Sunday, March 23, 2025

AI Let Down

AI is great at manipulating text and documents, and it does a very nice job at examining photos and transcribing text from images. But today AI let me down with what seemed like a simple task: to take a single, three-and-a-half-hour MP3 recording and break it down into individual tracks.

I used to belong to 3rdSpace, which was a coworking space for creative people. They had monthly Jazz Jams along with other music events. I would typically turn on my audio recorder on my iPhone and let it record the entire event as a single audio file. Occasionally, I’d then take that MP3 file, load it up in GarageBand, and slice it into individual music tracks. But more so than not, instead of doing the work myself, I’d upload the single MP3 to AWS’s Mechanical Turk and pay someone a few dollars to slice up the music into individual tracks. 

This morning, I thought, for sure, that one of the big AIs could do this for me. After trying ChatGPT, Gemini/NotebookLM, and DeepSeek, they all failed me. The closest was ChatGPT, which kept apologizing for timing out on me. Gemini referred me to other applications, and DeepSeek was beyond its depth. 

Perhaps one day; but, for now, AI’s sweet spot is language, not action.

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