5 ms·

I've been a writer and musician my entire life, since I was a kid. I'm also a professional coder and I have a decent understanding of how things like neural net

I've been a writer and musician my entire life, since I was a kid. I'm also a professional coder and I have a decent understanding of how things like neural net modeling work, and the intermediate concepts of both strong and weak AI. And when you find me an AI that can do this, I'll happily concede the goddamn planet to them. https://youtu.be/N8uk9Ql8J-A https://youtu.be/N8uk9Ql8J-A

instagraham 4y ago
There is a tendency among the technocratic-minded to dismiss the creative and social science fields, mostly because they have yet to explore the depths of these pursuits. To reach even a degree of knowledge in any of them is to understand just how important nuance is necessary to becoming a good musician, social scientist, journalist, writer, author, painter, designer and even politician. Can you program nuance? You could certainly try. And maybe you could create something that supplements these fields. And maybe you could try hiring AIs to do some of their work for them, and believe in some meritocratic pipe dream that you have somehow done society a good deed by hurting the job pool of a bunch of underpaid professionals. They will still be needed. And when they are not, only the social scientists will be able to explain what that will do to the human psyche. Or anyone with an understanding of what high unemployment rates have done to once-powerful states
- notahacker 4y ago
  The other thing is a lot of the time it's nuance on top of dead simple stuff, and humans actually get something out of seeing humans perform. You don't need advanced AI to compose a blues, a toy script calling RNGs will give you a chord progression and rhythm of the backing track that 'works' and decent DSP will replicate authentic sound with great consistency. In fact, I'm pretty confident the toy script will consistently generate progressions which appeal to enthusiasts more than the neural network with a corpus of all the greatest blues performances in history, in much the same way I'd trust a pocket calculator over GPT-3 to perform basic addition. But the sum of those parts still isn't quite the same as watching a bearded middle aged bloke with a guitar trot out the same basic chord progression over a slightly sloppy drummer, so people rarely pay to watch blues soloists (themselves often playing something which in terms of basic composition is just common variations on a scale) play over a prerecording.
  - instagraham 4y ago
    At least in the case of social science, I would argue that it is not dead simple. It is volumes upon volumes of research just to describe what happens in a small district in a small town. But many who opine freely on matters that affect entire societies, miss this fact, in much the same manner that a script kiddie might imagine that they are some form of terrific hacker--only to realise just how shallowly they have scratched the surface.
libertine 4y ago
>And when you find me an AI that can do this, I'll happily concede the goddamn planet to them. We underestimated flaws, sloppiness, mistakes and changes in tempo, stuff that makes us humans and we can relate to. Rick Beato, a music producer & youtuber that has a video series where he breaks some of this stuff down in "What makes this song great"[0]. I like Jimmy Page a lot, and I know he isn't known to be the best technical guitar player, but the songs he makes and plays (especially in live performances, with the whole LZ band of course), it's just magical. Can that be emulated? Maybe, eventually, down the line. But the question that will eventually arise: do we care more about the arrangement of notes, chords, instruments, or the story behind it? I don't have any doubt that machines might be able to produce music that's pleasant to hear, that gives you goosebumps, that will be #1 in some charts, and we will listen to it. But we relate to other humans too much to replace them, I believe we will always seek the human condition because we relate so much to it. How would an AI come up with Bob Dylan, that doesn't sing well, but it's bound to a time and place. A quick anecdote: an ex girlfriend of mine taught me how to appreciate a bit more of art, to go beyond the "it's pretty" you need context, the story of the artist, what was the status quo and what did they disrupt at that point in time. To have NFTs that are procedural generated, or trippy images made by an AI, might be technical achievements but of little value to my human experience. A cynic might say: "if you didn't know, you would be a sucker! One day an AI will create his own back story and produce art and you will be a sucker to eat it like it was the real deal! Maybe there's one already!" - so what? We are deceived on a daily basis, and we're easy to be deceived in some areas more than others, we even fool ourselves. The problem is that when you realize you're deceived, you empty the thing of it's value, and you move on with your life. Don't think too much of it just because it was able to fool a human. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFVpSjRUD2E&list=PLW0NGgv1qnfzb1klL6Vw9B0aiM7ryfXV_ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFVpSjRUD2E&list=PLW0NGgv1qn...
- ilamont 4y ago
  Here's a little thought experiment. Someone invents an AI that can create songs in the style of any band based on existing recordings as well as known market trends at the time. And you want Led Zeppelin 1970, at the heart of the British blues/hard rock/psychedelic period, because Led Zeppelin 1978 doesn't sound that good owing to the creative core shifting away from Page and the general floundering of "Classic Rock" artists at that time amidst the punk/New Wave movements. So your AI whips up a fantastic Led Zep 1970 album. And it sounds almost nothing like Led Zeppelin III, which was actually released that year. How could it? The inputs were Led Zeppelin I (composed and recorded late 1968) and Led Zeppelin II (composed and recorded while on tour in 1969) not to mention the other trends taking place in the British music scene, from Hey Jude to War Pigs as well as American influences like Jimi Hendrix and CSNY. Led Zeppelin III came out of left field, from a desire of the band to switch things up and take a break from what they had been doing for the first two albums. They did a lot of writing and some recording at an isolated farmhouse in Wales. It's more acoustic, and it's quite wonderful. I don't think any AI could pull it off even with some setting like "skew acoustic" because little of that existed in the band's earlier output, Page's Yardbirds work, or even the mid-60s studio musician sessions completed by Jones and Page in London. What the "Led Zeppelin 1970" AI would turn out is something more akin to the hard rock/psychedelic sound of the first 2 albums and reworkings of obscure American Delta blues songs. Would it be fun to listen to? Maybe. But it wouldn't represent the creative evolution and experimentation of the band, which comes about from 4 very talented people (and sometimes other out-of-sight creative forces) working together and sometimes making unpredictable discoveries, mistakes, and wrong turns.
nl 4y ago
I think trying to to replace perhaps the greatest male pop singer of a generation is a stretch. And even if AI can't replace Jeff Buckley it doesn't mean that the jobs of many working musicians doing things like backing music for corporate videos aren't at risk.
- ricochet11 4y ago
  this is the threat. not needing voiceover actors for your ads, not needing actors for stock videos, not needing musicians for a jingle. taking away the work and economy that gives you a place to start and keeps you fed. The support for someone who might one day become a jeff buckley if there was money for them to spend time learning and practicing and honing their skills. so many big film actors get started in small tv adverts, so many musicians support their ambitious solo albums after work spending the day as session musician for some video game soundtrack. etc. of course the artists never stop and wont go away, but the economics of it all may end up pretty brutal and demoralising, theres already so little respect and fractions of pennies paid for listening to your music. add to that the fact that many people will probably happily listen to the spotify AI generated band that can spit out music on demand in any style based on a search query...

instagraham 4y ago

There is a tendency among the technocratic-minded to dismiss the creative and social science fields, mostly because they have yet to explore the depths of these pursuits. To reach even a degree of knowledge in any of them is to understand just how important nuance is necessary to becoming a good musician, social scientist, journalist, writer, author, painter, designer and even politician. Can you program nuance? You could certainly try. And maybe you could create something that supplements these fields. And maybe you could try hiring AIs to do some of their work for them, and believe in some meritocratic pipe dream that you have somehow done society a good deed by hurting the job pool of a bunch of underpaid professionals. They will still be needed. And when they are not, only the social scientists will be able to explain what that will do to the human psyche. Or anyone with an understanding of what high unemployment rates have done to once-powerful states

notahacker 4y ago
The other thing is a lot of the time it's nuance on top of dead simple stuff, and humans actually get something out of seeing humans perform. You don't need advanced AI to compose a blues, a toy script calling RNGs will give you a chord progression and rhythm of the backing track that 'works' and decent DSP will replicate authentic sound with great consistency. In fact, I'm pretty confident the toy script will consistently generate progressions which appeal to enthusiasts more than the neural network with a corpus of all the greatest blues performances in history, in much the same way I'd trust a pocket calculator over GPT-3 to perform basic addition. But the sum of those parts still isn't quite the same as watching a bearded middle aged bloke with a guitar trot out the same basic chord progression over a slightly sloppy drummer, so people rarely pay to watch blues soloists (themselves often playing something which in terms of basic composition is just common variations on a scale) play over a prerecording.
- instagraham 4y ago
  At least in the case of social science, I would argue that it is not dead simple. It is volumes upon volumes of research just to describe what happens in a small district in a small town. But many who opine freely on matters that affect entire societies, miss this fact, in much the same manner that a script kiddie might imagine that they are some form of terrific hacker--only to realise just how shallowly they have scratched the surface.

libertine 4y ago

>And when you find me an AI that can do this, I'll happily concede the goddamn planet to them. We underestimated flaws, sloppiness, mistakes and changes in tempo, stuff that makes us humans and we can relate to. Rick Beato, a music producer & youtuber that has a video series where he breaks some of this stuff down in "What makes this song great"[0]. I like Jimmy Page a lot, and I know he isn't known to be the best technical guitar player, but the songs he makes and plays (especially in live performances, with the whole LZ band of course), it's just magical. Can that be emulated? Maybe, eventually, down the line. But the question that will eventually arise: do we care more about the arrangement of notes, chords, instruments, or the story behind it? I don't have any doubt that machines might be able to produce music that's pleasant to hear, that gives you goosebumps, that will be #1 in some charts, and we will listen to it. But we relate to other humans too much to replace them, I believe we will always seek the human condition because we relate so much to it. How would an AI come up with Bob Dylan, that doesn't sing well, but it's bound to a time and place. A quick anecdote: an ex girlfriend of mine taught me how to appreciate a bit more of art, to go beyond the "it's pretty" you need context, the story of the artist, what was the status quo and what did they disrupt at that point in time. To have NFTs that are procedural generated, or trippy images made by an AI, might be technical achievements but of little value to my human experience. A cynic might say: "if you didn't know, you would be a sucker! One day an AI will create his own back story and produce art and you will be a sucker to eat it like it was the real deal! Maybe there's one already!" - so what? We are deceived on a daily basis, and we're easy to be deceived in some areas more than others, we even fool ourselves. The problem is that when you realize you're deceived, you empty the thing of it's value, and you move on with your life. Don't think too much of it just because it was able to fool a human. [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFVpSjRUD2E&list=PLW0NGgv1qnfzb1klL6Vw9B0aiM7ryfXV_ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFVpSjRUD2E&list=PLW0NGgv1qn...

ilamont 4y ago
Here's a little thought experiment. Someone invents an AI that can create songs in the style of any band based on existing recordings as well as known market trends at the time. And you want Led Zeppelin 1970, at the heart of the British blues/hard rock/psychedelic period, because Led Zeppelin 1978 doesn't sound that good owing to the creative core shifting away from Page and the general floundering of "Classic Rock" artists at that time amidst the punk/New Wave movements. So your AI whips up a fantastic Led Zep 1970 album. And it sounds almost nothing like Led Zeppelin III, which was actually released that year. How could it? The inputs were Led Zeppelin I (composed and recorded late 1968) and Led Zeppelin II (composed and recorded while on tour in 1969) not to mention the other trends taking place in the British music scene, from Hey Jude to War Pigs as well as American influences like Jimi Hendrix and CSNY. Led Zeppelin III came out of left field, from a desire of the band to switch things up and take a break from what they had been doing for the first two albums. They did a lot of writing and some recording at an isolated farmhouse in Wales. It's more acoustic, and it's quite wonderful. I don't think any AI could pull it off even with some setting like "skew acoustic" because little of that existed in the band's earlier output, Page's Yardbirds work, or even the mid-60s studio musician sessions completed by Jones and Page in London. What the "Led Zeppelin 1970" AI would turn out is something more akin to the hard rock/psychedelic sound of the first 2 albums and reworkings of obscure American Delta blues songs. Would it be fun to listen to? Maybe. But it wouldn't represent the creative evolution and experimentation of the band, which comes about from 4 very talented people (and sometimes other out-of-sight creative forces) working together and sometimes making unpredictable discoveries, mistakes, and wrong turns.

nl 4y ago

I think trying to to replace perhaps the greatest male pop singer of a generation is a stretch. And even if AI can't replace Jeff Buckley it doesn't mean that the jobs of many working musicians doing things like backing music for corporate videos aren't at risk.

ricochet11 4y ago
this is the threat. not needing voiceover actors for your ads, not needing actors for stock videos, not needing musicians for a jingle. taking away the work and economy that gives you a place to start and keeps you fed. The support for someone who might one day become a jeff buckley if there was money for them to spend time learning and practicing and honing their skills. so many big film actors get started in small tv adverts, so many musicians support their ambitious solo albums after work spending the day as session musician for some video game soundtrack. etc. of course the artists never stop and wont go away, but the economics of it all may end up pretty brutal and demoralising, theres already so little respect and fractions of pennies paid for listening to your music. add to that the fact that many people will probably happily listen to the spotify AI generated band that can spit out music on demand in any style based on a search query...