Tag Archives: Google Gemini

Zucchini Two Ways

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Like everyone who has a vegetable garden, or even just one potted plant, we have an abundance of zucchini. I was asking AI language models for casserole cooking times & temperatures based on what I had around & could easily grab from the store, and I sort of picked a hybrid of all of them. I used ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, & CoPilot. Originally I had been asking about zucchini bread recipes, then asked about the casserole. It is interesting to bounce ideas off of them.

Zucchini Casserole & Pizza-ish Zucchini Things on a white plate.
“Zucchini!” (But, say it like a Jawa yelling “Utini!” in Star Wars.)

I had the idea for the lil’ zucchini things last time I made breaded zucchini & ran out of breadcrumbs before zucchini.

Zucchini Ditalini Chickpea Chikini

I hesitate to call this a casserole, because the kids are on a brainrot social media kick where they have been informed somehow that Crock⬩Pot meals & casseroles are bad. The best part is they both ate & loved it… one even went back for more. It was a hit with the wife too, and I’d eat it again.

Zucchini Ditalini Chickpea Chikini - the top of a casserole dish just out of the oven, with a nice brown crispy breadcrumb topping over gooey melted cheese.
Zucchini Ditalini Chickpea Chikini

I felt like making a casserole, but not making a mess by pre-cooking/par-cooking or measuring anything. So… I ended up making two 9″x13″ casseroles. Here it is to the best of my memory.

The ingredients:

  • 1 ridiculously large zucchini from the garden.
  • 1 Spanish onion
  • 1 orange bell pepper
  • 1 pack (1½ lbs.) of chicken breasts
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 (16 oz./1 lb.) box of Ditalini pasta
  • 1 (15.5 oz.) can of garbanzo beans
  • 2 (8 oz.) blocks of cream cheese, softened (Leave it out for a bit, nuke it, or cradle it in your armpits.)
  • 1 (2 cup) bag of shredded white cheddar cheese
  • 1 (2 cup) bag of Havarti cheese
  • 1 (1½ cup) bag of Gouda cheese (Same damn size bag – thanks, shrinkflation!)
  • 1 (32 oz./4 cups) box of chicken stock
  • 1 stick (4 oz./½ cup) butter.
  • Breadcrumbs – Maybe 3 cups?
  • 2 Tbsp. minced garlic from a jar because elicits unwarranted hate.
  • Seasonings to taste – I used Rotisserie Chicken seasoning, Mrs. Dash’s Table Blend, Black Pepper, White Pepper, Onion Powder, Garlic Powder, Paprika, & dried parsley. Ain’t nobody measuring all that.

I was going to include some “bacon pieces,” but I must have left them in the store, or they fell out in the car, or I put them in a weird place or threw them out, because they absolutely are in what may as well be a pocket dimension.

The Method:

  1. Pre-heat the oven to 375°
  2. Grease apparently two 9″x13″ glass baking dishes with a stick of butter.
  3. Get two mixing bowls. In one, whisk the egg, then fold in the cream cheese, the chicken stock, the garlic, the (drained) chickpeas, about half of each of the shredded cheeses, the dry Ditalini, and spices in one mixing bowl.
  4. Slice up the bell pepper, onion, zucchini, & chicken in consistently sized cubes. (If you left the zucchini in the garden too long like I did, cut out the spongy center.) Put all that in the other mixing bowl, toss it with some more of all the spices.
  5. Mix the contents of the two bowls together as you string together new swear words and wish you have an even more ridiculously larger mixing bowl.
  6. Put those into the baking dishes. Or one big one, or a casserole dish, or whatever you’ve got. Cover with foil, place in oven, & bake for 45 min.
  7. Melt the remainder of the stick of butter in a microwave safe bowl. Or a microwave unsafe bowl if you’re an agent of chaos. Dump in some breadcrumbs and toss them in the butter, so the breadcrumbs are coated but not all gross. I used a mix of panko & regular. I did not measure.
  8. Pull from the oven, but leave it on, remove foil.
  9. Spread the remaining shredded cheese on the top of the casseroles, then the buttery breadcrumbs… and put it back in the oven. I swapped it to 350° on a convection setting at this point for 15 minutes… but you do you.

Notes:

  • YOU DO NOT NEED TO PRE-COOK THE CHICKEN, PASTA, OR VEGETABLES. You certainly can, and it may deepen the flavors and reduce baking time, but I wanted to do this all in one go. I checked the chicken in a few sports with an instant-read and it was a bit over the USDA recommended 165°.
  • I was going to mix the cheeses together at the end, but why dirty another bowl? I dumped them on almost somewhat evenly.
  • Obviously, cut out what you don’t like, add what you do, skip stuff, or add stuff.
  • I may try this again with bacon or ham… but there was a good bit of salt in all the cheeses already, and probably the chickpeas.
  • I may try this with shredded zucchini and maybe leaving the chicken breast cutlets whole on top. Maybe.
  • Ricotta instead of cream cheese may be good too.
  • Use chicken broth, bone broth, vegetable broth, milk, water, or whatever… just give the pasta enough liquid to absorb.

Pizzucchini Teeny Mini

Again, this was a quick idea I had last tame I made air-fried breaded zucchini and ran out of bread crumbs because the zucchini multiplies as I sliced it. I did it in the oven quick after I yanked out the “let’s not call this casserole a casserole.”

Melted cheese, some toasted breadcrumbs, & pizza sauce over a round slice of zucchini.
Pizzuchini Teeny Mini

Ingredients:

  • 1 normal-sized zucchini.
  • 1 (2 cup) bag of “pizza cheese”
  • 1 (15 oz.) squeeze bottle of pizza sauce
  • a bit of EVOO
  • Maybe ½ cup of breadcrumbs

The Method:

  1. Do you really need instructions here? I put the oven on 400° on the air-fryer setting. I didn’t pre-heat it because it was already running.
  2. I sliced the zucchini about ¼-inch thick, and put it on the baking sheet over a bit of EVOO.
  3. I dropped on some sauce, some cheese, and a tiny bit of breadcrumbs.
  4. I put it the oven for 15 minutes.

Notes:

  • What the hell is “pizza cheese?” It said that on the bag. I guess mozzarella & provolone? Please tell me in the comments that it is all plastic & slowly killing me. Maybe I should have read the bag.
  • I will probably skip the EVOO or get a cooking rack for the air fryer setting.

~🧀~

OK, so that’s it. Hit me up with suggestions, questions, love, or hate in the comments! Share your zucchini recipes, too!

Is AI music toothpaste out of the tube?

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So, I guess I had no idea that AI music was as advanced as it is. I assumed the stuff I saw on social medial was from paid or sophisticated programs. I have been monkeying casually with text prompts at ChatGPT or Meta AI, and image generators at DALL-E 2, Craiyon, & in the PicsArt app for a while. Luma AI even animates photos in the creepiest way possible. I have recently started messing with Google’s Gemini, too.

While the first two AI song generators that popped up when I googled did not require me to download an app or pay any money, I was able to have them bang out a song in less than a minute. The second one even let me insert lyrics, so I used ChatGPT & Gemini to write lyrics. Of course I chose punk rock, and the subject matter was just me poorly describing the blog. This stuff is wild.

The prompt was: “World (and Lunar) Domination” a punk rock song about drawing mazes and writing goofy letters.

For some reason, I can’t seem to embed these ones. 🤷

AI Music Factory automatically spits out 2 songs from the same prompts.

All of the songs are generic pop punk, street punk, and a weird attempt at some uncanny valley-ish horns. They are formulaic pop punk, of which I could certainly be accused of doing when I was actively playing in bands. The weird part is that is not all that dissimilar from my actual creative output. The lyrics have some interesting ideas & hooks too, if I’m being honest. Does that mean I am a terrible and generic songwriter? Perhaps my lack of commercial success in that area speaks to that. 😆

Self-depreciating humor aside, I feel like I have been involved in the creation of some fun, silly, & kick-ass music, and I was never really doing it for financial gain or recognition. It was an itch that I needed to scratch. I needed to make art via punk rock.

The above songs are derivative of a thousand different punk bands, but the one vocalist sounds oddly like Bad Religion. All of it is stealing from something though. Is it scouring the whole internet? Is it using Spotify, YouTube, Pandora, Apple Music, or Amazon Music? Is it creeping on hard drives in home studios or at record companies?

I feel like this is really close to having the ability to be passed off as a real band. It even reminds me of Crotchduster,

Is it theft, or inspiration? I would not have picked up a guitar and tried to write punk rock songs if I had not heard the Ramones & the Misfits doing what they did. Led Zeppelin’s entire catalog is arguably not entirely derivative of everything that passed through Jimmy Page’s earholes. (I mean, George Lucas did the same thing with Star Wars – it was just Flash Gordon, The Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress, & Dune.)

It can be argued that the music is soulless. I get that. I need music to move me in some way, in order to feel that connection. There are already lots of human generated songs out there that don’t really hit me that way. It’s terrible when a song evokes no emotion. I feel that way about Nickelback, even though it’s unironically cool to like them now. Ha ha.

In keeping with the theme of this post, I also used a bunch of AI image generators with various prompts about my blog, and got some weird weird wild stuff. None of them seem to accurately display text whatsoever at all… but the compositions, colors, & design choices are interesting. Is is stolen work though?

It was said that Robin Williams was notorious for stealing bits, but I have read/heard that he was always “on,” and just pulling in ideas and churning out jokes at a constant speed… he may not have realized that his thoughts weren’t entirely his own. But then again, were they? Everything we think, say, & do is a response to our own audio & visual input. (And, all the other senses.)

If AI is putting something out, and the way it “senses” is browsing the internet, what’s wrong with that? Is it stealing because it is not alive? Is it just a tool like a paintbrush or a calculator? Is AI song generation different than loops or sampling or guitar pedals that drastically change a tone?

Images generated by various AI image generators, with prompts pretty much just describing my blog.

🤘🐈‍⬛🎸

Because every single one of my thoughts also has an incomprehensibly tangential aside, I just did this as the idea came to me while blogging:

𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝖉𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍 𝖒𝖊𝖙𝖆𝖑 𝖐𝖎𝖙𝖙𝖊𝖓 𝖘𝖔𝖓𝖌 – I had ChatGPT write those lyrics a long time ago to be silly. It deleted the chat from the history as it found the content to perhaps be “inappropriate.” Luckily I grabbed a screenshot. I just used my last freebie at AI Music Factory to make this, and unlike with the other songs, I actually downloaded the mp3’s because I find it wildly amusing. AI plays guitar better than Kerry King.

A gothic metal style painting of an adorable black kitten dining with a fork and a knife, created by Meta AI as an album cover for a song generated by an AI song generator.
“FEED THE KITTEN” album art by Meta AI
Claws like razors, eyes like night My little beast, always ready to fight Hungry and restless, a bundle of fury I open the can, to feed the furry Feeding my kitten, hear her growl Tiny teeth and a vicious scowl Feeding my kitten, blood and meat Ripping and tearing, nothing sweet Pouncing and hissing, she's always keen Greedily slurping, the viscous cream Bones and gristle, she loves the gore My little predator, always wants more Feeding my kitten, hear her growl Tiny teeth and a vicious scowl Feeding my kitten, hear her growl Tiny teeth and a vicious scowl Feeding my kitten, blood and meat Ripping and tearing, nothing sweet Pouncing and hissing, she's always keen Greedily slurping, the viscous cream Bones and gristle, she loves the gore My little predator, always wants more Feeding my kitten, hear her growl Tiny teeth and a vicious scowl Feeding my kitten, blood and meat Ripping and tearing, nothing sweet My little monster, a killing machine Feeding frenzy, a fearsome scene No mercy, no pity, no retreat My kitten's hunger, can never be beat!
“Feed The Kitten” by ChatGPT

So, did I just write a song? No. But… I had the idea for one. It, much like my own artistic output, was a silly idea. (I was always sad that Gasoline Dion never completed songs that we were working on, including but not limited to “667, Across the Street From the Beast” and the ever poetic line “Let me put my meat hook in your beef curtains.”)

I just let my 10yo daughter hear the metal kitten song. She laughed and said it sounds like everything else I listen to (she’s a Taylor Swift fan). When I told her it was AI generated in under a damn minute & that ChatGPT wrote the lyrics, her eyes got wide and was all “That’s not good…”

She immediately understood the implications. Anyone could make a hit album. We could all be Milli Vanilli. Even better, you could probably create a video avatar of an artist or band. I haven’t delved into AI generated video past the tiny Luma AI clips.

Would using AI as a muse, or to flesh out partial lyric ideas be “wrong?” Are we in an era like the early days of sampling where soon someone will figure out how to give artists royalties for music or artwork being fed into AI? I know there are already cases out there. I also know you can’t copyright AI images. Not sure about music, though? I know Mötley Crüe was accused of using AI to write songs.

Will commercials, social media, radio, TV, & movies forgo traditional composers and just make their own jingles, scores, & soundtracks?

It was fun to play with, but do I like it enough that I will pay for it? I doubt it. I can’t think of a practical use for myself other than making a fictional band or something… and who would want AI generated crap content right now? If I paid to put it on streaming services (if you can even copyright it), how would that generate income or even be sustainable? Live shows would be (for now) out of the question. I don’t think it would “feel good” to put that out, like it does to release actual music you created. Maybe kids will dig AI music in the future… or our eventual robot overlords might.

Because I can’t stop, Luma AI animations of AI generated images:

OK, I went back & messed with Udio again. I found where you could pop in the kitten lyrics from Chat GPT. I do not like the output nearly as much, but it’s still pretty wild:

So, what are your thoughts on AI generated stories, art, music, & video? Are we in the wild west? Do you use any of it? If you do use it, what sites/apps, and to what end? Please, hit up the comments!

Oh yeah, those sites automatically generated videos I could download too.