From the Editor’s Desk: No Synthesizers! ⭐

As a young fan of rock music in the 1970s, I would pore over my father's extensive album collection in the years before I would start buying my own. Some of the packaging was art in its own right, including the working zipper on the front of the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers. And many of these albums were chock full of information about the musicians and their music.

I was especially happy when song lyrics were part of it, as I still thought that these people were somehow elevated and had something to teach me. But I would read and re-read whatever there was, from the obvious to the cryptic. And one of my clearest memories of that time, mostly because it was so confusing, was that the early Queen albums boasted that they had been made with "No Synthesizers!"

This was a different era, obviously. But even as a child, I understood that Queen was taking a stand ... against something. In the delightfully quaint technology of the era, the name synthesizer does a reasonable job of communicating what that thing does. And I vaguely understood that a synthesizer was like a piano, but electronic, and that it could be made to sound like other things. And so Queen was perhaps broadcasting that its music was somehow more real, more human-made. This was particularly interesting given the technical excellence of that music.

History shows us that Queen didn't just step back from the "No Synthesizers!" but rather embraced synthesizers to a degree in the 1980s that was both hypocritical and hilarious. Songs like Radio Ga Ga are a celebration of synthesizers and synthesized sound, creations that the younger version of that band would have mocked just a few years earlier.

Queen's cheeky u-turn on synthesizers is a lot of things, but the band's stance against this technology in the 1970s now reads are misguided if not clueless. These are some of the smartest and most talented individuals to ever grace a stage, and yet they succumbed to a strange Luddite-like pushback on a technology that perhaps they should have utilized and innovated with. Fortunately, they got there eventually.

History often repeats itself, and I was reminded of this Queen story when I noticed that Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney tweeted his support for Steam and other game stores dropping their "Made with AI" labels. Yes, there are places for this kind of labeling, but game-making is not one of them. As Sweeney notes, "AI will be involved in nearly all future [game] production."

Right.

If you like your fights nasty, AI is the perfect topic. The responses to Sweeney's tweet are predictably all over the place, but this isn't really a debate, as what Sweeney predicts is obviously correct. I've made the point that AI is fundamentally about saving time, but that could be expanded. It is also fundamentally about saving money. And, in a more nebulous sense about allowing us to achieve things that would otherwise be, wait for it, too time-consuming and expensive to even...