Thoughtful Thursday · Word Crafters

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Thoughtful Thursday

Video Killed the Radio Star (And I Was There to Watch)

So I have a thought, and it showed up this morning with the radio on...

I was getting ready for the day, half awake, the way I am most mornings before the Diet Coke kicks in, and the song came on. You know the one. And a line went right between the eyes before I'd even found my shoes.

"They took the credit for your second symphony / Rewritten by machine on new technology."

Sigh. I stood there in the hallway like an idiot with one sock on.

Because I was there. I mean I was really there, for the very first one. Around 1981, I was twelve (maybe thirteen, the math argues with my memory a little), sitting on the living room floor of the friends across the street with basically the whole neighborhood crammed in around a television, waiting for MTV to start. We didn't have cable at our house. We didn't even have a color TV, that didn't happen for me until I was seventeen, so the whole reason I was on that floor was that somebody else had the future and was kind enough to let the rest of us watch it come on. Blew my 14 year old's mind when he found out I was alive before we had color!

And the first thing they played was a song about how the future was going to kill the thing we were all about to stop doing.

Let that sink in for a second, because I don't think we noticed it then. A room full of kids, cheering a new technology, and the opening statement of that technology was a lament for the technology it was replacing. Nobody on that floor was thinking about the radio star. We were thinking about the pictures. The pictures were amazing.

"Video killed the radio star / In my mind and in my car, we can't rewind we've gone too far."

(I typed "to far" in my notes this morning. Fixed it. Leave me alone, I was typing on my phone.)

Okay, here's where the tangent starts, and I'm flagging it now so you can't say I didn't warn you.

The radio is still here and Murphy's radio won't leave me alone.

I know that sounds obvious. It was playing in my hallway this morning. It's in my car. It's in the shop right now, humming along behind the laser. Video did not kill the radio star, not the way the song said it would, not the way everybody in 1981 half believed. What actually happened is weirder and a lot more boring. Some radio stars did lose their careers, because they didn't look right for the new thing, and that's a real loss and I'm not going to pretend it isn't. Some people who'd never have been heard before suddenly had a camera and an audience. Radio changed what it was. Video changed what it was. Then the internet showed up and did it all again to both of them, and somebody always stands up and says this is the end of the real thing.

In 1994 I had my own sound studio and was recording music for various local and regional bands. Fourteen years later and we were till making music. There was a shift in there from analogue recordings to digital which is why I eventually closed the studio. I couldn't do computers day and night. I got into music because it wasn't computerized when I started, Sidebar. Did you know the Beatles were originally recorded in mono on a 3 track tape machine? They bounced mixes to another 3 track machine to add more tracks making modern remastering next to impossible...before Ai.

It's never the end of the real thing. It's the end of the assumption that the old way was the only legitimate way.

Whew. Okay. That's the sentence I've been trying to get to for about three weeks.

So let's talk about the witch hunt, because that's what this morning's song was really about for me, even though the song has no idea.

I've been watching it for months now. You've been watching it too. Somebody posts a book, somebody else runs it through a detector, and suddenly there's a mob. Somebody's cover "looks AI" so the whole book is garbage. Somebody's prose is "too clean" so they must have cheated. I've written about this before, the Shy Girl business, the detectors flagging the Declaration of Independence as machine written (that one still makes me laugh, it's the best time travel story nobody has written yet). And what gets me every single time is how sure everybody is. Absolute certainty, from people who couldn't tell you how the thing works.

"They took the credit for your second symphony."

Think about who that line is aimed at. In the song it's aimed at the new technology, the thing that's taking the credit. But in the mouths of the people yelling at authors right now, the accusation is exactly the same. You took the credit. You didn't write it. A machine did.

And here's what I keep coming back to, with a Diet Coke in one hand and a very guilty conscience about the thousand things I haven't finished. Spellcheck finishes your sentences now. Word fixes your grammar. AutoCrit has been rewriting whole paragraphs for twenty-one years (I wrote about that already, I know, I know). Every one of those got the same speech when it arrived. The typewriter got the speech. The word processor got the speech. Moveable type got the speech from the guys who'd spent their lives hand copying books by candlelight, and I have a lot of respect for those guys, I've set type on a letterpress myself, but the genie didn't go back in the bottle for them either.

That's actually where this whole line of thinking started—a funny sidebar from yesterday—when I saw a book at the bookstore called "Hot Type, that Magnificent Machine that Birthed Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad." As I said above I've worked with one before replacing the typewriter interface with a computer. And did not think anything of it at the time other than it was cool typing on a screen to produce a hot lead type slug for a letterpress machine.

I still carry a handwritten notebook. I'm not anti-anything. I just notice that the people shouting the loudest about purity are usually standing on three or four layers of technology they stopped noticing years ago. The No Data Center Sign in my neighborhood sits in front of a house that gets a pile of Amazon boxes every day that wouldn't be there without a datacenter or three.

Okay, Squirrel.

Here's what actually pushed me to write this instead of the article I'd planned.

This week I saw that Adobe is adding MCP connectors to all of their software. For those who haven't run into the term, MCP is basically a standard plug that lets an AI talk directly to a piece of software and actually run it, not just chat about it. And the reason Adobe is doing it, from what I read, is that the guys who cloned their stuff got there first and one upped them. Adobe. The company that owned the entire creative world when I was learning Photoshop and Illustrator, sitting there going, oh no, everyone's plugging an AI into their tools, we'd better do that too.

(This is the same Adobe I left because of the monthly bill, by the way, so forgive me a little smirk.)

And I'm doing it too. I'm building an MCP connector for WordCrafter.Pro right now. What that means in plain English is that you'll be able to use Claude, or whatever frontier model you like best, and just talk to what's inside WordCrafter. All 390 plus functions in there. Ask it to tick the right boxes in your binder, pull up your Series Bible, run a pass, whatever. You'd be sitting in your favorite AI and it would be reaching into your book.

Crazy, I know. I said it out loud to my wife and she just gave me the look she gives me when I say "I had an idea" at eleven at night.

But here's the part I really sat up for. This is the thing that made all of this land for me in a way the song didn't.

Yesterday I had the day off. A whole day, actual hours, which almost never happens (the day job has been eating eight to ten hours out of me daily and I've been a ghost around here, sorry). And I spent a big chunk of it building a pair of skills that do something I've been failing to do for months. They create all the training. The onboarding. The how-to videos for every new feature, the ones I keep promising and keep not finishing because there's only one of me and about forty things on the list.

And they did it better than I would have.

I'm going to say that again because it stung a little. They did it better than I could have done it. Not because they're smarter than me, they aren't, they're a pair of skills I built. It's because they have no ADHD, no 300 open tabs, no three teenage boys asking where the charger went. They just did the job, start to finish, and every time I ship a new feature (and I shipped a lot yesterday) they can document it the same day and have it ready to share. The thing I could never keep up with is suddenly keeping up with me.

And I stood there looking at it, the way I stood in that hallway this morning with one sock on, and I thought... huh. Rewritten by machine on new technology.

And I wasn't angry. That's what surprised me. I felt relieved.

Here's where I land, and I'll be honest, I'm not sure it's tidy.

Everything is going to have AI in it. That isn't a prediction anymore, it's just what's happening, in the software on your desk and the software in your phone and the software at the day job where I fix things other people break for a living. Every program that wasn't built around it is bolting it on to keep up, because the ones that don't are going to be the next radio star. Adobe is doing it. I'm doing it. Your word processor already did it and didn't tell you.

Which means the people who've decided to treat AI use as a moral failing are going to have an increasingly lonely time. At some point it gets very hard to find a tool that doesn't touch it. The ones who really mean it may have to go back to rock and chisel, or clay tablets, and honestly I'd read that book. Somebody would have to write it, though, and they'd probably need a laser engraver to finish before the sun burned out. (I have one. I'm just saying.)

I'm not saying that to be cruel. I'm saying it because I think the fight has moved. It was never really "AI or no AI." Tuesday's piece was about what happens when the machine can do the whole loop, and Thursday's was about the three boxes, the little B and S and ¶ that decide what the machine sees and what survives and what leaves the building. The question that's still standing, the one that's actually worth arguing about, is who holds the judgment. The tools are about to get a lot better at talking to each other. My connector is one tiny piece of that. When they all plug into each other, the boxes still need a human to tick them.

Video didn't kill the radio star. It changed who got to be one, and who got to decide what a star even looked like.

I was twelve on a living room floor, and I thought I was watching the end of something. I was really watching the start of everything that came after, and I didn't know it yet.

So here's my question for the room, and I mean it, I'm not asking rhetorically. What was your MTV moment, the day you sat on the floor and watched something new arrive that everybody swore was going to ruin the thing you loved? And now that it's AI instead, which side of that floor are you sitting on?

And if you actually read this far before Friday night type ME in the comments and maybe I'll share the skills I created and how I did it for the video below

3:07

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Thoughtful Thursday