I’m getting pretty pissed off reading endless articles or posts where people diss AI big time. I often wonder if some of these criticisms are AI generated themselves.
Oh - and don’t even get me started on AI - generated posters for your local jumble sale. Yep, they’re absolute shite. Be gone! You could do a better job using Microsoft Paint.
But wait! What’s this?
For all you AI doomsters and gloomsters, as someone once said, it’s all about how you use the tech, right?
In less than 15 minutes this morning my very friendly Claude work colleague managed to whack out a spreadsheet that randomises almost 3,000 albums each day.
If you’re a long term reader of this blog, you’ll know that R and I have been going through the daily exercise for maybe three or four years of having the exact same album served up to us each morning to listen to, and then add some feedback notes.
This was part of the original 1,001 Albums to Listen to Before You Die list. Such definitive lists are of course bollocks in themselves, but the daily revelation of a new piece of music has opened up my tastes and also my CD collection.
We long since finished the original 1,001 Albums list. We moved on earlier on this year to the Colin Larkin list.
So far so good. There was, of course, some duplication, plus the crappy old website displaying the Colin Larkin list was full of ad-heavy gunk. It didn’t half slow your browser down.
I managed to find a spreadsheet online where some dude had imported all of the Larkin albums, as well as combining these with some of the other definitive muso beard-stroking lists that are out there.
I thought, Hey! We could just go through this each morning as R and I work our way down the combined list.
But the problem was that they were all A to Z. When you hit an artist that you think is absolute crap - for argument’s sake let’s just say, erm, Aerosmith - then you’re going to get 10 Aerosmith albums across 10 days.
No ta.
I turned the task over to Claude. I gave it a fairly brief prompt and said, Yep my tech skills are diminishing. Just bloody do it for me.
A few tweaks here and there and 10 minutes later, a Google script was produced, which aggregates every album on the list and then at the click of a button both R and I get served up the same album each day.
Others, of course, are free to join in. I’ve made the link shareable so all you need to do is to open this Google Sheet in your browser. You’ll get the exact same album as us each day once pick Random Album in the Google menu bar.
Of course I could tinker around with this and have an option to leave a shared listening experience with some brief listening notes. I might fire up Claude and see what he’s got to say.
So yeah, stop and think before you post up some shite dissing AI. You should be able to tell what AI slop is, certainly in terms of images and probably text these days.
But for the tech coding side of things this is truly a SHIT THE BED breakthrough advance.