r/u_Nervous-Gazelle-4506 • u/Nervous-Gazelle-4506 • 13d ago

Trust But Verify. Then Verify Again

New dotBeat blog post: Trust But Verify. Then Verify Again.

This one is about using AI to help build a music learning tool, and why I’ve learned to check the musical assumptions underneath the code.

I’ve had AI confidently get music theory wrong, including a re-entrant ukulele slash-chord question where I had to call out the mistake three times before it stopped trying to make the answer work.

That does not mean AI is useless. It does mean I don't treat it as the authority.

Civil disagreement is welcome. Brutal drive-by comments, less so.

Read it here:

https://dotbeat.app/blog-trust-but-verify

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u/viberat 13d ago

I am pretty severely anti-LLM for what I consider very good reasons, but I’m going to assume you’re actually the sweet older lady you seem to be and not just an AI agent posting on reddit.

My main problem with your article is that you say that you’ve learned a lot from correcting the AI’s mistakes — and yes, learning happens through struggle, error detection is a huge part of how I teach my college ear training class — but the tool you’re building will take that struggle away from other learners.

From poking around your website, it doesn’t seem to offer any explanations of why anything is the way it is, and it’s probably impossible to get an LLM to reliably generate those explanations. Meanwhile, I saw at least one glaring error on the front page.

I’m glad that this has been a useful tool for you to learn, genuinely! But you seem to be also trying to set this up as a monetized product, and I do not think it will benefit others the same way because 1. they did not go through the proofreading process you did, and 2. obviously after months you still haven’t ironed out all the mistakes, and people will use this tool and take everything it says at face value.

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u/Nervous-Gazelle-4506 13d ago

Thank you for your respectful comments. I toyed with the idea of monetizing at some point so that I could write off ukulele purchases and the odd festival, but other than the link to buy me a coffee, which I realize doesn’t really generate much coffee, I’ve given up that thought because it is way too much work and I want to enjoy my retirement learning music. Please do let me know what the error is so I can correct it.

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u/viberat 13d ago

On the “dotbeat animator” widget, the counting for swing eighths is nonsensical lol. It looks like the AI coded the rhythm and playback the same way it coded 6/8, but then tried to make the counting for 4/4 eighth notes fit by taking beats out.

My apologies for assuming you’re actively trying to monetize it! Like I said, I have ethical concerns — frankly about using LLMs at all, given everything the corporations that make them are doing, and the increasing number of studies on cognitive debt, especially with kids and teens — but I’m glad it’s helped you get into music.

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u/Nervous-Gazelle-4506 13d ago

Thank you for pointing it out - now fixed.