AI Summer

 

Made in Ideogram. Heilan coo in the pub.

It's been a summer of AI tools. I've been using Claude for research prompts and expanding into other tools such as testing Perplexity (I still don't love it as a tool). In June, I shifted to using Ideogram pretty regularly as a feature of the blog. In fact, quite a lot (see here and here). I used it again to visualize a 3rd-great-grandfather leaving the port of Valparaiso, Chile in the 1850s, a travel poster from Belfast to Cairnryan, imagining medical education in 1775, and my 3rd-great-grandparents working at the Buck Tavern in 1850. And as I'm paying for it, I'll continue to use it again for some other prompts.

I've taken things a step further to use multiple AI tools together to generate something truly something. First I used Claude to generate lyrics for a country song, giving it some basic prompts that it be set in an Indiana summer, set between those formative years of high school and college, driving on country roads, enjoying a swim at the lake, etc. It promptly spit out "Indiana Summer", a heart-string sentimental journey back in time to 2006. As this was a bit late for me, I quickly suggested that it try again using 1992 as the date. 

Of course there was a line about driving an old Ford, and I asked this be changed to a rusty old Bonneville. Claude said "Great change! The old rusty Bonneville has a perfect nostalgic feel for early 90s country music and fits well with the Indiana summer vibe. Those old Pontiacs were definitely part of that eras landscape."

Made in Ideogram. Rusty Bonneville in Indiana.

Yep, I definitely tore that car up on the back roads of central Indiana during the summer, not quite like the guy above, but not too far off either. The song lyrics in Claude were pretty spot on too. So I took those lyrics and put them into another free tool called Suno. There's been quite a bit of controversy over the past few weeks about an AI generated band called the Velvet Sundown (see article on The Guardian and this YouTube video). Perhaps they used this tool as well.

Back to my AI-generated song lyrics in Claude. This was not something I set out to do when I first entered the rabbit-hole of AI music. I had watched a YouTube video earlier in the day, Tuesday 15 July and thought I could do that too. And there you go. It worked rather well. Once I edited the prompts in Suno, that's where the magic happened. I'm a bit impressed with the output, and it's kind of crazy how quickly and how spot-on the tool works with the prompts given.

An update to add a photo of the old Bonneville being sanded down by my Dad, sometime about 1990-1992.

Photo by Patrick Jones. Dad sanding the Bonneville.