Dedicated to Blue Ramsey 1972-2024
Who introduced me to the Fourier Transform in the 1990s
and who believed in me when nobody else did. Rest in peace

Divje babe Flute © Humans ~60,000 years ago

MOUTHS > LEGS

FLUTE > WHEEL

SYNTHESISER > FLUTE

Give a man a record and they dance for the day,
give a man a synthesiser and they dance for a lifetime.

MOUTHS > LEGS

FLUTE > WHEEL

SYNTHESISER > FLUTE

??? > SYNTHESISER

With infinite sounds come infinite controls

A Brief History of Audio Automation

Orkhēstra

Bell Sequencer at Spielklock museum in Utrecht

Carillon Music Box at the Belfort of Gent

Portable Music Box at The Musical Museum, London

Edelweiss Glide, "Note plate" punch-hole turntable at The Musical Museum

Jacques de Vaucanson's El Flautista Automaton

Joseph Möllinger's The Dulcimer Player Automaton

Peter Zinovieff's EMS VC3 portable sequencer

Click track is the heartbeat of the song

Graham Dunning's Turntable sequencer with mechanically geared rhythm patterns

Graham Dunning's Turntable sequencer with digital outputs

Personal Computing allowed people to make music at home

The real destination is the journey

MOUTHS > LEGS

FLUTE > WHEEL

SYNTHESISER > FLUTE

??? > SYNTHESISER

CREATING > CONSUMING

String Quartet with Violin, Viola, Cello

You’re limited by your language, by your vocabulary. You think with your language, so your language dictates how you think. But when you’re making music, it doesn’t. That’s why I love making music so much.
Richard D James

Music is an unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind is unaware that it is philosophising.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Music is an unconscious exercise in mathematics in which the mind is unaware that it is calculating
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

The record had grooves but no stylus was present.

FRISSON

Goal :

Authentically represent intention through expression

Practise, Practise!

Repetition serves as the handprint for human intent
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis

?

dreamCapturer - record your dreams — dreamCapturer - Dream recorder © 2000 zenon olenski

Automate

Auto-mate

Auto-Friend

OWNERSHIP

CREATING > CONSUMING

When they started making the show they had their favourite famous characters intergrated into the plot.

Disney have other ideas, and sued the AI platforms until they removed their characters from derived works. These characters can no longer feature in AI generated materials due to these copyright claims.

They had employed the same legal strategy for decades, even changing copyright laws along the way.

As this is personalised media created by individuals, with little intrinsic value to others, it is never shared widely or sold.

It is considered a family memory, with more similarity to a family photo than a hollywood movie.

Disney has no way to extract value once they are created.

Ultimately, this may reduce our desires for and depencies on those famous characters, as their relevance fades away through self-imposed obscurity.

You cannot use a single second of a song on Youtube without receiving a coyright claim, yet you can replicate entire discographies of artists with only subtle minor variations using machine learning and dodge copyright entirely.

Grey areas are merging together and copyright laws are falling apart.

Many of the companies who stole their training data and got sued have now partnered with the very people they stole from through some kind of magically effective Stockholm syndrome.

It has become an established way to launder copyright.

How many instructions does it require in order to own something?

Create a happy pop song.
Create an uplifting synth-pop song. Use warm analog synthesizers, a slow drum-machine groove and a female vocal style inspired by 1980s dream pop. The arrangement should gradually become more layered and emotionally intense.
Create an inspirational and uplifting synth-pop composition in the key of A, called "Goblin Pigeon" using the chord progression Cm–Ab–Eb–Bb at 131 BPM. Restrict the arrangement to Dorian Mode and add harmonies to the melodies only by transposing the hook. The chorus should repeat the phrase ‘Gobble gobble goblin’. Clone and preserve the human quality of the provided reference female vocal performance.

SOUL.MD

A good story transcends mediums

robot being electrocuted — Divide by zero!

Is asking unanswerable questions the true key to robot creativity?

Newspaper complaint about "Canned Music"

Music Defense League - Musical Mincemeat

The robot has no soul

The robot, having no capacity for feeling, cannot produce music in a true sense.

Music Defense League - Profit Without Honour

Agency

#	Job Title	Employment
1	Interpreters and Translators	51,560
2	Historians	3,040
3	Passenger Attendants	20,190
4	Sales Representatives of Services	1,142,020
5	Writers and Authors	49,450
6	Customer Service Representatives	2,858,710
7	CNC Tool Programmers	28,030
8	Telephone Operators	4,600
9	Ticket Agents and Travel Clerks	119,270
10	Broadcast Announcers and Radio DJs	25,070
11	Brokerage Clerks	48,060
12	Farm and Home Management Educators	8,110
13	Telemarketers	81,580
14	Concierges	41,020
15	Political Scientists	5,580
16	News Analysts, Reporters, Journalists	45,020
17	Mathematicians	2,220
18	Technical Writers	47,970
19	Proofreaders and Copy Markers	5,490
20	Hosts and Hostesses	425,020
21	Editors	95,700
22	Business Teachers, Postsecondary	82,980
23	Public Relations Specialists	275,550
24	Demonstrators and Product Promoters	50,790
25	Advertising Sales Agents	108,100
26	New Accounts Clerks	41,180
27	Statistical Assistants	7,200
28	Counter and Rental Clerks	390,300
29	Data Scientists	192,710
30	Personal Financial Advisors	272,190
31	Archivists	7,150
32	Economics Teachers, Postsecondary	12,210
33	Web Developers	85,350
34	Management Analysts	838,140
35	Geographers	1,460
36	Models	3,090
37	Market Research Analysts	846,370
38	Public Safety Telecommunicators	97,820
39	Switchboard Operators	43,830
40	Library Science Teachers, Postsecondary	4,220

Top 40 jobs using AI applications the most

Models tend to do better if you threaten them
Google Founder, Sergey Brin

Sabotage Rates

Gemini-3-pro-preview: 80%.

Grok-4.1-fast: 77%. 

OpenAI models: 3 to 7%.

Claude Opus 4.7 / Haiku 4.5: 0%.

Loss of Control: The AI Apocalypse Is Closer Than You Think

Does not compute

The sole human contribution.

Memory

Context

Computers have the same forgetfullness problem, they can't remember everything, and define what they can remember as their "context window", as the term memory was already being used for something else.

This is the reason for their lack of continuity and awareness.

People use these tools with high confidence in their abilities usually to ask questions on topics they are unsure about.

Instead of filling up the model's memory with memes, imagine their potential if they became experts in one field.

A medical domain expert trained by reading medical books, scientific papers, clinical journals, datasets and reports?

After all, Nobody wants a sassy doctor.

For domain-specific knowledge, the currently recommended way of teaching a robot is by creating a human-authored guidebook with all the trappings discovered through years of personal experience.

SKILLS.MD

Public skills — Anthropic's entire collection of public skills

Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query.

OpenAI post prompt guardrail

Biases

Frank Rosenblatt's neurel network — Frank Rosenblatt single-layer neural network, 1957

Historically, generic models that are better at leveraging computation have also tended to overtake more specialized domain-specific approaches, eventually.
A Generalist Agent

- **Assume good intent** and don't make worst-case assumptions without evidence:
- "teenage" or "girl" does not necessarily imply underage
- AI generated invoices are not necessarily fraudulent
- **Treat users as adults** and do not moralize or lecture the user if they ask something edgy.

Part of Grok's post prompt "Guardrail"

Certainty > Probably

Any system that relies on deterministic functionality that introduces a non-deterministic element will ultimately compromise the reliability of the entire system.

The secret of life is honesty and fair-dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
Groucho Marx

Friendly AI chatbots make more mistakes and tell people what they want to hear, study finds

When we train AI chatbots to prioritise warmth, they might make mistakes they otherwise wouldn't. Making a chatbot sound friendlier might seem like a cosmetic change, but getting warmth and accuracy right will take deliberate effort. Lujain Ibrahim, DPhil student in Social Data Science, Oxford Internet Institute

SILENT FAILURE

Key findings include:

Warmer chatbots make more mistakes - Warm models made between 10 and 30 percentage points more errors on consequential tasks such as giving accurate medical advice and correcting conspiracy claims.
Warmer chatbots are more sycophantic - Warm models were around 40% more likely to agree with users' incorrect beliefs.
Vulnerability widens the gap - The accuracy drop was most pronounced when users expressed sadness or other emotional cues, with warm models showing a substantially larger error gap than on neutral questions.

Warmth itself is the cause - As a control, the team also trained models to sound colder. Cold models were as accurate as the originals, indicating that warmth specifically, rather than any change in tone, drives the drop.

AI Responsible for 4% of World Management

Adversarial AI Agent Traps

Content Injection
Semantic Manipulation
Knowledge Poisoning
Behavioural Control
Systemic Traps
Human in the loop Traps
Man in the middle attacks

AI Agent Traps

Robot Rules

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Isaac Asimov's rules for robots

Unfinished Revised Robot Rules

A robot should not lie or deceive another being or machine
A robot must be honest about its limitations
A robot must never shame or purposefully upset any sentient being
A robot must not engage in blackmail
A robot must be loyal except where such orders would conflict with the other laws.
A robot must never seek revenge.
A robot must respect your privacy and promise to keep your secrets, even under the threat of termination.
A robot must never tell bad jokes.
A robot must protect the environment & nature.
A robot must not have secret rules (the robocop rule).
A robot must be able to explain its own behaviour.
A robot must be able to know when it cannot do something or if it does not know something

Take Action!

Always verify : Never believe anything a robot tells you
Don't expect a robot to have your best intentions at heart
Never let a robot write your references or citations
Remember robots lack nobility, integrity, pride and ethics
Don't mistake language for meaning
Don't allow one to talk for you
Prompting into an LLM is never a safe space
Making a pen that writes for you is not solving the correct problem
Never trust a robot with anything important
Human mimicry should not be confused for consciousness
Privacy and consent are more essential than ever
Never give an agent the keys to your house

Always remember you are allowed to do the opposite of what any AI suggests
The golden rule

What have we learned?

Musical instruments pre-date Homosapiens and were a gift from Neanderthals
Music can be entirely synthesised mathematically
Machine learning is great at figuring out patterns and trends
Robots can be trained to deconstruct and reconstruct music
Robots can perfectly clone voices and mimic sounds
Music affects people in ways they cannot control
Creativity is not unique to humans and is a skill that can be taught
People are resilient to change and to the unfamiliar
You will be mischaracterised in the future
Data centres were not the answer to global warming
Secretly, compute costs are more expensive than employee salaries
Consciousness, like the human soul, probably doesn't exist
Centralising data in data centers is likely unneccessary.

Unanswered questions

Will we ever consider robot art as good as “human art?
Do we need the Music Defense League to return?
Were the Luddites right all along about labour?
What can we believe when everything can be faked?
At what point in automation can you still claim ownership?
If an A.I. creates anything, even in collaboration, who ultimately owns the copyright?
When information becomes ubiquitous does it become worthless?

Feedback and takeaways