Image: Resettlement Administration photograph by Arthur Rothstein.

Science Fiction? I’m rarely a fan. Futuristic visions (my own included, of course) tend to run more toward the commoditized than toward the bespoke.

I did, however, like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which came out in 1984.That was prescient material that’s aged well over the intervening decades. I was fascinated by the plot point where the AI runs inference to create a reggae track, a mighty dub, that it imagined the space Rastafarians would enjoy. I’ve often thought, so how would that work algorithmically?

Now I know. The epiphany arrived piecemeal over the past year. I slowly started to grasp how the diffusion models work. During training, you start with the low-entropy data and perturb it — step after step — with a fixed Gaussian noise process until you arrive at static. Doesn’t seem like a big conceptual deal. But then, at inference time, successive nudges invoke a learned approximation to the local direction back toward that elusive manifold. The smashed egg reassembles on the floor and leaps into your hand.

Music inference, moreover, is now a thing. A service called Suno seems to be the go-to, so I tried it out. Having seen ChatGPT’s work on all things poetic, I decided to retain a shard of agency and took charge of the lyrics. Verse-chorus-verse:

twenty nine times I wrote that letter
twenty nine palms my mouth’s so dry
an airstream trailer gone to nowhere
slipstream halcyon days gone by

dust on the dash
a rip on the seat
a box to unload
full of casual deceit
and the radio beam
tracks sun-baked dreams
and gasoline
and nicotine

a brief sunflower in a dust bowl
always a sight for desert skies
a languid glance along the counter
i never want to close my eyes