Riffs

Explore in the Musing On Music Mostly LLM

AI-analysis with GoogleNotebook is sometimes comical in its hallucinations. It's already started drinking for the holidays, Not that it's not interesting. But it's main purpose is to find patterns. So my including a 1974 article about David Bowie being in the studio tied it together with "historical facts". Well, ok, not exactly...thanks for finding that connection.

Hilarious: "You had to be a polymath just to keep your family fed and clothed."

I like how these hosts like everything.

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11/25/1974

(From the article, "Bowie Meets Springsteen", published in The Drummer magazine)

"We arrived at Sigma Sound a little after eight. Producer Tony Visconti was arched over a mammoth soundboard, pressing buttons, being generally pleasant to the half-dozen engineers and musicians in the control room, and peering into the large windowed studio directly in front.

The album was practically finished. The first rough mix had been accomplished since Bowie recorded the basic tracks some weeks ago, and this week had been devoted to clean-ups and overdubs. This was the final night in the studio for the album; the final touches would now be made.

"I'm Only Dancing (She turns me on)" [subsequently released as "Hang On To Yourself"] was being played back....

"You know Barry Goldwater is resigning from politics to become President of a UFO organization... he's not really resigning from politics, he just realizes they can't keep it all secret much longer and he wants to be at the top when it breaks. It will break soon."

[11/25/2025: Even things we think are permanent and invincible always eventually break. Goldwater was also an interesting photographer. Typically it's the artist who makes a foray into politics, but after politics, it's back to the art. Also, Goldwater believed in UFOs and became the president of the Mutual UFO Network. It's all that looking at the sky and horizon].

A tranche of 10 new entries from my ongoing Dynaxiom book, analyzed with Google NotebookLM. The analysis is pretty good. It seems to use a higher temperature setting, generating texts that wasn't in the sources. I think they need to have a setting for this. Higher temperature can result in too much hallucination. There isn't hallucination in this case which results in it being inaccurate--except in not knowing certain things, for example the MAGA backronym.

https://www.amazon.com/Dynaxiom-Lee-Barry-ebook/dp/B01FVFWHRM

I don't want to call these confabulations but they extrapolate what I said in everyday language to something perhaps too over the top. It riffed on inventing new words (neologisms) , and this is essentially that. I suspect that it's scraping the internet to elaborate on the topics, but I didn't instruct it to do that. It has apparently extended the context widow.

AI-generated content will always have a sneaky "truthiness", but it doesn't represent what a person actually said in their own words. That said, I think this is quite interesting. You can learn more about what you were originally thinking about.

The original sources of most of this is my audio diary 2021-2024. Anyone that has large amount of content, like a YouTuber would find this useful.

You ask yourself, "Did I really say that?" You did but it's embedding other related text. It's not "wrong" per se.

AI-generated analysis of my diary entries from November 20 1997-2024

• How the late 1990s were the harbinger of the 2020s in technology and culture
• On songwriting credits for instrumentalists in bands–does your guitar part qualify you as a credited writer?
• Having a general sense of curiosity about things as opposed to letting life wash over us and accept what’s pushed at us
• Using music theory as a metaphor (resolving cognitive dissonance)
• How social media keeps on the hamster wheel of content creation and creating news
• The trend of being anti-science and anti-facts starting under the Bush administration
• How generations process traumatic events depending on whether the experience was first-hand, and the potential of traumas being passed to younger generations
• The sunk costs of conspiracies or being in a cult.

i let loose AI on my diary entries and writings made on 11/14 over 20 years. What's interesting about the AI Analyses done with Google NotebookLM is that it suggest ways of understanding things in a different context because of the natural LLM embeddings. This is also problematic because it riffs too much on one thing, like ti did with the concept of exformation. A takeaway isn't necessarily exformation. Short videos aren't exformation.

AI-generated analysis of just 11/7 entries on politics, art, culture, and technology.

AI analysis of 3 book excerpts: The Singing Neanderthals, Beethoven's Anvil, and Language in Time

LLM: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/ba8e3bed-2aba-41c2-b02f-28083137a353

(AI-generated)

Sources:

• https://leebarrymusic.blogspot.com/2025/06/do-llms-have-soul.html
• https://www.noemamag.com/ai-signals-the-death-of-the-author/
• https://news.byu.edu/intellect/byu-study-finds-the-real-reasons-why-some-people-choose-not-to-use-artificial-intelligence

AI analysis of the 2012 book, Sincerity: How a moral ideal born five hundred years ago inspired religious wars, modern art, hipster chic, and the curious notion that we all have something to say (no matter how dull)

Sources:

• A book excerpt
• A book review
• Reader comments