SLO resident Pete Biltoft uses AI tools to create visual images and music

Have you used AI? Maybe it helped you write an email or summarized a Google search. Maybe you have an AI personal assistant—“Hey Siri?” “Hey Alexa?” Or maybe AI scares the shit out of you, especially if you’ve seen Terminator and think Skynet and total human enslavement is only a matter of time.

Or maybe you’re like SLO resident Pete Biltoft, who thinks AI is just another tool. Not scary, simply useful.

“Let me first start with a disclaimer,” Biltoft said in an old-fashioned, face-to-face analog interview. “I by no means equate the images that I create with those images created by real artists. This for me is a hobby. I’m not trying to compete or displace real artists for whom I have immense appreciation. My wife’s an artist. I see what she does. I want real artists to survive, make money, enjoy their craft. I’m not competing with them in any way.”

What he is doing is creating colorful, painterly, often whimsical images starting with his original photos and using Photoshop and AI. He also creates songs using Suno AI Music Generator. Is it art? That’s for every viewer and listener to decide. If you like it, you like it, right?

A little background. Biltoft graduated from Georgia Tech with degrees in chemistry (1979) and metallurgy (1981). He worked in the Plutonium Metallurgy R&D Division at the Rocky Flats Plant near Golden, Colorado, from 1981 to 1984, then worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1984 to 2007. In 2008, he started his own business, Vintage Vibe Guitars, designing and fabricating custom electrical components for electric guitars, retiring, and closing the business in 2024. 

“I play guitar a little bit, but I try not to inflict myself on others,” he joked. “I’ve always appreciated artists and always wanted to be one, so I use the tools that are currently available to us in the 21st century to do what I can. My feeling about AI in some ways is it’s a democratization of the creative process. I’m just one of the masses who enjoys being able to bring ideas that I have to fruition.”

The genesis for his foray into AI stemmed from frustration. 

“I actually had an idea from years and years ago about a live musical performance that I wanted to put together,” he explained. “And I just could never communicate it to other creative people who, I hoped, would work with me to make it happen. I essentially wanted to be a producer.”

AI itself can offer is own frustrations. Biltoft noted that so-called AI “hallucinations” are problematic.

“I still cannot create, at least not with the tools that I’ve subscribed to, the thing that I have in my brain. But in terms of digital art, I can get a lot closer because I start out with my camera. I’ve got a Nikon mirrorless camera. I go out and take pictures; I work on the composition. And then I come home, and on my computer I can increase the saturation. I can remove distractions. I can make the sky more vibrant, and then with the help of AI, I can add some painterly effects.”

Much of Biltoft’s work looks like impasto painting or like the crackle paint effect. 

“I could spend months on end in front of a canvas and never be able to create anything near that,” he said. “My wife could, but for me, I just don’t have the artistic talent. She and I actually painted together. It was one of those wine dates where you go out and sip wine and make a painting. Well, we both had an image in front of us, a beach image, and she made art, and I made garbage.”

‘If you could, with digital software and artificial intelligence, create a song that actually brought you to tears, I think that’s a new level. That’s reaching emotion at a level that I think is pretty impressive.’
—Pete Biltoft, SLO artist

Biltoft’s music he’s created with AI is remarkable. One song especially, “Lost Within the Tide,” has an earworm chorus that will stick in your head.

“I’ve created some songs that I think passed a new kind of test. Now you’re familiar with the Turing Test?”

In 1950, British mathematician, logician, and cryptanalyst Alan Turing proposed the Turing Test devised to see if a human evaluator could distinguish between a conversation with human and a machine.

“Could a computer fool a person into thinking that you were talking with another person? I think that there should be a new test now, and we’ll call it the eye watering test because some of the music that I’ve created that has instrumentation and vocals has, to me, been so good that it almost made me cry. If you could, with digital software and artificial intelligence, create a song that actually brought you to tears, I think that’s a new level. That’s reaching emotion at a level that I think is pretty impressive.”

It helps to feed effective prompts into Suno, and the program allows you to tweak and refine the songs through one iteration after another.

“I asked Suno to create a dark, moody song in 1950s surf guitar style about a surfer who gets lost so far deep in the tube that he never comes out. I asked for a female vocalist,” Biltoft recalled. “And the first iteration was pretty good, encouraging.”

Suno also came up with the song’s lyrics. 

“He paddled out at break of dawn, chasing whispers in the foam, a gleam beneath the curling waves, calling him to come alone. The sea was still, holding its breath—a doorway in the water’s depth. … He rode a tube so deep inside, where sun and sound both disappear, the ocean closed around his light, and kept him hidden year to year. No one saw him slip away. No one heard his fading cry. The tide just rolled like nothing changed, but the shoreline learned to sigh.”

“Now, I do go in and edit the lyrics because sometimes they’re a little clanky, you know? I try to wordsmith them, but probably 95 percent of the lyrics in this song were generated by artificial intelligence,” Biltoft said. “Honestly, when I when heard that, my eyes did water up.” 

Biltoft is having fun, and he wants to “crack people up.” His secret dream was a to be a contributor to Mad magazine. Instead, he’s contenteed himself with creating images like Godzilla attacking the Fremont Theater.

“I just went downtown and took pictures of the crew repairing the Fremont Theater. And then because I’d done the Godzilla picture in Morro Bay earlier, it occurred to me, ‘Oh, I could make a funny image out of this.’ And so, this image, I removed a bunch of cars and construction stuff. I replaced the sky with a photograph taken from my house. I circled that area in the foreground and I said, ‘Add people running away, screaming and in horror.’”

Voila. Fremont closed due to an act of Godzilla. ∆

Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.

This article appears in March 12-19, 2026.

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