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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.

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.