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. Through all of these experiments I tested the various generative AI processes using recordings of a few readings of Alice In Wonderland, specifically "Chapter 5 Advice from a Caterpillar." As such, I have recordings from early LSTMs and RNNs to more recent variational autoencoders, latent diffusion models and transformers. 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. All of the sounds heard in this piece were generated through various iterations of generative AI approaches from 2016 to 2024. No effects, audio processing or enhancement has been done to the samples outside of adjusting amplitude, cutting and splicing the recordings, and layering. 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; an introduction to the chapter, voice and story trying to break out from the noise of randomness pulling back to my first experiments with RNNs and a listening to AI's first "breaths"; finally we hear the questioning and introspection of the AI with a glimpse into the glitching fractured "thought" process pulled from the generative AI stream well before its final outputs. It is with these thoughts that we close the piece. We all have to deal with 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>