Don’t freak out about AI just yet

I’ve shared a few times on here some concerns I have with AI. There are good things coming, but probably some bad things too. You’d be wise to spend time with AI tools and start learning how they work, but it’s not time to freak out over it yet.

Napster

Back in 1999, the record labels were freaking out. Napster was the cause of it, and perhaps rightfully so, but the labels let their fear spread into weird areas.

With Napster, the record labels essentially did nothing other than try to stop it. No innovation, no new ideas, just lawsuits. Fortunately for them, Apple and Pandora (and later Spotify and others) found ways to make them money in the new world.

OLGA

Around the time that this was going, there was a site growing in popularity known as OLGA: The OnLine Guitar Archive. It was huge database of guitar chords so you could learn to play your favorite songs. While their use of lyrics on the site was indeed illegal, it was a weird fight for the record labels to make, since it wasn’t competing with a paid alternative. The labels chose to fight anyhow, and they got OLGA shut down.

Around the same time, I ran a very popular Christian music guitar site with similar content (lyrics + chords to popular songs) and faced the same issues from record labels. I…