AI

I know we’re all supposed to hate AI, but this image is not really how it works. For my concept album cover for The Tower, I asked for an image of a crumbling university tower, and I selected the one I liked the most. Possible enhancements it suggested (that I agreed to) included a greater amount of ivy, ravens, and a mysterious figure staring at it from the outside. For my one song, “In the Halls of Academia,” I asked for a song lyric about precarious academic employment in the style of Rush’s Neil Peart. What it came up with almost perfectly matched the music of an earlier, unrelated song that I wanted to re-use anyhow. I’m probably not going to use AI for something like this again, but it is not obvious to me that it can’t or shouldn’t be used at all.