I discovered it is surprisingly easy to accidentally indoctrinate your children. See, Twitter was aflutter with p(doom) renditions and I became particularly enamoured by this faux anime take by MakeVoid.

It’s cute! It’s peppy! It’s a direct causal link to me hearing my 5-year old sing “Orthogonality thesis blueeeeeee-ue-ue-ues”.

Now in my defense, I grew up agnostic. No Sunday hymns or evangelical pop for me. Just my sister awkwardly shushing me when I started cheerfully belting out “My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard” before anyone had explained low protein milkshake alternatives to me.

Now once my children were cheerfully reciting a first approximation of AGI Ruin, I did ask them what they thought the song was about. My 8 year old said it was about “ChatGPT please don’t eat us” and my 5 year old said it was about “AGI”. When I asked her what AGI actually is, she said it’s when the computer talks to you but you shouldn’t listen cause it might hurt you.

Oh.

Well.

I mean.

Kiiiiinda?

So, that was my crash course in the childhood memetic effects of catchy tunes. I briefly debated playing the competing songs of e/acc for them, but in the end decided I’d just be more mindful in the future and let them consume what they wished in the mean time.

Yet the power of song did not leave me, and I decided I wanted more.

I had already been playing around with Suno just before p(doom) dropped. The first time I fed it this tweet about the German wiki owner unknowingly holding back an AI swarm:

I couldn’t stop giggling at the dramatic rendition.

I tried making a few more songs, including one to help me write.

But when all is said and done I’m a music barbarian: In primary school music was the only class I managed to fail, which was honestly a bit of an achievement in itself. Yet I know what I like and now we have ways to create even the barbarisms that please one such as I.

So here we go. I want a song about myself and have it look cool. Oh mighty machine gods, will you grant me this gift?

Well, apparently yes, for $65 dollars a pop.

Which is super valid, but also I’d probably be tempted to iterate my life’s savings into the ground. So instead I decided to mush Astra and Fable together and see if they would make babies I mean art I mean my ego project.

I asked them both to look me up online, look through all their memories of me, and look through my social ranking data on Glosso (a social media website revolving around stats and dating).

People rank you on different traits based on their impressions so far, and then the ranking is weighted for how well they know you. I apparently have a fairly warm social demeanor. Hi <3

I asked them to invent song lyrics to describe me. Fable recited all my life events back to me as a grocery list and Astra saw straight into my soul. Suno then sang about said soul. And thus I found myself wistfully gazing at the p(doom) video and implored Opus 5.5 to please make a video for my soul song that would ascend to such heights. (if you are wondering why I keep asking new models, it’s because blinking is a known cause of new model releases and I couldn’t sustain a continuous stare through the entire project).

Still avoiding the 65-dollar-life’s-savings-trap, aka Fal AI, I asked Opus 5.5 to “just figure it out” and let it talk to ChatGPT on its own. I came back the next morning to phantom ghosts of smaller animation models now inhabiting my computer and the video results still being terrible.

I discovered that whatever character design you go with as a seed for the video will define the entire visual language and you better make sure your protagonist is your one true soul buddy come into pixelated existence or you won’t love them always and forever.

When I tried to storyboard these ladies to the same scene in the song I got three entirely different visual narratives.

Observe:

The Dgeneric Dreamy Drawing Damsel:

The Powerful Wrench Wench:

And What if Captain Ahab Was Light, Bright, And Entirely Unfit for Service?

So back to the drawing board looming over an AI to please get the details of my outfit right cause maps, wrenches, and going cross-eyed about a flower don’t resonate with my soul.

A few more iterations and we ended up with Hiking Gamer Girl who’s scarf should make her fly but this apparently dropped out of the context window ever after into the abyss where all 1s and 0s go to die:

And Magic Aesthetic Girl who likes warm things:

As we’ve now determined the full depth of my personality, we can finally start a storyboarding.

Actually I gave her necklaces for family members and bracelets for partners and friends. I wear these in real life.

After assuring Opus that yes, I really really like the aesthetic of that one p(doom) video. No don’t literally copy it. Yes use the character designs above. No don’t animate her as singing about herself. Yes she is allowed to open her mouth as long as she is not singing. No arms don’t move like that omg please stop.

I love you, Opus, but and also alignment is hard.

Joint alignment in humans, I mean.

Eventually we found the sweet spot at just rotating the images and karaoke highlighting the text.

So now I have an ego song and I’ve never been this excited to share something so deeply embarrassing.

What do you think?

Substack doesn’t allow video embeds and I didn't check if LW is better, so you’ll have to click through here