Ep72. Jason Schneider: A.I. & the Grateful Dead

Ep72. A.I. & the Grateful Dead: Explore Human Intelligence vs Artificial Intelligence on the Analysis of the Grateful Dead Song “Ripple” with Jason Schneider

Grateful Dead fans, lovers of lyrics, and those curious about A.I.’s interpretation of art are in for a treat with today’s episode, which explores an overlooked question in the great debate of machine versus human intelligence: “can A.I. grasp the meaning in a song as well as a human?”

Our guest, Creativity Squared resident writer and philosopher, Jason Schneider, returns to the podcast to share insights from his own and ChatGPT’s analyses of the Grateful Dead song, “Ripple,” which he compiled and compared in a blog post that’s quickly become one of our most popular to date.

Understanding “Ripple” by The Grateful Dead

Jason is a true modern-day Renaissance man with passions that include photography, motorcycles, poetry, music, and philosophy. A self-proclaimed lifelong Leica maniac, Jason’s many titles also a camera collector, fine art photographer, writer, and photojournalist. He’s authored three books on camera collecting and an authoritative volume on woodburning stoves.

Of course, a conversation with Jason wouldn’t be complete without discussing the poet Emily Dickinson. He’s discussed Dickinson’s writing on his first Creativity Squared appearance and more recently in a blog post exploring the theoretical physics of consciousness. He’s also writing a book with a working title, “Understanding Emily Dickinson: A Reader’s Guide To The Enlightened Master.” Don’t miss this week’s episode for Jason’s thoughts on how Dickinson’s writings and “Ripple” explore similar themes of mortality, consciousness, and the human soul.

“We are the modulation between the finite and the infinite ”

Jason Schneider

Jason built a long and prosperous career as a photographic journalist across numerous prestigious positions. He is perhaps best known as the author of “The Camera Collector” column and for rising through the ranks at Modern Photography magazine to become its Editorial Director. After leaving Modern, he served 15 years as the Editor-in-Chief of Popular Photography, the world’s largest imaging magazine. Currently, Jason is a contributing writer for the Rangefinder Forum and Creativity Squared.

Helen met Jason back in 2011 when her social media marketing agency started managing Leica Camera’s social media channels and blog. Working with Leica for more than five years, Jason was instrumental in writing questions and editing interviews for the Leica Camera Blog. They’ve been colleagues and friends ever since.

In this post, we’ll highlight some of Jason and Helen’s major takeaways regarding A.I.’s grasp of nuance in music, humans’ relationship with music, and what those dynamics say about what it means to be human. To get the full picture of how ChatGPT’s analysis of “Ripple” stood up against Jason’s, check out his write-up. For more about Jason’s thoughts on Emily Dickinson, A.I.’s impact on photography, and how symbolism is intrinsic to being human, listen to his first appearance on the podcast.

A.I. Music Analysis: Technically Proficient but Missing The Human Element

“Provide an in depth analysis of the thematic structure and meaning of Robert Hunter, Hunter’s transcendent poem that Jerry Garcia masterfully set to music in ripple 1970 by the Grateful Dead.”

That was the prompt Jason fed into ChatGPT-4. Without giving the A.I. the chance to read the analysis he’d written himself, the chatbot’s analysis highlighted themes like “journey and the search for meaning,” “the ineffability of truth,” faith and mysticism,” “interconnectedness,” “acceptance and the flow of life,” “community and shared wisdom,” and “the role of music and arts as spiritual conduits.”

These themes largely echo those that Jason wrote about in his own analysis, including how the song “reveals essential elements of the spiritual and spatial-temporal journey undertaken by all humans.”

Jason says he found ChatGPT’s analysis to be superior in some ways to what a human can come up with. He describes it as a “technocratic” interpretation, filled with detail and accurate overall, but missing the “personal touch” that can only come from lived experience. His human analysis, in contrast, he says contained less detail but let the human element shine through in a way that would enable another person to tell that his analysis was human-generated.

While ChatGPT couldn’t replicate the full emotional depth of a human’s interpretation of music, it can get pretty close to the mark. But how is that possible when A.I. doesn’t possess the lived experiences or emotional memory that makes music so meaningful to humans?

A.I.’s Reliance on Human Data

As one of the Grateful Dead’s most thought-provoking songs, “Ripple” has been the subject of academic discourse for decades. In fact, Stanford University offers a whole course on the music and culture of the Grateful Dead.

As a result, ChatGPT doesn’t need to have the same emotional intelligence as humans in order to write about the philosophical and psychological themes in “Ripple,” because more than likely it’s already consumed the majority of scholarship on the topic.

“A.I. couldn’t have done as good of a job if scholars and rock enthusiasts and poetry enthusiasts and students had not provided a body of work based on human perception and human experience.”

Jason Schneider

However, Jason says that when he asked the chatbot to analyze his human analysis of “Ripple,” ChatGPT’s response became much richer as a result of engaging with the more emotionally grounded language of his own piece.

While A.I. can quickly analyze the published literature on “Ripple” than any human, the fact remains that its analysis is only possible thanks to previous works of the human mind. Likewise, while ChatGPT can distill those ideas into a compelling analysis, it lacks the emotional depth to fully flesh out those ideas without the help of a human.

In the end, Jason’s experience analyzing “Ripple” shows that while A.I. can generate a convincing reproduction of abstract human thought, it still doesn’t have the context nor the human experience necessary to really interpret the deeper emotional currents in a work of art without human guidance.

The Uniqueness of Human Experience

And what is it about our humanity that separates our perception of art from an A.I. model’s?

Helen cites Responsible A.I. advocate and influencer, Aza Raskin, who pointed on stage out that the way A.I. learns is fundamentally different than how humans do. He explains this through the analogy of learning to play the piano. A human can be taught to play the piano, but has to play it for their self to learn how to actually play. A.I. doesn’t work this way — if an A.I. is trained to play the piano, then it simply transfers that knowledge like copying and pasting, which is a fundamentally different way of learning…almost like how Neo learns kung-fu in The Matrix.

For Jason, the most fundamental feature of being human is our inevitable mortality. Invoking Yeats, Jason says that A.I. can’t achieve the same perspective as humans because it’s not “fastened to a dying animal” the way that human intellect is inseparable from our perishable human bodies.

“Human beings should value the glory and beauty of imperfection in themselves. The fact that A.I. can produce something more perfect than we are is both an asset and a liability.”

Jason Schneider

Knowledge that our time is finite is both an asset and a liability, according to Jason. A.I., however, doesn’t possess that same urgency to create and so, Jason says, even if the technology gets good enough to write what would pass as great art, anything generated by A.I. will always be a reproduction of human emotion and experience — a human imposter. A.I. could write “Ripple,” but it could never experience the emotions that led Robert Hunt to pen his poem, and it could never experience the purely human sensation of finding meaning in art.

Conclusion

In exploring A.I.’s ability to analyze the Grateful Dead’s “Ripple,” Jason doesn’t just provide an exercise in A.I.-generated creative writing — he gets at something profound about both artificial intelligence and human nature.

While A.I. can produce an impressively detailed analysis of music by drawing on vast repositories of human knowledge, it ultimately, in Jason’s words, is an imposter of human experience and emotions. Our mortality, our imperfections, and our subjective experiences shape how we interpret and connect with music in ways that A.I. cannot replicate.

As Jason reminds us, there’s a certain beauty in human limitation — our awareness of our own mortality drives us to create art that transcends our finite existence. Perhaps the greatest insight, though, is that A.I. won’t replace human interpretation or creation of art, but rather build upon it, adding new layers of understanding while remaining fundamentally dependent on the rich tapestry of human experience and emotion that informs all meaningful artistic expression.

Enjoy the conversation on the original article found here:

Understanding “Ripple” by The Grateful Dead

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Thank you, Jason, for joining us on this special episode of Creativity Squared.

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