>> From WXXI News.

This is Connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour is made in the pages of The New Yorker, where Ted Chang wrote a piece about art and artificial intelligence.

It's obviously been a lot of talk about AI in the art space.

AI winning competitions in places like Denver or Painting contest and the controversy that ensued there.

AI music entering the Spotify charts.

Are you comfortable with that?

Are you downloading AI music?

Are you good with that?

Well, Ted Chang writes in The New Yorker, AI isn't going to make art, and he writes to create a novel or a painting.

An artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence.

And as I read that, I felt for a moment optimistic.

Then I saw the date on the byline there.

That was two years ago.

That piece feels outdated to me, simply because I see Spotify charts.

I see AI artists, people sharing their work.

I don't even like the term AI artist.

There's not an AI artist.

There are songs generated by AI.

There's paintings generated by AI.

Presume there's poetry generated by AI, but there are not actual artists, even though some people, the creators of these AI, are giving these AI names, they're anthropomorphizing.

So I read that piece and I thought, boy, this feels optimistic and it feels quaint, but maybe I'm overreacting.

Maybe there's a space for AI in art.

Maybe it can be a supplement.

Maybe not.

I don't know.

And we we contacted three people to come in and either, you know, set me straight or call me down or tell me to shut up about AI because we talk about it all the time.

And, and obviously, I'm concerned in many ways, and I want to welcome our guests who are going to have a lot to say on this.

We'll go around the table.

Peter Conners is publisher and executive director of Boa Editions, which, by the way, has a lot going on there too.

Um, how are you, Peter?

>> I'm good.

Evan, thanks for having me.

>> What's going on at Boa?

>> Well, we are celebrating our 50th anniversary this year.

So 50 years of independent publishing in Rochester.

So we're really proud of that.

And hopefully everybody in Rochester is proud of that.

>> Congratulations to you.

We'll set aside some time to talk about what else that means and what you want people to do to access more of the work of Boa coming up here across the table.

Hello, Zahyia Rolle an educator, a singer songwriter.

Great to have you back here.

>> Hi.

Thanks for having me.

>> Nice to see you.

And Michael Solis is back with us.

And Michael is executive executive director of Writers and Books.

Nice to see you as well.

>> Nice to see you as well, Evan.

>> So let's just kind of go around.

I'll start with you.

Michael.

Do I need to calm down about all this or am I justifiably concerned that human beings are too rapidly?

This is the way I would put it.

I am surprised at how rapidly we are accepting art that is created by non-human entities.

I am surprised at how we are not considering the possible effects on the human artist, who might be crowded out of spaces, and I am disappointed that we are not pushing ourselves to define those categories more.

So if it's on Spotify and you see we've done this before with just the music category, but you're not even necessarily told that a piece of music is AI generated now.

And we haven't demanded that.

And I'm surprised that all those things.

What do you think?

>> I'm not surprised.

I think over time we've seen that we as humans are willing to accept artwork or creations, even when they're human made.

If they are maybe not always the most elevated form of artwork or experience.

If we think about, you know, reality television, sometimes what we absorb and want to witness is really something that helps us to disconnect from our lives.

Something light, something fluffy, something entertaining, and maybe AI created work provides us with that easy access to things from the writing world, where words just spill out.

Like, I think there's a quote, the words spill out like rain, right?

So we can generate so much, so much more quickly, which is concerning, of course, because writing and creating takes time.

Music takes time.

The human experience of creativity takes time.

We're tapping into that one fundamental piece that makes us different from all the other species on the planet, which is imagination and the ability to create.

So I think that AI is tapping into that somehow, whether it can do it as the quote that you mentioned from The New Yorker or not, it is a bit scary because it means what does it mean for the future of artists, for the creative work?

And will, will we be able to distinguish what is created by humans and what is not going forward?

>> Yeah.

There's one other thing that surprises me, and I take your point about why you're not surprised.

It's interesting to bring in reality television to all of this, but it's it's a fair point.

Um, I'm surprised that there hasn't been an even bigger backlash among art creators about the fact that in many ways, AI is just thieving.

I mean, it is just taking from existing human creation.

It's not creating from whole cloth because it is mining material that will never be able to track.

But it is mining human made creation.

And I am surprised that there hasn't been more momentum to stop it on those grounds.

Are you surprised?

>> Well, there's the huge court case around Anthropic and Meta and OpenAI basically stealing all these books and copyrighted works.

>> Absolutely.

>> Putting it into the system.

And that gives the capacity for us to say, hey, I want to write this essay or this book on the ecology of bees and the voice of Toni Morrison, and then the AI systems can spit out exactly that.

And the voice of those authors.

So this is stolen work.

And I think that's the area where it has crossed a major line.

Um, that permission was never granted to steal copyrighted work.

And I think that's the importance of regulation.

Anytime that new technology is introduced, it's introduced without the regulations in place.

And unfortunately, this means that so many authors have have yeah, had their work stolen without their permission.

And that is a red line that should have never been crossed.

>> Zahyia how are you feeling about all this?

>> Ooh, I have two two thoughts on this.

Um, one is, honestly, we've been here before and I can get into that a bit, but, um, the second thing is I saw this coming on all honesty with music because we, again, it's funny that Michael brings up that it is.

Michael.

Right?

Yep.

Okay.

Michael brings up the reality TV because I feel that way that it's directly affected music.

Um, and we saw this with American Idol, like the minute that we got into this mindset that vocalists had to sound perfect on pitch all the time.

We already started setting ourselves up for this, like almost, um, non-human sounding productions that we now see with like the ton of compression and people are not used to hearing these like pitch wavering, natural human voices that exist.

And, and I say all the time, I'm like, would Bob Dylan even have a chance today?

Like, I don't think he would have because he's not pitch perfect.

Raphael Saadiq is another example I bring up.

Like he was not pitch perfect and he would not stand a chance today, competitively on like the the higher level of celebrity musicians because of how we've kind of set ourselves up in this in consuming music that is perfect and that has been processed.

So now AI is able to do that.

And for a trained year, a lot of people can who have listened to AI music.

And then, um, non AI music, there are artifacts that exist inside the music that are detectable.

>> Definitely.

>> And like a lot of people can, can tell right away.

They're like, oh, I got to turn that.

Then they're, you know, repulsed.

>> But I want to put a fine point on it because I think this is important.

Several years ago, I think this was sometime in 23 when ChatGPT was sort of the rage.

And I, you know, I invoked this quite often on this program, but I've always remembered this.

The amount of teachers who reached out to me and said, I am not worried about my students using ChatGPT to write papers because I'll be able to tell, you know, it doesn't have the human touch.

Well, three years later, they cannot tell.

And ChatGPT is very good.

It will put in spelling errors.

It will mimic your style of speech or your writing.

It is not what it was three years ago, and it got very good, very fast.

And right now it's the worst it will ever be.

At that.

Having said that, I've listened to a lot of AI music and there is like this uncanny valley kind of weirdly plasticky, non-human aspect to it that feels that feels very similar and formulaic.

And right now, I do feel like it's you can kind of go like, whoa, that doesn't I'm not down with it, but I assume it will go in the direction of getting better and more nuanced.

I don't know, I wouldn't be surprised at the moment.

I think music stands out more than writing because the writing is there's been a lot of progress in three years with that.

With music.

It still feels weird to me.

It feels like it kind of fakey, plasticky, uncanny valley.

>> Yeah.

But that might be for you because you do have a trained ear.

Like, I know you listen to a lot of music, but I'm shocked at how many people cannot tell.

>> Or don't care.

I that's my issue is like people like, don't even care.

Yeah.

Like, why don't we care?

>> Yeah.

I think it's because like I said, we've just kind of been set up for this.

And I asked my students this question all the time.

Like, what exactly is art?

And that's a really difficult question to answer because, it ends up being based on somebody's identity and what they connect with.

Like, you know, what I consider art might not be the same thing that Peter considers art.

And, you know, and across the board.

So when somebody says like, I cannot remember the first name of the artist, but I know her.

The last name is Monet, that there's a.

>> That's right.

>> Yeah, yeah.

And like, people are connecting to her music.

Well, her AI music, like it's deep.

>> It's music.

>> Yeah.

>> I don't want to.

>> Answer my music.

>> I've had to do that too.

Yeah, yeah.

>> And so it's like, but you know, okay, so she writes the poetry part and then they're like, they're just like, you know, this is exactly what I needed to hear.

And at this time, and it's, it's like the individual.

>> You go to the YouTube comments, people are like, I can't wait to meet her.

Like, well, there is no her.

>> There's no her.

>> It's not a her.

>> Yeah.

Well, I will say for a positive side for this, though, I am hoping because I am seeing it like, like we were kind of talking about generation Gen Z and how they're just like visceral reactions to this, this whole AI movement.

And even my students, my eighth graders, I tried to do a lesson on AI and they were like, miss, this is awful.

Turn it off.

Like they hated it.

So the thing that I'm seeing now is this beautiful rebellion where people are like, okay, I'm going to start buying CDs.

I'm going to start buying vinyl.

And that's interesting.

So there's like, I feel like there's this duplicity that's existing right now.

That's really beautiful.

>> And you're right, Gen Z hates AI.

The polling is incredible.

It's in the teens.

The popularity approval of AI in Gen Z is in the teens now.

And that is largely because the tech companies themselves have told Gen Z, you may not have the job that you went to school for.

You may not have the life that you dreamed of, and you may all die anyway, but you might not.

And maybe we'll just give you all, you know, we'll just put you all on some form of welfare and you'll have more free time to create art.

But AI will create the art anyway.

I mean, Gen Z is like, this is not what we wanted.

This is not what we signed up for.

It's very interesting that even your eighth graders are like, get it off.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter is poetry immune to AI?

Give me something good, man.

Save the.

Ship.

>> Well, let me say this.

So I, I came across a term, uh, in an article I was reading recently, and the term was algorithm aversion.

And the definition that was given.

And this is by biology professor named Alex Van Hun.

He said receptivity to empathy is contingent on the belief that the human subject is interacting with a fellow human being.

Knowledge of the machine identity dispels the experience of connection.

So it got me thinking about the role of empathy in both creating art and receiving art as a reader, and I, as an editor, have come across things that I definitely know are AI generated, and they can be, you know, within a fraction of an inch to passing, to being, you know, real to being something.

But there's something missing.

There's something not there.

>> And I a consistent giveaway for you.

>> I, there's a stiffness to the language, kind of like you described with music.

There's a stiffness to the language.

I didn't have the language until I read this to say, this is what's missing.

There's empathy.

And I know that you can train a machine to project empathy, and you can train it to recognize empathy, but you can never train a machine to my understanding, to actually be empathic, right?

So when we're missing the empathy to the art exchange, let's say from reader to writer, there's a sort of it's almost like a pause, you know, there's, there's an empty space that's there.

And I can feel that as somebody who reads, you know, a thousand manuscripts a year that haven't been published yet and are looking to get published.

When I hit that, I have a feeling first, and then I have to go back and I start looking at the language.

And a lot of times there is sort of a stiffness to the language.

I don't know if that's, you know, the best way to explain it.

>> So interesting.

>> But it's there's, there's something there.

And I will tell you, I recently got a cover letter from a poet that I have published several times whose name I will not mention.

For whatever reason, this poet decided to use AI for the cover letter to explain their new manuscript.

And my first thought I immediately recognized, and I thought, well, why did you do that?

You could pick up the phone and we could talk about it, but I immediately saw what was going on there, and it was like kind of a bad, lukewarm review, badly written, lukewarm review of his past work.

And he was using it to try and summarize and step outside of his work to present it.

Now, it's hard for any artist to describe their work.

A lot of times, if you ask a poet like, tell me about your work.

Uh, you know, then they struggle with that.

So maybe it's a way to get over that, but it never, never flies with me.

>> And but you're someone who reads thousands of manuscripts and like the average reader obviously doesn't write.

And if we don't have that recognition piece, then number one, we won't see it.

But then we also might not even recognize what we're losing empathy in writing when we accept more machine driven work.

>> Yeah.

And I have to check my own smugness because for all I know, you know, I don't I know I haven't published anything that's AI generated.

>> Like the least smug person.

>> I know.

>> I mean, like, you're really very low on the smugness scale.

>> Something could have slipped past me.

I don't think it has yet.

Um, but I also do want to mention that boa is a part of this big anthropic lawsuit.

And in my own books as an author and also many Boa books were used to train, you know, against our, uh, our, you know, nobody asked us.

They were used to train AI models.

So we were asked to be a part of that, that lawsuit.

>> Do you consider it?

Um, do you consider it theft?

>> Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

I mean, absolutely, because, you know, just in all fairness, that is, um, you know, that is our property.

That's the author's property.

We've gone into an agreement with them, a contract with them to publish their work and to present it in a certain way.

And that's not the way.

So we weren't consulted.

And yeah, I do consider that theft.

>> Do you have a sense of the timeline of this lawsuit?

>> I don't know, I have no idea.

And, you know, the reality is we have probably at least 30 to 35 books that were involved in that, that we know of.

And I've got a couple of my own that I know of.

Um, it could be years.

It could, you know, I really don't know.

And at the end of the day, once everybody gets through taking their nickels and dimes, who knows what that amounts to for boa.

>> But I'm not trying to be cheeky when I ask you this.

Give me the headline that you think would actually be like a plausible result of this lawsuit that I mean, far end of the spectrum, but still within reach.

What could happen?

What's a headline we might see someday?

>> Boa endowment fund launched for the remainder of the press?

You know, I mean, I'd love to see Boa get money for it.

Quite honestly, it's too late.

The damage is done.

The work has been taken.

It's been used.

So we can't get that back.

>> But couldn't conceivably panel, couldn't this lawsuit or lawsuits like it lead to a judgment that says you these companies cannot create products that create this way anymore.

I mean, I know it would seem earthshaking, but everybody's like, well, you can't stop AI.

There's nothing you can do.

Like baloney.

It's hard.

It's hard.

Culturally.

It's hard with norms.

It's hard legally.

And there's a lot of power in tech.

And there's a lot that power pervades Washington, D.C.. >> You know, we were talking.

>> About that.

Impossible.

>> Yeah.

We were talking about this out in the lobby.

And it might not be the intellectual property aspect that does that.

You know, we were talking about the environmental, you know, damage that's done through these huge AI systems.

And maybe that's going to be a thing that slows it down.

I don't know, I wish I was more optimistic than that.

>> That's really interesting.

Um, so Michael Solis, I have this bad habit that occasionally I check Facebook and I try not to because it feels bad.

And social media tends to feel bad.

But you know, I have a lot of family in there and whatever, it's, it's not like a regular habit, but what I have noticed when I'm there is people are sharing more articles that are clearly AI written and they're the formula.

You know, Peter's talking about seeing something missing in writing the formula I'm seeing in writing of like an article.

And this might be like a review.

This is often like the this is the untold story of this, this actor and this movie that you think you know the story.

Well, here's the story.

This person walked onto the set not thinking that their life would change, but their life changed and the world would never be the same and you would never be the same ever.

And then the formula, there's there's a three sentence formula.

This person does something and here's the formula.

It was an X, it wasn't Y, it was Z. Like look for the formula.

You will see it.

You will see this formula.

This is so AI.

And I'm thinking of this because when Peter talks about you really can't train a machine on empathy or really understanding emotion, it will parrot what it thinks is emotion, but it comes off as overdramatic.

Like this really like saccharine, you know, sometimes lachrymose, you know, say it wasn't X and it wasn't Y. It was actually Z. And you're like, whoa.

I mean, like every article, it means to be profound.

And I don't want like, I like subtlety in writing.

Do you like subtlety?

I mean, I'm a big fan of subtlety.

>> I do appreciate subtlety, I guess.

I guess what it's going for is the big finish, the big bang at the end.

Yes, that wraps people in, gets their attention, um, tapping into the psychology of how do we, you know, get people to click into things and then sustain their attention?

>> Like if I, if I was the AI writing the Michael Michael Solis story coming to Rochester, it'd be like Michael Solis had never even heard of Rochester.

He would have thought it was fake.

Not even a real place.

Maybe on another planet somewhere.

But no, Rochester was real.

>> That's what some people told me in New York City.

And so it would.

And I came anyway.

>> It would.

It was.

>> Like Rochester was real.

>> And Michael Solis.

Oh, he was definitely real.

He wasn't excited.

He wasn't scared.

He was opportunistic.

This was going to change the world.

>> With an em dash.

>> With.

>> The em dash.

That's what it is.

It all sounds.

>> Like that.

And so I say that in the article space in the social media shared space.

But there's products of writing that are much better than that.

I have to get.

I'm, I'm poking fun now because I think it's all.

>> But it can be better.

And I'm sure it can be subtle.

I'm going to take a phone call in a minute, but let me just ask briefly and then we'll take this call.

What do you want consumers of art to do about this?

>> Well, there's a really interesting case, if you don't mind me sharing about an author named Mia Ballard who wrote Shy Girl, which was self-published in 2025.

Um, it's a feminist body horror novel.

It did really well as a self-published book, and it got picked up by one of the big publishers, Hachette, and it was acquired in the UK and the US, and it was supposed to have this big, wonderful release, um, this wonderful story of an independently published book going traditional.

Um, and then in late 2025, early 2026, uh, on social media, a lot of comments started emerging that this piece felt, this book felt it was AI generated.

So some of the patterns were repetitive phrasing that people were seeing.

It was overly polished, excessive metaphor use, emotional flatness, which we've talked about here, kind of that empathetic or that lack of soul.

Right.

Um, and then serious accusations were made.

The book ended up getting pulled by the publisher.

So now this author's career has really kind of been destroyed.

Um, and it raised all these questions around authenticity and art.

The author herself has said that she didn't use AI.

Maybe it was one of the editors along the way, one of the freelance editors.

So it got very messy very quickly.

But people who read and supported the book felt emotionally deceived.

So I thought that was really interesting that people who are reading felt that they'd been lied to, that they weren't sold something that they thought was human created, and they felt deceived by it.

So I think that pushback has happened in this case, but it's also raised questions.

Was this a witch hunt against this specific author?

Um, they said that they used AI detective detection tools to, to determine that 78% of the book was created by AI.

But then there's also questions around, okay, what are these authentication tools?

How, how valid are they?

And these are also AI tools assessing AI.

So what, what the heck does that mean?

Right.

Um, so I think the search for authenticity is still there.

It's the value of the work that we do at writers and books, right?

Human created experiences, people spending time together, tapping into their creativity.

And I think we, we want this, we hunger for it, we thirst for it.

And I think we hope to see more of it.

But if we're not sold that, or we think that we're we're sold that.

And it turns out to be something that it isn't, then it's this really sense of being deceived.

>> Briefly, if you read a memoir, a book of any genre that really moved you and then you found out it was not written by a human being, would you have felt deceived?

>> Totally.

Yeah, yeah.

Especially a memoir.

That's a human's story and their experience.

>> Yeah.

So Zahyia when when we talk about people jumping into the YouTube comment section going like, oh, this, this artist is amazing.

This song speaks to me, my soul.

I can't wait to meet her.

And then you go like there is no her.

This is an AI song.

I'm surprised the amount of people who go like, well, it still affects me the same way.

Do you?

Would you feel deceived if a song that you feel like, you know, that's not that's not a bop, that's not cliche.

It's amazing way to use the AI formula.

But like, if you really love the new song and you found out it wasn't actual human beings creating it, would you feel differently about it?

>> So fun fact whenever I hear whenever I a new song pops up for me, the first thing I do is scroll down and I look at the about section.

And then if they have a social media profile, I go look at it.

If they don't have any social media profile or then I don't, I don't even bother to continue with the song.

So I've tried to like stay in a due diligence kind.

>> Of policing.

>> It a little bit.

>> Yeah, I police it and I learned this from a professor that I had Professor Dozier over at Eastman School of Music, and he would always, he would his he did it with articles.

He'd say, you know, tell me about the article.

Tell me about the author who wrote this article.

What is their what are their potential implicit biases?

Like he was teaching us through that way.

But I feel like that's something that we never do.

We never really deep dive or question.

And so, um, I'm hoping that I would not be deceived by it to begin with because I kind of, I go down a rabbit hole before I even get into a song.

>> So that's good.

I mean, that's good.

One day, Peter, you're gonna, someone's gonna send you something and you will not feel like there's an empathy gap someday it's possible.

And you'll go, oh, that's really good.

And then you're going to find out it's AI.

Well, you feel like that pulls the rug out from the experience.

>> Yeah, I would, I would, I think there's yeah, I would feel deceived.

And you know, we've put into the front of all our books now within the past, I guess two years or so that none of the books that we published can be used for AI training.

For what it's worth, there's a statement in the front matter of the book.

>> Doesn't mean anybody's listening.

>> Yeah, this was after anthropic had already, you know, gone through us.

Um, but yeah, I would certainly feel deceived.

Yeah.

>> Well, so here's, um, the comment from Paul in Brighton on that subject.

Hey, Paul, go ahead.

>> Uh, yeah.

Thank you for taking the call.

And good afternoon everyone.

Uh, question I have is, um, will there ever be or could it possibly be, uh, you know, like when I go into a grocery store, I'm able to take a look at a label and determine, you know, yeah, I think I want to this is okay.

You know, there's nothing here I'm scared about.

Um, is and I've kind of given up on music because as you mentioned earlier, it is so obvious.

Uh, you know, that it's machine generated music that in popular music is not worth the time.

Uh, but books, you know, books and artwork.

Um, is there, you know, and maybe I'm naive again, but is there a way to, uh, you know, could that ever happen that it's like just stated right up?

There's a label on the book that says, uh, warning 100% AI generated or, or, um, is, you know, is that even possible?

>> So, >> Paul, >> First of all, it's a great question.

>> I'm sure all of our guests will have thoughts here.

I think about food.

You bring up food labels.

If I tell you something is organic, there should be I think there's actual certifiable standards to meet that.

If I tell you something is sustainable, what does that mean?

You know, you may not even know what that means.

Um, you know, in, in wine, a wine can be called a reserve.

Wine doesn't have any meaning.

Anything can be reserve.

Every wine you make might be reserved, by the way, that most winemakers don't do that, but they can.

It just doesn't have any legal meaning.

So there would have to be some teeth, I think, to the way we label, because if you say like this is this is human generated or organic, Jimmy Highsmith likes to say organic, you know, like, is this organic music or is it synthetic music?

Synthetic is the kind of the way he thinks about AI, but I think it would have to have teeth because I think people could play with it, or people would abuse it, I don't know.

What do you think, Peter?

What kind of labeling do you want to see?

>> I'm actually I might defer to Michael because he was talking about an author.

Do you want to share?

Yeah.

>> And yeah, I think this is a really interesting one.

And there has been pushes for that exact thing of if this work is AI created, then let's put a label on it.

And that at least we can see and then we know what we're buying.

But the challenge here is that there is no regulation.

So and what does that even mean?

Does that mean that the book was created completely by I, I with a prompt?

Um, did the author use it to spell check and correct syntax?

Is that acceptable?

Was it used to outline the plot or portions of the plot?

And then the author wrote themselves?

Um, so there is no sense of scope or detail around at what point can you use it?

Publishers are asking and literary agents are asking when you submit it.

Was any of this created by AI?

It's really a checkbox type thing.

Self-published authors also have to do this on Amazon when they're publishing their own work, but there's there's no teeth, as you said, so there's no way to verify.

And it's easy, easy to not check the box, even if it has been used.

So it's yeah, the regulation just isn't there right now.

>> I think culturally we have to demand it, though.

That's one of the things that people will respond to if you simply just don't click or you don't listen, or you don't buy or you don't read, if it's not verifiably or stated boldly, then people will respond.

But you have to demand it.

You have to want that.

What do you want?

How do you want to do this?

>> Zahyia um, this is a I feel like this is a tough one with music.

Um, for similar reasons.

Like what Mike is saying, like how much is AI involved?

I mean, is, for example, like a lot of vocalists when they're, when they're writing or creating music, they use melodyne to do like as a pitch corrector.

Like if Melodyne as a company decides that now their process for doing the pitch correction is, is an AI tool that they shift gears or whatever, like now as a musician, if, if somebody is using Melodyne, does that mean that now I have now included AI, do I have to put a check box there?

>> What about like a drum track versus a human drummer?

Right?

I mean, like, what if about GarageBand versus, you know, a five piece band?

>> Well, that's also something that's a slippery slope too.

>> I know.

>> It's tough.

A lot of a lot of artists will.

There's a platform called splice, which, um, that's basically almost like a sampling kind of thing where you could take these little bits and clips of pre pre-made drum loops or things like that.

And then you alter it, you kind of put it through processes and create something with some, with what was already created.

Some people will use AI to create that little splice.

And then now manipulate it and create it and pull it into a composition.

So I really feel like it's a, it's a lot to try and regulate and like, you know, how do you exactly now where, where is the line?

And then of that.

>> So I talked to somebody recently, someone I've known for a long time, a very good songwriter who used to be in a band that traveled, and now it's in the working world, still writes often will write half songs, you know, kind of noodling, which I'm sure you've done right.

Like you get a melody in your head or you get an idea.

Maybe you get a verse that you think, I need to build on this.

This is a, this could be a beautiful poem, but it's not done.

Maybe it's an idea for a book that's never quite finished.

Artists always have stuff banging around that's unfinished.

Like that's what it means to be an artist.

Artist is not art is not like a perfectly complete process all the time.

Easy.

And even if you do write a book or you write a book of poetry, or you write, you create an entire musical album that does not even offer a peek into the work.

That was always half done or, you know, incomplete.

And that's there's something beautiful about that.

Well, I was talking to this person and he said, you know, I have all these songs I just never finished, and I just want to hear them.

And I don't have a band anymore and I'm busy.

So he, you know, he went on snow and got the pro program and now has a whole Spotify section.

Mhm.

And like, I mean, I, I like the tunes.

I like the, the, the, the spine of it.

But there's that uncanny valley weirdness that like when you hear it from the eye, but also I feel like even though there's something that you wanted to get this over the finish line, I get that that's very human.

If we all just give in to the temptation to let the machines complete the art, the half done art, the 80% done manuscript that we just couldn't finish.

Now AI completes the last 20%.

The poetry that never quite felt like you could put a bow in it.

Well, now you do.

If we just give in to that.

Yeah, I guess you get what you want.

Like it's this visceral experience, like, yeah, but what are you losing?

Like we're creating a norm that says we're willing to accept that, that art doesn't have to have a struggle to get over the line.

And it doesn't have to be created by humans at all.

That's what I worry about the most.

Maybe you got.

>> Yeah, I think about, um, Game of Thrones, George R.R.

Martin, right?

Everyone wants these last two books to come out, but what happens if they don't?

And who will create it?

Will it be a human or.

Yeah, as you said, would AI do it for us, which would be very scary.

>> Zahyia I.

>> I'm gonna go ahead and go unpopular on this.

>> Go for it.

>> Because we've been here before.

Like, I feel like these same questions that you're asking have been asked before, exactly 100 years ago.

>> 100 years ago.

>> 100 years ago.

Yes.

And because this happened with orchestral musicians, we went through this whole thing where, um, all of a sudden we had recorded music and I actually wrote down this article from a Substack that I found before.

Um, but yeah, in 1926, I think it was the first talkie films started coming out.

And prior to that, all the music had been performed live in the movie theater by orchestral musicians.

So 22,000 musicians lost their job in this when when this movie industry shifted and started having audio in the films and everybody was saying, oh my God, canned music is like, everybody was calling it canned music, and they were comparing it to robots, and they were like, oh, now the robots are going to sing lullabies to your babies.

It's not going to be a real musician anymore.

So like, for me, I'm finding it very interesting.

And there was a visceral reaction at the same time too, in the American Federation of Musicians.

I think they're called somebody please fact check me on that name.

But, um, they, they had a whole like strike and musicians were like, you know, we're going to be replaced and this is awful.

There'll be no more live music.

And it was huge, a.

>> Huge.

>> I love actually hearing this story.

This gives me a little bit of hope that we've been there, done that, and we can get through the other side.

Yeah.

Because to me, the biggest question with AI, especially with jobs, when people talk about like job replacement, because a lot of people say like, well, the horse and buggy industry, they were, they feared cars, but all those people, they got jobs, you know, maybe.

Yeah.

But not everything is like it was before.

And eventually you have to find out if the sky's actually falling.

And people have said the sky is falling.

In the past, it hasn't fallen.

This may be the time.

Like that's what I'm saying about AI is like, we may be living through something that is going to fundamentally rework life on this planet in ways that are really hard to understand.

And we're right in the middle of that.

And it's easy to be like, well, 100 years ago, we worried about orchestras and live music, but at the same time, you might be right.

It might be like, no, we've, we've, uh, we've said the sky was falling before.

We've cried wolf before.

>> But from that, we cognitively have shifted.

So I do think that this is yeah, it sucks that this change is, you know, nobody likes change.

And I'm the my line and I know this might sound really crass and crass and harsh, but I'm always like, there's two things we know that will always exist where there's always going to be change.

And then eventually we're all going to die.

But like the, the, but the part about this, and I really do get excited from the backlash, like if there was no backlash, then this would be awful.

But because there's backlash and because humans are so like, we're, we're survivors and we always push through.

And then we think of new ways and then new things evolve.

And I mean, there was even a big backlash with when hip hop first came out and everybody was like, oh my God, sampling.

And my favorite is the lawsuit against Biz Markie, which drastically changed hip hop.

Like we went from this, you know, everything in hip hop was sampled, and then all of a sudden people were like, okay, I can't sample it now.

Interpolations.

And now we go into this whole.

>>, you say, he's just a friend.

Biz Markie.

>> Yeah.

>> That guy.

>> Yeah, that guy, he was.

>> Sued.

And it was like, it was a huge deal and I can't the judge literally, I studied this in like my music law class and this judge was like, he got up in front of the court and he was like, this is theft.

And this isn't music, and it will never go anywhere.

And this is like 1989, I think it was something around.

>> That sounds.

>> About right.

Yeah, yeah.

And but the guy who sold him angered Humperdink, I think is the artist.

>> Engelbert.

>> Engelbert.

Engelbert Humperdinck, that dude.

So he, he sued.

He sued Biz Markie because of the, um, because of the Pretty Woman song.

It wasn't even just a friend.

He, he did like a pretty woman like song.

And then that's what changed everything.

And then music and then hip hop industry was like, oh my God, no more samples, no more samples.

And they all started doing interpolations.

But like we evolved.

And then now we have this, you know, worldwide genre of music that's completely different from where it started.

So I'm wondering, when I see all of this discord about it, I instantly think about, well, what's this going to what's the new genre of music that will evolve from all this?

>> Yeah, it's just that every previous iteration has involved human beings at the creation point.

>> And it.

>> Can still do.

That's the difference.

If if human beings are not going to be at the creation point, we've entered something that is not like previous change anyway.

You say he's just a friend.

We have to take this only break.

We come back.

Can we listen to Astral Plane a little bit when we come back?

Yeah.

So we have some Zahyia music.

I want Peter to tell us what's coming up with bow.

I want Michael to tell us what's up.

Coming up from Writers & Books because, um, these are three really important community figures who've given their time on this Monday to talk about not only AI and art, but the value of the human element in art.

And we'll come right back with them next.

I'm Evan Dawson Tuesday on the next Connections, longtime New Yorker cartoonist Harry bliss joins us in the first hour talking about his memoir, Achingly Sad, at times poignant might surprise you and our second hour students from Fairport and doing some work with NASA, thinking about the future.

And a lot of people were thinking about recent rocket launches and Americans in space.

We'll talk to them about that.

>> Support for your public radio station comes from our members and from Renaissance Academy.

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>> Can you hear me?

I've been breathing breaths of love, the spark, a flame with the embers.

Your heart has cleared.

Hard has claimed.

Can you feel me?

I've been guiding your steps.

Away from harm's cruel way.

When.

And the pain of yesterday.

And now I can't stop the high mountain.

I can reach the deepest sea.

But I'll always be beside you.

Won't you?

Maybe take out.

>> Take out Tom Homan.

I suppose.

To so let me give Itay Hod.

Stop!

>> Why.

>> This is not AI.

>> Not AI.

>> Astral plane by Zahyia.

Tell us about this.

>> Oh, man.

Um, this song, you know, we spoke in the beginning about like, humanity and that connection.

And I'm very much into that.

Like that's the foundation for a lot of the stuff I do.

And this song actually came to me after my aunt passed away.

Like I, um, all of a sudden these words just started coming to me and I, and I was like, seeing her with my eyes closed and hearing the song without hearing any sound, which I know sounds weird, but sometimes that's how music comes to me.

And so, um, I started just writing down these words and it felt like us.

And it is a song about someone reaching out after they've transitioned, but letting the person in the material world where we are existing right now know that they're still there with them and that they're looking out for them.

And that's something I believe.

So that's where that was.

And yes, no.

AI was made in the in the recording of this music.

>> Now, what about the individual instruments?

>> Um, that's, that's where it is.

So the individual instruments are, it's all production.

So I do use splice and I use a lot of.

And what I do is I manipulate a lot of the things I think on this one, I actually played the chords and I did create that drum track by like altering a lot of things, but they were live sampled drum sounds.

And I think it was like a Travis Barker like kit that I got.

And I, because I love Travis Barker.

And so I use those sounds to create the what you're hearing with the drum patterns.

>> Oh, that's really interesting.

I'm going to go in a weird direction with this.

You ready?

>> Okay.

I'm ready.

>> So I mean, first of all, that's your creation though.

Yeah.

It's your ideas.

You knew the sounds you wanted and you knew why.

Yes.

And you know why it fit within the theme of the song.

Yes.

First band I ever took my son to see was his favorite band, AJR.

>> I love.

>> Them, okay.

And so we go to Boston to see them.

And my ten year old son was like, whoa.

Like, you know, like never seen like a live show with 15,000 of his new best friends, you know, going crazy.

But AJR.

I didn't know this until you go they in the live shows, they will show you how they create certain sounds for certain songs.

Sometimes they'll take like the jangling of a key set and they'll jangle the keys and they'll record it digitally, and then they'll speed it up or they'll slow it down.

Sometimes they'll hear like a neighbor banging on the floor, and they'll take that and make it a percussive sound.

They'll record that, and they'll actually use that.

And then they show you this stuff and people are like, whoa, it's kind of weird and kind of cool and fun, but it's always for the purpose of serving a song that they wrote as human beings, it's never like, what's the weird thing that we create just with machines, right?

It was like, how can we use machines to serve what we want to create with this piece of art?

So people kind of celebrated that.

But if they said, we told the machine, uh, make a song and we'll just perform it.

Like then people would be like, no.

So that's kind of where the line is.

I think that people have is like, is it, is it human idea, intention, artistic vision, or is the artistic quote, unquote artistic vision coming from an algorithm, I guess.

Yeah.

Makes sense.

>> To you.

Yeah, it does.

And, um, that makes sense to me.

And I would actually argue, well, what if one of those elements of that song that was created by the human was something that was created by AI, like maybe just a guitar lick, maybe I can't get in touch with.

Actually my favorite guitar player just moved over to Singapore.

So sad.

But like, you know, maybe he can't actually do a clip of a recording for me.

And I have this idea and I could play it or I can sing it because there is technology that lets you sing your idea, which Michael Jackson did all the time, by the way, when he was composing.

What if he actually had a way that he could sing in, and then the AI would say, and you tell it, okay, this is the melody, but make this a guitar.

It's using AI still to create a composition.

I haven't done it yet myself, but I'm not.

I'm not saying that I wouldn't in the future.

I appreciate that.

So it's like, yeah, it's kind of still using AI, but now it becomes a tool rather than this dependent full thing.

And I do think that people are going to get sick of this corporate sound, that AI produces when it comes to music, and they are going to start to look for the imperfections and, and those things that are really human.

>> Sorry, I didn't sorry I didn't hear any imperfections on the voice though.

I was listening.

>> Well, I don't use melodyne.

So there's like.

>> Uh, Tony writes in to say who will make a biopic about an AI song in 20 years?

Who will write the biography about a so-called AI artist?

Will there be 3-D AI concerts on projection screens?

These are weird questions.

Like the answer to that is like, at first I thought he was just being cheeky, but I'm like, oh no, this could actually happen.

Um, so Boa does not do AI.

And so as you celebrate 50, what do you want the public to know what's going on at Boa?

>> Um, I'd love the public to know that.

Yeah.

Boa is a, is a internationally celebrated nonprofit publishing house, one of the longest running independent publishing houses in the country at 50 years.

And we're still going strong.

And we are from Rochester and we're still in Rochester.

And this year we have all sorts of great stuff going on.

Our social media is really robust, and we're sharing all the information about our capital campaign for our 50th.

We have a gala happening in September with Naomi Shihab Nye.

Um, just beautiful poet who's going to come and read.

And we have a new book of hers.

We have a new book by Lucille Clifton of previously unpublished poems that were just releasing.

So we got all sorts of great stuff happening for the 50th, and the best place to check it out is on our social media.

>> What's going on at Writers & Books?

>> A lot is going on at writers and books.

So one of my favorite things about Rochester is that it's a city of resistance, right?

So that resistance energy pervades throughout.

So what I would encourage people is if you want to resist this trend, please support artists, especially local artists, when and where we can.

And we have lots of activities coming up.

First and foremost is the Flower City Poetry Fest of 2026.

So that will take place June 10th, 11th and 12th from 6 to 8:30 p.m.

At Highland Park Bowl.

We have artists, poets from all over New York State Cornelius Eady, Kimiko Hahn, and we're also promoting local teen writers from here in Rochester from various schools will be sharing their human created poetry.

We have an event called Scary Proud, which is a pride event on June 30th at the Little Theater.

This is supported by our new initiative called The Rainbow Quill, where we will be uplifting the voices of Lgbtqia+ writers.

We have summer camps all summer long for youth, so if you want your child or if you know someone who might be interested ages 7 to 17 to take part in a summer camp.

All about creative writing and creative expression.

We're doing that from July to August, and then in November, November 10th, we have our 25th anniversary of Rochester.

Reads will be having Omar El Akkad, who just won the National Book Award for his book One Day.

Everyone will have always been against this, and Sonia Livingston, the author of Ghost Bread, will be joining.

Joining us at Saint John Fisher University on November 10th.

So please mark your calendars.

Um, there's a lot of other things like workshops, but just visit our website, wrur.org and you'll find out more.

>> Zahyia where do people find, um, you know, Zahyia music that's non AI.

>> The Zahyia music is on all streaming platforms, Apple Music, Spotify, et cetera.

And I do have some two new singles that I'm working on this summer, and those will be released probably only on vinyl for I think I'm going to go ahead and follow that resistance trend.

By releasing things on vinyl.

Yes.

So I'm hoping to have that out by December.

So if people are interested in following me on Instagram, I'll be posting there.

And then eventually shifting everything over to my website.

>> Which is gonna hate this question.

>> Zahyia.com.

>> Zahyia.com.

And it's zahihaiyazahyiayia.com.

I'm looking.

>> At it, I know, yeah, you got you gotta flip, flip, flip the y and.

>> The I thank you.

>> That's okay.

>> Peter, this is gonna be the worst question, but what's the best thing you've read recently?

Oh my gosh, I know, it's so unfair.

>> You know, the funny thing is, again, most of what I read is unpublished.

So I spend hours every day reading new poems that have never been in print.

So, um, but honestly, I'm really, really proud of this new book of Lucille Clifton poetry that we just published.

And I know it's a Boa book, so I shouldn't even be allowed to.

>> I teed this up, baby.

>> Let's go.

Let me tell you something.

So Lucille Clifton, National Book Award winning poet, celebrated.

She passed away some years ago, but she was originally from Buffalo.

And so this is the first collection of previously unpublished poems since she passed away.

Um, a poet named and scholar named Kazim Ali went in, um, went through her archives at Emory University in Atlanta.

And these are all things that, that were worked up in different drafts.

And he has this great foreword about why he selected these and why they should be published and so forth.

Um, and so it's brand new poems by this amazing poet that have never been seen before.

So that's the book.

It's called At the Gate by Lucille Clifton.

>> Awesome.

Um, let me close with a couple of, uh, emails here.

Oh, no.

Now the tech is failing me here.

Uh, CYCY says, can AI have a conversation in jazz?

Improvised live and respond to the changing jazz environment like a broken string, things like that.

I will say this c y if it can't do that now, it probably will.

I mean, one of the beauties of jazz is the watching amazing artists improvise together and just kind of getting lost in the sound of it.

It's awesome.

I agree, I would not put it past AI to be able to do that.

Like I'm, I'm not such a cynic that I'm like, nah, it'll never do that.

Like it might do that.

But again, it's drawing on what it will have been programed to learn from humans.

And if you're good with that, you're good with that.

And if you're not, you're not.

But I would think it probably could, man.

Um, and, uh, just a, let me just read part of Kevin's here.

Kevin sends a note that says, um, I love and deeply support human artists, musicians, and writers.

I also believe AI is not going away.

So the real question is not whether we stop it, but how we live with it ethically and honestly.

I believe artists absolutely deserve royalties and protections when their work is used to train or influence AI systems.

The companies building these tools should be required to track usage and compensate creators fairly.

Um, and that's part of his email.

I just, I, that's a really optimistic idea.

I don't know how like what model works in practice.

Do you think that can be done?

Peter.

>> I mean, it has been done right with royalties and songwriting royalties and so forth.

Um, but, you know, a whole new system has to have to be developed around that.

And to do that, we need a lot of transparency.

And transparency has been a huge issue with all of this, because a lot of this was going on outside of everybody's view.

And then it was launched into the world.

So, um, but I would love to just quickly comment on that last thing about Improvization.

And, you know, part of art has always been this idea of inspiration and almost like from the muses, you know, going back in the day.

So we need that white hot moment of consciousness and humanity and a connection to something a little higher than ourselves to create real art, I think, and I don't think that can be replicated.

>> And I want to tell Michael and David who've emailed, we didn't get your emails on the air.

I'm going to respond to you separately, and I'm going to try to find a show coming up here where people convince me of all the good that AI is doing just to try to counter program my brain.

It'll probably won't work, but I'm going to try.

I want to be open minded.

I want to be open minded.

But I also want humans at the forefront of creation.

Peter Conners from Bhalla.

Congratulations on 50 years.

Thank you for being here.

>> Thank you.

>> Evan.

Well, you're listening to Zahyia taking us home.

Great to see you.

>> Thank you.

>> Thank you for being Michael Solis Wang Yi.org.

Writers & Books.

Thank you for spending some time with us today.

>> Wonderful being.

>> Here and from all of us at Connections.

Thanks for being with us.

We're back with you tomorrow on member supported public media.

>> They are strong things.

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