This brief piece draws from 8 years of experiments in AI over a time when it has gone from making scratchy noises and chirps to fully generative music. It's been a remarkable transition, but the direction that it has gone is not necessarily useful. “What do you mean by that?” The latest AI generates convincing voices, instruments and music based on things that already exist. When you listen to this piece, you may find, as I did, that the most interesting music comes from the "failed" projects from 6-8 years ago. It turns out artificial creativity is not the same as artificial intelligence. _Advice from a Caterpillar_ comes in many segments, but the first and most important is to know the answer to the existential question, "Who are you?" If we are to have a creative Artificial Intelligence it will eventually have to answer this question as well, and to this I say, "Explain yourself!" <iframe width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" allow="autoplay" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/1941117303&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true"></iframe><div style="font-size: 10px; color: #cccccc;line-break: anywhere;word-break: normal;overflow: hidden;white-space: nowrap;text-overflow: ellipsis; font-family: Interstate,Lucida Grande,Lucida Sans Unicode,Lucida Sans,Garuda,Verdana,Tahoma,sans-serif;font-weight: 100;"><a href="https://soundcloud.com/allisonic" title="allisonic" target="_blank" style="color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;">allisonic</a> · <a href="https://soundcloud.com/allisonic/advice-from-a-caterpillar" title="Advice from a Caterpillar" target="_blank" style="color: #cccccc; text-decoration: none;">Advice from a Caterpillar</a></div>