No Expectations 017: Two More Bottles of Wine
No Expectations 017: Two More Bottles of Wine
AI is for suckers, 'Paul T. Goldman,' and a report from Chicago’s natural wine fair, Third Coast Soif.
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“And just like that. The music industry is forever changed.”
The marketing around generative AI and large language models is still pretty unconvincing to me. In its current iteration, this technology is clearly not going to replace music, art, or writing, be able to function effectively as a search engine, or even generate actual insight beyond responding correctly to leading prompts. But that doesn’t mean it’s not going to get worse and be bad in similar ways that crypto and the metaverse are right now. I really think the better the technology gets, the more harmful it’ll be, serving as just another way for bosses to hurt workers, grifter tech types to profit even more, and vultures to steal from artists. It will also intensify the proliferation of disinformation and bullshit that already makes going online borderline unbearable. There’s a line-in-the-sand moment coming soon for people who don’t want this disruptive technology to disrupt their own lives, jobs, and the way they use the internet. It’s probably already here, to be honest.
Over the weekend, an AI-generated image from Reddit’s Midjourney subreddit went megaviral. The image, created by a Chicago construction worker funnily enough, showcased Pope Francis donning a white and puffy Balenciaga jacket. It hit the uncanny valley sweet spot of being something the Bishop of Rome might actually wear while also resembling a jacket a hypebeast with too much cash to burn might shell out $3500 for. While originally posted as an example of Midjourney’s prowess executing prompts like “The Pope in a Balenciaga puffy coat walking the streets of Rome, Paris,” the image went viral on Twitter as fact. You couldn’t scroll the site last weekend without coming across a quote tweet of something saying that the Vicar of Christ has “hella drip” or bits about how the 86-year-old Jesuit might listen to How Long Gone and shop at SSENSE. The image wasn’t real but it seemingly duped the entire timeline. As Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick noted, “Balenciaga pope might be the first real mass-level AI misinformation case.”
It’s a good thing that the first time the majority of people, including many journalists, were fooled by AI, it was just a low-stakes image of the Pope in a cool jacket and not something more nefarious. That said, seeing how ubiquitous that image was and how many people unthinkingly shared, joked, and passed it off as fact it’s not hard to have a sense of dread about how ill-prepared we are for this technology. While this image itself was not important—most people likely thought “cool jacket” and moved on with their day—the fact that this didn’t warrant further scrutiny is a testament to how easy it is to let your guard down online. Whenever the most gullible and sycophantic members of Silicon Valley hype AI’s benefits with the confidence of the guy trying to open Jurassic Park, it’s even easier to imagine things going disastrously wrong. This won’t be some sort of I Robot dystopia but something sublter that’ll eventually be just as insidious. It’s an Internet devoid of reality full of just-believable-enough content and a user base lacking media literacy happy to trade critical thinking for the dopamine rush of a retweet.
Elsewhere, one of those NFT-as-profile-picture grifter doofuses with a podcast and a Twitter Blue subscription decided to use AI to make a song in the style of Kanye West. He posted, “And just like that. The music industry is forever changed. I recorded a verse, and had a trained AI model of Kanye replace my vocals. The results will blow your mind. Utterly incredible.” To be clear, the song is bad, an uncanny valley amalgamation that barely elevates his pedestrian lyrics, but it’s just believable enough to fool the least discerning among us. Of course, the guy has an AI-startup and will profit off this technology so take what he’s saying about the music industry being forever changed with a grain of salt. Where he is right is that people like him are going to try their hardest to steal from artists and pass off these shitty Xeroxes of actual work as legitimate art. It’s becoming clearer that this parasitic use of technology must be actively fought and the creators of this nonsense should be mocked and treated as the vultures they are.
That he used Kanye West, the disgraced rapper whose antisemitism and vile attention-grabbing stunts have forever tainted his iconic discography, is unfortunate but there’s no way this is going to stop at unsympathetic artists. In his video clip, the guy talks of a future where every pop star has multiple AI models aping their voice and melodic sensibilities. You can easily imagine a world where this sort of thing is used to mock, plagiarize, and appropriate the work of artists who are independent and trying to pay their bills. It’s already happening to visual artists. What this guy is doing is taking a human creation and turning it into a parlor trick. It’s auditory blackface in one sense and a way for people to profit off the work of others without the original creator’s consent in another. What’s stopping the powers that be in the music industry from turning this technology against the artists it exploits?
One of the initial utopian promises of AI is that it would automate menial, labor-intensive tasks to allow people the freedom to pursue their interests. Instead, this uninvited wave of opportunistic tech dorks is seemingly only concerned with automating creative endeavors and spreading fake news. They sell you an inhuman and undeniably worse version of art with no insight and no humanity and tell you it’s the future. They expect to profit off mass gullibility. Do not fall for it. Take every claim from people who stand to make money off of AI promising that it’s an inevitable technology on par with “the industrial revolution” with skepticism. If you aren’t forced to by your boss, don’t use it. It will be incredibly harmful and exacerbate already horrific inequities if left unchecked and without government regulation. It should just be used for practical, menial things like transcribing audio not songwriting or serving as a stand-in for genuine human connection.
In an interview with the New Yorker, the legendary songwriter Nick Cave had a solid take on it.
My objection is not with A.I. in general. For better or for worse, we are inextricably immersed in A.I. It is more a kind of sad, disappointed feeling that there are smart people out there that actually think the artistic act is so mundane that it can be replicated by a machine. I find that insulting. There’s no earthly reason why we need to invent a technology that can mimic this most beautiful and mysterious creative act. Particularly writing a song. The thing about writing a good song is that it tells you something about yourself you didn’t already know. That’s the thing. You can’t mimic that. The good song is always rushing forward. It annihilates, to some degree, the songs that you’d previously written, because you are moving forward all the time. That’s what the creative impulse is—it’s both creative and destructive and is always one step ahead of you. These impulses can’t be replicated by a machine. Maybe A.I. can make a song that’s indistinguishable from what I can do. Maybe even a better song. But, to me, that doesn’t matter—that’s not what art is. Art has to do with our limitations, our frailties, and our faults as human beings. It’s the distance we can travel away from our own frailties. That’s what is so awesome about art: that we deeply flawed creatures can sometimes do extraordinary things. A.I. just doesn’t have any of that stuff going on. Ultimately, it has no limitations, so therefore can’t inhabit the true transcendent artistic experience. It has nothing to transcend! It feels like such a mockery of what it is to be human. A.I. may very well save the world, but it can’t save our souls. That’s what true art is for. That’s the difference. So, I don’t know, in my humble opinion ChatGPT should just fuck off and leave songwriting alone.
Any attempt to use AI to appropriate art or just spread disinformation pretty much shows how “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” right now just seems totally for suckers. There are grifters who overhype and overpromise this technology expecting the public to embrace it unthinkingly and there are people who merely want to use this technology just to dupe others and sow chaos with disinformation. It’s the same impulse driving these two things. I don’t want to sound alarmist but any act of resistance against the ways these people want to use AI seems like a necessity. You gotta find moments where you can affirm your humanity, your critical thinking skills, and genuine art made by human beings. This means actively repelling the tech world’s plans to exploit it all. Some things are too important to be automated.
Here’s what happens when an Old Style and Malört guy goes to a natural wine festival
I’ve always been a beer guy. When lockdown happened, I decided to only drink local and ditch the domestic light beers I love. I was irrationally worried every craft brewery I loved would go out of business thanks to the stay-at-home measures to slow the pandemic’s spread. In what was both an urge to spend social distancing drunk and a genuine belief I was “doing my part” by supporting local businesses, I just got curbside pickup from my favorite Chicago beer makers: Half Acre, Marz Brewing, Dovetail, Pipeworks, and Off-Color. It turns out none of those spots went out of business and I honestly just gained 25 pounds by the time I got the vaccine and started going out again.
I grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan which now calls itself Beer City U.S.A. thanks to Founders Brewing and other spots. Sometimes I feel like I tweet about the pleasures that come with having a cold one more than a great band. But over the past year, I’ve been making a conscious effort to get into drinking wine. While you could chalk this up to this being what happens when you enter your thirties, it’s been a lot of fun. There’s less bloat with wine than beer and I’ve noticed that if I go for natural or “low-intervention” wine I usually miss the hangover unless I really overindulge. I’ve learned what “carbonic maceration” means and about a couple dozen different grape varietals. While it’s been great to finally be able to tell the difference between a Sauvignon Blanc and a Riesling, there’s still so much I don’t know.
This past weekend I checked out Third Coast Soif, a festival in Chicago “celebrating minimal intervention wines, ciders & beers grown and made naturally.” For $30 a ticket, you could try tasting pours of over 350 offerings from over 70 producers at a Plumber’s Hall in the West Loop. I find the traditional wine world with caring about vintages and aging bottles a little too intimidating and stuffy, which has made the natural wine movement, that I am hilariously late to, very appealing. With natural or “low intervention” wines, where winemakers add minimal to no sulfites or additives, focus on environmentally-sound farming practices, and practice viticulture free of herbicides and pesticides, they’re usually meant to be consumed within a couple of years and not aged. That seems right to me: wine is meant to be drunk. I might try out a joke that saving wine bottles feels like buying expensive and fashionable sneakers but leaving them in a box but I don’t want people to get mad at me.
Natural wines usually have a lower alcohol percentage too and contain a more wide-ranging flavor profile than you’d expect as a novice who previously only knew about grocery store bottles under $30. I’ve had a Pét-nat (a shortening of the French "pétillant naturel” which basically means naturally sparkling) from Michigan that tasted like popcorn and a totally out-there but incredible bottle of red wine from Primitivo grapes via a small California producer called Zumo. It was spicy and fruit-forward and sort of changed my conception of what wine should taste like. This past year, frequenting local spots like Diversey Wine, Red and White, and Door 24 or just messaging my friend who runs a wine program at a nice restaurant have really opened my palate and allowed me to try new things my Budweiser-soaked palate otherwise wouldn’t.
I got a ticket to Third Coast Soif right before it sold out and planned to get another for my partner on the ticket waitlist but unfortunately, the email saying more tickets were available never came. I bought it months ago and while I would’ve loved to have a wine fair be a cute date, I figured going alone would be a rewarding experience. If I could power through the awkwardness of going solo, and talk to a bunch of winemakers who probably could tell I had no idea about wine compared to the hordes of industry folks there, I could probably learn a bit more about wine or at the very least get a significant buzz. Going to shows alone is no big deal: I’m in my element with live music and chances are I’ll run into someone I know there or at least know the bartenders and door people.
Here, right off the bat, I was overwhelmed. There are over 70 tables, hundreds of people who all seemed to know each other armed with wine glasses and spit cups. I beelined straight for the tables featuring Michigan wineries. First up was Native Species from Grand Rapids, a winery that started when a craft beer brewer (of Speciation Artisan Ales) got a celiac diagnosis and decided to venture into wine. Like the brewery, their wines are funky, experimental, and really thrilling. I loved the Inner Cell, a chilled red made with Michigan DeChaunac grapes vinified with carbonic maceration, which is a process where fermentation involves filling a sealed vessel with carbon dioxide and then adding whole, intact bunches of grapes. Next to them was Neu Cellars in Old Mission Peninsula by Traverse City. They have a killer sparkling program and a great Riesling.
After those small pours, I had enough liquid courage to venture out and talk to winemakers who don’t share my home state. I loved California’s Emme Wines, especially their “Pink Lemonade.” When frosts in 2020 lowered winemaker Rosalind Reynold’s yields, she decided to make a blend of all her grapes resulting in a pink-colored rush of fruit that just ruled. Also from CA, Disko Wines really impressed with me an easy-drinking and crushable selection of low-alcohol wines: Really dug the Flower Power skin-contact wine and the Gamay Noir. Elsewhere, Vom Boden an American importer of mostly German wines, had a sick variety of Rieslings and a Trollinger from Beurer, a BMX champ turned winemaker, that I’m going to pick up several bottles of ASAP. The highlight though was Oregon’s Hiyu, a producer my Portland-based friend Josiah raves about. I had a red from 2015 which apparently retails for $250 and it just floored me (I am likely very wrong about not wanting to age wines).
There’s a lot worthwhile from getting out of your comfort zone and trying new things. I still know less about wine than I do know but that’s exciting to me. Meeting the people who make these wines and seeing their easygoing lack of pretension about it made it easier too (That said, wine fans do not respect lines and there seem to be just as many punishers in this world as there are in music). Immersing yourself in an unfamiliar world and finding what sticks is sort of the point of this newsletter. I’m happy I did it but next time I’m going with a group of buds.
What I listened to:
No gig reports this week: freelance deadlines kept me from a bunch of shows I otherwise would’ve attended happily like Foyer Red and Why Bonnie at Schubas, Katy Kirby and Andy Shauf at Thalia, as well as Wilco’s residency at Riviera. Next time.
Fishplate, Next Time I Won’t Cry
Friend of the Substack Rui, who also plays in the band Lawn, texted me about Austin’s Fishplate a few weeks ago and I haven’t really been able to keep his tunes out of my head since. (The band and its members are old buds of his from when they all lived in New Orleans). Last week, they put out a new album called Next Time I Won’t Cry which is basically pitch-perfect breezy country rock. A real highlight is single “Angel’s Gone” especially with that silky guitar riff. Singer Grady Bell’s voice is inviting and smooth and it’s easy to imagine how hard these songs must hit live. It reminds me of Nashville’s Sun Seeker or if Fountains of Wayne just listened to the Flying Burrito Brothers and Steely Dan.
What I watched:
Paul T. Goldman
Kudos to Nick Lutsko for the rec in yesterday’s Taste Profile. Immediately after our interview on Monday, I binged all six episodes of Paul T. Goldman on Peacock. While Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal is an obvious comparison, this show feels like On Cinema meets Tiger King thanks to the real-life and honestly pretty dark antics and psyche of its subject. I don’t want to spoil it so please watch it. I am shocked, well maybe not because it’s Peacock, that I didn’t see more about this online.
Daisy Jones & The Six
Besides a cheesy reveal at the end and final shot, I think Daisy Jones stuck the landing in its last two episodes. This is a show about people who despite getting everything they want are still fundamentally unhappy and I think it was a pretty interesting exploration of that. I was rooting for the drummer the entire time and I’m happy it seemed to work out for him. Dude was on a different wavelength than the rest of the band.
What I read:
We're Living in a Scroll-and Swipe Doom Loop Culture
I focus on TikTok, but every major social media outlet is moving in the same direction. Facebook launched its Reels globally last year. Around that same time, Instagram copied TikTok’s full-screen scrolling interface. A few months later, Twitter did the same. YouTube also has its ‘Shorts’ option. And now Spotify—which has such huge impact on our music culture—also aims to be more like TikTok.
In other words, the web is turning into the online equivalent of the Las Vegas strip. As soon as you leave one casino-like platform offering intermittent reinforcement, you walk into another. The games are almost the same everywhere—with the same loser’s payout—but you have an illusion of choice.
What happens when an entire culture shifts to intermittent reinforcement models?
Very good points about AI ... thank you
When were you gonna tell me about the natural wine fair..