In a discussion recently a friend compared generative AI to self-driving cars back in 2017: the makers were convinced, perhaps rightly, that they had solved 99.9% of the problem, and therefore would have a viable product within the year. The problem for self-driving cars back then, and generative AI now, is that the last 0.1% is something special. Intractable.
It’s worth holding on to that as more and more playlists are flooded by uncannily realistic impersonations of country, disco and what have you. We are about to get glutted by a technology that seems all encompassing, but there remans an 0.1% of the original source material that it can’t imitate.
It’s in that intractable thousandth where Swedish singer-composer Isabell Gustafsson-Ny dwells. This tiny – 18 minute – album of ultraminimalism just doesn’t make sense. One minute its piano stabs sound like you’re in a conservatoire, the next the violin lilt has you sitting on a rock on a Baltic island, then Gustafsson-Ny’s pure vocal tone takes you right inside her own mind. It’s full of oddness, eeriness, absurd humour, it feels ancient and modern, and it’s entirely individualist.
That’s it. It’s a little folk, it’s a little jazz, but mainly it’s just individualist, ultraminimalist, inimitable, existing in a space that makes no sense on its own terms. Maybe generative AI could come up with something like this but it would take some pretty twisted prompts to get there, and by that time you’re back into the realm of creativity anyway. It’s a perfect little window into the lovely unutterable.
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