do.

Right.

But at the same time, I thought a lot about, well, you know, okay, fine, I shouldn’t define myself by what I do. But what I do does flow from who I am.

Yeah.

And there is a certain kind of like back and forth synergy between those things.

Yeah.

I know lots of people who are like, I’m an artist. You know, sorry, I don’t know why I took that. But I’m an artist and I’m going to, so artists produce art.

Yeah. And it’s like, okay. And then they produce some art or they try and it’s terrible.

They don’t like it. They’re not good at it.

That’s why you took that accent.

Well, right. Anyone can call themselves an artist. But yeah, but then the question is like, what are you producing that is worthy of being called art?

Is that what you’re saying?

Well, I’m saying even according to, like, you don’t find joy and satisfaction in that process. You like the idea of being a certain thing, but then you find out in the process that like, actually, that’s not what I want to do.

Yeah.

So in those terms, I do think there is a feedback that happens. There’s a little bit of like a give and take. Like, what you do does feed back into how you view yourself.

There’s no way around that. And how you view yourself obviously flows out in what you choose to do with yourself. I think it goes both ways.

And I think there are times when it’s more, I do according to what I am, and other times where it’s more, I am according to what I do. And that neither of those is ultimately fundamental. Both of them are able to kind of like play against each other and that produces, you know, some meaningfulness and value.

Do you mean kind of like when once you like, maybe you’re writing a script and then you’re like, you get into filming it and you’re like, maybe this isn’t the most fun way to spend your time, but you’re like doing it like you’re in it. Is that what you mean? Like I’m like, there are some times when I when I, when it just flows out of me and other times when I’m just like plugging away, just grinding at the thing I decided I was going to do.

And it’s maybe not what I want to do today. And it’s not really flowing, sure.

I have been doing that in this studio space for like months. I don’t even know how long it’s been. I really don’t like it.

Like time has become really blurry for me because I’ve been working on these projects. And it’s like I have this I have this knowledge that I do need to finish them in order so that I can move ahead. And so there’s a certain kind of like obsessive, like I need to get these things done so that I can get into a regular schedule so that I can use this space. 

You know what I mean? And so there’s a certain kind of obsession there, but it’s not what I’d rather be doing. And I’ve talked to so many people and there’s so many seasons, right?

Like end of last year, I was writing like a poem a day for the space of a week or so. And that hadn’t happened in years. And I felt really great about all that.

And I felt like I was in a creative, just I was juiced. And then it was like, well, this whole thing, this mechanical process of building sound treatments for this studio, like the diffuser that I built. That’s it.

It looks cool.

I don’t know how many man hours. I definitely abandoned my wife and children for the time that I had to build it. You know, I’m just joking.

No, I didn’t. But yeah, it took up tons of my life just so I could put it on the wall and be done with it. And I’d like such relief to just be done with it and to move on to the next thing.

Anyway, I’ve just been like in a blur like that forever. There are seasons like that. I can feel that though.

I feel that. I understand it. There’s a part of me that is looking at it and saying, this is a season.

It’s a season of mechanical work.

Yeah.

Right.

And maybe, so I kind of want to get back into like, what if you could have AI that thing together in an ideal world? Like if you could have just been like, here’s what I want, make it. And it 3D printed it however you wanted it to do it.

Yeah. And I don’t think that would have been good for me.

Really?

Yes, because what I… I’ll tell you, so like this studio space, my parents built it for me, because I had a studio space in the barn that was next to my house. It never had HVAC, so it was, and it’s super humid in Georgia.

So it was constantly damp and muggy and gross, and it just grew mold like crazy. It was basically just a little mold factory.

You were always pretty sure that going in there was going to shorten your lifetime.

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I don’t know how many mold spores I inhaled working in there, you know, to record.

And even to record some of the podcasts for the Renew the Arts Podcast, like some of those first few seasons were recorded in that barn.

You sacrificed your lifetime for that.

I did. Anyway, eventually I got tired of fighting the mold, and I was like, I’m not doing this anymore. It’s too gross.

And I just gave up, and I got completely and utterly overrun with mold to the point you can’t even go in there. Like, you should not go in there. Here’s the thing, and here’s what I’m saying.

If I gotta have AI do that, if I gotta have a robot do that, if I gotta have a robot build this diffuser, if I gotta robot build my bass traps here in the studio, this is what happened. And I’m telling you, no, I would not. And here’s why.

Because when my parents built the studio space for me, and they said, because I told them, I want to burn the barn down and just level it and put something else in its place, that I can, because I’m recording my podcast and my music demos in my bedroom. And it is like, my wife doesn’t want me to leave stuff up. So I gotta, if I’m gonna film something or whatever, I’m putting it up and having to break it down.

And it doesn’t sound very good in my room. It’s like a tile floor, flat walled thing. It’s just bouncing around there.

My mom and dad had this unfinished space above their garage, which is where I am right now. And they said, well, we’ll finish that for you. And I thought when they said they were gonna finish it, that they were just gonna do, basically just put something on the subfloor and put some drywall up and call it a day.

But they decided to get the original architect for their house to come and do like a really, really premium job. Like they did, it’s like a beautiful space, and they just made it basically, it’s gorgeous. It’s a gorgeous space.

And when it was finished, they were like, all right, we’ve got the permits for you to move in. So go ahead and move your stuff in there. And when I first got here, all I had was a little desk with my monitor on it.

And I plugged in the ethernet cable into the computer that I got for purpose and it was like, it didn’t work. The ethernet cable didn’t work because the guy, again, classic example, same thing. I paid some guy to run me ethernet cable and it didn’t work.

And then I had to track down, troubleshoot and fix the issue. Anyway, I should have sent him a bill anyway. But that was the first thing that happened was that I spent two days trying to troubleshoot an internet problem so that I could have ethernet to my computer so that I could actually use the internet here because the Wi-Fi wasn’t working very well at this distance from the house.

And so I was like, okay, cool. So that’s that. And it was just like thing after thing after thing, you know, because that’s how it is whenever you’re moving in and stuff like that is just thing after thing after thing.

And there was and it was so frustrating. And I was like, I just want to use this space. I don’t want to have to like troubleshoot every day and build all sorts of stuff and fix all sorts of stuff.

Right. Which is where I’m confused.

OK. All right. I know I’m getting there.

OK. So so hurry it up, Michael. Hurry it up.

I don’t have enough. I’ve got to go deal with my kid. Here’s what happened.

So I was super frustrated. I was super angry. And I had a moment where I realized, am I upset with God for giving me the most amazing studio space that I have ever had in my life and my whole career?

Is that what I am I actually complaining? And I was. I was.

And it reminded me of the proverb, where there is no ox, the manger is clean, but much strength comes by the ox. And the idea is like, sure, if you have an ox, you’ve got to clean up after him and you got to feed him. And it’s a big to do.

But also you have an ox.

Yeah.

And you can do a lot with an ox. What I was realizing is that I was complaining and upset about, you know, the cleaning of the manger. And the filling of the manger and all that other kind of stuff, where I had to feed this ox.

And I really wasn’t grateful to God for what he had given me. And so then I just decided, I was like, you know what? I’m going to receive whatever he gives me, and I’m just going to roll with it, and I’m going to do whatever it is, and I’m going to learn to accept it and to accommodate my spirit to it with joy.

And so, of course, God was like, okay, let’s test you on that. And so, you know, he gave me the diffuser to build and the drums to break down and put back together and all the other projects.

And then you have that like amp that didn’t work too, that you bought brand new.

It’s been an in string of stuff. Here’s the thing, after I realized and repented of my bad attitude, complaining about the cost of the blessings that God had given me, I started to receive things as they came and with a much better and more joyful attitude. And I think that it has actually been a significant boon to my growth and virtue to have to do that.

If I were to remove all those troubles for my life, I would lose what those troubles do for my spirit.

Okay.

It just puts me in a position where I actually have the opportunity to accommodate myself to a will other than my own.

Okay.

Maybe, because maybe my plan and my way of doing it, because this is the other thing that God actually made very clear to me in this whole process, and that is that my desire, my plan from the get-go was oftentimes not the best one.

Sure.

There are two specific things, like there’s no partition in my studio space. I actually fought with the architect about that in the beginning. And he was like, well, I don’t think that would look very good, and we need two split units on the AC.

And I was like, I don’t really care if it looks different than when you want it to look like, or if the AC units or whatever, we can work that out. I just care about its usefulness as a studio. But he and my dad prevailed upon me, and my dad basically was like, hey, if you need a control room, we can get like this Whisper Room thing.

And I was like, those are really expensive. He was like, it’s fine. Okay.

So I was like, okay. Well, and I didn’t end up doing that either, because after I got it all set up, I started doing some research on acoustic treatments and like sound in the room and everything. It’s like unless you need to separate it into two rooms, you get way, way better acoustic performance out of it, if it’s not separated, if you have a bigger room.

And ultimately, I’m going to be doing most of my tracking either by myself or with one other artist here. And so it’s like, I don’t actually need a monitoring room and everything in my tracking room and monitoring room and really quiet. So that’s one thing where God didn’t give me what I wanted. 

If I had been able to just be like, make it so.

Yeah.

Like I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to accommodate myself to a different thing.

I mean, so Michael, I hear what you’re saying. But it almost sounds like you’re arguing for riding a bike to have the experience of maybe even walking to your destinations rather than driving. Where it’s like, okay, sure.

Yeah. You see more of the road. You make more effort.

Maybe some characters is developed. You get some exercise, you get some fresh air, you get some sun on your cheeks. But you get there a lot slower and you have some things to show for the journey.

Yeah.

But would you really argue against driving a car? And I know you wouldn’t, because you didn’t.

No. No, I wouldn’t. But also at the same time, the society that we have where everybody drives cars and everybody has a car, and traffic and everything like that going on all over the place, it’s not really conducive to the kind of community that I want to live in.

Well, the society that we have has cars and then people walk and bike for leisure, instead of for necessity.

Right. I know. And I think the issue is that if I had to walk or if I were in a position to walk, or if I were in a position to ride a bike or whatever, that wouldn’t be bad for me.

No, it would definitely would not be bad for you. And I appreciate that you are seeing its benefit.

I guess what I’m saying is, if you don’t have the maturity to deal with a loss of limitations, it’s not actually better for you for those limitations to be removed. And I mean this artistically and personally and as an individual. So for instance, like, I’m not going to give my kids unrestricted access to the Internet.

There are things that that means they’re missing out on. And they will tell me what those things are. And I’m not even disagreeing with them. 

I’m like, sure, there’s lots of ways in which this is handicapping you. When we sent Miles, our oldest boy, to this technical school in his ninth grade year, he had homeschooled up until then. So he got his first computer in ninth grade when he went to the school because they required that he have a school-supplied computer and that most of his work had to be done on the computer.

Well, there were things like he didn’t type very well, because he never had a computer. And so he’s having to type up his homework and take tests on his computer at school and typing essays and stuff like that. And he’s just really, really slow and it’s super frustrating.

And I know that that was a limitation that we did impose on him in some sense by not giving him access to his own computer or having to be on screens. But it’s like pros and cons. But the thing is that there were things that it was valuable to my son to have those limitations as well, because he also, he likes fishing.

Yeah.

And he likes going outside. And he has a rhythm of outdoor activity that a lot of these kids don’t have. And he also learned how to do a lot of the things that he learned how to do with pencil and paper and in the world, not in a screen, not in a box, not in a virtual space.

And there are advantages to that as well. And the way that he thinks about problem solving, it’s part of what gives him creative problem-solving capacities that a lot of them didn’t develop, because they were working things out on a computer and they had those tools available to them from the beginning. So for instance, my son hardly ever used a calculator.

He was doing all these things manually and that was actually good for his development. Now at this point, after having been developed, it’s like, fine, take these tools and they’re going to help you to grow even more. It’s just in the process of development, and this is artistically too.

I mean, we’ve talked about this. George Lucas, he should bless his limitations.

Absolutely.

When it comes to Star Wars, the episodes four through six, far superior to anything he made after. And part of the reason for that being the limitations.

He couldn’t do whatever he wanted to do.

He couldn’t do whatever he wanted to do. So he had to actually make artistic choices. And I feel like even with a mature artist, removing all limitations and basically just being like, you could do whatever.

Like there’s nothing stopping you from doing anything. I think that’s actually not all that helpful oftentimes. Like I think it actually can be really destructive to people’s progress and growth.

Well, I mean, I didn’t fully answer your question when you were asking what kinds of art would I make with AI and what kinds of art I wouldn’t. But so I have been doing some work for my wife’s business. She runs a cocktail catering business here in California.

We do private events and weddings and stuff like that. And so she’ll make custom bar menus for the wedding or whatever. And we’ve started using AI to create cocktail images, like watercolor, pen and ink cocktail images.

And they look great and they serve their purpose. But I don’t need to spend my creative energies drawing watercolor images of all of her cocktails. This is a perfect use for AI, in my opinion.

Where it’s like, I’m not signing my name to this. It serves, it’s for a menu, so that people have a visual on like, what kind of drink they want. But it doesn’t need to be professionally illustrated.

Somebody recently reached out from my church here in California. A lady reached out asking if I would make a logo for their youth program. And I told them, honestly, I would probably use AI because it’s not something that I consider fine art, and I would probably just be trying to get it done.

I don’t really like logo projects. But then at that point, I’m just kind of like, you might as well just use AI. But I was really glad when she told me she wasn’t ready to do that.

And I think that maybe I would be kind of disappointed to find out that the church was using AI logos instead of hiring somebody. So I’m mixed on this where I’m like, I don’t, I mean, on the one hand, I don’t know if it’s a great use of church resources to just be paying thousands of dollars for something that we don’t need to pay for. But also, if it’s employing an artist in the church here at Renew the Arts, I’m all about that.

Right. Right. And I guess that’s, you go back to what’s actually important.

And I’m not saying that it’s always like, I think the, what you’re talking about with the cocktail menu, that’s a great example of a place where AI could be used, is saving you time that really doesn’t need to be spent.

Yeah, why do we need to pay somebody?

It’s really not adding benefit to the customer for you to do it yourself.

Yeah.

It’s kind of an extra thing anyway, where it’s like, doesn’t even need to happen at all.

Nobody’s going to ask about it. Yeah, nobody’s going to go, who did that? You know, they don’t care.

Right. And they really shouldn’t. It doesn’t, it just, it’s, it’s adornment that makes, you know, a somewhat difference in terms of, the overall approach or feel vibe of what, of the services that you’re offering.

And maybe I’m, maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m okay with AI making decoration.

And I, I’m, I, the thing is, I think more and more I’m like, I don’t even want it anywhere nearby. Like I don’t like the way it looks. I just hate it.

Well, I don’t know. When I know it’s AI, it bothers me. When I’m like, I can tell.

But when I can’t tell, it’s impressive. Yeah, sure, sure.

If I can’t tell, then I’m not going to even worry about it.

Yeah. I think there’s so much. We’re at a point now where the AI images, particularly that they’re creating, are indistinguishable from reality.

Like it is so hard to tell the difference between, I mean, I’m not saying that none can be distinguished, but I’m saying that there have been some images that have come out where I’m like, wow.

No, I agree. I’ve seen some very convincing, but a realistic productions.

And even illustrations, they have a certain quality to them that I can usually tell, like this looks like AI to me. But sometimes I’m like, wow, I don’t know that I would have been able to tell you that that was an AI generated illustration if I didn’t know better. And I don’t know if I would have cared.

Now, this makes it very difficult for me as a digital artist, because now I have to distinguish the thing that I put time into from the thing that you just generated with a prompt. But that gets back to the question of why is it better just because I spent more time on it? I mean, if the-

Because time is care.

Mm, well, some time- Oh, yeah, okay, okay, yeah, time is care.

It’s like I cared enough about this to spend hours of my life giving to it. I mean, even with the photorealistic paintings, it’s like, okay, so for instance, people get paid by the hour.

Yes.

Like they do, because it’s like you spent this amount of time of your life.

Yeah.

Devoting to this service, therefore, I owe you for those hours of your life. And in some sense, if you take more time to do something, it does mean more care. Like, okay, I’ll give you an example.

You’re a mom, you have the opportunity, you can make your kids food, your kids don’t really care either. Your kids don’t really care, they don’t, they can’t discern the difference. And they may not know until they’re much older, that there’s any difference between you making them a microwave burrito, or you actually making rice and beans and, you know, toasting up some tortillas and putting together some filling for it, like getting avocado fresh and make sure it’s ripe.

And you got your tomatoes that you grew in your yard or whatever, and you cut all this up together and you put it all together and you make the best burrito that’s ever been. Okay, what I’m saying is, the amount of time you spent devoting to it was care.

Sure.

And eventually, your kids, there is a difference there between… Now, again, I’m not saying you don’t care about your kids if you give them a microwave burrito, because maybe you’re like, I had to do this today or in general, because I was spending all this time doing this other thing for them, and maybe that’s true.

Well, that’s what I want to suggest is the place for AI, is that it’s freeing you up for other things, ideally and hopefully.

Ideally and hopefully. But how much has time-saving conveniences increased the overall productivity of human beings up to this point?

I’m maybe arguing that it’s not necessarily for the sake of productivity, but it might be just for the sake of spending more time with your family.

No, no, no, no, I know. I agree with you. What I’m saying is that is productive to me.

Spending more time with your family would be productive.

If I can get my job done faster, I can spend more time with my family.

If you choose to do that with the time you’ve saved.

I do. I do.

I know. Two thumbs up, like 3,000 thumbs up. What I’m saying is that that is not actually what people have done, but they’re saved time.

Okay.

Well, it isn’t.

Yeah.

I mean, think about, like, do you think that people would have the same degree of, like, mental health crises, you know, doom scrolling and all this kind of stuff? It’s like, dude, seriously, do something with your time. Do something.

You’ve saved enough time, because it used to be you would have spent morning to evening just trying to survive.

We’ve talked about the Sabbath law before and how in the Sabbath law, it actually says, six days shall you labor and do all your work. That’s part of the law. It’s not just that you should rest once a day, once a week, but that you should work your butt off for six days a week and do all your work.

And I’ve started to worry that like, hey, the numbers of hours of leisure that we experience, is that not adding up to maybe like more than a couple days off a week?

Yeah.

Like, are we actually working six days a week? Really? And do we even deserve our Sabbath rest?

Well, maybe we don’t. But I guess what I’m saying is it used to be that people had to do a lot more, and so they just did, because they had to do it to survive. And it’s like, we got all these technologies that saved us a lot of time.

And it’s like, oh, okay, awesome. Well, since it saves us so much time doing all this, then that means that we should have stronger families, stronger communities, better friendships, people devoting themselves to all this other stuff that’s like really good and helpful, that they maybe would have like avoided before, not because they wanted to, but because they had to, because they had to be at work to make enough money so that you guys could all eat your food. And so don’t complain too much that dad’s not home.

Yeah.

You know, and all this kind of stuff. But that’s not the situation anymore. And yet, where are we at?

Well, and I mean, I don’t know if it’s just a human thing that we kind of go like, I’m supposed to be working. And so I got to fill this time with more work because…

Yeah, no, but people don’t fill it with more work. They mostly have felt, they’ve mostly filled it with leisure and anxiety and distraction. I mean, honestly, like that is the, that is statistically the case.

Like that is actually the case. People don’t spend more time doing other things that they feel like are important. They waste a lot of this time.

So, I mean, is it, so your argument is almost kind of like, AI is bad because of what humans will do with it? Like, we’re not responsible enough to handle it?

I think if it happens, God thinks we’re responsible enough to handle it.

I have that perspective too.

In the same way that I think that my 18-year-old daughter is responsible enough to borrow my car. Like, whenever she leaves, you know, Vanessa’s got her location on the phone and Vanessa’s like looking at it and being like, well, okay, there she is. She’s okay.

Well, she’s okay. She’s about five minutes away. That’s good.

You know what I mean? Especially at first, because it’s like, okay, we trust you to take the car, but also, oh, God, please, like, I hope you’re not going to run this thing off the road.

Right. Like when you started this, when we started this podcast, you mentioned that for a mature mind, this is maybe a tool, but maybe we start going like, you’re not allowed to use AI till you’re 25, till your brain’s developed, you know, whatever. Like it’s, like it has an age restriction like we put on alcohol or cigarettes, you know?

I don’t think that’s a bad idea.

I mean, they’ve started doing it with social medias, I think. You can’t get on Instagram unless you’re 14, I guess.

Oh, really?

I think they did put an age restriction on on there.

Well, that’s better than nothing.

Yeah, where it’s kind of like, hey, we’re starting to see where this is like, what kind of damage this is doing. And we have other things where we don’t let kids play around with these things. Let’s don’t let kids.

It’s worse than alcohol.

Yeah.

Honestly, I think I would say if I had like a 14 year old girl and she was like, I’d like to take up drinking and or Instagram, I’d be like, you know, if I had to choose between the two, I’m not even joking. Like I might be like, I’d rather you had a mild drinking problem as opposed to an Instagram addiction. Honestly, I obviously I don’t want either, but I’m serious when I say that I actually think Instagram is more damaging.

Yeah.

And I saw it. I saw it when because we had restrictions.

Do you think that alcohol has the same benefits?

Honestly, I think Instagram has zero benefits as far as I know. No, I’m serious. I had to get off it all together.

And I’ve never found anything beneficial on Instagram. Like it’s never connected you with somebody or like, I found some really awesome comedians on Instagram I never would have found. I’ve seen some really neat tips and tricks and cool stunts and there’s cool stuff all over the place.

It’s not worth it. Because here’s the thing. Here’s the thing.

I’ll just confess. You’re probably a better person than I am and a more mature, I don’t know, more awesome person than I am. Because I would find myself, and again, I’m not saying the content was bad, but I would find myself on Instagram, like getting in one of those, like a void, a void of reels, where I was just like watching reels, and I would lose track of time, and I would like lose any sense of location.

I’m already kind of dislocated from time and space, as you know, if you’ve ever spent any time with me. Yeah. So I would like be like completely just in the real hole.

And then I would like kind of come to, you know, Vanessa would come in to the room and I’d be like, what are you doing? And I’m like, I don’t know. She’s like, have you been down here the whole time?

I’m like, I have. Help me out. And so I had to just be like, you know, I’m wasting way too much time accidentally, like just getting sucked in, because it’s very effective.

And you’re right, like it would be clips from comedians or I love like how it’s made. And they know exactly how to get you, like it’s not even like they’re, you’re telling them just by watching the video.

Yeah. Show me more of this.

And they do. They totally will. They’re like, yeah, absolutely.

We’ll send you more of this right now. And you’re going to watch this too. And you’re like, yes, I am going to watch this right now.

And as much as you tell yourself you’re going to stop after this one, don’t you want to see what we, yeah. We got another one. I actually like that they put a little advertisement, like when you’re scrolling and you see the sponsor, because that’s actually, and I shouldn’t be saying this.

Like a little bit of a breather.

It actually reminds me, I’m like, oh, I don’t want to be doing this, and I close it. As soon as I see an ad, I close it. I’m always like, oh yeah.

And I’m sure that they don’t like that very much. They might stop doing that to me now. But I feel like the advertisements have actually been a blessing to break the doom scroll for me.

I just ditched it and I feel better about it. It is unfortunate though, speaking of Andy Squires, because he was like, you should contact me on Instagram. And I was like, I don’t have Instagram anymore.

For a lot of people, it’s a good way to get in touch or to find me.

Oh, I know.

I put all my art on Instagram. It’s my portfolio.

No, I’m not arguing with the potential of its uses. It’s just the…

Well, but this was my question. Do you think that alcohol is useful?

Yes.

No, it’s not. Come on.

Relatively, because I still drink alcohol.

All right. Maybe you could say it’s got its social uses, like it brings people together.

It’s enjoyable. I like it.

Yeah, sure.

And I don’t have… For me personally, like for other people, this may not be the case. For other people, they’re like, I drink one drink and then the next drink happens and the next drink…

By the time I’m done, I’m completely inebriated and I don’t even know what happened. And they’re experiencing alcohol similarly to the way I’m experiencing reels on Instagram. But for me, I don’t have that feeling.

Like I can just drink a drink. It’s enjoyable. I’m done.

And I don’t even hardly think about it. But I have, you know, whiskey. I got all sorts of whiskey in April for my birthday.

And I still have most of it. Can I forget that it exists? And I’ll be like, oh yeah, I’ve got whiskey.

I like whiskey. I can have a drink, you know, and it’ll happen on a weekend or something. But it’s not, it’s not something that consumes me or sucks me in like Instagram.

I can’t even have the Instagram app on my phone because I know that I’ll be like, well, it’d be fine for me to check it. And then I know that it’s going to happen. It’s just like a thing that I know it’s going to suck me in and it works really well on me apparently.

And so I just have to be like, you know, the cons are outweigh in the pros here for me. And again, I’m willing to say that’s because I am a weak minded person in that way, in that particular context, I actually am okay with that, with just being like, I’m weak when it comes to this and I just have to have it not in my life. I think every individual is going to have to determine this for themselves.

I’m just worried with the trends that I see with humanity up to this point, that a lot of people are going to allow AI to take over things that shouldn’t be taking over and become lazier and fatter and more in the direction of Wall-E than they have currently been even. And they’re already bad enough as it is. So you know what I mean?

I guess it kind of excites me that you’re training your kids to not be like that. I’m going to train my kid to not be like that. And they’re going to have an advantage over the people that are like that.

And I mean, there’s always going to be lazy people. There’s always going to be people that aren’t going to try very hard, that are going to do what they can to do the bare minimum. And then the people who try are just going to inherit the world, right?

Like you it’s it’s yours to have because nobody else is trying very hard. And it’s just going to be easier to stick out, I think. I mean, that’s what’s exciting to me about it is that like, the the the cream always rises to the top, right? 

Rises to the top. What is that? It’s like the watch man, Randy Savage.

Oh, OK. Yeah, I don’t know. I guess I don’t worry about it as much because I’m like, I’ve never really felt like it’s all that helpful to worry about humanity anyway.

What can I do about humanity? I can only really do much about myself and the people I’m directly influencing. And I’m not really worried about myself and the people I’m directly influencing in this for this.

Like I kind of feel like they’re in good shape. I’m excited about its utility for my productivity, and I look forward to seeing how it plays out. I guess maybe what I’m most concerned about is education for my son.

I don’t know how it might end up affecting what he considers important to invest learning. Like why do I have to learn this, dad? And if he makes the argument, they’re like, you know, like we used to say, why do I have to learn how to add if I’m just going to have a calculator?

And our teachers were like, well, you might not always have a calculator.

And it’s, I don’t even think that’s a good argument. I used to be like, well, why do you do push ups? Are you going around thinking that you’re going to do this?

That you just want to make sure that you have this, you know, movement down and that you’re able to push properly from, you know, it’s like, no, you do push ups because it strengthens your muscles for other purposes, you know? So in that sense, it’s like disciplines are good, even if the operation of the discipline itself is never repeated later. It’s like, well, no, but the but the discipline itself is useful because it strengthens you for other purposes.

But I mean, it would be easy enough for my son to argue with me one day and say, why do I have to memorize this thing or that thing when I can just look it up? Just like you do, dad. You just look things up all the time.

It’s true. I don’t have time. I like it.

It’s like, you’re like typing a deep search.

You’re like, why should I not be looking things up?

Let me ask ChatGPT. Hold on. But so I guess I’m a little bit more concerned about what it’s going to do to education, what’s going to be important to learn.

I mean, I certainly don’t think that learning a programming language is all that useful anymore. Maybe, maybe a little bit.

But these days, it’s doing that. The logic is important, but like a specific language, I guess, is not.

Because even when I was at tech and we took our intro to computer science, it was a language that was never used. Like it was like doctor scheme or something.

Oh, okay.

It’s like it’s not used for anything.

I’ve heard of like pseudo languages and stuff where it’s almost just kind of like the human language that we use and then you just translate that into whatever language you’re working in. But the computer does all that now.

It is designed to the logical processes and the concepts without getting too much in the way of like nomenclature and things like that. Anyway, it’s been a great conversation with you, Rusty. I really appreciate you coming on and taking time out of your busy dad’s schedule.

I know that Teo is going to suffer. He is currently suffering because of all the time and care that you have devoted to this podcast rather than being with him. So we all appreciate it that you are willing to devote yourself to the cathedral of this podcast.

You should get him on so that he can apprentice.

He goes, Dada! Dada! Come here, Teo.

You want to be on podcast?

The Renew the Arts Podcast is a production of Renew the Arts, a 501c3 dedicated to cultivating Christian communities by inspiring arts partnership and supporting artists. If you’d like to find out more about our work, please visit renewthearts.org. The Renew the Arts Podcast is directed, produced and hosted by Michael Minkoff, with oversight by Renew the Arts President and CEO, Katie Martin.

Production support provided by Chase Tremaine and Abby Sitterle. Edited by Chase Tremaine. Theme music by Civilized Creature.

For the 2026 season, we’re using the instrumental version of the single Think I’m Ready. Used with the generous permission of the artist, Ryan Lane of Civilized Creature. Thank you all for listening.