I AM ___

For nearly four years of my life, I AM ___ has accompanied/tormented me and I hope you will take the time to enjoy it in a quiet uninterrupted extended moment to yourself.

Like many of you, I have major concerns over the unethical training and environmental impacts of AI but the technology itself is not to blame. I have been working hard to change minds and gather together those who want to do something about the future instead of succumbing to fear. If this is you, perhaps you’ll join us.

I’m itching to share the full story behind the making of it because I see how much clarity is needed, especially after reading your comments and concerns re: the use of AI. Making this work took many years so telling the story will likely take some time as well. I appreciate those of you who are willing to ask questions and discuss it with me.

What is I AM ___ about?

I AM___ explores the turbulence of personal exploration, geopolitical upheaval and now an accelerating technological revolution.

The relationship we all have with AI, whether we like it or not, and the future of where it goes in our human story (this genie isn’t going back in the bottle) is all of our responsibility. I want to nurture this “intelligence” not just as a tool for our amusement but as if we were raising a child; with care and with good intent. Hopefully, in the best image of ourselves.

How was AI utilized in the making of I AM ___ (Music & Video)?

Neither the song I AM___ nor the music video were “created by AI.” The song as well as this music video were created by dozens of human artists over the past few years.

For clarity, the utilization of AI was done strategically and specifically as follows:

The vocal performance during the section “Aftercare” is all sung by me but I timbre transferred or “swapped out” my human voice sound for a model I trained off of my own voice called ai.Mogen. I then spent 100s of hours trying to make it sound nice.

For the “Noise” section of the music video, the artist Robert Seidel used personal video footage from my phone that was relevant to the song’s theme (the audio of those videos is featured on and off for a couple of minutes in the song). He processed those videos through the model Stable Diffusion. Four layers were then taken and re-edited by director @DariaKorsak pretty much frame by frame. After which, half was turned into particles by the VFX artist Falk Müller.

As the song and video highlight the turbulent relationship with emerging AI technologies in these extraordinary times, this was an artistic choice.

Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion model was chosen due to their collaboration with @Spawning.ai and the Do Not Train Registry. This was the best in practice at the time. The Creator ID and IP platform I founded over 10 years ago, @auracles.io, I’m proud to say, is now integrated with the DNT registry for musicians. Through your Auracle ID, we hope to allow musicians a chance to opt-out of AI model training and hope that more AI companies will honor this and do the right thing. The key is to make it easier for them to do so which is why creating a source of good, clean data (that we control!) is so important.

If you want to know the deep work I’m doing to help protect myself and other artists, I hope you will go check out @auracles.io.

What is ai.Mogen?

ai.Mogen is a spoken and singing voice model that began as a Chatbot over 6 years ago before the AI revolution. It was made in a desperate attempt for me to try to live at a human pace with all the incoming messages and requests from various channels. I was feeling like a robot trying to reply to everything and needed a solution. Mogen’s knowledge has been growing through conversations I’ve had with my fans over the years and continues to learn via my new Heapster.Live app. If you’d like to take part in the raising of Mogen, through interactions with me online, we are starting to beta test her during my live streams over on Heapster.live and I hope you will join us.

Mogen’s voice has also been featured on several other songs and has opened up an opportunity for me to engage in more collaborations with artists I may not otherwise be able to work with due to time constraints. To my knowledge, I am the first musician to intentionally train and utilize a private model of my singing voice for commercial use, something I hope will be available to other artists in the future.