DiS005: How music can embrace the power of AI with ChatGPT expert David Boyle

There's something about dystopian sci fi films that have made us terrified of artificial intelligence and probably for very good reason. I mean, I'm terrified of all of the fascists slowly and steadily making millions and taking over the world, pumping up bigotry on news networks and making misogyny a normal thing to put on the front page of a newspaper. I mean, there's lots of things to be fearful of. Even more intelligence being put in the hands of those people who maybe lack some intelligence some of the time. But that's a whole other monologue for.

A whole other podcast.

This podcast is about how musicians can embrace some of the powers of chat GPT, which is one of the most talked about things in tech over the last few months. It is essentially a chat bot, which means a bit like being on MSN messenger or BBM if you had a BlackBerry or, you know, iMessage or WhatsApp if you're a bit more modern. You type something in and it gives you a response. And that response is coming from a computer, but it's not really coming from a computer, it's coming from millions of computers. Like someone has walked into a library and all of the world's knowledge is in there and it's read all the books and you ask it a question and it gives you the answer. So I think Short Circuit the movie, if you've seen that, like when he speed reads all those books, that to me, in my head is what it looks like. At one point in this conversation, I talk about Wally the Pixar robot that's like left on our dystopian planet after humans pollute it and everything goes bad. Which is actually like an incredible thing to think that kids are being shown that and like loving it as a film and then probably gonna have to grow up in a world where if we don't address a lot of the problems, that could be the planet that they inherit again. Another rant for another monologue for another podcast. There's something I really like about this conversation with David that he says quite early on he starts talking about in the old world, what he doesn't mean years ago. He doesn't mean before we had laptops. He doesn't mean before the electric guitar. He literally means before November, before chat GPT went live in earnest. Actually, from what I understand, there's. I think there's an even better version of it. The next version of it is available soon. Currently, the data that you can access is based on stuff going up to 2021. So if you ask it a question about Liz Truss, the UK Prime Minister, it won't know that she was Prime Minister because it doesn't have that information in its database. I'm not saying that I've done that, but that might have been one of the things I just played around and tested. And it won't know certain bits of information because it's been kind of trained and it stopped. And by trained, I kind of mean that, like, short circuit. The books it's read has all been up to that point. The way it's able to assimilate, like, understanding, I don't know, French so that it can translate something for you, but then being able to understand the difference between certain dialects or the way in which it has read cookery books and knows all the different ways you could use an aubergine. I am just freestyling different things, which. And it's limitless. And I could literally talk about lots of things. But, yeah, so he talks about in the old world, and that's how much ChatGPT has changed things for him in that there's literally been this, like, Technicolor moment of suddenly all the world's knowledge is at his fingertips and what he's an expert in. And the reason I really want to talk to him is writing the prompt that you put in. So asking the question. I thought this podcast would be helpful because I read a really brilliant tweet from the composer Hannah Peale, and if you don't know her records, honestly, go out and listen to them. She's an extraordinary talent. She was nominated for the Mercury Prize, but she managed to sum something up so simply. She said, Music now is 90% admin, 10% making music. And what I want to do is make that 90% of admin a lot less, because partly I might get more records by Hannah Peele, but mostly because I think musicians spend a lot of time and energy going down dead ends. They spend a lot of time trying to understand the complexities of a very broken, upside down, intentionally complex industry. One of the things that I'm always fearful of is musicians getting a bit of advice and then thinking that's what they need to do for, like, months at a time. Not really towards any goal that's growing them a fan base or making their music better. Like, often it's playing the Spotify algorithm and various things like that. I think that the one key takeaway I had from this episode is David says he thinks of it as a tool for thinking as well as writing. And I definitely, definitely think that that's the way I've been using it. And I think the thing to consider is like, if you open up the app now, I will be linked in the biog here, but if you just search for Chat GPT, you'll find it. There's a few others that are very similar. It seemed to be integrated with Microsoft's Bing as well. And also literally just as I started recording this introduction, I've seen that Spotify are going to be integrating some of the technology to introduce songs on AI generated radio and have a AI voicemaker read the scripts based on information. But I think their editors are going to be a bit more involved in what that information is. So hopefully it will all be correct in ship shape. One last thing, that last thing is this conversation inspired a book. Prompt was already a book that David had co written and I don't know how, but in the space of time between recording and editing this, they've taken loads of the different things we discussed in here and done an edit of the book just for artists. So if you have a little look in the description, you'll find out how you can get hold of that. Right, let's get into it.

ChatGPT.

I'm pretty focused on practical uses. How can it help me today?

Yeah.

And what do I need to worry about today or over the next week or two? You know, the rest of the stuff is for somebody else.

Have you got to open another tab?

I do actually. All day, every day? 100%, yeah.

Would you like to introduce yourself to begin with?

Yeah. I'm David Boyle and my background is in audience understanding for lots of big brands like BBC HarperCollins in books and EMI Music. I love music and yet my passion is understanding audiences.

So you have co written a book called Prompts, which I've been following you online and getting lots of tips. I think the first thing I saw that you shared, which really showed how writing a good prompt was important, was how to write a kid's book. And you had very specific briefs, lots of bullet points, lots of notes on who the author was. Obviously there's been that big story of Nick Cave and him talking about how ChatGPT isn't that good. Can you just begin by just sort of talking about the input what then happens to then create an output? I think that might be really helpful for people.

Yeah. Actually that children's story is a really good example because if I remember rightly, I'm on version five of that now and version one was really not very good. I think a Lot of people start with something like a version 1. You ask it to do something relatively simple. You're not very clear what it is that you want, you're not very clear what the context is. And it does its best, but without context and without clear instruction, just like anybody you ask for help, it gets a little bit lost. Maybe it waffles a little bit, or. Or it provides something that's just not that clear. So what it's doing is it's doing its best to understand what you're trying to do, and then it's doing its best to predict what will make you happy, what words in what order will make you happy. So, like anyone, the clearer you can be with what you want and what you're looking for and how you want it to be, the clearer it can be, the better it can match your brief. So, yeah, one of the big lessons for me is if you start out and it doesn't do something that you're very impressed by, your assumption should be that your prompt wasn't very good, rather than that it can't handle that request. That's a really big lesson.

So my understanding is how this artificial intelligence works, which is what AI stands for, in case people haven't clocked that bit. It goes off. Searches different databases, different language models, and I think the term language model feels a bit nerdy and a bit kind of jargony, so maybe we should need to explain what that means. But it goes off. So, for instance, I tried to get it to do something on Saturday of I was putting together a playlist of songs inspired by Sylvia Plath, and I wanted it to go away and find music that had drawn influence from Sylvia Plath. And what it actually did was presented me with probably. I asked it for 30 songs and it presented me with about 10, which were actually correct. Like, I think there was an Antlers song. And I'd forgotten Hospice was loosely inspired by Sylvia Plath. And I'd already started this playlist, so I'd kind of like. It was quite nice to see some of the things already picked was in there. But then it started making things up. And I'm guessing what it did is it read an interview with Kate Bush and her talking about how much she loves the Bell Jar and just assumed that she must have a song called that. Similarly, it did something like that with St. Vincent and there's like. Or Hayley from Paramore, and it's like, they don't have those songs. So can you sort of explain? So you're talking to this like you're on Instant Messenger. It goes away. And in my head, it's like Wally's running off and collecting something and another Wally's going another direction and they're stitching it together. How would you sort of explain what it's doing?

Yeah, I think that's a pretty good explanation. The difference is, I think it's already done that. It's already been off and read all the books for you and read all the reviews and scraped the Internet. It's already done all that. That's what they call its training. So think of it as an artificial brain that's read the Internet. It's a good way to think about it.

Light short circuit.

Yeah, it's read the whole Internet and it's ready. It's just sat there, ready for you. And when you ask a question, it kind of looks up all the words that you've asked in your. Well, your prompt looks up all the words in your prompt, looks at what words go together in your prompt and the way you structured your sentences. And it says, given everything I've learned, what do I think Sean wants to hear? And if there's really clear facts that it's learned that feel like they go really well, it'll pull the facts together and share them with you. But like you say, it'll also draw inferences and be clever about words. So maybe there's some songs that allude to the kind of influences that you're looking for. And it's thinking, huh? They feel like they answer the question. And so it's doing all these clever inferences as well as looking up facts. Yeah. One of the big problems is it's impossible to tell when it's giving you a fact versus when it's giving you a clever inference that feels like a fact. Absolutely impossible. So one golden rule is you always have to check, fact check the results yourself. So get great stuff out of it, but then go away, look them up yourself. It's a bit of a pain.

And I actually got it to say, I can't find any song. Is that, Are you sure this is correct? And it came back saying, no, this is an incorrect answer. And I think it often gives you the answer you want to hear. One of my favorite stories so far is I was chatting to a musician and she thought it'd be fun to get it to write her new biog. And what it started to do was it picked, like, facts and stats from interviews and things, but then it started making up song titles. But they were plausible song titles of songs that she could write. And it was just quite funny because she's now like, maybe I should write that song, if that's what AI thinks a song title should be. So I kind of like that, like collaborating with your past self and future self. One of the things I started to discover from partly going down a TikTok hole that's decided that ChatGPT is something I'm interested in was writing in the first sentence, you're a dentist with 20 years experience in dental work. What do you think this problem is with my tooth? And gives you a very different answer to what's I've got this problem with my tooth. Like how. How does it kind of make those kind of distinctions and changes?

Yeah, that's a really good question. And a lot of people are doing that type of prompt and it does feel like it gives you a better result. I have to say I think there's probably a lot of hope in impromptu as well. If I write this, I hope it gives me a better result. And it's really hard to tell. So I do that though, definitely. I say, hey, imagine you're a market researcher with 10 years of experience and you're an expert at qualitative research. And then I ask it the question and I feel like it's given me a better result. I think if you think of it in really simple terms, back to my other description, what it does is to look at all the words you've shared and the way they go together to the word market next to the word research. And that helps it to narrow down the places it should look. It helps it to narrow down the types of phrase it should use. And it says, what are all the words that usually go with the phrase market research? Because probably he wants some words that feel like that. So I think of it all just as context as well. I don't think it specifically does what you're asking. It doesn't specifically say, okay, let me pretend I'm a dentist. But what it does do is say, hey, what are the kind of words that go with the word dentist? You know? Yeah.

Actually achieves a similar result because I found some, like, nicer things of like, he wrote it, wrote something for me and I said, now write it in the style of Hemingway. And like. Because someone like that's writing styles being analyzed or I had quite a bit of fun, actually. I was trying to find a film to watch and rather than using normal recommendations engines, I've had this idea for ages of I want to pick a film based on artists. I Like being on the soundtrack. So obviously it's smart enough to go off to like Discogs or Amazon or somewhere and look at the soundtracks. So it was like, recommend 5 films featuring cat Power on the soundtrack, but write it as a blog post by a film critic. So it wrote me this really nice, like, thoughtful kind of summaries of the films. And. But then I was like, I've seen like, I think I was like, I'd seen all five of these. Pick five less popular movies and it came back with five more films with Cap how on the soundtrack. And, and I think thinking about the input to get those outputs, I mean, there's a chance it picked films that she's not on the soundtrack to. I didn't triple check all of it, but I think that's the bit where I started to think it'd be good to talk to you because lots of independent musicians, I mean, there's a hundred thousand tracks being released every single week at the moment. So a lot of artists trying to get their music heard, trying to be self sufficient, lots of managers and people running record labels like me, people doing podcasts and like, we can't afford an assistant, we can't afford all the time to do all the research. And I think one of the things that you're using the tech for quite a bit is to help with your research, to sort of augment it rather than lead it. Would that make sense?

Yeah, I think it enhances the abilities you already have or amplifies the abilities you already have. And so if you have a little bit of research now, then it will multiply that and make it a little bit better. I think you see problems when you try and apply it in areas where you've got no skill. So I'm not a musician. If I tried to use it to write a song, it would be garbage because it's multiplying, a lack of ability and just ending up with noise. But yeah, I think as long as you've got some curiosity about a topic and some passion, then it will help you get further, quicker and better in that area. Definitely. And you touched on something really important in what you said before, which I think is another kind of golden lesson, which is to not accept what it gives you the first time. You almost never want to say, okay, that's its best effort. Let me pause there. You almost always want to say, huh, Be bolder, be clearer, give me more, give me more niche answers, give me more mainstream answers, give me more popular answers. You know, reword it in this style. You Almost always want to do that. So that's a really, really important lesson.

Because my gut feeling when I started kind of digging more into AI a few years ago and when things like Dall E appeared, obviously there was big criticisms of these kind of whereabouts is this training data from? But like, is that training data any different than listening to or reading all these different sources to get your knowledge? But I started to think, is this going to liberate some people? Because in an almost kind of like punk rock way, if it can make you more self sufficient. So for instance, I tried to use it to write a contract and it was actually reasonably good. I'm guessing somewhere along its training data it knows what should be in a. If you're going to license a song for a compilation album, what should be in there. And as long as I know that the terms need to be certain sorts of things. And it had complex language in there. So I got it to explain sentences to me, which actually for me was better than feeling a bit stupid talking to a lawyer and being charged for it. And I don't know whether I'm actually going to use the contract and if it be legally binding. But at least I kind of looked at it and thought, well, this is quite a liberating use for the technology. But my, my experience of using it and not being very specific makes me wonder if we're going to hit this like coldplayization of data where everything kind of sits in the middle unless you kind of give it the right input. So for instance, I asked it to write a social media plan for a brand new single just to see what it would do. And it was the most boring, simple, kind of. It was like tell your fans that it's available on Spotify type of suggestions. Because obviously the question I put in didn't give it very much information of the input, the output, the audience. So how do we avoid it being bland?

Yeah, that's a great question, a really great observation and I think a couple of things you've already said I think will do the job there. And I think the first is, you know, it's best to use it in areas where you already have some skill. So I have no legal skill whatsoever, so I could spin up a contract, but I would know I've got no ability to judge whether it's good or bad or what's missing. So for me that's probably not a good way for me to use it. But I'm not musical at all, so I shouldn't use it to write a song as I said earlier, but if you want to learn how to write a contract or learn about it, if you're not just trying to do the thing, but if you're trying to learn the thing, then it can really help you because then it can explain terms and then it can educate you and you can ask, well, what other terms sometimes go in contracts, but not always, or where are the main points of contention in a contract? Or you can put in a contract you've been given and say, I was sent this. Which of these terms seems strange to you and unusual and it will highlight them for you, but you've got to have some curiosity or some innate ability or a willingness to learn, and then it's a good partner for you. So I think that's the first.

And I think that's. I think that's the thing, isn't it? Thinking about as a partner, like, not. It's like it's a bandmate, not your band.

Yeah. And it comes back to the other point that we made, I think, which is iterate and ask questions. So you get your social media plan and the first version is bland. Then say, huh, you know, this is bland, this is boring. I want to be edgier than this. But then you're giving it direction. Or you say, I want to be more controversial. You say, I want to target this audience. What does this audience think or feel or want to see? Or you could say, what have some other artists done that were particularly exciting in terms of social media planning? And then you're going to get a much more interesting plan out. So I think between those two lessons of do things you're good at or go on a journey of learning with a partner on the other side. The other lesson being ask questions, iterate, push it, tell it when you don't like it. I think in both cases you'll get to a really good answer.

So say, for instance, you wanted to dig into what another campaign has done or other artists have done. How would you begin with, like writing a prompt, like, for instance, if you want. So one of the things I've been trying to find is radio stations in France and Germany that play St. Vincent and Anna Calvi and similar artists. Like, how would you approach kind of using that as a kind of research tool?

Yeah, that's a great question. I thought of that. Use case. Yeah, my first, my first feeling on that topic, by the way, is to be a little worried because what you're doing is placed to asking for factual knowledge. And, and that's one thing I'm Always a little bit wary of, like, give me a list of radio stations that satisfy this criteria. That's a fact. And we talked earlier about how it, it likes to come up with plausible things which might not be real. So my gut would be maybe some of those radio stations are not real, but they sound like they are and things like that. So my first thing is to watch out there. Or doesn't mean don't do it, but it means be careful about that type of use case. But yeah, I think you're on the right lines. It's definitely worth trying. And I'm constantly surprised trying new things when it actually does deliver. I would say describe your audience really clearly. If you can always describe your audience, like, who are you trying to reach? Describe your artist. Maybe like, my artist is X, they do Y and Z and they're a bit similar to these other ones. Give it all that extra context. Yeah. And then ask it for more niche stations or more regional stations or, you know, just push it and push it and probe it. But yeah, it feels like a fun use case. I had not thought of that one. And the angle I approached that topic was I said in preparation for this, I was thinking about use cases and I said, hey, how does Fortet market his music? What would be. What are some things he's famous for in terms of marketing styles or strategies or tactics? And with a few prompts and nudges and questions, I got what looked to me like a really thoughtful guide to like mark your market your music in the way Full Tet does. So that's another angle you could go down as well. Pick an artist you admire and interrogate it.

Can you flag that up and tell us a few things that it told you?

Yeah, we'll see if they're any good or not, shall we? Yeah.

So, I mean, he mostly posts a picture of him in his laptop going, here's my band and announces five pound shows. I'm trying to think of. I'm sure he does lots of. I mean, his music's amazing, which is obviously the main marketing tool that is.

Half the problem, but unfortunately it's only half the problem and you've got to get marketing right as well, otherwise you're. You're often in trouble. So strong presence on social media, that's not very exciting. Thank you very much, ChatGPT. But it says he regularly posts updates about his music and that's not interesting as well. Often shares behind the scenes glimpses of his creative process, such as video clips of him working on music in the Studio feels true and useful.

Yeah.

Live events, dynamic and immersive live events.

Which his show with those lights at Alexandra palace is one of the greatest things I've ever seen. The boxing ring and people being surrounded by lights which were like swarming was amazing.

I was there as well.

There's anything revelationary in that. In his. In ChatGPT's understanding of Fortex marketing, I've.

Got three or four different versions of the query and different, different angles on it. I think there's anything revolutionary. No, I think what it was is it was much better than the bland version which you otherwise get. I think that there were some relatively simple lessons in there, but ones I think you might not have otherwise thought of or joined together in your head. So often it'll give you things and you have to take it with a pinch of salt maybe or be creative in your interpretation of it. So I read it through the first time thinking, oh, okay, yeah, I hadn't quite thought of that. That's interesting. And yeah, I could apply that in a creative way. But yeah, looking back on it now and saying, no, nothing that's mind bendingly innovative. But it was enough to get you going and thinking and sparks of inspiration and challenge and get the mind thinking. And a lot of people say this to me as well about this, which is what it's done is it's solved the blank page problem, which is I don't have to write a marketing plan, I have one and now I can improve it. I don't have to write a contract now I have one. So just having a first version, even if it's bad, is a huge step forward and a huge way to engage the brain. So now you're thinking about what's wrong or what's not innovative. So no looking at it now, nothing too exciting. But at the time I thought, oh yeah, I hadn't thought of that, I hadn't thought of that.

I think the thing that I found it useful for is when you feel like you got your face to the window and everything's so zoomed in that you can't really see it. Well, that's not the right idiom, is it? But I'm sure it's close enough that people understand what I mean. But it kind of been able to zoom out a bit and actually like sometimes those real basic foundational things, like one of the things I find as a manager is you often only have to do something like once every like six or ten years. And so you're not really that much of an expert in certain types of deals or like, for instance, I don't really know where to go. Like, I haven't had to do visas for artists for years and like, at some point I'm gonna have to dig into all of that and like, I might have a load of questions that are so specific to artists that I'm probably better off speaking to the musicians union. But even feeling confident I'm going to be asking the right questions when I speak to someone and getting the most out of the call and like that idea of having something, something that's already pre chiseled to kind of finish off the details on is I guess, the draft kind of mentality, isn't it?

Yeah. I find that there's lots of tasks that I was perfectly capable of doing in the old world, perfectly capable of doing them. But my phrase is always that they're quicker, they're better and they're clearer now for me, so I do them more often. My social media marketing plan, I totally could have written one if I'd sat down, but it would have been a bit of a chore. I would have put it off a little bit. Now you get it today, same day you ask for it and it's better than it would have been because even though it's not revolutionary, there's a few things in there I would have forgotten if I'd written it from scratch. And it's clearer because at least it's really well worded. I mean, it's very well worded. So that's a huge step forward on waiting for the other version. So I find I jump into tasks like that with some joy now, genuine joy. Whereas I. It would have been a chore in the old world, which was November.

Yeah, the old world, November. And we are currently speaking in February 2023. So like that. That's one of the things that I've found with it, that being able to almost like jam with an idea, like I'm. I'm not someone that necessarily thinks like jazz, but sometimes having that ability to like. I quite liked getting it to argue something and then giving me the opposite argument because then you can then. Or like you can paste in this is what I've written. What would be a smarter way of. Or a more succinct way of saying this or like I got it with the first podcast. I put the entire transcript in and I got it to summarize each section and then, then once it had done, each section of the chat. So kind of like a waterfall of conversation at the end. I Was like now summarize the entire conversation. The small flaws were when I asked it to pull out quotes from the chat, it didn't know the difference between the conversation transcript and things had written in the summary. So the best pull quotes were all from the summaries and not from the actual transcript. So again, that's probably down to me not writing the prompts correctly and like. So there's probably a. And I'm sure as the tech evolves.

That'S all going to become a bit.

More user friendly to do.

Well, you have to go back and record the podcast to put those quotes in now. And you.

Yeah, sadly they were not my ones. The though with Descript, which I use to edit the podcast now, I've created a deep fake of my own voice and I've. I've replaced like a couple of words just to see what it's like and it's pretty amazing. Like if you've. If I trail off on a sentence and like move away from the mic and you can't hear what I've said, I can just drop it in. And that's. Yeah, that's some of the artificial intelligence stuff, which is very intriguing.

That's amazing. I read about that, but I've not tried that one yet. There's too many to try them all every day. I mean, literally every day there's exciting new AIs that I want to try and I'm spending a lot of my time on this topic and I can't, I just can't play with them all. It's amazing.

So I guess outside of ChatGPT, we should probably talk about some of the other useful things, because I think writing a great prompt seems to be the key to. For instance, the first time I used Dall E, which is the image, one of the image generator ones, which is made by the same people I started playing around with. Recreate the COVID of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures if it was painted by Turner. So it merged the Turner painting and the kind of radio waves from that cover and started. But I also started to find that it didn't have enough notes to understand Ralph Steadman's style. And like, if you put in something like Jenny Savile, it didn't really know what Jenny Savile's style of art was, so it was kind of limited. Whereas if you ask it to do something around a video game, it's got loads more training data because it's probably a lot more screenshots in Google Images or wherever it all come from. Which other things have you found that kind of getting good prompts and using it that's been really either fun or useful or time saving Because I guess my view is if we can all get to a four day week because AI is doing one day a week's worth of our work, it's not so much the fear of something else coming over and taking our jobs, but I think there is a bit of the very dull automated kind of things where like trying to, trying to summarize a thousand words in a tweet that I can do and if it give me 15 options I can pick the best one.

Yeah, I think for most things during your day they're going to be better, quicker, clearer and more fun if you use this most text based tasks full stop. And yeah, whether it's contracts or marketing plans or emails doesn't matter. I think if you get really, really good at this, my promise, my expectation is that all those tasks are better, clearer, quicker and more fun. That's huge. Professor at a US business school I was talking to said he reckoned the it would be about 20 or 30% saving of executive time or executives if they really mastered this, which is your one day a week on the beach. I strongly suspect people won't take one day a week on the beach. I strongly expect they'll do more work and take on more clients or more artists or or do more marketing in more places as a result. So I strongly expect although it'll be more fun to do your work, you'll end up doing more and therefore being more stressed. But let's see, I hope people take one day a week on the beach and keep the same level of productivity because I think that's a possibility. Absolutely a possibility. But my strong advice if you want the real benefits with any technology is to master it. And so for me it's been almost entirely about ChatGPT, which is one thing that can help me with almost everything I do. And I think of it as thinking as well as writing. Like we talked about this already but it helps you think through ideas. You bounce ideas around. Even if you don't take its output or use its output, it's a partner to help you think. So for me, thinking and writing and I yeah, and really master it. Get really good at prompts, get really good at giving feedback and knowing when to use it, when not to. That's by far the biggest benefit. Pick one thing and get really, really, really good at it. Images are great. I use midjourney instead, which is a bit similar it's baked into discord. So it's on the phone and you can just mess like a message it and get the image back. It feels like it's easier to use for me. So I use that one for images and they're the two I use almost exclusively. But there's a long tail of other things. There's a five or ten now that will summarize a YouTube video for you. So if you have a YouTube video, you're not really sure you want to devote ten minutes to it, you push a button and you get a nice little summary and you can ask questions like, give me the highlights, which artists were mentioned in this video, Stuff like that. Right. So there's a very specific set of YouTube related ones. There's one where it plugs into Google sheets. I'm a data nerd. So anything you've got in Google Sheets, list of artists, a list of restaurants, a list of friends, you can put a little formula in the sheet and say for this restaurant, please pick three others that are nearby. Or for this artist, please give me recommendations of the highest rated album. I don't know. But if you want data sorted in sheets and tables and stuff, there's one that's really, really good for that.

Is that how you did the taking a menu and doing the like tasting notes or ingredients or whatever you did, which I thought was really smart. There was like a cocktail menu.

Yeah.

Because it really told you what they all tasted like.

The very personal problem, right. Which is that I just, I do not like big complicated words. And restaurants and bars often like to use very complicated words. And so yeah, just put in the copy and paste the menu in and just say, look, explain this to me like I'm a 5 year old. All these big words go away and you can really understand it for the first time. So it's a genuine use case. It's also very funny. Yeah, but that kind of thing is great. But look, if you're not big into spreadsheets, don't worry about it. If you are, then get really, really good at that. And then there's a few different ones. The next area I'd be interested in, there's a few different ones where you can load in your documents or maybe your YouTube videos or maybe any reports you're working on or your files and it'll kind of train themselves on you or your documents and you can ask questions about your history or your way of thinking or your, your reports that you're working on. So they're kind of interesting, but Also a little, you know, a little bit niche as well.

And would that have been. Because I think I've seen some, like, personalized ones. Would that have got a better result when Nick Cave said these lyrics are awful? Like, would it have, Would it have better understood, for instance, I was thinking, if I was writing a prompt to write a Nick Cave lyric, I'd probably want it to first analyze the lyrics of Nick Cave in the first prompt, then suggest that you are Nick Cave, You've just read this beautiful book by Don d' Alelio and it's raining outside and you want to write a song about something in particular and then get it to write the lyrics and then go, you need to make these more in the style of a different writer or. Because I think if you just ask it to write lyrics in the Stalinic Cave, they're pretty bland, aren't they?

I think that is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant summary of how to go about it. And there's a lot of lessons in there. So, yeah, number one, you said brief it and actually get it to think through the topic in question before you ask it to do the work. So on the market, to our marketing plan analogy might be better to say, huh, what are all of the different ingredients to a social media marketing plan? And then ask it to write a social media marketing plan. The same with the contract. What are 10 things that are really important to get right in an artist contract and ask it to write the contract? So, yeah, I bet that pre thinking, pre elaboration, I bet that's very, very useful. And then, yeah, I'm certain if I would bet that with the right set of prompts and that you're right, it's a set in a string rather than just one, I would bet it could write a very good, very good Nick Cave song. Actually, I bet that it could. But I feel very uncomfortable saying that because one thing I said earlier, I've got no musical talent, so I'm not qualified to judge and I'm not qualified to give it feedback and I'm not qualified to work out what the right prompt is. But I'm yet to find an area where a subject matter expert can't make it do something that is astounding to them. And this happened to me with the artist the other day, electronic music producer, and he started off pretty skeptical about the role of ChatGPT in his life. And then two days later, he was sending me screenshots of chord progressions that it was suggesting to him, and he'd worked out how to give it the right context, the right prompts. And I said, I have no idea what you're sending me. Like, is that good or bad? And he said, it's effing remarkable. And so I no idea whether that's possible or not. And he told me that it was. I do think it can do anything if you put the right prompts and the right coaching and guidance in there.

And is that because it treats music as a language model? So we didn't. I don't think we totally explained what a language model was, but I guess it's like in the same way it could say, can you write this now in French or could you Write this in 20th, 18th century French? It kind of knows what that, that kind of sub genre is. Is that what it's doing with shaking music and thinking this is something with a certain set of kind of grammar and. Because that's why it's really good at writing code, because code is kind of just grammatical sentences with different full stops and brackets and things, isn't it?

Yeah, I think that's a good way of thinking about it. Yeah, it's very good at finding patterns, things that go together. And so how did it know to suggest that chord progression? Well, maybe a bunch of people on Reddit had been talking about how chord progressions work and in electronic music and for this particular subgenre of electronic music, and maybe it was mimicking some of what they had said and riffing off it a little bit. Maybe, maybe not though. Maybe it just had read loads of chord progressions and worked out what kind of patterns that happen and found some underlying pattern there which enabled it to work it out from first principles, like maybe. Yeah, and it's very, very good at programming, it's very good at languages. Yeah, apparently it's good at music if you ask it the right questions as well.

But the same way anyone can play guitar, it's like Anyone can use ChatGPT, but not everyone can play. Like Johnny Greenwood. Like, I think that's possibly the first time I've really understood how to explain the technology. So just digging in, just back one step you were talking about, which I guess is almost exactly how you talk to the app. I realized that I might. Someone might think it's actually the app interviewing you. When you talked about the marketing plan, one of the things I thought was quite interesting is once you've kind of trained its focus on who you are and what you're trying to get out of it, if it then gives you, like you should do these kind of posts on TikTok. You can then go suggest 10 topics that I should be posting about on TikTok and then suggest, write five, give me five options of opening lines or scripts or topics, things. So you can kind of go from the very big broad funnel right down to the very specific kind of post. If you kind of understand that you're following this kind of path, but it's kind of got the knowledge from the conversation you're in, so it knows that you're a certain type of artist. And like maybe you tell it that you've got, you've got one light and a microphone, so it kind of knows you do something to a certain standard. I don't know all the different bits is going to kind of keep in its mind. Is that the sort of thing that you start to use it for when you're doing a marketing plan with it? Do you sort of like, it tells you you need to be tweeting every day, so ask it to tell you 30 different things you could be tweeting about?

Yeah, absolutely. And I would start before all of that actually as well. My passion is audiences, so I would start by getting really clear who you're trying to engage, what audience it is. So I would say something like, hey, I'm an artist in X genre. If it knows you, that's great. Use your name. If it doesn't know you, that's fine. Use some other artists who are similar and I would say who had five different audiences that I could target and then then hopefully come with some exciting, interesting, thoughtful audiences. And the more specific you can be there, the better. Then pick one. Okay. I really want to reach that audience right there. Think about the kind of media content and, and creative stuff that they love and how do they spend their time. Get it to elaborate and all that and say, okay, how can I be relevant to them? What could I do that would engage that audience? Give me the strategies to start with, then drill down to the tactics and then drill down to the specific words or phrases or keywords or SEO optimized articles or YouTube scripts that would really work for that audience. So yeah, right from one end, the strategy like who am I trying to reach right down to the other end. You talked about something there as well. We've touched on a couple of times. I think we should explain to people that if in ChatGPT, if you're in one chat session, then it remembers quite a lot of what you've talked about. We'll pick up that in a second. If you start a new chat Session and the little plus button. Start a new chat, it forgets everything, totally forgets everything and starts again. So that's useful. Sometimes it's. If you're in one chat, though, its memory is about 3,000 words.

Okay.

So if you end up with quite a lot of thinking and going through this whole progression, it does remember everything, but at a higher and higher level of abstraction. So it's going to remember the spirit of the quotes from the podcast, but it's thrown away all the detail so that it can keep within this 3,000 word limit. So that's partly why the quotes didn't work.

Okay, that makes sense.

And that's why a good trick is to start a new chat session for each task so that it's got a much higher resolution memory for what's going on in those chat sessions. So there's times when you want to just keep one chat going and elaborate and expand, but there's also times you want to start fresh in a new session as well.

So it's some sort of ancient goldfish that can only think back 3,000 words.

And sometimes that's really useful and you want to cram as much in. And sometimes you just want to reset that memory and start again in a whole new chat session. But even if you start a new chat session, you can still paste in some of the old chat sessions to bring it up to speed on roughly what you were talking about. So you can have two or three chats that go slightly different directions in.

A kind of 3D printer printing a 3D printer kind of style. Do you use it to help you write your prompts?

Yeah, actually. So one of the first things I did when I was thinking about how can artists use this, I pasted in a whole list of different things artists need to do, like find a manager, distribution services, market their music. Just like a whole list. I have like 30 or 50 different things artists do. I just said, hey, for each of these things, come up with 10 prompts that an artist could use to help them to do that thing. And they came up with quite a thoughtful list actually for each of them. So, yeah, absolutely. Hey, I'm interested in, I need to do a contract for an artist. How can you help me with that? What are the, what are the many different ways you could help me with that? And it will tell you, I could write it for you, I could give you advice, I can give you feedback on the contract. I can help you find a lawyer. You know, I can train you in the law. Yeah, ask it for help It'll tell you how it can help you.

Okay, that's. That's interesting. So my 3D printer, printing a 3D printer thing is kind of how it can work, I think. So the artificial intelligence is intelligent enough to tell you which question to ask it to get the better answer.

I will argue with you as well when it wants to. I had a little row with mine earlier and I had a really strong idea about this analogy I really like. It amplifies your talents. And then so I was saying, hey, I think AIs amplify talents. And therefore if you've got no talent in a certain area, me and music, then it's amplifying noise. And it said, well, yeah, kind of. But also I could teach you how to do music if you want me to. So it's not quite true, David. I was like, yeah, but that doesn't help me tell the story. So get rid of that. Just focus on my bit. And he's like, no, but I can help you in all these ways. Okay, you've changed my mind. Fair enough.

Here I am playing guitar, which I wasn't planning to do because can it also do things like tell you where else to go to find more information? Because I found that that was the bit I was starting to struggle with with, for instance, when I was looking up. What was I looking up? I think I was looking up like music venues in a certain area. And I was trying to. Because basically had a hole on a touring schedule. And I was thinking actually this might be a smart find me venues within two hours of Manchester on the way back to London. I was trying to see if I could be really clever with it. And it started to suggest them, but it didn't really know what were concert venues and what were pubs. And so it was like I realized I probably needed a bit more information. But what would have been really useful would be if it had provided the hyperlinks to the venue websites so that I could have just clicked on them rather than having to google each one. And like, is there things like that you can add to the prompt that.

Help or yeah, def. Well, kind of. So I would say first of all, that's the kind of prompt that raises alarm bells for me again, because it's very much a factual lookup type prompt. And again, that's not where it's specialized. That said, I absolutely bet you could have crafted the prompt and more specific about it and got it to give you a pretty good answer. So list a bunch of artists who've toured the UK and say, where did they play in between these places? I bet you could have done that. But I think the answer probably isn't chatgpt for what you said there. I think the answer is the ChatGPT integration into Bing, which is out for some users now, not me, but I'm on the waiting list like lots of other people. What that tries to do is to do everything ChatGPT does, but also search the web and give you URLs and evidence for the fact that it uncovers. So I think that solves your problem perfectly, which is a list of venues with URLs next to them. And I should say, though it also suffers from the same problems as ChatGPT, it also likes to make things up that seem plausible. So you still can't trust it, but at least you've got the URLs right there that you can click on and check it much more easily. So I think, yeah, the Bing integration is where you need to go for that in the future, not chatgpt.

Great. Well, I feel like we've covered a lot and I feel like I was. What I was trying to do was to find some practical admin tasks that people have got, but I feel like I've sort of talked through enough of mine that we probably don't need to do that. So I guess the kind of final thing was, what would you suggest that someone that's. That's kind of using it for the first time, what are the really key? Because hopefully they've listened to this and if they've not been playing around with it while listening to us, that they might go away and start using it for the first time. What would you say are just like the really quick things that are either going to wow you a little bit or make you think, actually this could be quite useful. What sort of things would you suggest?

Well, I think you hit on something there saying about wowing, and I actually made a slightly derogatory tweet a little while back about everyone's having fun and being silly with ChatGPT, but there's lots of practical uses as well. And somebody I used to work with on BBC Earth documentaries replied and said, yeah, but this is how animals learn to use tools. They start by having fun with them and then they say, huh, there's something here. I can use this professionally as well, or, you know, in a useful way. So I had to admit I was wrong and actually I think you're right. Wow is good. And just play with it, have fun, be silly. If you're an artist, why don't you write some songs or get it to critique your songs or get it to explain quantum physics in the style of Snoop Dogg, or be silly and have fun. And certainly if you look back at when I first started using it, I sent poems to an awful lot of people in lieu of emails or formal notes because I thought that was fun and creative and silly. And then I worked out how to use it for more professional things. The good advice that would might be just have fun with it.

Yeah, the silly thing I did was I got it to rewrite. We didn't start the fire, but if it had been written in 2015 and it started bringing in all these contemporary news stories and examples and phrases that wouldn't have been around when Billy Joel originally wrote the song. And I think I got it to do things like. Actually, one of the most sinister things I did is I got it to write a pitch for a Katie Hopkins column. And it came up with the most, like, how the woke is destroying Western Civilization. And it was like the most like, clickbaity Katie Hopkins kind of column. But I also quite liked just putting in, like, one of the things a lot of artists struggle with is writing copy about themselves and, like, and actually doing that. We sound like these five things. And we are from here. And these are the. These are some of our successes. Can you summarize our band in three sentences and then go, could you write that in the style of a music journalist? Or could you change, like, I got it. To write a review in the style of Drowning Sound, which was quite funny of like, kind of made up Radiohead album. And it's like, those are the kinds of things where I found it was kind of, oh, okay, this is. This is. Rather than just talking to your smart speaker, you're actually getting a bit more back from it. But yeah, I'm still waiting to have the, like, oh, my God, I'm gonna have to use this all day, every day at the moment. I'm using it for things like we were trying to set up some silent disco headphones the other day, and I couldn't find any good guides online. And I put in the type of speech, type of things they were and what sort of things could cause interference. And it started to then give me all these different, like, here's 15 different things to consider which. Which I think was kind of how I started to find it kind of useful. I've not really asked a question there. I've just rambled at you, which is kind of what podcasts are for. Right. If I'd asked Chat GBT what how to approach this podcast, I probably would have been told to ramble on on a podcast. So thank you very much for your time. Is there anything else? So people can. You've got a book called Prompt and Whereabouts can people find you online to see your experiments?

Yeah, well, I guess go to the book website. So Prompt mba. And the whole point of the book is pick some things that you're trying to do and we'll show you how to do them. And so very, very practical. So that would be my advice to kind of answer that question. It's like, pick something that's a chore for you. Maybe it's a social media marketing plan, or maybe it's writing a contract or evaluating a contract. Pick something that's a chore for you and work out how to use it. My strong advice would be if it doesn't help, assume that's not because it can't. Assume that's because you haven't got the right prompt. Work it out and then you'll have this breakthrough. You'll have this one thing that it does for you, and then you can get it to do that every time, and then you'll find other things. So that would be my advice. That's the basis of the book. Here's some things it can do. You should do it. Do these things with it every time. But yeah, and I'm very happy to help. So if you want to reach out and say, look, I'm trying to get through this thing, it's lame, it's not helpful, it can't help me, then tell me what you're trying to do and I will try to help. I bet you we can make it work. I bet you we can. So maybe Twitter's the best place for that. It's my middle name. B E G L E N for November.

I'll put it in the description. That's. That's what podcasts do, isn't it? Thank you very much for your time.

Cheers.

Thank you so much.

I hope you found that enlightening and hopefully very useful. Listening back to it, I'd realized there was quite a lot of things which I was realizing on the fly. I'm really kind of better understanding the platform just from talking it through. I feel like you basically listen. Listened in to a consultancy session I got. So hopefully that has been as useful to me as it has been to everyone else. And I think if you didn't clock it at the start, if you go to the Drowning Sound Substack, which is just drowningsound.substack.com for our newsletter you'll find a discount off of a special book which was inspired by this chat. We recorded it about a week and a half ago and David was like wow, I want to put some of these prompts down and because they were already going to offer a discount off the their book, but they've made it much more for musicians and artists and kind of created a version of it. I think there's lots of useful things in there and I've scribbled a forward in it too. So AI tell me what you make with it. If you use ChatGPT after listening to.

This, send me some screenshots of some.

Silly things that you've done. I'm ShawninSound on Twitter or Instagram or even LinkedIn if you're cool. And yeah, I will be back next week with another episode of the drynessound podcast. And if you enjoyed it, send it to a friend on WhatsApp, DM it to someone on Twitter and hopefully they will benefit from it too. See you later.