JHS Pedals owner Josh Scott has exposed the factual inaccuracies of AI and how the tech's “crazy” misinformation is a danger to the history of pedals.
Artificial Intelligence, whether we like it or not, is here to stay. And it isn’t all viciously villainous – Positive Grid’s Bias X plugin has received positive reviews for its prompt-generated tones, for instance. But it has a dark side, too, and Brian May has already spoken of his fears of how the tech will impact the music industry.
Josh Scott, meanwhile, is on a mission to show AI – in this case, ChatGPT – for what it really is: an inaccurate, unreliable source that gets fact all wrong.
“I just asked ChatGPT on my iPhone the history of my industry, guitar pedals, and the answers that I got back were so horrible and inaccurate,” he says in a new YouTube video, which sees him undertaking an experiment in real time.
“I am going to take Chat GPT, and I'm going to question it about my own industry, guitar pedals,” Scott explains. “As many of you know, I am a super nerd here. I have researched, and I have traveled all over the world. I have sat with the inventors. I have written about this stuff in detail. I can even ask it some very detailed information about that company, which I know I'm the only person who knows this information.”
So what does it spew out? Gobbledegook.
Scott asks which guitar pedal is most important from an economic and social standpoint. I don't think anyone expected the “Bibanez Tube Screamer” to be the answer. And the stone-cold look on Scott's face says it all.
However, mispronunciation aside, its reasoning – the pedal’s sheer popularity plus how it helped reshape rock, metal, and blues – isn't awful. But as Scott delves deeper, things get weirder. It first claims that the Big Muff Pi was made by Ibanez, not Electro-Harmonix, and refuses to list its sources; it just says it draws on “well-documented music history.”
“When doing research and giving people information for things they're going to requote on forums, or even Facebook groups, one thing that commonly happens is people just say stuff and a lot of what they're saying you're just telling them, but there's not actually a thread of evidence or provenance for the claims,” Scott returns. “And I think this is a big problem.”
Like Google's search engine has done for decades, AI feeds off pre-existing information from across the web to answer prompts. The problem is, the sources it pulls from aren't always factual.
Ironically, ChatGPT agrees that provenance matters “in a world where pedal lore gets tossed around like campfire stories,” despite the fact that it is doing exactly that. Scott has a theory as to what’s happening here.
“It's in a feedback loop of its own making,” he posits. “It's giving people information that's inaccurate. Those people are posting it, and then it's reading itself. And this is horrible for history.
“Pedal history is in danger,” he claims, issuing a warning to all pedal fans. “ChatGPT is rewriting facts.” It’s easy to understand these fears.
It's worth watching the video in full because it's a fascinating, if dystopian and terrifying, watch, and Scott consistently challenges the historical inaccuracies it regurgitates. The man lives and breathes pedals like no one else, and he has ChatGPT's number every step of the way.
All in all, this underscores another moral dilemma surrounding the rise of ChatGPT and the public’s use of it.
“Be sure to question sources,” Scott concludes. “Be sure to question where the information is coming from. And do not take something as fact simply because it's in a forum or has been typed into the comments.”
Elsewhere, AI practice tools and web-browser amps are a thing, but Billy Corgan warns that musicians using generative AI are doing a deal with the devil.
