Ceaseless searching

After an hour of “ceaseless searching”, Lord Percy believes he has created a “nugget of purest Gold”. He has however, according Blackadder, created a “splat of Green”.

Alchemy offers an extremely useful metaphor for modern-day black-box AI; base things are supplied (such as a prompt), and through some mystical process not fully understood by the Alchemists themselves, out comes gold (or your essay assignment).

Lord Percy hasn’t been idle or self serving, in fact his motivation is to save Blackadder’s finances and he has worked a whole hour to make his Green. His excitement at having solved the problem after his ceaseless searching is real. Percy truly believes he’s onto something. It takes the cynical Blackadder to point out that Percy has made a “splat of Green”.

Percy is like all of us who use LLMs and GPT-models to make things for us. Percy is too caught up in his excitement and too ignorant of the real thing that he’s trying to engineer that he wouldn’t know gold even if he had made it. For all he knows, Green is Gold. If you’ve not done the work, you have nothing to compare the outputs to. We’re not domain experts, but suddenly have access to what looks to our untrained eyes, domain expertise.

Similar — and in my view — misplaced ideas have bounced around the music computing and sonification world for many years. For example, the idea that a midi note sent to a synthesised saxophone could stand in for an actual saxophone and all of the parameters that a real saxophonist controls inside a real acoustic.

Midi notes

Notes in midi are described thus:

note number, how loud, duration, e.g. [60, 100, 3000] will result in the note C played at dynamic 100/127, lasting 3 seconds (3000ms).

With these descriptions we are able to trigger notes and play back notation, but they’re not music, rather representations of the music we would like to hear if we had a saxophonist playing. The thinking that a midi note is enough of a signifier for real sound has lead to problems and huge work to mitigate these.

Updated on 08 June, 2025