“Keep your work and play separate.” That was the capitalist propaganda that I, like most kids, heard growing up. This mindset is what kept my math at school and my music at home. I avoided taking classes on topics I was interested in out of fear that I might poison the well of hobbies that I did purely out of interest. Under this ideology, school was merely something to endure until I could finally go home and play my drumset and guitar again. However, once I came to Stanford, I realized that this distinction I had drawn for myself had only ever had the detrimental effect of preventing me from doing things I enjoy. This perceived divide between academic interests and hobbies was a product of tradition, not an inherent property of the human experience.
I first discovered that work could be playful when I took a computer science course at Stanford. Before that point, I had avoided CS like the plague because my mom ingrained in me at an early age that she didn’t want me to spend my life like my Dad staring at a computer all day. When I started getting disappointed that I would finish my CS homework too fast and had no more to look forward to, I knew that maybe my worldview was utterly wrong. I asked my dad for the first time ever, “do you enjoy your work?” To my surprise, he said there hadn’t been a day in his life when he didn’t have fun programming. This whole time, I thought he hated work due to the impression my mom gave me, but he was having a ball every time he commuted to the Silicon Valley. After that conversation, I started only taking classes that intrigued me, and by accident, I finished the entire CS core. Something about CS scratched an itch in my brain that I had never attended to before.
In the spirit of erasing the line between school and play, I started taking art and music classes at Stanford. I took Drawing 1 and the professor said my banksy inspired graffiti final project was the coolest project she’s ever seen. I took MUSIC 101 which inspired the creation of my band “Banana Bred” and led to my first-ever published EP under the name MSTR. I did my PWR 2 final project on reforming the fitness industry, something I never considered to be academic previously, and I was nominated for the Lunsford prize. I even started incorporating visual art into my CS classes. In CS 148, my final project—a stylized low-poly rendition of Iroh—was selected as one of the best projects in the class. For the CS 248 final project, I invented and implemented an algorithm that stylizes an image by converting it into polygons. With computer science and music being my two most significant interests, I thought, why not combine them? This is my primary motivation to study artificial intelligence further at Stanford (and my primary motivation to take Ge’s inaugural “AI and music” seminar next quarter).
AI's true power has only recently been demonstrated with powerful tools like Dall-E and ChatGPT. Artists, especially writers and digital artists, have been forced to rethink what it means to create and to find ways to use this new technology to augment their workflow. But one place where AI has yet to exert nearly as much influence is music. ChatGPT is pretty good at coming up with lyrics or composing simple melodies, and even I already use AI mastering plugins like Izotope’s Ozone 10, but this is far from the ability to create music from an idea in the way that Dall-E makes pictures from ideas. Whether we want it to or not, AI will inevitably exert more and more power over music to the point where it will put the role of musicians into question. There will always be a place for live music, but why would anyone stream my songs when their computer can craft a record in seconds that perfectly satiates them.
Watching these early examples of AI makes me feel the same excitement and awe I felt believing in Santa Claus as a child, except this time it’s not magic. I feel overwhelmingly compelled to be a part of this next wave of ingenuity that will likely define the world for the rest of my life. So, that’s why I am applying for a coterm: I’m not done learning yet.
However, as an artist, I also offer an important perspective to the field of AI. Computer science is usually seen in too technical of a light when in reality, it has many artistic and creative elements that tend to be overlooked when we don’t approach problems with the right perspective. All of my friends know that I haven’t taken notes once in my life, but they also know that I’m the person to go to if they need any kind of CS help. The reason I can help people with a class I took two years ago is the same reason that we need artists in computer science. The one thing I try to learn from every class isn’t the algorithms or particular facts of the course but rather the mindset and way of thinking that led to these facts. Since high school, I’ve never memorized a mathematical formula, as I’d much rather learn the artistic mindset of mathematics and just derive the formula during the exam. Once, I even accidentally rediscovered Karatsuba’s algorithm for a homework problem because I didn’t even know it existed. There is something to be said about the power of learning mindsets instead of facts, because there are no more facts at the forefront of AI research. There, you must rely on the artistic perspective of computer science in order to make the next advancement. The one group of people best equipped to handle the unknown is artists.
Furthermore, there is this crucial ethical question that looms over all computer scientists who develop AI: should we even be doing this? Developing these insanely capable technologies can easily be done irresponsibly, and it’s important that artists are part of the process that decides their fate in this rapidly changing world.
So those are the two reasons why I feel compelled to study AI further than I have in my undergraduate career. Firstly, I really enjoy it, and I’ve come to understand that work should be playful. Secondly, I want to be part of this next tide in music making, not only to hone my craft, but also to ensure that we are making responsible decisions as a society.