Time doesn't stand still for Jack Tempchin.
A half-century ago, the San Diego singer-songwriter was sitting at a local Der Wienerschnitzel, finishing the lyrics of "Peaceful, Easy Feeling," a poignant, mellow love song made famous by the Eagles.
Today, he's promoting a Halloween-themed music video that he produced, in part, with the help of a robot. Or artificial intelligence, to be more precise. "Ghost Car" is streaming on YouTube, competing with zillions of other offerings for attention.
Tempchin, who is now 75, used AI to generate the video, the tale of a hitchhiker who gets a scary ride through the cosmos with James Dean at the wheel and Marilyn Monroe riding shotgun.
He wrote the song and lyrics. Then his son, Robert, fed the lyrics into AI software, did some modifications and produced fluid visuals that range from Dean's head morphing into a skeleton to the night sky shattering into pieces roughly where the moon was located.
There are also lots of symbols of Halloween, from plump pumpkins to spider webs to menacing bats.
"I like Halloween because it's about imagination and entertainment, and it's so universal," said Tempchin, who was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2019. "Along with Thanksgiving, it's my favorite holiday."
Music videos aren't new. Neither is AI. But using different versions of this kind of software to create songs, lyrics and videos is only now starting to come into widespread use throughout the music industry.
And it is not just in the hands of professionals. Comparative novices are using virtual composition software like AIVA to create new music, some of which is blended into content that gets posted to platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
AI is a complex, jargon-filled world that can be hard to grasp. In simplest terms, the AI tools used by Tempchin's son are programmed to match words and lines of text — in this case lyrics — with countless images on the Internet. The algorithms convert this material into new images that can be further modified by artists.
"We were using this to paint imagery," says Tempchin, who lives in Encinitas.
Robert says the process is sort of like asking a human artist to sit down and look at 500 images of a dog, then to come up with their own representation. The result is something new.
This represents fresh opportunities in what has been a very long and successful career.
In the late 1960s, Tempchin wrote "Peaceful, Easy Feeling," which he showed to his friend, Glenn Frey of the Eagles. The band recorded the song, which became a smash hit. The song will turn 50 on Dec. 1.
Tempchin also co-wrote "Already Gone" for the Eagles, and several other pieces. And he co-wrote the hits "You Belong to the City" and "Smuggler's Blues" with Frey when Frey was a solo artist. Tempchin also wrote "Swayin' to the Music (Slow Dancin'),'' which became a hit for Johnny Rivers when he did a cover version of the song.
His life as a singer and songwriter remained busy until the pandemic when, like others, he retreated to safer spaces, where he spent part of his time enhancing his recording skills. Part of that involved AI — an emerging technology that has raised some provocative questions, especially about whether AI is simply a tool, or, in a sense, a separate independent artist.
"I guess it's both," Tempchin said. "You can use it as a tool. But, like Arthur C. Clarke said, when a technology seems impossible, it might as well be magic, right?"
As for whether AI can possess the soulfulness that humans have, Tempchin said, "It can create things that have soul. But it cannot appreciate what it is doing. It's like a guitar, which can be used to create soulfulness that moves you. But you have to play it. The guitar itself can't appreciate what it is doing."
He's floored by what's happened, and what's to come.
"Before there was the kind of AI software to do what my son just did (with "Ghost Car"), you'd had to have a crew go out and shoot footage, then assemble the footage and put it together with the song, and use your own ideas.
"Now, overnight basically, you can put the lyrics of any song (into AI) and it will make a video. It's mind blowing. This is the verge of change that humanity is on. We can't stop it."
That doesn't mean the past is past. Several days a week, you can find him standing near the cliff at the Swami's surf break in Encinitas, where he makes up and records songs on the spot as surfers drift by. Everything ends up on Jack's Beach Jams, a site on YouTube.
"I don't redo or edit the songs," Tempchin said. "I just put them up. It's how I have fun."
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