In this vibrant episode our host Lena Robinson sits down with Tom Morley, a founding member and drummer of 80's pop band Scritti Politti, who’s now reshaping his creative journey with AI. At 70, Tom's experiences are as dynamic as ever; he shares his reflections on using AI in everything from drumming and visuals to song production. With a background in fine arts and a well-earned reputation as an engaging performer, Tom brings a unique perspective on the intersection of human creativity and AI.

Tom discusses how AI tools like Midjourney and Suno have transformed his creative process, allowing him to experiment with visual art and music in unprecedented ways. Despite initial skepticism, Tom dove into AI, embracing the technology to enhance his work’s reach and resonance. His story touches on fascinating examples, like the AI-generated visuals that captivate audiences at his drumming gigs and his foray into AI-assisted songwriting.

The conversation also explores the essence of creativity in the digital age. Tom emphasises the importance of human touch—the art of “knowing when to stop”—and the role of years of artistic experience in making the most of AI's potential. Together, Lena and Tom unpack the delicate balance between embracing new technology and maintaining artistic integrity, leaving listeners inspired to reflect on how AI might serve their own creative goals.

Things mentioned in this episode

• Tom Morley - https://tommorley.com
• Scritti Politti (On Spotify) - https://open.spotify.com/artist/59luKpdal8UwxcuLJNoKwS?si=D6gzScPtQKKZ4b7ybVGbxA
• The FTSQ Gallery - https://ftsqgallery.co.uk/shop-prints-sketches-merch/tom-morley
• Fox & Badge - https://www.foxandbadge.com/
• Midjourney - https://www.midjourney.com/home
• Runway - https://runwayml.com
• Suno - https://suno.com
• ChatGPT - https://chatgpt.com
• Vogue - https://www.vogue.co.uk
• Jamie Wheal (Books - ‘Stealing Fire’ and ‘Recapture the rapture’ - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Books-Jamie-Wheal/s?rh=n%3A266239%2Cp_27%3AJamie+Wheal
• Brian Eno - https://www.brian-eno.net
• Clive Langer - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Langer
• Grace Jones, Demolition Man - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlHiX8-33Jw
• Antonio Gramsci - https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci
• Afro Celt Sound System - https://www.facebook.com/officialafroceltsoundsystem/
• Simon Sinek (Book - The Infinite Game) - https://simonsinek.com/books/the-infinite-game/

SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS

• Insta - https://www.instagram.com/_tommorley_/
• Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/tommorleyspeaker
• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommorleyrockstar/
• Twitter - https://x.com/TomMorley

Thanks for listening, and stay curious!

//Lena

00:00 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Hi everyone,

Welcome to ‘Creatives WithAI’. I'm your host, Lena Robinson, and today is our first, well for me anyway, first ever in-person conversation with somebody and I'm really delighted to say that it is my dear friend and somebody that I met a couple of years ago, Tom Morley, who is one of my fine artists, who does work with AI, with the FTSQ Gallery, but he also has a fine arts degree and was one of the original founders of 80s band Scritti Politti, which I bet some of you already know who that is. So, Tom, welcome. Thank you. I'm really excited today to talk to you about the journey that you've had. Obviously, you've started in the music industry and the arts world with your fine arts degree back in the 80s, that's right isn't it? In the 80s? And now you're on a podcast called ‘Creatives WithAI, and I know you're using AI for multiple things. Tell me about that journey that took you from there to where we are today.

01:12 - Tom Morley (Guest)

It's very interesting just listening to you describe it. I mean, I'm 70 years old now, so I'm officially diverse, which is great for booking me, even though I'm a white male, it’s great for booking me.

01:29

Um, even though I'm white, I'm a white male. So, yeah, my journey I mean let me tell you the journey in reverse, because yesterday I was out in a big country house drumming on drums like this with a bunch of lawyers. Now that would seem to have nothing to do with AI, but part of the publicity that got me that gig was AI pictures like this, and you'll see in those pictures. What I do on LinkedIn is I make drums look really attractive. So I don't have just photos of the drum store, I have pictures like this of drums flying, drums with wings, of the drum store. You know, because in the kind of media scrum of trying to make things look attractive, you can't just ‘do’ documentaries anymore. You've got, you know, you've got to make it look uh, superlative, like you've got the best drums, you've got the most exciting drums. They're going to have the most exciting experience. So that was yesterday.

02:26

On Friday I was invited to do a gig for ‘Fox and Badge’. I don't know if you know ‘Fox and Badge’. It's like Victoria's Secret, on acid. Yeah, they said “can you do a drum circle between 2am and 4am because we've got a Mad Max theme and we want you to be in the Thunderdome?” And at first I thought “I can't possibly do that, I'm 70 years old, my bedtime's 9pm.” And then I thought “What the hell? I'm going to do it anyway.” And there, you know, in their backgrounds, in their stuff, they had lots of AI visuals making it kind of Thunderdome-like, and I got some footage of that and I needed to put it together and I did some AI Mad Max cars which you'll see here, it kind of gave this whole Thunderdome scheme.

03:31

So, and the whole thing about this, about me being an elder, is that I've been dealing in ‘drugs’ for many, many years Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, Endorphins. They're drugs we produce ourselves, so nobody makes any money out of them, but they are produced by us as we drum together, as we sing together, as we, you know, and with Oxytocin it's a kind of tribal thing that when you get gather around a circle and you drum and you sing and you dance, you produce Oxytocin yourself, but then it connects, you connect very fast with people around you. So my journey with, starting with a very basic beat on a drum, which you'll hear here. Starting with that very basic beat. You'd think that has nothing to do with AI. It just has to do with firelight and people drumming in the dark. But as you attract people, you need to hold their attention, and I think you know.

04:39

I'll tell you about one other gig that I did a couple of weeks ago. I did a charity gig and at first they just asked me to be a judge on the panel because it's called Events Are Talented and it's for people in the events business, rather than just do all the background stuff, to actually get on stage and sing. So I said to them “well, why don't, if I'm there as a judge, why don't I do an icebreaker anyway?” And they said “I'm not sure if we have time.” I said “look at this video which had some AI stuff in it and me drumming.” They said “oh, yeah, yeah, do the icebreaker”.

05:15

And then they said “we're going to have a charity auction” and I said “well, you're having a charity auction, why don't I do some pictures for that?” And they said “oh, I don't know if we've got time for that”. I said “take a look at these pictures, which are some of the ones that you saw. Yeah, that brought us together in the first place.” And they said “oh, we love these pictures”, so I made a grand just auctioning those pictures. They're now on their way to France. These were the Brighton ones, yeah, yeah yeah, drums and uh, and I said, “well, look, if you…”

05:44

I said, “how are you opening the show?” “This is well, we're just gonna have a guy on stage.” I said, “ why don't I make you an AI movie intro to the whole thing?” where I used Midjourney, Runway and had them speaking, their past winners speaking. I did, which was so great because if we'd have had to get film cameras to them all or get them to film, that will come in different formats, yeah, yeah, would have been a nightmare.

06:16 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Nightmare and costly too.

06:17 - Tom Morley (Guest)

I said “yeah”. So I said “just send me a photo, one photo of you with your mouth slightly open, I'll do the rest”. And they said “what are we going to say?” And so I said to the organiser” why don't we write a song? Right, so we'll write an AI song on Suno. And he said “how long will that take?” I said “we'll do it right now”, “oh wow”, meeting him in the lobby of a hotel, I said “what style do you want it? Rock, you know Stadium rock?”

06:45

And he and I wrote it together and I, luckily, I took two pairs of headphones for that meeting so he and I wrote together without disturbing the rest of the bar, and what was so lovely, as feedback from him as I tweaked it to be what he wanted, he said “how did you know to do that?” How I knew how to do that and how I knew how to get a grand for the pictures in the auction, is that I've done 10,000 hours of art, you know, at art school. Four years at art school, many years as a designer for albums and posters and stuff. I've done a lot of songwriting by the solo deal for a while. I've worked with David Bowie. I've worked with all sorts of people in the music business.

07:34

I was in Scritti Politti a long time, so I've done 10 000 hours of music. It now allowed me, in that hotel lobby, to put that whole package together, of the song, the intro, the auction pictures, everything bang, bang, bang and what and what really hacks me off. Uh, I would use a stronger word, but I wouldn't?

07:59 - Lena Robinson (Host)

You can speak. It's fine.

07.59 - Tom Morley (Guest)

I won't give the editor too much work in this. Um, it is what really irks. Many other people say “oh, it's so easy. You just have to tell it a few things and you get what you want.” Yeah it's a fantasy that you get that or you can get something. You can approximate something, but it's not going to be of, you know, all the people. And all the artists I know who use AI and musicians. We know how to tweak it.

08:35

It's that tweaking that brings in the quality. You can have as much quantity as you want, but there's some of us who are going for quality, and you hear it, and you feel it, and you see it. You may not be able to identify it, but you feel it.

08:53 - Lena Robinson (Host)

So, when did you? I mean, obviously you've got this long history and back catalogue of your own creativity. At which point did you start looking at AI and go? “I might give this a go.” Because, as you said, you're using it for your fine art, you're using it for music and you're using it for filmmaking. At which point, how long ago did you start going? “Oh, I might have a look at this.” Because a lot of people in your situation would be scared yeah by it right yeah.

09:29 - Tom Morley (Guest)

I think I actually, I remember a friend of mine posted the picture on LinkedIn, uh on Facebook, and it was funny enough of a Mad Max sort of car, and I was looking at it, and I was looking at the detail. I thought, “wow, that is beautiful”. And she said, “oh, it was done in Midjourney”. And I thought, “oh, I've got to check this out”. And as soon as I kind of got into Midjourney and it said you can pay for a subscription, I said “right, where's my card”?

09:57

I'm on, you know I'm on, and you can either do it slow or you can do it fast. Yeah, I'm doing it fast and bang, bang, bang. And I was man, I'll tell you. I didn't, uh, I didn't really sleep for probably the first couple of weeks, but it was so difficult to get what you wanted, you had to tweak it, tweak it, tweak it, tweak it, pray, tweak it, tweak it, tweak it, pray, tweak it. Have a coffee, you know, and then.

10:26

But now there's a, there's a thing, you see, there's pioneers. If you're a pioneer, like all the people who used html to build websites, and then they started bringing out templates, and then they started making it easier but there's a kind of camaraderie between all the people who learn HTML, and learn how to get everything just in line on different browsers. You know which was? It was like, kind of the Klondike, you know, gold rush, we're all digging, digging, digging. And it was similar with AI. I joined a number of groups for Midjourney and stuff and I said, yeah, this is how, if you want bright eyes in a model, right put in Vogue cover shot, because, and if you've ever done any photo shoots, as I've done many times in the pop business, when the photographer takes a shot and then they look down to check it, or they used to take polaroids to check it. What they're looking for is the eyes. If the eyes are in focus they don't care about it.

11:47

All this can be done, but they have to get the eyes, and there were some models I remember watching, I think you see it in the September issue of Vogue, that film about it. They're talking about one of the models. They say she has a lazy eye. You have to get her in the first halfout right? Otherwise it gets tired.

12:10

So in Midjourney, as what, just one of the things that we shared those early days, you want the good eyes. You just say Vogue cover shot, but without the Vogue. You know, yeah, and then suddenly you'd get all these beautiful pictures, these eyes like this, but you'd have to say Vogue cover shot, with a smiling model. No, smiling eyes. If you said smiling, you'd get the Joker, Jack Nicholson as the Joker, suddenly go. I didn't want that, smiling eyes. So then you get the Vogue model, kind of looking quite, kind of you know, looking interesting.

12:55 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Human.

12:56 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Human yeah, human, but kind of elevated in that Vogue way. And if you look at any magazine, stand anywhere at the station, anywhere, 90% is people looking at you, and the reason they do that is because we engage with eyes, to check if we're safe or not. That's what we've always done.

13:20

So we swapped all sorts of tricks like that in the early days and it did. It meant we didn't sleep much but we didn't care. It's like we're on this roll and then, as you're asking, “how did I get into it?” That's how I got into the visuals. And then a friend of mine called Bruno Bridge, who's a great, great producer, really good with sound at Bridge Studios off the M25, he sent me a thing and he said “I just did this on Suno”. And I thought and we are so used to listening to, you know, with studio ears. Has it got the sub bass? Because when you're in a studio setting, in a music, because when you're in the studio setting, in the music studio, you're always listening out for the frequencies. It's got the top high, middle, high, middle, middle bass subway. I thought “he surely produced this himself because he understands sound”. He said “no, I just did it on Suno oh, so you couldn't tell?”

14:22 - Lena Robinson (Host)

No, I couldn't tell. Oh wow! No, I couldn't tell.

14:25 - Tom Morley (Guest)

And he's a music producer and I thought, “well, I'm going to try this out”. And then again, I didn't sleep for a couple of weeks after that. I mean it's, it's outrageous. The quality that is coming through now and we're, and we're kind of at the beginning. I'm going to say a bit more about this, about the quality and the and what you can do. Because one of the main criticisms which you're probably going to ask me that, so I'll answer your question now is…one of the main criticisms and people who don't really understand AI, who haven't researched it, they say it can only ever do what has already been done. Or a prestige or a collage of that. And to a certain extent that was true at the beginning. But now what, what it allows you to do, is work with it as a medium that takes that as a platform. That's what happens, but really build on it, and sometimes in that kind of exponential way.

15:36

Before I got up this morning, I wrote a song for a friend of mine in America, Jamie Wheel, who has written a book called ‘Recapture the Rapture’ and ‘Stealing Fire from the Gods’, and I took some of his lyrics, and I know he likes Appalachian music. So, I put it to an Appalachian band. I listed all the instruments and now I thought but we want to be able to dance it. So I put it with a Euro Pop Beat. Yep, right, and it's incredible, and the If it was all right. So gonna add one more thing to this. As you know on the way here, I could hardly get here. So I don't have any money. I do lots of work, but my money just disappears, so very often I only have 30 pence in the bank, you know.

16:30

And yet I just call the guy on the way here. “What do I invoice you for yesterday?” “Two grand.” So I have two grand waiting in the wings, but I could hardly get here. But what I did on the journey I had two ways, two ways of coming. I could come on the Piccadilly Line Underground or I could come on the Overground. Now I choose, chose the Overground because I could stay online and I could keep working on that song even though I was skint. Um, I was doing the song as a favour to my mate in America, so I wasn't getting paid. It's two grand.

17:09

In the background, and the criticisms of people, even Brian Eno, I've seen, who I love and you know think he's great. He said the trouble with AI is you have too many options all the time. You never finish anything. It's iteration after iteration. I mean, that's one of his arguments. He said “I'd much rather go down to my garden studio and, you know, work on it and feel that, the blood sweat and tears.” These are not his words, but it is what people say. “Where's the blood sweat and tears now?” When you're working class and you're skint, you don't have a garden studio. Yeah, nor do you have two days to take off because you're on your way to something else. You're on, you're hustling yeah, all the time.

17:57

So. So I think AI is a gift to skint people. With ideas, you can be the artist in the attic with a rent person banging on the door and you go yeah, excuse me, I'm just mixing Appalachian music with Euro Pop and I'll put my mate's lyrics to it and it costs you $30 a month.

18:23 - Lena Robinson (Host)

I think what's really interesting about that is that, and I've had this conversations with other artists on the show before and other people, just generally is that, and you and I talked about this as well, about AI being the tool and what comes out of it is still dependent on the human to a huge degree. You've used a term before which I have used when talking to other people, always attributed it to you, that it's ‘the art of knowing when to stop’. Now, that's experience, right? So, the combination of, because you are prolific. You've given me access to your Midjourney. There's hundreds of thousands of images, but the quality of them is superb.

19:09

And I think what's interesting is that without your existing experiences and your years in the pop industry and art and music, all the things that you would be producing would be a very different thing. So I think that I'm so glad that you're not fearful of any of this stuff, and you're excited by it. Because I think what you produce is incredible. But I also think, also the fact that you, as you said, you are 70 years old. You've not been afraid of it. A lot of people are too scared. I was having a conversation with my cab driver on the way here and I was telling him what we were doing and he said “oh, how old is this person?” I said “he's 70”, he goes “and he's not afraid?” And I went “no, the complete opposite, he loves it”. So I think that's just a yeah, it's a really cool thing, it's the joining of the artist with the brush, or anything else yeah, the artists who are into all this and how.

20:16 - Tom Morley (Guest)

One of our experiences is you learn how the term is. You learn to ‘slay your darlings’. And so when you begin in any creative venture, if you know there's people who, they work for 50, you know, they weren't until their 50s. They um, take their money, retire early, create a studio and whenever they show you a picture, right that they've painted or something, they love it, they absolutely love it. And if you say to them, “yeah, but you see the light, that you've got the light source coming from there and you've got a shadow going the other way here, you know you're going to have to fix that if you want that kind of picture” and they can't do it.

21:07

They go. “Well, how would I adjust it?” You don't know, you can't adjust, you just have to start again.

21:12 - Lena Robinson (Host)

What?

21:13 - Tom Morley (Guest)

So they cannot ‘slay their darling’ and go, yeah, chuck it. You know, use it as a stepping stone to actually do the picture you wanted to. And we get right from art school, from music school. You know, any artist will grow up ‘slaying their darlings’. You know, destroying, destroying.

21:36 - Lena Robinson (Host)

No, no, no, no. Well, all the greats had sketchbooks of thousands of pictures in them. Didn't they?

21:42 - Tom Morley (Guest)

‘Slaying the darlings’, I guess, isn't it? Yeah, and I remember being in the studio with Bowie and Clive Langer, the producer, and we were trying to get this mix right. And it's a thing that if you let the musicians in the studio as well, as all the musicians, you know the lead guitarists will go “yeah, I love it, I love it”. And in there they'll start pushing up. Very surreptitiously, they'll start pushing up the guitar, so the guitar's bigger in the mix than the bass player. “Oh yeah, doesn't it sound good?” “It sounds good, yeah, yeah”, as if they're just sort of leaning on the desk, and I remember this. And of course, we had rulers in those times, you know, wooden rulers. I remember Bowie just getting a ruler, just you know, putting it across, all the faders pulling them all down. “Oh really? Now we'll start again”.

22:32

But, he could do that, because in his head he knew what all the parts were, and he knew where he wanted them in the mix. So you start building.

22:40 - Lena Robinson (Host)

He could see his vision, yeah.

22:42 - Tom Morley (Guest)

23:41

Yeah, yeah yeah, so that's what, that's what we have, and I think you can't, well, maybe you can't. Uh, no, I think you can't grow up dedicating yourself to making money in the business world and then go, now I will be an artist. I've got my garden studio. I've got my cleaner who comes in twice a week to tidy it up, some up. Well, yeah, you, you make an approximation of something, but you've got to, you've got to. I love that Grace Jones version of ‘Demolition Man’, because you've got to demolish nearly everything in order to get something that you want, and we are not trained to do that. We're trained that life should be this, you know, gradual we're it never is, it's like that, yeah, it's like that, but we pretend it's like that.

24:38

24:59 - Lena Robinson (Host)

It's life, though, isn't it?

24:59 - Tom Morley (Guest)

It's life, yeah, so yeah.

24:59 - Lena Robinson (Host)

So AI has come along and in some ways it's starting to blow up these industries. Music, art, you know, any kind of creative film like what do you think? You know, we're in ‘the now’ with it and you're using it a lot. What's it going to look like in three to five years time, from your perspective across those sorts of industries? Or what are you going to be doing with it in three to five years' time? is probably a better question.

25:33 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Well, the stories are not going to die out. We're storytellers. We are different from the animals in that way because we tell stories, and we tell tribal stories which carry on the culture of the tribe, and we have to make them engaging. So AI, I think, will always be at the service of storytelling, and when I say at the service, I don't mean subservient to. I mean it will be used in storytelling exactly the same as CGI was. Nobody said “I'm not watching that film because I don't really believe in Star Wars. I don't really believe Luke Skywalker dropped that thing”, and they're always the same story. Anyway, trust your intuition. All of the ‘Hero's journey’, take all your weapons, train, train, train, train, train. In the end, trust your intuition so that story will continue because it's very attractive and people like to think that could be them. They could be Luke Skywalker, because they didn't have to train..

26:50 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Yeah, they had the intuition.

26:52 - Tom Morley (Guest)

So, and so, where will it go technically? Well, it's just kind of exponential. We'll probably, musically, we'll probably discover bass sounds that we didn't know existed. In the same way DJs did. You know 20 years ago, bass just kept going down.

27:17

I mean it's really sad, because we grew up listening to, you know, Cool and the Gang ‘Celebration’ time, and which sounded like there will never be a bigger song than ‘Get down on it’. You know you listen to ‘Get down on it’. It's about the size of a postage stamp, frequency wise so we’d have been still good, though. Yeah it's. It's a brilliant song, but DJs who still use those songs, they put in some sub-bass and they boost the higher.

27:49

You know, remix. What remix does, you know, keeps it current. So actually I have no predictions that I can enlighten you with, other than it will be exponential. And I mean Hollywood it is man, I mean. But all right, I'll tell you what I do think. People do not trust AI at the moment because they don't like being tricked. Nobody likes being tricked. Just like when you look at a Vogue cover, you want to believe that person and those eyes, those smiling eyes, are looking at you and saying “you're a really attractive person...”

28:38

“..iIf I met you in real life, we'd be having a relationship right now.” That's what you want to do and dream in Vogue, it's like “....we might share a drink together in Cosmopolitan , you're my dream lover.” So they all look at the camera in different ways. So that will. I'm not quite sure where I'm going with that. I was going somewhere and then I got distracted by those aliens.

29:06 - Lena Robinson (Host)

The real versus the fake.

29:07 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Oh, it's about being tricked, yeah, so nobody likes being tricked, and at the moment, even at the words ‘AI’ people go. “I hate it. It's.”

29:15 - Lena Robinson (Host)

AI.

29:16 - Tom Morley (Guest)

I've had people look at my pictures and go “oh man, that is a beautiful picture”, I go,” it's AI” and they go. “I hate it”.

29:24 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Well, that's just ridiculous stuff, isn't it? Just ridiculous.

29:29 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Well, it's weird, but that will not last. No, it might last for the next 10 years. I mean, what they're worried about is being tricked politically or tricked out of money. Nobody likes being tricked. That's why eyes are so important, because that's where we sense where we've been tricked or not. And then we check our body language and all that. So something will happen. Where either people, you know the younger generation go, I don't care.

30:07 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Yeah.

30:07 - Tom Morley (Guest)

It's just beautiful or it sounds amazing, I don't care if it's liked. I wrote a song the other day and it sounded like a country song. It had Nashville guitar on it. It's absolutely beautiful Guitar solos. And some people said “I know this is AI, and I hate it, but this is a really good song.” And not only that. And someone said “why didn't you sing that song yourself?” And I said “well, because the AI had more emotion”.

30:37

That's interesting, yeah, country singer and I wanted a female country singer and he said, “well, I hate to agree because I don't like AI, but this is a really good song and it is being sung with the emotion that you want to get across in the song” so that who knows what in the next 10 years, if that will become more common, because what we want as artists is the outcome. Yeah, people, people believe vision to reality in love with the process.

31:15

We love our garden studio. We love staying up late. We love drinking Red Bull and ruining our health. No, we don't. If we can have it in 15 minutes and go for a walk in the park or a walk on the beach, wherever we live, we would much prefer to do that. We're not addicted to the process. Some people love the process, but what we want is the outcome, and if you speak to any artist who's on tour promoting their album, “it must be great doing all these songs?”. “I'm sick of these songs on the tour bus. We're writing the next album.”

31:53

That's what we're interested in, you know, and yet there's this dream that everyone has. “Oh, it must be amazing. They're out promoting your work.” “No, we're fed up with these songs.” You know…why do people keep asking for the early stuff?

32:06 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Because they love it.

32:07 - Tom Morley (Guest)

They love it, yeah, so there are going to be changes afoot which I think are going to be less to do with…well, they still will be to do with trust, but the trust will expand as people go. “Oh yeah”. I told a company the other day, I was asked for a risk assessment for a gig that I was doing. I looked up the room I was going to be performing in, a big country house venue. Golf course. I looked up the room, put the venue in and I said write me a risk assessment. And it says like, something like, “the fits right”, sweet, and this is in ChatGPT. Now I hate writing risk assessments, but it wrote it in 10 seconds and it said “there's four steps up to the Fitzroy suite, as long as the drummers carry it themselves.”

33:06

Yep, participants don't do it. Because at first it said “you could trip over on the step”. I said “look, rewrite this…”.

33:13

“...You can trip over your feet, so there's no risk.” So it said “oh sorry yeah”.

33:17 - Tom Morley (Guest)

So, it wrote me a risk assessment, with no risk to the participants and I sent it off. They said “thanks, it's very comprehensive. You obviously know the venue.” I mean how ChatGPT knew that. I have no idea. But, man, it saved me a lot of time because I used to say in my risk assessments “there's a risk that the participants will get into the groove so much they won't be able to stop. They'll start singing in the car with their teenage sons and daughters. That's the biggest risk” love it.

33:47

Yeah, but they did. They didn't like those types of risk assessments, so now I can just toss them out and I sound like some expert on every venue in the country, but it's also giving you time and the space, isn't it?

34:00 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Yeah?

34:00 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Yeah, and I loved, I loved the fact that at first it said “it was quite risky”. I said “don't, don't put them off”, you know, just tell them there's no risk as long as they listen to the facilitator on that, really as long as they listen to the facilitator on that, really, in seconds, and they bullet point to their everything, I think, the admin side and the business side of art and creativity.

34:25 - Lena Robinson (Host)

I know this because owning the art gallery and working with all my artists. They hate the business stuff, they hate the admin stuff and a lot of what ChatGPT is doing is taking that rubbishy bit away that you guys hate. So that in itself gives you more head space and space in your head for creativity.

34:54 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Yeah, part of the reason I've got so many Midjourney pictures is that, politically, I decided at art school, putting a picture on the wall. You know it's very left-wing. We were a very left-wing group ‘Scritti Politici’ at the beginning. It means political writings and it was taken from a book by Antonio Gramsci called ‘Scritti Politici’ and Gramsci wrote about how if you control the common sense he called it “hegemony of a population” then you don't need guns or anything, you don't need coercion, because they police themselves. So we thought “we want to get that message out more. You can't do it, just putting a picture on a wall.” So we decided to form a band.

35:38

Now, I wasn't a musician. At 23 I decided, give up art and become a musician. I was a good artist and a bad musician. So, it was a bit of a wrench, to be honest. And what happened a couple of years ago when Midjourney came out, I thought I'll just fill in those 50 years that I left.

36:02 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Oh wow, that's cool.

36:03 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Consequently, I loved screen printing, but I know it takes two days to do a decent screen print because each colour has to be separated. Put it on a rack, wait left to dry, you can't get it, even though you're impatient you can't get it off too early because if you put it down and you put the next colour on, it's going to blur.

36:21

So it's a very kind of frustrating process to get to your outcome. However, I can do that. I can say “give me this in a screen print style, give me this picture” and it'll do it. It doesn't have to wait for the colours to dry.

36:39 - Lena Robinson (Host)

However, all those pictures that you make, you know how to do them manually because, it was the question I asked you when we first started talking about whether you were going to come on board with me at the gallery. I did say to you, “just out of curiosity, could you create that in real life?” Because that was a bit of a test in my head of how I felt about the pieces. And you said “absolutely”. And I was like “we're on”.

37:13 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Yeah, yeah, and I've since done watercolour. You know, I've really studied watercolour and I know how to let the light come through the watercolour by saying” leave more paper” because the white paper is the white in a watercolour. You don't use white paint, true? You leave the paper. So I really looked into that and how you get them glowing a bit like those Vogue eyes. It's different between a picture of you, and a selfie of you and a friend against a brick wall, and a Vogue person looking at you.

37:45 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Which was quite a shift from what you were originally, the pieces that you were originally doing. And I know when Dave, who's sitting behind the screen over there, he and I had a look at the work that you were doing and we were just blown away by the watercolour stuff. Like when I've shown that to other people they've gone. “That was done on AI.” I go. “You need to understand the amount of hours this man has spent crafting his prompting.” It's a prompt craft isn't it?

38:15 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Yeah, yeah, there is. And, like I say, you need to know, the white is the paper and the and even the texture of the paper. You know, I put in. Do it on this paper and it was bubbly.

38:30 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Was it?

38:30 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Not bubbly, but rough yeah yeah, and ‘30 white’ showing through. So that's why they glow and you can see what I mean. It sounds funny to say, but the thing about watercolour, it's not like paint by numbers, not like anything. Nothing's got a border. No ‘where the paint ends’, that's where the leaves on the tree because it'll go out as far as it goes.

38:55

Yeah, that's where the water ends. You don't go now. “I want within that little bubble. I want that different blue.” It's not like that. It's, you are the watercolour artist when you're prompting in AI, as you are with any, you know medium, like I say, screen printing, sculpture.

39:16

I've done some sculpting in stone, which I may have had time to do between my 30s and 40s, but I was busy being a musician, so I'll just go and get AI to do it now and probably actually, when you talk about what's coming, I'm sure 3D printing, you know I'll be able to soon. I'll just be able to send some of those pictures and say “make this”, you know.

39:42 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Oh, that'll be cool. Yeah, that would be very, very cool. It's fake. It's not fake.

39:50 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Because it's kind of insulting when they say that because it's in your imagination. So if you have imagination, you have a story, you have a song, you have you know all these things. They all have outcomes. The reason you write a song, it's not to prove how clever you are, it's so people will dance and then on the dance floor, as I say, Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, Endorphins. They then feel good, they go out and do good things in the world. It's not like “hear my song, it's punk rock” so what? You know yeah.

40:27 - Lena Robinson (Host)

I think that leads me into a really good question. I was going to ask you, actually, which was around good examples and absolutely shite examples of the use of AI that you've seen out in the world, and it could be whether it be art or music or filmmaking or what have you. So, starting with the good, what is the best example you've seen besides your own work, obviously, of AI being used brilliantly from a creative perspective?

40:57 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Well, I'm afraid I'm going to disrupt your question because that's cool.

41:00 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Disrupt away what's the sort of example?

41:04 - Tom Morley (Guest)

There's a great example on Linkedin right of a whiskey company who were trying to do this very sophisticated advert.

41:06 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Oh, I think I know which one you're talking about.

41:07 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Guy in the tweed suit, library, whiskey glass looking great, and he only had three fingers on the glass that he was holding. And all the intelligent comments were “you're obviously a Dave Allen fan”. You know Dave Allen? The Irish comedian. Yep, because he had a finger missing and he used to drink on stage, and he used to like whiskey. So so all that and yet they… man, they whipped that advert down and they now have a real model, right, with holding, a real glove, you know but... So that was such a shite example because, because they obviously thought they could get away with it and if we're talking about trust, people don't trust that. I mean, if you're inexperienced, right, and you look at those pictures, those early pictures, you're really, really impressed. When you first start using AI you're really, really impressed with how they are.

42:16

And at first all the hands were mangled. And he has an issue with hands…doesn't it really do?

42:20 - Lena Robinson (Host)

I can't draw hands either.

42:23 - Tom Morley (Guest)

No, it's a lot better and but, but to the extent where you could tell they thought “it's nearly right, it's so nearly right, let's use it”.

42:35 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Everything else is perfect. If they'd been honest, maybe that may have made a difference, do you think?

42:40 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Sorry, what?

42:41 - Lena Robinson (Host)

If they'd been honest about what they'd used initially and just said “this was created by AI, probably would have got a better response. Maybe.

42:49 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Maybe not who, who knows? I think they weren't that intelligent. I think they thought they'd go away and they may not have even noticed. That's the thing, because you get so bamboozled by it.

43:00

It can be, um, uh, what's the word? Enchanted, enchantment? Yeah, there was an enchantment to the early pictures and songs because it was so revolutionary you could get anything out of it. So they think, well, what finger missing? Who cares, nobody's gonna notice. Well, actually, yeah, my mate Bruno's song.

43:24

He sent me this example of a song and it's from, in a style of African music, where he met his wife, which is West Africa, and I just thought, well, this is really authentic, you can program the sounds like I programmed. This might make me very unpopular, right? I programmed, I wanted it to sound Afro-Celt in a style, dance style in Afro-Celt. So I looked up and I know ‘Afro Celt Sound System’. I was a good friend of Simon Emerson, dead now, but lovely guy, and I looked up all the instruments on a particular track of theirs that I liked and I listed them all over in this. Mix of pipes and tin whistle. So I put them all in. Do it in that style. I got this absolutely amazing song back with all those instruments in it. I don't see any examples out there in the world, or if I do, I don't know that they're AI, you know what I mean.

44:33

So someone's poster on the tube may, may be an AI creative picture. Like I say, the whiskey one, it was a giveaway. But I may have seen other adverts where they did get all the fingers right, where I just think that's very attractive. So, so I don't know, is the answer actually, but I do know on some of the AI Groups I'm in, there's some amazing work going on, really, really beautiful, and it's not 70s album covers, no, you get enough of that.

45:08 - Lena Robinson (Host)

I think I'm in one of those groups with you. It's pretty amazing.

45:11 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, incredible stuff.

45:13 - Lena Robinson (Host)

But a lot of…there's some rubbish too, though.

45:15 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Yeah, yeah, well, that's it.

45:17 - Lena Robinson (Host)

But they're playing, aren't they?

45:19 - Tom Morley (Guest)

You slay all those. You slay them all. You go “wow that one” and the thing about that, they, some of them were quite surreal and what is it? I? I think there's been an AI kind of surrealist revival, because when Dali was doing that and the surrealist, what? What they did was they made weird things look normal. You know, all the shading would be right. I say all that I love dali but you get, you get an elephant with very spindly legs and you think, well, that can't really exist. But it does exist, because he's done it in such a realistic way that we can't look away, we can't deny. We can't just go to kids “sketch”.

46:07

They always get the legs wrong. You know so. And the thing is, the surrealists, they didn't just want to impress us with things like that, they wanted to be a political disruption. They had a much bigger kind of what's the word? They had a much bigger mission than just to disrupt us aesthetically or visually. They wanted to disrupt things politically.

46:36

So I think, and this is where, okay, so if you, I can't predict the future, but if I have a hope for the future, it will be AI creates that disruption, both aesthetically, visually, visually, story-wise, and politically. Because if you, if you ask anybody who's done, who's from the 60s or 70s, or anybody's done any LSD, any medicinal herbs, you know kind of visionary stuff.

47:13 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Yep.

47:14 - Tom Morley (Guest)

You know it's illegal. No, there's a reason it's illegal. It's because it opens up our imagination and governments want us to not imagine anything. They don't educate us to destroy them, obviously. So my dream would be that it becomes normal too, for us to create kind of visionary things that aren't to do with GDP. They're not to do with quarterly targets yeah, and you'll know it if you've watched Simon Sinek. Simon Sinek says there's two games we're playing. There's the finite game.

47:52 - Lena Robinson (Host)

And the infinite game.

47:53 - Tom Morley (Guest)

And there's the infinite game. Big fan. Even yeah, and the reason for the infinite game, or being part of the infinite game, is to keep the game going. Yeah, it's not to win.

48:07 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Yeah.

48:07 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Nobody wins.

48:08 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Participation in the game going, yeah it's not to win.

48:10 - Tom Morley (Guest)

Yeah, nobody wins participation. Healthcare, you know you can win,, a finite thing within healthcare of… I want to lose, you know, so many pounds by the end of January. So that, you can measure. You can't measure. I want to have good health, or I want the nation to have good health, you can.

48:32

So, if AI can be woven into the infinite game and it can support it and it can allow us to be part of something much more imaginative that we want to keep going and everyone's participating in it, and everybody slays as much as they feel, kind of, everyone slays as many darlings as they can muster, of which the artist will be on top of that hill. Yeah, slashing, slashings and going oh, that's quite a good one. All right, put that one in the cupboard. Um, so that's what I wanted to do. I wanted, I wanted to be the, the dream of surrealism, which is now delivered to us all, because we don't have to be Dali with all our technique. We can just be Dali on AI without saying in the style of Dali. We can just say I want a surrealistic picture.

49:42 - Lena Robinson (Host)

That is a future that I very much look forward to. We're nearly at the end. There's one more question I wanted to ask you, which is interesting, that we kind of almost finished on a conversation about another author. In Simon Sinek, you yourself have been writing a book and that's going to be released soonish. I don't know the exact dates, unless you can tell me what those dates are. Tell us a little bit about that book in a couple, of a minute or two. Tell us about that book.

50:13 - Tom Morley (Guest)

The book is really about serenading, serendipity, chant, its chants rolling with the rhythm and something the dance. I haven't got the word for that.

50:23 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Still playing with it.

50:24 - Tom Morley (Guest)

I don't want to be doing the dance. It's got to have a D. It could be demolishing the dance or demonstrating the dance. It's gonna have a d. It could be demolishing the dance or demonstrating the dance. Anyway deconstructing the dance, constructing the dance.

50:34

We got it. We got it all right. All right, I'm gonna hit print when I get home. So, um, yeah, so it's gonna be self-published. I've been writing over a couple of years and, funnily enough, it is actually good that you've asked this question at the end, because I got into Midjourney, yeah, because I was attracted to it, but also I wanted to illustrate the book, and in publishing, which is actually a very traditional, you know, quite conservative area, you have to justify every picture, everything has to be credited, and I thought, all right, I'm just going to make all the pictures myself.

51:12

And then I started to come upon these trust issues, because people who love my writing said oh, we love your writing, we love your authenticity, we love your, you know everything you stand for and these are all fake pictures. You can't put them in the book. So, consequently, I've been through quite a journey of fire, you know, trying to keep those people on board and at the same time thinking well, if they're not on board, maybe they're not my audience, because I really love the AI pictures and songs and everything. And in the book there will be QR codes, like the one you're about to see now, which go to particular songs, the one on the screen, actually goes to a vimeo page with several songs on it if you want to hear them, and you'll see those songs are illustrated with AI pictures, not all the time, sometimes I'm just in them myself. So it'll be this kind of, I actually think, it'd be quite a revolutionary book.

52:15 - Lena Robinson (Host)

I've read snippets. It's looking pretty good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

52:18 - Tom Morley (Guest)

I mean the writing I'm very confident about, but also I decided to do it the size of an album. And the reason I did that 12-inch album is that when I was a teenager, before social media, our version of social media at school was to walk around with our books yeah, but with album covers.

52:37 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Amazing.

52:39 - Tom Morley (Guest)

And the earlier the better. So if Jimi Hendrix brought out, Are you Experienced? There'd be a couple of us walking around the next day having gone down the Virgin Records. Amazing Walking around.

52:50 - Tom Morley (Guest)

So I thought, yeah, why not? And of course everyone's saying, don't do that, we won't fit it onto our airport bookshelves, it won't fit into, you know, Waterstones. But I just thought, what the hell? I'll probably only ever write one book. Why not make this book?

53:10 - Lena Robinson (Host)

The ‘be all and end all’, yep.

53:12 - Tom Morley (Guest)

And also I could hand it to people and say if you want me to come to your conference, or if you want me to come and be a speaker about AI and music or anything here, take this and rather than just go oh yeah, and put it in their bag. They go “where do I put it?” And they have to walk out with it under their arm, like we did as teenagers.

53:33 - Lena Robinson (Host)

Well, I'm really looking forward to the book. I cannot wait. You better be signing one for me. I'll definitely be buying one. Thank you so much for coming on. I think we could have talked for many more hours. Who knows, we might get you on again, because I think there's lots of other things we haven't even uncovered today. But thank you so much for coming on. Thank you to the listeners for being with us today talking to Tom on Creatives WithAI, and continue being curious, everybody. See you later.