6 ms·

Exactly, it's a tool. The skill floor, as in the minimum amount of skill to produce something passable, has been lowered -- dramatically lowered -- but the skil

by mjr00 4y ago

Exactly, it's a tool. The skill floor, as in the minimum amount of skill to produce something passable, has been lowered -- dramatically lowered -- but the skill ceiling is now higher than ever as a result. It's similar to music. DAWs and samples didn't kill off music; instead, it made it easier than ever for a teenager with a computer and a passing interest in music to create a song and share it with a world. As a consequence, though, the standards for mixing and mastering have gone up massively; people don't really tolerate bedroom recordings with $10 mics any more. I imagine most amateur musicians in the 90s didn't know what a compressor actually did (I certainly didn't). Seeing the results of talented artists who are experimenting with AI[0] makes you realize that there's still going to be a massive gulf between skilled artists using SD etc as a tool, versus those who think they can be artists just by putting keywords into an image generation AI and calling it a day. [0] https://twitter.com/jamm3rd/status/1619896080619159553 https://twitter.com/jamm3rd/status/1619896080619159553 https://twitter.com/jamm3rd/status/1633758455952703488/photo/1 https://twitter.com/jamm3rd/status/1633758455952703488/photo... (moderately nsfw I guess)

chii 4y ago
> the skill ceiling is now higher than ever as a result the fear from the current professionals is that the new ai raised floor is good enough to be usable commercially, and thus, cut a chunk of economic value from the professionals. There is no fear that AI stops people with the intrinsic interest in creation to stop creating - their ceiling and productivity would sky-rocket as a result in fact. And it would be _these_ productions that wow an audience.
- randcraw 4y ago
  Not if creators are paid nothing for their work. I think inescapably, the profession of writing is about to take a big hit from GPT-X, with the few remaining journalists paid considerably less than before. There will be an exodus of talent, leaving... Microsoft and Google to write our news for us?
  - zirgs 4y ago
    If you just copy and paste from Reuters then you're not a real journalist. ChatGPT can't travel to a war zone to find out what's going on there. So real journalists aren't going anywhere.
    - rchaud 4y ago
      No journalist has a job where they spend all day copy/pasting AP/Reuters. This is a simplistic dismissal of the nature of working in a news organization. It would be akin to me saying that using code from a Stack Overflow response makes one 'not a real developer'.
      - nickelcitymario 4y ago
        Agreed, but only because I assume they’ve automated it. Most small town papers are filled with verbatim Reuters reports.
        tablespoon 4y ago
        > Most small town papers are filled with verbatim Reuters reports. Not exactly. It's mostly AP reports, not Reuters, covering stuff from outside that small paper's area. If there's a flood of national interest in that small town, it's probably one of the reporters from that paper that will write the national wire story. That's kind of the point of the Associated Press, lots of small local organizations banding together to offer comprehensive local/national/international coverage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press: > Many newspapers and broadcasters outside the United States are AP subscribers, paying a fee to use AP material without being contributing members of the cooperative. As part of their cooperative agreement with the AP, most member news organizations grant automatic permission for the AP to distribute their local news reports. The AP traditionally employed the "inverted pyramid" formula for writing, a method that enables news outlets to edit a story to fit its available publication area without losing the story's essentials, although in 2007, then-AP President Tom Curley called the practice "dead".[6]
- zirgs 4y ago
  Unlike in the 80s - most programmers no longer need to know assembler/machine code to do their jobs. The skill floor has been lowered - so that programmers like me can get a job.
  - mjr00 4y ago
    Yeah, that's a comparison I've been thinking about. C lowered the skill floor, and then Java/Python lowered it even more dramatically, plus the explosion of open source tooling, cloud infrastructure, and general hardware improvements. The average modern junior data scientist could build a software application in a day that would have taken a team of senior C developers months or years to build in 1990. Yet we have not seen a reduction in the number developers.
    - monknomo 4y ago
      I feel like the dev job may change, but as long as people have difficultly describing their requirements so that a programmer can understand, they'll have difficulty describing their requirements so that an AI can understand. It's one thing to ask for a pong game, it's another to ask for a program that "does a kyc process" or something similarly complex
      - tjr 4y ago
        Right, I believe so too. I work in aerospace software, and, for as remarkable as the GPT code generation examples have been so far, I think that even if it could write aerospace software, it would be because humans have spelled out the requirements so precisely that we really aren't looking at any substantial reduction in (human) workforce. You're unlikely to be able to ask an AI tool for "flight management software" and get what you want. This stuff is extremely complex, with lots of moving parts and interactions with other components and with government regulations. You may be able to successfully ask for some specific function, but again, in order to understand that level of detail to even know what to ask for, you have to be pretty involved. It can't just be some non-engineer asking for things they don't understand. Never mind the challenge of certifying the resulting software for use in commercial airspace... And while I think AI tools may be a help (not unlike Stack Overflow), I think it would be a really big mistake to start replacing novice junior engineers with AI tools, even if we could do so, because we need senior engineers who really understand this stuff, and most of the training for aerospace work is on the job.
bsaul 4y ago
i agree with the tool analogy. However there's something different between using a tool, and outsourcing the entire content production by only specifying the end result. Whenever a customer ask me to develop an app, i don't consider that he did the job. I did it.
MetaMalone 4y ago
Love the connection to home studios. Everybody was able to make more music much more easily - but it also inflated the music industry with a lot of mediocrity. So some will find ways to use AI for greatness, but most won’t.
kif 4y ago
It is a tool only when used as a tool, in the sense you're talking about. For example, I can write a sentence, and being a non-native English speaker, I can tell there's something wrong with it but I just can't place my finger. So I ask the AI to rephrase it for me. Now I can pick and choose an option from those the AI offered, or I can just keep my version if it turns out it's good enough. I feel this is an acceptable use, and you can still maintain authorship, just like book authors maintain authorship after an editor has overhauled their writing. Your DAW example would work if DAWs could generate samples, beats, and whole songs by the click of a button. But are you truly the author, then?
- mjr00 4y ago
  > Your DAW example would work if DAWs could generate samples, beats, and whole songs by the click of a button. But are you truly the author, then? They absolutely can, at least with 15-20 clicks rather than 1 at the moment. Drag in drum loop, drag in melodic loop, use Scaler2/Cthulhu/Captain Chords to come up with a chord progression, use a synthesizer preset to play the chords, drag in vocal sample, put on Ozone AI Mastering on the master bus, done. If you sent me back in time to 1990 with that track, people would be really impressed. As to whether you can claim you're the author, this gets debated a lot. I'll just paste the famous goat farming quote. > I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.
  - kif 4y ago
    I really like the goat farming quote, as we all have to start somewhere. Still, the takeaway isn't that you can find a song on the internet and claim it to be your own creation.
  - mrob 4y ago
nerdponx 4y ago
The skill ceiling isn't higher. It's just in a different building next door to the current one. The same thing happened with the film to digital transition. The skill range didn't change, the set of skills itself changed.
- furyofantares 4y ago
  The ceiling refers to what you can produce at the top end, not the specific skill used to achieve it.
randcraw 4y ago
There's a GIGANTIC difference between a hammer and a button that when clicked builds a cathedral.
- mjr00 4y ago
  There's also a gigantic difference between spending 10+ years learning to play the drums and recording my playing at a recording studio, and dragging in a drum loop from Splice. Listeners don't seem to care either way.
  - randcraw 4y ago
    Look into the history of drum machines. When they arrived in the late 70s, they sounded terribly mechanical. In the next couple of decades, small amounts of variation were added to make them sound more natural, the way many photographers today are adding artificial artifacts to photos that have been cleaned up too much by cameras' semi-automated post-processing algorithms. But how sterile will art become? Already most people become inured to mass synthesthesia, where pureed sterilized Disney-fied content is fast becoming the unavoidable norm in so much of our media (e.g. pop and country music). Today's AI yay-sayers are receptive to a synthetically generated window onto the world are looking only at the first step in what will surely be a progression -- from a highly variable world of human-wrought artifacts to a homogeneous digitally simplified model of the world, one that will evolve into something ever more 'palatable', until... what? Is that a trend you would welcome? Not I. Especially with Microsoft and Google and other gigacorporations calling all the shots in the absence of informed enforced guardrails to constrain how this rapidly evolves.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  And there remains a GIGANTIC difference between what AI does today and its version of a cathedral-button. It’s a bit more like a hand crank that builds a lopsided toolshed at this point. Which is absolutely incredible, to be honest, and couldn’t have been anticipated by many people five years ago, but doesn’t necessarily entail that the cathedral-button will arrive any time soon. We kinda have to be patient.
VLM 4y ago
> minimum amount of skill to produce something passable Look at the history of woodworking for inspiration. It used to take human sweat to make flat straight surfaces. Something like a walmart flatpack bookshelf would have been VERY expensive to make 1000 years ago. Industrial tech made that cheap and ... now its seen as tacky and out of style and only for poors. The result culturally this century is an avoidance of "plastic wood" finish, faux finishes and faux surface prep that look old and worn and hand scuffed, and a strange hipster fetish for "live edge" raw bark on finished product. Sure, in 1875 one might have predicted based on mass production trends that furniture in 2020s would be all right angles, smooth as glass mirror, photographic "ideal" woodgrain instead of real woodgrain, plastic-y lifetime thick film finish. But thats only for poor people who shop at walmart, nobody with money buys that stuff. I suspect what AI can cheaply produce will rapidly culturally be considered lower class and trashy. Oh, sure, completely AI generated movies look very nice and sound very nice and are ever so trendy and well written, but special effects and yesterdays memes on todays big screen generated entirely by computer algorithm is only for poors. Now, us rich cognitive elites only attend live theater plays. Aspirational middle class types watch recordings of theater plays (admittedly maybe some AI generated). You wouldn't show off your 'wealth' and 'class' by taking a date to an AI generated movie, that would be insulting, you might take her to a live theater play... I'm sure there will be some AI incursion, maybe the lights will be run by AI or AI painted backdrops or some actors will lipsync their lines to AI, or roughly every 5 years we have to tediously suffer thru a new generation of rewritten modernized classics and it'll be worse in the future with AI... but in general human will be the status symbol because it'll be expensive. I suspect being able to ask an AI to generate non-copyrighted commercial quality music will mean massive noise pollution (much like every room required 15 digital clocks in the 80s and every room required 15 super bright blue power LEDs in the 00s) followed by the only people making money in music will be live humans playing physical instruments. Poor people try to get by and don't spend money and when they do it'll be on infinitely cheap AI commodities. Rich people spend money on unique stuff, not mass produced AI shovelware. Aspirational people spend money trying to look rich so they will spend all their money on non-AI stuff.
pwpw 4y ago
> As a consequence, though, the standards for mixing and mastering have gone up massively; people don't really tolerate bedroom recordings with $10 mics any more. I don’t find this holds true for hip hop, the most streamed genre, whatsoever. There are countless examples of people making it big recording on a cheap mic in their mom’s bed room. One example is Chief Keef. A much more prominent example is Kanye who had terrible mixing on The Life of Pablo to the point where he released patches[0] for the album. He also recorded parts of Jesus is King on an iPhone[1]. To further the point, bootleg recordings and demo tapes of unreleased songs in artists’ back catalog continue to be popular with devoted fans. Average people like good music, even if the quality of the mixing and mastering is not stellar. Even The Beatles released songs with minimal takes from a live rooftop performance on Let It Be; hardly an ideal recording set up. Although they surely had better mixing. [0] https://archive.org/details/2016-the-life-of-pablo-updates https://archive.org/details/2016-the-life-of-pablo-updates [1] https://genius.com/a/kanye-west-says-20-percent-of-jesus-is-king-was-recorded-on-an-iphone https://genius.com/a/kanye-west-says-20-percent-of-jesus-is-...
bobsmooth 4y ago
> people don't really tolerate bedroom recordings with $10 mics any more It's called bedroom punk now.

by mjr00 4y ago

chii 4y ago

> the skill ceiling is now higher than ever as a result the fear from the current professionals is that the new ai raised floor is good enough to be usable commercially, and thus, cut a chunk of economic value from the professionals. There is no fear that AI stops people with the intrinsic interest in creation to stop creating - their ceiling and productivity would sky-rocket as a result in fact. And it would be _these_ productions that wow an audience.

randcraw 4y ago
Not if creators are paid nothing for their work. I think inescapably, the profession of writing is about to take a big hit from GPT-X, with the few remaining journalists paid considerably less than before. There will be an exodus of talent, leaving... Microsoft and Google to write our news for us?
- zirgs 4y ago
  If you just copy and paste from Reuters then you're not a real journalist. ChatGPT can't travel to a war zone to find out what's going on there. So real journalists aren't going anywhere.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    No journalist has a job where they spend all day copy/pasting AP/Reuters. This is a simplistic dismissal of the nature of working in a news organization. It would be akin to me saying that using code from a Stack Overflow response makes one 'not a real developer'.
    - nickelcitymario 4y ago
      Agreed, but only because I assume they’ve automated it. Most small town papers are filled with verbatim Reuters reports.
      - tablespoon 4y ago
        > Most small town papers are filled with verbatim Reuters reports. Not exactly. It's mostly AP reports, not Reuters, covering stuff from outside that small paper's area. If there's a flood of national interest in that small town, it's probably one of the reporters from that paper that will write the national wire story. That's kind of the point of the Associated Press, lots of small local organizations banding together to offer comprehensive local/national/international coverage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press: > Many newspapers and broadcasters outside the United States are AP subscribers, paying a fee to use AP material without being contributing members of the cooperative. As part of their cooperative agreement with the AP, most member news organizations grant automatic permission for the AP to distribute their local news reports. The AP traditionally employed the "inverted pyramid" formula for writing, a method that enables news outlets to edit a story to fit its available publication area without losing the story's essentials, although in 2007, then-AP President Tom Curley called the practice "dead".[6]
zirgs 4y ago
Unlike in the 80s - most programmers no longer need to know assembler/machine code to do their jobs. The skill floor has been lowered - so that programmers like me can get a job.
- mjr00 4y ago
  Yeah, that's a comparison I've been thinking about. C lowered the skill floor, and then Java/Python lowered it even more dramatically, plus the explosion of open source tooling, cloud infrastructure, and general hardware improvements. The average modern junior data scientist could build a software application in a day that would have taken a team of senior C developers months or years to build in 1990. Yet we have not seen a reduction in the number developers.
  - monknomo 4y ago
    I feel like the dev job may change, but as long as people have difficultly describing their requirements so that a programmer can understand, they'll have difficulty describing their requirements so that an AI can understand. It's one thing to ask for a pong game, it's another to ask for a program that "does a kyc process" or something similarly complex
    - tjr 4y ago
      Right, I believe so too. I work in aerospace software, and, for as remarkable as the GPT code generation examples have been so far, I think that even if it could write aerospace software, it would be because humans have spelled out the requirements so precisely that we really aren't looking at any substantial reduction in (human) workforce. You're unlikely to be able to ask an AI tool for "flight management software" and get what you want. This stuff is extremely complex, with lots of moving parts and interactions with other components and with government regulations. You may be able to successfully ask for some specific function, but again, in order to understand that level of detail to even know what to ask for, you have to be pretty involved. It can't just be some non-engineer asking for things they don't understand. Never mind the challenge of certifying the resulting software for use in commercial airspace... And while I think AI tools may be a help (not unlike Stack Overflow), I think it would be a really big mistake to start replacing novice junior engineers with AI tools, even if we could do so, because we need senior engineers who really understand this stuff, and most of the training for aerospace work is on the job.

bsaul 4y ago

i agree with the tool analogy. However there's something different between using a tool, and outsourcing the entire content production by only specifying the end result. Whenever a customer ask me to develop an app, i don't consider that he did the job. I did it.

MetaMalone 4y ago

Love the connection to home studios. Everybody was able to make more music much more easily - but it also inflated the music industry with a lot of mediocrity. So some will find ways to use AI for greatness, but most won’t.

kif 4y ago

It is a tool only when used as a tool, in the sense you're talking about. For example, I can write a sentence, and being a non-native English speaker, I can tell there's something wrong with it but I just can't place my finger. So I ask the AI to rephrase it for me. Now I can pick and choose an option from those the AI offered, or I can just keep my version if it turns out it's good enough. I feel this is an acceptable use, and you can still maintain authorship, just like book authors maintain authorship after an editor has overhauled their writing. Your DAW example would work if DAWs could generate samples, beats, and whole songs by the click of a button. But are you truly the author, then?

mjr00 4y ago
> Your DAW example would work if DAWs could generate samples, beats, and whole songs by the click of a button. But are you truly the author, then? They absolutely can, at least with 15-20 clicks rather than 1 at the moment. Drag in drum loop, drag in melodic loop, use Scaler2/Cthulhu/Captain Chords to come up with a chord progression, use a synthesizer preset to play the chords, drag in vocal sample, put on Ozone AI Mastering on the master bus, done. If you sent me back in time to 1990 with that track, people would be really impressed. As to whether you can claim you're the author, this gets debated a lot. I'll just paste the famous goat farming quote. > I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.
- kif 4y ago
  I really like the goat farming quote, as we all have to start somewhere. Still, the takeaway isn't that you can find a song on the internet and claim it to be your own creation.
- mrob 4y ago

nerdponx 4y ago

The skill ceiling isn't higher. It's just in a different building next door to the current one. The same thing happened with the film to digital transition. The skill range didn't change, the set of skills itself changed.

furyofantares 4y ago
The ceiling refers to what you can produce at the top end, not the specific skill used to achieve it.

randcraw 4y ago

There's a GIGANTIC difference between a hammer and a button that when clicked builds a cathedral.

mjr00 4y ago
There's also a gigantic difference between spending 10+ years learning to play the drums and recording my playing at a recording studio, and dragging in a drum loop from Splice. Listeners don't seem to care either way.
- randcraw 4y ago
  Look into the history of drum machines. When they arrived in the late 70s, they sounded terribly mechanical. In the next couple of decades, small amounts of variation were added to make them sound more natural, the way many photographers today are adding artificial artifacts to photos that have been cleaned up too much by cameras' semi-automated post-processing algorithms. But how sterile will art become? Already most people become inured to mass synthesthesia, where pureed sterilized Disney-fied content is fast becoming the unavoidable norm in so much of our media (e.g. pop and country music). Today's AI yay-sayers are receptive to a synthetically generated window onto the world are looking only at the first step in what will surely be a progression -- from a highly variable world of human-wrought artifacts to a homogeneous digitally simplified model of the world, one that will evolve into something ever more 'palatable', until... what? Is that a trend you would welcome? Not I. Especially with Microsoft and Google and other gigacorporations calling all the shots in the absence of informed enforced guardrails to constrain how this rapidly evolves.
swatcoder 4y ago
And there remains a GIGANTIC difference between what AI does today and its version of a cathedral-button. It’s a bit more like a hand crank that builds a lopsided toolshed at this point. Which is absolutely incredible, to be honest, and couldn’t have been anticipated by many people five years ago, but doesn’t necessarily entail that the cathedral-button will arrive any time soon. We kinda have to be patient.

VLM 4y ago

> minimum amount of skill to produce something passable Look at the history of woodworking for inspiration. It used to take human sweat to make flat straight surfaces. Something like a walmart flatpack bookshelf would have been VERY expensive to make 1000 years ago. Industrial tech made that cheap and ... now its seen as tacky and out of style and only for poors. The result culturally this century is an avoidance of "plastic wood" finish, faux finishes and faux surface prep that look old and worn and hand scuffed, and a strange hipster fetish for "live edge" raw bark on finished product. Sure, in 1875 one might have predicted based on mass production trends that furniture in 2020s would be all right angles, smooth as glass mirror, photographic "ideal" woodgrain instead of real woodgrain, plastic-y lifetime thick film finish. But thats only for poor people who shop at walmart, nobody with money buys that stuff. I suspect what AI can cheaply produce will rapidly culturally be considered lower class and trashy. Oh, sure, completely AI generated movies look very nice and sound very nice and are ever so trendy and well written, but special effects and yesterdays memes on todays big screen generated entirely by computer algorithm is only for poors. Now, us rich cognitive elites only attend live theater plays. Aspirational middle class types watch recordings of theater plays (admittedly maybe some AI generated). You wouldn't show off your 'wealth' and 'class' by taking a date to an AI generated movie, that would be insulting, you might take her to a live theater play... I'm sure there will be some AI incursion, maybe the lights will be run by AI or AI painted backdrops or some actors will lipsync their lines to AI, or roughly every 5 years we have to tediously suffer thru a new generation of rewritten modernized classics and it'll be worse in the future with AI... but in general human will be the status symbol because it'll be expensive. I suspect being able to ask an AI to generate non-copyrighted commercial quality music will mean massive noise pollution (much like every room required 15 digital clocks in the 80s and every room required 15 super bright blue power LEDs in the 00s) followed by the only people making money in music will be live humans playing physical instruments. Poor people try to get by and don't spend money and when they do it'll be on infinitely cheap AI commodities. Rich people spend money on unique stuff, not mass produced AI shovelware. Aspirational people spend money trying to look rich so they will spend all their money on non-AI stuff.

pwpw 4y ago

> As a consequence, though, the standards for mixing and mastering have gone up massively; people don't really tolerate bedroom recordings with $10 mics any more. I don’t find this holds true for hip hop, the most streamed genre, whatsoever. There are countless examples of people making it big recording on a cheap mic in their mom’s bed room. One example is Chief Keef. A much more prominent example is Kanye who had terrible mixing on The Life of Pablo to the point where he released patches[0] for the album. He also recorded parts of Jesus is King on an iPhone[1]. To further the point, bootleg recordings and demo tapes of unreleased songs in artists’ back catalog continue to be popular with devoted fans. Average people like good music, even if the quality of the mixing and mastering is not stellar. Even The Beatles released songs with minimal takes from a live rooftop performance on Let It Be; hardly an ideal recording set up. Although they surely had better mixing. [0] https://archive.org/details/2016-the-life-of-pablo-updates https://archive.org/details/2016-the-life-of-pablo-updates [1] https://genius.com/a/kanye-west-says-20-percent-of-jesus-is-king-was-recorded-on-an-iphone https://genius.com/a/kanye-west-says-20-percent-of-jesus-is-...

bobsmooth 4y ago

> people don't really tolerate bedroom recordings with $10 mics any more It's called bedroom punk now.