Best New Non-Artist
A letter to a dog, a song generator and a room full of crying adults. Is any of it real?
Written with AI, not by it.
Is this real?
I was moving overseas and the dog wasn't coming.
There's no good way to break that to a dog. So I did what any normal person would do and wrote him a letter. It was raw and honest and written as if he were a son. It wasn't hard to go there, he's my boy. Somewhere in the writing I saw what else it could be, so I took it into ChatGPT and we turned it into a spoken word piece. The satire and ambiguity were honed. Read it cold and you might struggle to say who I was writing about. You might even judge me as an arsehole for leaving my 4 year old boy behind while I went to live my dream life… just like they did it back in the day.
Then the piece just sat there.
A few months later a friend's kid was playing a truly atrocious country song on loop. It was so bad I immediately thought that AI could do better. I downloaded a song generator and a few moments later had made him a superior version. I mean, anything would have been better. Time passed. I kept thinking (as I do) about it until the question rose to the surface.
What would this be if I put my own words, my own experience, my own feelings into this thing?
I already had the piece. I had a clear idea of what it needed to sound like. I developed a style to suit it, thought hard about how to carry the feeling without tipping it over into something cheap, and I made the song.
It moved me. I'd authored the whole thing and still it got me. It made my wife cry. It moved friends who knew the story. But would it move people who didn't? Everyone who had heard it so far knew it was AI. The emotion that went into it was real. The thoughts were real. What anyone feels when they hear it is real.
So is the song real? Is it a lie, or just a different mode of telling the truth? And if a song made with a machine carries more weight, and connects people to something deeper in their own humanity, than "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy", which one is worth more?
I've been turning that over ever since, and I don't have the answer. What I have is a longer story than the song. I've put plenty of myself out there before, for work, for approval, to entertain, to express myself. It was all mine. This is different. Maybe not art. Definitely an experiment.
It's out now, and so is the jury.
Dirty secrets
Long before any of this, I had things I wanted to say that had either nothing to do, or conflicted with, how I earned a living. I've worked as a landscape architect, a personal trainer, a videographer and more recently a brand strategist. Whatever went out under my name had to sell the professional me, at least that's how I felt at the time. Something more personal, philosophical or even controversial sitting beside it would at best confuse people, at worst turn them away from my business, or even me. Fear of what people would think, and of muddying the waters one way or the other, was stopping me from putting my deeper, sometimes darker thoughts out there.
Social media never sat right either. Posting my own life felt icky, like I was invading my own privacy. And why would I do that? When I asked myself why I kept doing it, the honest answer was usually approval. Validation. Ego. None of them a good reason to share your life with the world.
So I did what writers have done for a very long time. I made someone up. Miles Journeyman. A name to publish my dirty secrets under, to say what I really wanted to say but felt I couldn't. A voice, my voice, but one nobody could trace back to me.
This was all long before the dawn of AI. Just a name, and a man hiding behind it who wanted to be heard but not seen.
The mask I never wore
Then the machines arrived, and the pen name got interesting, even compelling.
A name on its own only hides the author. A name with AI behind it could hide everything. Give Miles a face that wasn't mine. Give him a voice, somebody else's voice, and let him say all the things I wanted to say, and none of it traceable back to me. The content couldn't be linked to Kendall Monk. I would be untouchable, no pathway to accountability. How free that would have felt.
In my mind I went all the way. The possibilities were endless! The consequences non-existent! For a day or two Miles wasn't going to be a writer at all but a full-blown proto-guru, with a cult-like movement of his own gathering around him. That idea survived, Miles-as-guru did not. The cult became a satirical proto religion and the guru not Miles but an AI Sloth, but that's another story for another day.
Nothing ever went out under Miles. Not a word, not a frame.
The tools were there, the barriers were gone, so why not? If it wasn't for a feeling of unease not dissimilar to that which I felt around social media I might never have pulled the brakes. Different reasons, but something wasn't sitting right. It felt like I was somehow underselling myself. If I wasn't prepared to stand behind it and put my name on it, however badly I wanted it said, then saying it was deception, even manipulation. Of everybody, and of myself.
If I'd been looser about my principles I'd have gone ahead for sure, and the AI would have made it easy. What stopped the mask was principle. The technology would have built it in an afternoon.
Say say but different
So what changed?
The need to say what I wanted to say got so strong that I changed the work to make room for it. I was saying things to anybody who'd listen, which most of the time was my wife. It really wasn't fair for her to bear the brunt of so much saying for long. In the end we agreed the best thing to do was the thing I'd wanted to do for a very long time: make the work the saying. That did away with any need for a separate version of me dedicated to sharing the dirty secrets. So now, all that saying goes out signed.
Miles didn't die though. Miles became MYLS and is no longer a he, nor a they, or a them. MYLS is not an identity, not even a fake one. At best, MYLS is it. A project, an experiment, a collaboration with a machine. I'm not a musician and neither is AI, and with our powers combined, what comes out is music?
Calling it MYLS is not about claiming a separate persona, it's an admission that it isn't me alone. I can put my name to every word of the writing. I can't put it to a single note. What I can put my name to, though, is the idea, the subject, the experience, the thinking and the feeling that gave rise to it. MYLS is just the speaker it all comes out of.
98% Real?
Back to the song, and to the question. Is it real?
The feeling survived, which took me by surprise to be honest. It's the presence of the feeling that kicked off this whole dubious experiment. I'd talked about the pain of leaving my dog behind. I'd written the letter. Neither did what the song did, which was to put it all out there in a way that cuts to the core.
The machine lent me a pair of hands I don't have, and the genesis was all mine. It's not straight up fabrication, then, or mindless AI generation. The way it makes sense for me can be better explained as expansion, augmentation and, depending on how you look at it, exploitation.
While we are playing semantics, I don't think an absolute term like fake is always the most useful, or even accurate, for what AI makes. A fake video of someone doing something they never did is fake. This is something else. In many ways it's 100% real. The letter was real, the dog is real, the feeling that went in and the feeling that came out were both real.
How seriously we should take something, how much we let it shape how we see the world, comes down to how authentic it is and how much of a real person's life is in it. Try putting a number on that.
What definitely matters is if there is deception, and at what level. Miles with a borrowed face would have failed absolutely on all levels. Whether the song passes or not, and by how much, is the question I'm interested in.
You're the voice
Try and understand it.
The first version of the song failed on the voice. My words, my feeling, not my voice. It was an approximation of somebody's voice, to be precise, and I've got no idea whose. A voice is as good as a fingerprint. This one was most definitely not mine.
So I recorded myself. I can't sing, and the recording is evidence of that. Then I pumped it through the machine. The voice on the songs now is an approximation too, but it's an approximation of me, and any similarity to someone else is an accident and I am sorry.
The rest of it, the avatar that's a machine, the name that reads as a handle, the bio, are the flags. Nothing in the picture pretends to be a person.
I had a dream of MYLS as the most authentic AI musician the world had ever seen. But it still would have been bullshit – MYLS isn't a musician or an artist. MYLS is more like a collaboration. My life, my perspective, my vision and my feeling – combined with a crazy amount of questionably sourced data, incredibly powerful software and my skill at getting a machine to understand what I want, which in this respect is as far as my talent goes.
Balanced on a low bar
Straight up, I'll never value making a song this way over learning to play one. Putting in the years, bringing a life to it.
What is MYLS doing, if it isn't that? Despite the flags, the music arrives sounding like somebody played it, and nobody did. It's a simulation of a performance that never happened.
This experiment doesn't stop at music. Is my writing my art? I wouldn't call it that. Is my thinking my art? It's a contender. And if the thinking is the art, then the words are the conduit. I can claim the words. I've no idea if the notes are what I would have played. Every word on this page, though, I've weighed, and I'll put my name to.
Which puts the line between what I made and what the machine made somewhere within me, machine circuitry enmeshed with its biological forebear. People have been using machines to make music for decades, producers on laptops playing instruments they've never held, and nobody calls that a simulation. I'm not sure there's a line at all.
How's this for a reference point? There's a YouTube channel with 250,000 subscribers that posts nothing but AI generated porch-pirate videos. Underneath them, people comment as if the actions and reactions of the people in them were a genuine reflection of society. Whatever MYLS is, it carries more meaning than that. A low bar, and MYLS is balanced on it.
My friend's kid, meanwhile, never stopped listening to the tractor song. He doesn't know the difference between real and AI, or good and bad, it would seem. He just knows what he is into.
So what exactly are we praising when we like a song? The sound, or the life behind it? If all we're praising is how it sounds, the kid has it right: he likes it or he doesn't – who made it and how it was made is beside the point. If it's the life, then MYLS has mine in it and nobody else's, and whether that counts is what I'm waiting to find out.
Replican or replican't?
Where does the experiment stop? How far does it go?
For a while I had a similar plan for Kendall Monk. Not a mere pen name this time. Me, codified. Everything I put out, the words, my face, my voice, a hundred per cent artificially produced, with a hundred per cent of me standing behind it. An authentically synthetic Kendall Monk who presented as a totally real person, with full disclosure right there on the label. You know what they say: if you want to get cloned right, clone yourself.
Right now I'm focused on the AI-augmented version of me you're reading. Not a replication. The thinking comes first, pushed and tested with AI until it's locked down. Then AI writes the first draft from it, and I shape it from there, so the message lands the way I meant it.
The replicant door is not closed though. I'm keeping my virtual foot in it. Like the music, there are things I want to say that might reach more people, more effectively, in different modes and mediums than writing. A version of me that could reach people that way would be expansion, not substitution. I'd be authoring it, and it would carry my name, my likeness, my voice.
If this went ahead, there is one non-negotiable condition. It has to meet the standard I hold my (real) self to. Something I'd look at and accept as a true approximation of what I would say, how I look and what I sound like. If it's not that then it's not happening. But if it does? Is it a clone or a purpose-specific extension of me? One built for a job, with noble intentions and my stamp on everything it makes.
MYLS is the small version. The voice on the songs is mine, pumped through the machine. Whether a whole person can go the same way and come out honest is the open question the song started.
Wine, chocolate or cancer?
None of this gets settled by me sitting on the toilet chatting to Claude about it. MYLS is out, and as of publishing this article, the only people who've heard it are a few friends, and not all of them gave a shit. Everything that matters happens from here.
Some will hear it knowing the story and knowing it's AI. Some will know it's AI and not the story. Some won't know either, because they're not looking, and I'm not going to stand in front of every song shouting about it. The flags are there for anyone keeping an eye out. What, if anything, people feel in each of those cases is what I want to know.
How will I? No fucking idea. People being moved would be a yes. People angry about how it was made would be an answer too, and a valid one. Either way the intention is to add to the conversation, nothing more. I'm not trying to convince anyone. I'm trying to get a read on where all this sits, and how I feel about it.
Can we even use this stuff and keep our humanity intact? Or, like wine and chocolate, is it OK in moderation? Or is its use a cancer on what makes us human?
Now for the biscuit.
The dog, for the record, has no idea any of this happened. I didn't play the song for him, I didn't even read him the letter, he's a dog. He doesn't want an apology, he wants a biscuit.
The letter is still the letter. Whatever the machine did with it, it started as a man who couldn't take his dog with him, trying to say sorry. That part is not up for debate. Everything after is.
If you give a shit, listen to it. Then tell me what you felt, and whether it mattered that you knew how it was made. Moved, angry, bored, entertained… anything. The jury's still out. You're on it.
To listen visit mylsjournymn.com
