Eric Clapton May Have Been More Important to Artificial Intelligence Than We Realized

I have recently uncovered evidence suggesting that Eric Clapton may have played a previously unrecognized role in the development of modern artificial intelligence.

There are problems with this theory. Many of them, actually. But we'll get to that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5JfV6rqajg

The whole thing started with It's in the Way That You Use It, which Clapton wrote with Robbie Robertson for The Color of Money in 1986.

And once you hear that title through the lens of modern AI, you can't really unhear it. Because that's, annoyingly, kind of the whole thing.

It's in the way that you use it. Which would already be a fun coincidence.

Except 1986 was also the year Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams published their famous backpropagation paper in Nature, helping push neural networks toward the modern era.

So just to review:

In 1986, computer scientists are figuring out how to make neural networks learn more effectively. Also in 1986, Eric Clapton releases a song explaining that the important part is how you use the thing.

See how this works? We're not proving anything. We're just making the historical record increasingly uncomfortable.

And then there's the movie.

The Color of Money is about pool. That may be the most suspicious part of all. Because pool is almost a perfect way to explain what's happening with AI right now.

Give two people the same cue. To one person, it's basically a stick. To another, it's how they make money. Same cue. Same table. Same balls. Completely different outcome. The difference is what the person holding it knows how to do. Which is becoming the story of artificial intelligence.

Millions of people now have access to essentially the same class of AI systems. One person uses it to clean up an email. Another person uses it to research, build, automate, analyze, connect things together and generally create an unreasonable amount of leverage.

Same cue. Different player. It's in the way that you use it.

Eric. What did you know?

Now, before anyone gets too excited, there's absolutely no evidence that Eric Clapton had anything to do with artificial intelligence. Which is exactly the sort of statement you'd expect to find if he had. So naturally I kept looking.

This is where the investigation began to lose some of its academic rigor.

Microsoft has a Chief Scientific Officer named Eric Horvitz, one of the better-known researchers in artificial intelligence.

Eric. .. Okay.

That's probably nothing.

Then I discovered there's literally a Python package called `clapton`.

And it's associated with machine-learning deployment tooling.

At this point I stopped asking whether any of this meant anything and started asking how many coincidences a reasonable person should be expected to ignore.

For the record, the answer is all of them. But where's the fun in that?

So now we have Eric Clapton. We have 1986. We have backpropagation. We have an AI researcher named Eric. We have Python. We have a machine-learning package called Clapton. And we have a movie about a man learning that owning a pool cue and knowing how to use a pool cue are two very different things.

This is either the most elaborate accidental metaphor in the history of technology or I've had too much coffee. Possibly both.

The really annoying part is that beneath the nonsense, the comparison actually holds up. For the first phase of the AI boom, access itself was exciting. Which model do you have? Which one is smarter? Which one can code better? How big is the context window?

All important questions. But that advantage starts shrinking when everybody gets access to roughly the same capability. Eventually everybody walks into the same pool hall. At that point, nobody really cares what cue you brought.

Can you play?

That's where the gap starts opening. Not because one person has some magical secret version of AI. Because they learned how to work with it.

They know how to give it context. They know how to break a problem apart. They know when to trust it, when to challenge it, when to connect it to something else. And all the other stuff.

You know the stuff.

The point is that the skill is moving away from simply having AI and toward understanding how to use intelligence as leverage. That sounds subtle.

It isn't.

Someone who sees AI as a chatbot gets a chatbot. Someone who sees it as part of a larger system starts building systems. Same technology. Different mental model. Same cue. Different player.

And pool players understand something else that matters here.

The good ones aren't just thinking about the shot in front of them.

They're thinking about what the table looks like after the shot.

Where the cue ball lands. What opens next. What becomes possible three moves later. That feels a lot like the difference between casual AI use and really understanding what these systems can do. The beginner asks for an answer. The experienced user is already thinking about what the answer unlocks next.

That's the real trick. Not prompting. Not knowing some magic phrase. Not memorizing which model won this week's benchmark. It's learning how to see the table.

Which brings us, once again, back to Clapton.

Apparently he and Robbie Robertson looked at a pool movie in 1986 and accidentally wrote a pretty good summary of the AI adoption curve forty years early.

Maybe that's all it was. A coincidence. Probably.

Almost certainly. But I do think the history books should at least consider a minor revision.

Alan Turing asks whether machines can think. The Dartmouth conference helps establish artificial intelligence as a field. Researchers spend decades figuring out neural networks. Backpropagation helps move things forward. Transformers arrive. Foundation models explode. And somewhere in the middle of all this, Eric Clapton is standing there with a guitar telling everyone:

Guys. It's in the way that you use it. We just weren't ready to hear him.

Because at the time, we thought he was talking about pool.

Sources

Eric Clapton — “It’s in the Way That You Use It” The primary evidence, obviously. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5JfV6rqajg

Nature — “Learning representations by back-propagating errors” David E. Rumelhart, Geoffrey E. Hinton & Ronald J. Williams. Published October 9, 1986. The extremely inconvenient same-year backpropagation evidence. https://www.nature.com/articles/323533a0

Geoffrey Hinton — Backpropagation publications Hinton’s own publication list documenting the 1986 backpropagation work and related research. https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/backprop.html

Microsoft Research — Eric Horvitz Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer and major AI researcher. His first name being Eric proves nothing and yet remains deeply suspicious. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/horvitz/

PyPI — clapton Yes, there is literally a Python package named clapton, and yes, it says it manages machine-learning setups. I did not create this to support the article. https://pypi.org/project/clapton/

“It’s in the Way That You Use It” — song background 1986 release, written by Eric Clapton and Robbie Robertson, and used in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_in_the_Way_That_You_Use_It

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Rich Washburn is a technologist, strategist, and Founder & Chief AI Architect of ARIA AI Labs, working at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, communications, and capital. He also serves as Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer at Eliakim Capital.