AI Guitar Lessons?

I've been thinking lately about AI - Artificial Intelligence - and how it may affect my activities. Especially writing, publishing and selling guitar lesson blogs and downloads.

I have two main sources on the subject of AI that I follow; one is generally negative, the other generally positive.

Positive: Peter Leyden's Substack, "The Great Progression: 2025-2050: A grand narrative of our historic opportunity to harness AI & other transformative technologies to drive progress, reinvent America & make a much better world. A positive reframe of what's coming via essays, interviews & gatherings..."

Negative: Ted Gioia's Substack, "The Honest Broker: A trustworthy guide to music, books, arts, media & culture by Ted Gioia."

Peter Leyden is very focused on AI and sees it as a paradigm-shifting opportunity to usher in a golden age for humanity. He's extremely knowledgeable of history and argues that the advance of technology and its effects on society occur at regular, predictable intervals and that we are on the cusp of one of those cycles. I find his perspective interesting, especially when it comes to politics; how he believes the political left and right are both necessary and have a role in this process.

Ted Gioia is much more broad in his subject matter, but his stuff on AI is generally negative; how it's affecting the creative process, output and income of creatives - musicians, artists, writers, etc. He curates articles on the "AI backlash" and documents many nightmare incidents of AI giving false information, abusive and life-threatening advice, and how it's destined for a downward-spiraling doom-loop.

My personal position at this point is somewhat conflicted; I see AI as a mixed bag. If you use a maps app on your phone to get from one place to another...well, that's you using AI. The maps app was the main reason I bought my first smartphone way back when; I knew I was going to be driving in LA. It was a lifesaver. "Hey, Siri..."

I like Peter Leyden's position in that it is, as he says, a "positive reframe." He sees everything - history, politics, religion - through a technology-positive lens.

For reasons I won't get into here, I have a personal bias against what I call an "apocalyptic mindset." It's not healthy. You see it everywhere on the internet, most commonly in politics (both sides); the Chicken Little Syndrome - "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"

No, the sky is not falling; "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

If you want to know where that quote comes from, ask Google; AI knows.

At the same time, I also resonate with Ted Gioia. I see that AI is DOMINATING social media. I don't believe anything I see or read because most of it is AI-driven. Ted Gioia says in 2026 social media will hit the 90% mark - 90% of what you see will be AI-produced. Even the most conservative sources say 50%.

A lot of the apocalyptic mindset you see on social media (and even in the mainstream media) is being reinforced by AI slop that isn’t even real; its only function is to increase clicks to attract advertising dollars. It creates a false reality-construct into which people buy.

Contrary to what some people say, just because there's video on FaceBook of an incident doesn't mean what you see with your own eyes is trustworthy; it is not. Because of AI.

AI curates and trains on what is already out there - on the internet. Think about that. AI is “learning” by, among other things, ingesting its own slop. I would also point out it exists only in the digital realm and only learns from the digital realm.

Ted Gioia's "doom loop" AI scenario does not seem that far-fetched to me.

How I Use and Don't Use AI

Whenever I write and publish a blog I go through an SEO process; Search Engine Optimization. One of the steps is to create what's called "alt text" for every image or picture in the blog. "Alt text" is a written description of what's in the picture. It's not visible to viewers, it's only visible to search engines.

A few months ago I noticed an "AI Assistant" was available to write alt text for images. Since writing alt text for all images (think about a guitar lesson with multiple fretboard diagrams) is a time-consuming, frustrating process, I started using it. What I discovered was that it was helpful. I generally would use about 60 or 70% of what it wrote, maybe edit it some and delete the rest.

So this is a positive - like the maps app on my phone. It saves me time and hassle. Theoretically, it optimizes the alt text for search engines, so that I don't have to educate myself on a bunch of stuff in which I'm not interested.

Then I noticed AI was available to write whole blogs. What? I've written well over 300 blogs. Believe me when I say I typed every word. Every thought came out of my mind. How could AI possibly create a blog that had my unique, personal approach to teaching guitar?

So I decided to experiment. Remember, AI has access to everything I've already published. So maybe it could create a blog that had my unique, personal approach to teaching guitar.

Prompt: Jimi Hendrix's use of triads.

Caveat: I admit that learning to write prompts for AI is a skill-set in and of itself. This is an extremely general prompt. Nevertheless, here is a screenshot of the first paragraph with a photo:

Except for the fact that the title is too long, the first paragraph is fine - as an introduction, no major issues there, but the pic? It couldn't be more wrong!

Jimi Hendrix was left-handed. He played a right-handed strat upside down. Jimi Hendrix was black. His fashion sense was very flamboyant. Jimi never wore plain black clothes - except black suits and ties when he was an R&B and Soul sideman before he became famous.

The fingering being shown is not a triad. I don't know what it is other than a cluster-f...k of crap.

Hey! Does that dude only have 3 fingers? And the caption ACTUALLY says, “Jimi Hendrix’s hand shaping a triad chord on guitar neck.”

I know for a fact that Jimi Hendrix had four fingers and a thumb on each hand.

WOW. The level of extreme-wrongness-presented-as-fact is overwhelmingly bizzarro!

As for the rest of the blog, it doesn’t get better, it gets worse.

All this presupposes you already know how to play triads! If you already know how to play triads you would know that most of the above is wrong.

Example 1: Instructing the student to "Play a C major triad on the 5th, 4th, and 3rd strings at the 3rd fret (notes: C, E, G)..." involves using an open string (G), and then "...sliding the triad up to D major at the 5th fret" - which you cannot do because of the open string! Sliding a root-position C major to a D major on a 5th-string root has some issues that involve techniques that a beginner or lower-intermediate player will not have mastered, and of which they probably are not even aware.

Furthermore, Jimi rarely, if ever, played root position triads on a 5th-string root.

Example 2: I'll make this simple; there is no E minor triad on the 4th, 3rd and 2nd strings at the 7th fret. Neither is there a G major triad on those same strings at the 10th fret.

Example 3: A D major triad combined with an F# minor triad is simply a D major 7 chord. I will concede that understanding a major 7 chord as a stack of 2 triads has some utility...but you have to know what a 7th chord is before you deconstruct it into triads.

It's going to be pretty unlikely (actually, impossible) that following these suggestions will cause (or even help) a beginning or intermediate guitar player to, "...understand Hendrix's triad magic..."

An upper-intermediate or pro player would already have at least a functional knowledge of triads, as well as Hendrix's use of them, and so would know to stay away from all this incredibly wrong, useless "instruction."

Here’s another screenshot:

Notice the first tip talks about the top, middle and lower string groups on which to play triads - as if there are three string groups. There are six strings. How many adjacent 3-string groups are there? FOUR! Strings 123, 234, 345, 456.

AI somehow missed how many strings there are on a typical guitar.

How many strings did AI put on the guitar in the picture above? It's hard to tell. One of the "strings" looks like a fret running along the neck instead of across the neck. If it is a string, the spacing is very weird and asymmetrical. There is not a guitar on earth that looks like that.

Tip number 4: "Use slides, bends, and hammer-ons inside triads for expression."

There is one note "inside" a triad. Is that the only note that can be slid, bent or hammered? No, there are two others, the top note and the bottom note. Furthermore, which notes, exactly, should be slid to, bent to, or hammered-on? There are some physically available extra-triadic notes that can be very wrong!

I could rant on and on about how messed up the blog is. And said blog, wholly written by AI, would be published as, "By Jay EuDaly."

NOPE! NOPE! AND HELL-TO-THE-NO NOPE!!!!

So at this point I will continue to use AI to help me write alt text for images, much like I use the maps app on my phone; a useful tool, but AI is no substitute for REAL creativity, or REAL writing. I don't see how it could ever be, since it doesn't create, it curates what has already been created.

Neither is AI a substitute for REAL pedagogy (look it up, AI probably knows what that word means). The examples I've given above are indicative of that.

BTW, here is MY blog on Jimi Hendrix's use of triads: Jimi's Triads. Among other things, it contains 21 fretboard diagrams and 2 demonstration videos.

AI had none of that, and the one picture it did have was completely F'd-up.

Originally I thought I would publish the AI-written blog on Jimi’s Triads so it could be compared to mine.

But I just couldn’t stand the idea of that slop bullshit being published under my name.

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P.S. Since I first wrote this blog, I have tried the same experiment several times with more refined prompts. For example,

"A guitar lesson using Jay EuDaly's teaching style on Jimi Hendrix's use of triads."

Notice I specifically directed AI to ME. Even that didn’t work. The results - several of them - were no better than the example that drove me to write this blog in the first place. AI Slop Bullshit. Repeatedly.

Get this: I can use AI to enhance the AI prompt I originally wrote! Cool! AI will slopify my prompt.

Here's the AI enhanced-prompt version:

And look - AI will enhance the enhanced prompt! So it eats the slop it produced from the first prompt and shits out double-slop. Slop upon slop upon slop! A veritable cornucopia of slopityness!

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How About 5 Lessons? - Real Lessons!

The 5-Lesson Foundational Series teaches the Circle of Keys as an organizational mechanism by which you ensure that whatever you learn is drilled in every key in all possible positions. It also gives you a method to find any note, anywhere, without memorizing note names on every string. That is a beautiful thing!

Almost every lesson I teach presupposes these 5 lessons.

You can download the 5-Lesson Foundational Series right here with no further obligation or commitment:

Click the pic to access the download page:

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(This is a real picture, of me, on a real gig, with real lights and real fingers. AI did not create it.)