A friend wrote lyrics for a country-western song and had it recorded. I listened to the results and, to my ear, it sounded great. When told that the song had been created by artificial intelligence, and not human musicians in a studio, my reaction landed somewhere between awe and dread.
A few days later, I fed lyrics of my own into the same program. In seconds, AI created a pleasant tune, though inappropriate, in tempo and tone, for the subject of the song. When I played the recording on home speakers for Mat Lane, a musician and songwriter here in Baltimore, he found the tune dull. “Had you not told me that it had been created with AI,” he said, “I still would have called it pedestrian.”
Between these two experiences — between AI and Mat Lane — I had coffee with Mario Armstrong, a genuine Baltimore whiz who achieved national celebrity as an expert on consumer technology. For years, he had regular gigs on local television and radio, then NPR, the TODAY show, CNN and Sirius XM. He also made hundreds of guest appearances around the country as a featured speaker and won an Emmy for a live-stream show he produced in New York.
“Super Mario” I called him, because of his positive personality, energetic drive, knowledge of emerging technology and keen skills as a communicator. He was the go-to guy for advice on everything tech and a champion of careers in the digital universe.
Now he’s on a very different mission, an effort to revive and champion the creative class, the one most threatened by technology, and perhaps existentially so by AI. He wants to do this by producing a weekly, high-quality national television show that inspires young creators and takes them through the process of entrepreneurship. In fact, the working title is “The Process,” and Armstrong wants to produce it in his hometown.
“Look at me, the tech guy fighting for the liberal arts,” he says. “I’m fighting for the kids in Baltimore who know they have some kind of talent or gift, yet have no clue about how to monetize it.”
Armstrong says his show would feature members of the creative class, especially those who already have been successful as entrepreneurs, and light the way for a new generation of artists to have sustainable careers. Artists, he says, do not have to starve, not even in the digital/AI age.
That’s the “Super Mario” optimism speaking.
For close to 30 years now, technology and a global “culture business” have forced a downsizing of the creative class — writers, journalists, photojournalists, musicians and poets, artists of all kinds. The late Scott Timberg, an excellent culture critic who lost his newspaper job in a layoff in 2008, wrote about this in his book, “Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class.”
Timberg argued that, as a result of all the downsizing, “too much quality art becomes a tree falling in empty woods, and each artist must become his or her own producer, promoter and publicist.”
That seems to be exactly what Mario Armstrong is saying — that, becoming an artist today, without the cultural infrastructure we had in the past, can be so daunting it stifles creativity. Too many young people, he says, hear pessimism about careers in theater, music, the visual arts and design.
His mission is, in part, to dash the idea that a tech career is the main road to personal success. That’s something he preached in his previous life.
“We needed that at a time, and I was really advocating for that, sure,” he says. “But we also need liberal arts and we need creators to be able to manage and use technology in a way that impacts society. So ‘The Process’ is tech, arts and entrepreneurship all coming together.”
Armstrong surveyed hundreds of students in high schools and performing arts colleges and found that the overwhelming majority wanted help with building sustainable careers.
“Ninety-six percent said, ‘Show me how to make money, how to make money with my ideas and my talent, we are not taught any of this stuff,’” Armstrong says. “It made me feel that entrepreneur education should be something bigger inside of our school systems.”
His proposal for “The Process” includes an ed-tech app to augment what young artists learn from watching the show. He’s hoping to get sponsor commitments to tape the inaugural episode in spring.
“I want to bring to Baltimore the biggest show it’s ever had,” he says. “I want, eight years from now, when you travel somewhere, you hear people ask, ‘Did you see ‘The Process’?”
I ask Armstrong what message he wants to convey, through the show, to the next generation of artists.
“No one — not tech, not critics, not even doubters in your own family — gets to determine your destiny,” he says. “Every morning, we wake up with two gifts — a chance, because we’re here, and a choice to push toward our dreams or let fear hold us back.
“Artificial intelligence can’t win because true artists have always been resilient. I’m fighting for every artist to understand their nuanced value in a tech-driven society, to see that they can be sustainable, build wealth and make an impact in a world that’s obsessing over AI.
“AI does not replace the soul of what we as artists do, so never lose sight of the power we have to create something meaningful and lasting.”
