Generative AI Showcase

There is a creative exercise I keep coming back to, where I feed raw lyrics into a prompt, with no direction and the “weird” dial turned all the way up. The tool answers in seconds, but that speed vanishes in a session listening to what came back. Some of it misfires, and some of the misfires land somewhere I never could have imagined. A jazz standard gets played a thousand times, and the good nights are the ones where a pianist or a trumpeter catches a bent note and answers it. That’s the improv at the keyboard: wide-eyed innocence, deep taste, and the willingness to let go.

Generative practice is expanding what craft is. What changes is when the conversation begins around it. A prototype can exist before the decisions are made, so clients, collaborators, and audiences can answer the work while it is still soft. The act of creation becomes a moment of generation, where many fingers can comb through the sandbox. Speed makes that possible, and the taste of the craftsman keeps it from becoming noisy slop. Someone still has to decide what to say back. We can still create and collaborate in the ink, mud, and labor of it. This is a new way to communicate in the process.

The vision has stayed with me since I was in the fields or dance floors of raves, head buried in a turntable or a MIDI controller. Strange DJs spun together across oceans and across the solar system, a beat unifying them all. For years I never found a way to visualize it. Then Midjourney gave me stills from my descriptions, and within months I could turn those stills into motion with sound. The beat thumps on. That’s the constellation of story: a story too massive to hold in my head, with the generative tools as a spigot for deep memory. It’s a hoot trying to keep up with each engine update.

Shelley subtitled Frankenstein “The Modern Prometheus,” and the part that stays with me is Victor walking away from what he created. These tools put a great deal of fire in our hands, quickly, and the old rules still apply: practice, judgment, and care for what we bring into the world. These images are small flares in the dark for whoever is looking back. I would like to be the kind of maker who stays to tend the fire.