13 ms·

Record labels panic as A.I. generated song becomes ‘hit single’

120 points by Syonyk 4y ago

em-bee 4y ago
aren't there already completely fictional pop-stars whose songs make a profit. (in japan i believe) using AI to generate such hits is only the next step. cheap to produce and the rest is marketing
JenrHywy 4y ago
I'm feeling quite ambivalent about where AI art is going. This passage from 1984 always stuck with me: “The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound.” On the other hand, people like Rob Sheridan are doing amazing things with AI art, and I've played with and enjoyed it myself as just another creative tool. I suppose it depends what you think music, or art is general, is for.
- solarmist 4y ago
  It can be more than one thing. I appreciate pop music and more artistic things.
- nazka 4y ago
  If you had an AI generated Netflix let’s say after 5 years of this you will start to see how it is dull and you will see the boundaries of it. Kind of like how Metflix sounds Netflix or TEDx sounds TEDx. Then I guess handmade or half handmade will be back in trend. The problem is after all this time AI was trending it was eating up talents and industries and after that a massive part of artists will be gone and the (human) industry shrunk. No more huge human made artistic ecosystem… Less worldwide talents. Less high quality and innovative ideas.
abraxas 4y ago
It says more about popular music than it does about AI that it's so easily replicated by a computer program.
- ProllyInfamous 4y ago
  ...easy there, cowboy. If you replace "Popular Music" with "Anything Else" (e.g. software engineering, standardized examination) you might see the silliness of your statement.
13years 4y ago
UMG actions will likely result in exactly the opposite effect of their intention. Everyone is tired of the gated walls of the music industry and this will only result in a rally behind AI even if AI itself becomes problematic in the end. "Where is the value in AI creativity? Does it actually create anything? What can be said of artistic works in which the creation was essentially a series of playing at the lottery of the machine until something fantastic emerges? Spinning the wheel of chance and instead of red, black or some number, it is a series of lexical phrases with which we hope to catch the spinning ball on the Roulette and award us a work of art." - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things
pvaldes 4y ago
To be honest, the bar to became a hit was very low. The same cowbell pattern with minor changes appears in most hits since a decade. The last videos of Alison Goldfrapp using AI are interesting at least, putting strange textures where they aren't expected.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Syonyk 4y ago
The capability of "Deep fakes" or "AI generated actors" or whatever you want to call it continues at a rapid pace. How long before we get back to some modern version of "key signing parties," in which you check how many layers of "Humans you reasonably trust to verify that other people are humans" are between you and some chunk of content?
- clarencewk 4y ago
  [dead]
- drewcoo 4y ago
  > How long before we get back to some modern version of "key signing parties," in which you check how many layers of "Humans you reasonably trust to verify that other people are humans" are between you and some chunk of content? And crypto finds a real-world application!
  - flangola7 4y ago
    Regular crypto(graphy) though, not cryptocurrency
- 0_____0 4y ago
  One can imagine key signing parties falling out of favor once AGI become clever enough to recruit meatspace humans to do their precise bidding. (I didn't make this up, Gibson did with Neuromancer in the 80s)
brucethemoose2 4y ago
Out of nowhere, random teenagers with computers generating anything they want from whoever they want, with perfect quality? And thats just the beginning? Yeah, if you are a record company, this must feel like the Rapture.
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  Or if you’re a musician who has a career? Imo we’re fucking up pretty hard, it’s interesting technology but I don’t think people realise that we’re all going to be “the record labels” soon. Imo it’s worse that most of the good works generated are based off peoples hard work. People used to complain when China would steal IP from the USA and sell it at a discounted price…this is going to make that look like a joke haha every single person on this forum will be effected too, don’t think you won’t be. Just because we can do things doesn’t necessarily mean we should keep doing them, using massive datasets that people innocently uploaded to the internet then reproduce works that will make them poorer is kind of, shit ?
  - dralley 4y ago
    I really don't want to contemplate the implications for crime or politics when we cannot trust even the most convincing evidence of wrongdoing. Innocent people can be smeared, guilty people can plausibly claim it was faked, and the inevitable result will be a world where truth is so obscured that people just believe whatever aligns with their preconceived notions. Which happens already, but it will get much worse. And in the meantime, a generation of people who didn't grow up in that world will fall victim to forgeries of a quality they cannot conceive of.
    - ChatGTP 4y ago
      So what is to be done about it? Do we just let it continue as is and slowly erode society, do we just continue with further technological advancement blindly no matter what the social or economic costs? I get this sounds hyperbolic but I really don’t see how the internet can continue like this. Like personally, if I was an artist, writer or musician I’d be never releasing any works online ever again. Sure people can get around that but like, I’d be making it harder to steal my stuff. This is probably the moment when the internet is no longer “cool” and just starts to get weird. I’m already becoming much much much more suspicious of the internet and even starting to question online forming participation, I have no idea if the comments section is real people or generated content made to influence people. It’s really turning me off cyberspace.
userbinator 4y ago
Endless cheap entertainment for the masses is IMHO one of the best outcomes of AI; it's a field where minor mistakes are tolerable (or even add to the entertainment value), as opposed to using AI for the more critical decisions of society. On the other hand, it may also make real human interaction far more valuable.
- 52-6F-62 4y ago
  “Endless cheap entertainment”… How depressing that’s sounds. Kind of like cheap cattle feed or something. Are you only here to be entertained? I’d like to contribute that music is not just entertainment. One of the best, and accessible, books on the subject was recently The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan. What ever happened to automating the boring things? Instead we’re hearing thousands of software developers celebrating what they perceive as the end of art (it’s not, sorry, just mass noise being injected into human communication). If only it was done with a little more discourse and less blind superiority then we might have something to talk about. This is the saddest trend in some time. Let’s go back to automating our taxes. Leave playing and writing music for all the time we create for ourselves instead. That was once the promise.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    > Are you only here to be entertained? Personally, yes. I'm counting down the days until we have the movie from Infinite Jest.
    - 1attice 4y ago
      'The Entertainment' from IJ is approximately as powerful as one FB-installed smartphone. We've been past that for more than a decade. And yes, absolutely, I know people who would cut off parts of themselves (or others) to get to their phone, after a period of deprivation.
  - somedude895 4y ago
    > How depressing that’s sounds. Kind of like cheap cattle feed or something. Are you only here to be entertained? GP said "for the masses." Popular media is just that: Cattle feed. It doesn't really matter if the next Marvel movie or the next Drake song is AI generated as long as it has its intended effect.
harshreality 4y ago
How is the song a violation of copyright? Someone's vocal characteristics are not meaningfully creative; it's the intellectual content of a work and specific instance of a performance of an artist's skill in singing or writing or drawing or fabricating that content, that makes the result copyrightable. Therefore, it seems like it's a stretch to think voice-mimicking AI works might be copyrightable by the mimicked artists. You can't sue someone for mimicking someone else's voice well enough to be confused for the mimicked creator's voice. Some people can do some voices quite well. AI can just do it better, faster. I hope the courts put a swift end to this, but maybe they'll try to uphold the status quo—entertainment megacorps get what they want—and only reverse course after a few years when it becomes clear that everyone's mimicking everyone else's voices and pictures for fun and profit and any attempt to maintain copyright or any other IP protection on such mimicry is absurd.
- prepend 4y ago
  I think that it’s knee jerk for now but the mistake is that there was confusion and promotion that Drake and Weeknd provided vocals. But I expect we’ll see some new law, or lots of “Drake-style vocals” in song labels. Cover bands exist and can even sing new songs while sounding like the original. So Journey hiring someone who sounds exactly like Steve Perry seems perfectly legal. So Journal training an AI on Steve Perry and having a robot sing exactly like him seems find as long as there’s no presentation as if it is Steve Perry singing or endorsing or using his celebrity likeness.
  - lancesells 4y ago
    I think there's a very big difference here in that you're equating a person singing like Steve Perry (one in millions) and a machine singing like Steve Perry (electricity required). These are very different things.
    - hgsgm 4y ago
      The law has not caught up yet. There will be a reckoning, and it will be decided by wealthy lobbyists.
amatecha 4y ago
Not exactly related to the content of the article, but rather the technology that displays it to me: the year is 2023, and the font face "popped in" a full second after the unstyled text was showing. If you can't use a custom font on your web page in an elegant, high-quality way, just use default system fonts.
numair 4y ago
It’s important to remember that the music business is one of the first places where corporations used technology to replace human workers. Back in my day (not really) you could get a job as a live musician, performing at restaurants, cafes, and and lots of other places. Then, suddenly, people started to install record machines and buy music from record companies! So, you know, AI-generated music is just a progression of a centuries-old trend. Quite ironically, this might be the disaster that causes the labels to license their libraries on more flexible terms to a larger variety of players, thus liberating the world from the current streaming service oligopoly.
- terribleperson 4y ago
  Don't forget the funny brief transitional stage where a musician or band would play for multiple recording devices multiple times to create consumable masters with very limited lifetimes.
toddmorey 4y ago
But it’s actually not a great song. It IS very impressive for the technical accomplishment of just how much it sounds like Drake & The Weekend. I think 15 million people have listened to it for that reason—to marvel at the likeness of artists they know like a digital audio wax museum. I think it will be important for artists to be able to copyright their appearance & sound; their visual & auditory identities.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  Most drake songs are repetitive and largely average. He's definitely got some with standout production, but don't kid yourself that he's some artistic virtuoso. The song became popular because it actually is a reasonably good imitation of early era Drake.
- 1attice 4y ago
  Right ok so now we come to the crux of it. With song copyright, for example, the gold standard has been 'is the melody the same'. How do you define a voice specifically enough to copyright? What if some dude just happens to sound like Drake, because he won the punnet square of larynxes? Is his work now a copyright violation? What if he sounds like Drake when he puts on the Drake filter? Did the Drake filter violate copyright? Does his voice violate copyright only when filtered? The people deciding these questions are not philosophers of sound. They're lawyers and industry hacks. It's going to get messy.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > it’s actually not a great song It is now. That the labels reacted like so. They’ve shown it’s great, or the king has no clothes.
  - asdfman123 4y ago
    It still doesn’t make it a great song. It’s plinky and repetitive. The technology is extraordinary, and there’s the possibility that it keeps going well past human ability. And the hype is there. But that doesn’t make it a good song by human musician standards.
fijiaarone 4y ago
Have you heard any hit single in the last 20+ years? AI couldn’t possibly come up with anything worse that every single one of them.
- bottom999mottob 4y ago
  Well back in my day prog rock and and jazz were all we had! My god, kids should be listening to fugues played on organs and Gregorian chants... Kids these days just don't know music gosh darnit
anonzzzies 4y ago
Won’t everyone at home in a few years not have this capability? Train on my fav music and make more. Doesn’t seem preventable anymore longer term.
- MagicMoonlight 4y ago
  That’s why they’re trying so hard to limit access. If you can run the model yourself, you can do anything.
baerrie 4y ago
Copyright shouldn’t exist by the simple fact that no creative work is made in a vacuum. Every song is derivative of its influences and only the big companies have the ability to enforce copyright, making it more of a tool of wealth consolidation rather than justice.
- gumballindie 4y ago
  If we lose our jobs to ai built by large entities using our content for free that’s going to solve wealth consolidation issues how? By making sure we are all equally poor?
  - baerrie 4y ago
    There will always be an aspect of our culture ai cannot take away, that we are human. The invention of the radio spelled doom for the local musician but here we are a century later with live music still happening. The fact that musicians and record companies are such big business to me has done more damage to music than ai ever will
    - gumballindie 4y ago
      I am not blaming the tech, I am just cautious about how it's being used by the very same big businesses that you mention. If used right ai can be a powerful enabler. It has the potential to create opportunity by enabling vast numbers of people to perform blue collar jobs, or it can damage society by devastating said jobs and concentrating power in the hands of those who blatantly take what is not theirs. If those who generate the art that suddenly millions of people can use it to create their own products are paid then that's a win win. Similarly for any job that this insane marketing campaign claims will be replaced. Proper use of ai can lead to more independent work because everyone can be their own team.
      - baerrie 4y ago
        I think AI will mostly lead to an automation and ubiquity of mediocre content. The high quality stuff will still be rare and made by those with the ability, talented artisans.
tailspin2019 4y ago
I’ve just been searching for info on how much of this song is actually “AI generated”. The initial news reports I read described only “AI generated vocals” (ie. effectively musical TTS with accurate AI modelled voices). But the phrase “AI generated song” implies more than just the voices. Anyone have a non-clickbait source which provides more details?
BossingAround 4y ago
If you're curious, I believe this is the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNExdztAtWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNExdztAtWU
- ProllyInfamous 4y ago
  [heroes in the comments] edit: wow, if your link (i.e. the song) was AI-derived (and thus not-copyrightable) then I am gd speechless. Smooth background, great vocals — lyrics too, of course — but wowsers, my tenant was just realizing that "the AI shit you been talking non-stop about is actually real: DRAKE is upset, shit is crazy!" So, that and this and these are interesting datapoints upon insanity.timeline.

120 points by Syonyk 4y ago

aren't there already completely fictional pop-stars whose songs make a profit. (in japan i believe) using AI to generate such hits is only the next step. cheap to produce and the rest is marketing

JenrHywy 4y ago

I'm feeling quite ambivalent about where AI art is going. This passage from 1984 always stuck with me: “The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound.” On the other hand, people like Rob Sheridan are doing amazing things with AI art, and I've played with and enjoyed it myself as just another creative tool. I suppose it depends what you think music, or art is general, is for.

solarmist 4y ago
It can be more than one thing. I appreciate pop music and more artistic things.
nazka 4y ago
If you had an AI generated Netflix let’s say after 5 years of this you will start to see how it is dull and you will see the boundaries of it. Kind of like how Metflix sounds Netflix or TEDx sounds TEDx. Then I guess handmade or half handmade will be back in trend. The problem is after all this time AI was trending it was eating up talents and industries and after that a massive part of artists will be gone and the (human) industry shrunk. No more huge human made artistic ecosystem… Less worldwide talents. Less high quality and innovative ideas.

abraxas 4y ago

It says more about popular music than it does about AI that it's so easily replicated by a computer program.

ProllyInfamous 4y ago
...easy there, cowboy. If you replace "Popular Music" with "Anything Else" (e.g. software engineering, standardized examination) you might see the silliness of your statement.

13years 4y ago

UMG actions will likely result in exactly the opposite effect of their intention. Everyone is tired of the gated walls of the music industry and this will only result in a rally behind AI even if AI itself becomes problematic in the end. "Where is the value in AI creativity? Does it actually create anything? What can be said of artistic works in which the creation was essentially a series of playing at the lottery of the machine until something fantastic emerges? Spinning the wheel of chance and instead of red, black or some number, it is a series of lexical phrases with which we hope to catch the spinning ball on the Roulette and award us a work of art." - https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things

pvaldes 4y ago

To be honest, the bar to became a hit was very low. The same cowbell pattern with minor changes appears in most hits since a decade. The last videos of Alison Goldfrapp using AI are interesting at least, putting strange textures where they aren't expected.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Syonyk 4y ago

The capability of "Deep fakes" or "AI generated actors" or whatever you want to call it continues at a rapid pace. How long before we get back to some modern version of "key signing parties," in which you check how many layers of "Humans you reasonably trust to verify that other people are humans" are between you and some chunk of content?

clarencewk 4y ago
[dead]
drewcoo 4y ago
> How long before we get back to some modern version of "key signing parties," in which you check how many layers of "Humans you reasonably trust to verify that other people are humans" are between you and some chunk of content? And crypto finds a real-world application!
- flangola7 4y ago
  Regular crypto(graphy) though, not cryptocurrency
0_____0 4y ago
One can imagine key signing parties falling out of favor once AGI become clever enough to recruit meatspace humans to do their precise bidding. (I didn't make this up, Gibson did with Neuromancer in the 80s)

brucethemoose2 4y ago

Out of nowhere, random teenagers with computers generating anything they want from whoever they want, with perfect quality? And thats just the beginning? Yeah, if you are a record company, this must feel like the Rapture.

ChatGTP 4y ago
Or if you’re a musician who has a career? Imo we’re fucking up pretty hard, it’s interesting technology but I don’t think people realise that we’re all going to be “the record labels” soon. Imo it’s worse that most of the good works generated are based off peoples hard work. People used to complain when China would steal IP from the USA and sell it at a discounted price…this is going to make that look like a joke haha every single person on this forum will be effected too, don’t think you won’t be. Just because we can do things doesn’t necessarily mean we should keep doing them, using massive datasets that people innocently uploaded to the internet then reproduce works that will make them poorer is kind of, shit ?
- dralley 4y ago
  I really don't want to contemplate the implications for crime or politics when we cannot trust even the most convincing evidence of wrongdoing. Innocent people can be smeared, guilty people can plausibly claim it was faked, and the inevitable result will be a world where truth is so obscured that people just believe whatever aligns with their preconceived notions. Which happens already, but it will get much worse. And in the meantime, a generation of people who didn't grow up in that world will fall victim to forgeries of a quality they cannot conceive of.
  - ChatGTP 4y ago
    So what is to be done about it? Do we just let it continue as is and slowly erode society, do we just continue with further technological advancement blindly no matter what the social or economic costs? I get this sounds hyperbolic but I really don’t see how the internet can continue like this. Like personally, if I was an artist, writer or musician I’d be never releasing any works online ever again. Sure people can get around that but like, I’d be making it harder to steal my stuff. This is probably the moment when the internet is no longer “cool” and just starts to get weird. I’m already becoming much much much more suspicious of the internet and even starting to question online forming participation, I have no idea if the comments section is real people or generated content made to influence people. It’s really turning me off cyberspace.

userbinator 4y ago

Endless cheap entertainment for the masses is IMHO one of the best outcomes of AI; it's a field where minor mistakes are tolerable (or even add to the entertainment value), as opposed to using AI for the more critical decisions of society. On the other hand, it may also make real human interaction far more valuable.

52-6F-62 4y ago
“Endless cheap entertainment”… How depressing that’s sounds. Kind of like cheap cattle feed or something. Are you only here to be entertained? I’d like to contribute that music is not just entertainment. One of the best, and accessible, books on the subject was recently The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan. What ever happened to automating the boring things? Instead we’re hearing thousands of software developers celebrating what they perceive as the end of art (it’s not, sorry, just mass noise being injected into human communication). If only it was done with a little more discourse and less blind superiority then we might have something to talk about. This is the saddest trend in some time. Let’s go back to automating our taxes. Leave playing and writing music for all the time we create for ourselves instead. That was once the promise.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  > Are you only here to be entertained? Personally, yes. I'm counting down the days until we have the movie from Infinite Jest.
  - 1attice 4y ago
    'The Entertainment' from IJ is approximately as powerful as one FB-installed smartphone. We've been past that for more than a decade. And yes, absolutely, I know people who would cut off parts of themselves (or others) to get to their phone, after a period of deprivation.
- somedude895 4y ago
  > How depressing that’s sounds. Kind of like cheap cattle feed or something. Are you only here to be entertained? GP said "for the masses." Popular media is just that: Cattle feed. It doesn't really matter if the next Marvel movie or the next Drake song is AI generated as long as it has its intended effect.

harshreality 4y ago

How is the song a violation of copyright? Someone's vocal characteristics are not meaningfully creative; it's the intellectual content of a work and specific instance of a performance of an artist's skill in singing or writing or drawing or fabricating that content, that makes the result copyrightable. Therefore, it seems like it's a stretch to think voice-mimicking AI works might be copyrightable by the mimicked artists. You can't sue someone for mimicking someone else's voice well enough to be confused for the mimicked creator's voice. Some people can do some voices quite well. AI can just do it better, faster. I hope the courts put a swift end to this, but maybe they'll try to uphold the status quo—entertainment megacorps get what they want—and only reverse course after a few years when it becomes clear that everyone's mimicking everyone else's voices and pictures for fun and profit and any attempt to maintain copyright or any other IP protection on such mimicry is absurd.

prepend 4y ago
I think that it’s knee jerk for now but the mistake is that there was confusion and promotion that Drake and Weeknd provided vocals. But I expect we’ll see some new law, or lots of “Drake-style vocals” in song labels. Cover bands exist and can even sing new songs while sounding like the original. So Journey hiring someone who sounds exactly like Steve Perry seems perfectly legal. So Journal training an AI on Steve Perry and having a robot sing exactly like him seems find as long as there’s no presentation as if it is Steve Perry singing or endorsing or using his celebrity likeness.
- lancesells 4y ago
  I think there's a very big difference here in that you're equating a person singing like Steve Perry (one in millions) and a machine singing like Steve Perry (electricity required). These are very different things.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    The law has not caught up yet. There will be a reckoning, and it will be decided by wealthy lobbyists.

amatecha 4y ago

Not exactly related to the content of the article, but rather the technology that displays it to me: the year is 2023, and the font face "popped in" a full second after the unstyled text was showing. If you can't use a custom font on your web page in an elegant, high-quality way, just use default system fonts.

numair 4y ago

It’s important to remember that the music business is one of the first places where corporations used technology to replace human workers. Back in my day (not really) you could get a job as a live musician, performing at restaurants, cafes, and and lots of other places. Then, suddenly, people started to install record machines and buy music from record companies! So, you know, AI-generated music is just a progression of a centuries-old trend. Quite ironically, this might be the disaster that causes the labels to license their libraries on more flexible terms to a larger variety of players, thus liberating the world from the current streaming service oligopoly.

terribleperson 4y ago
Don't forget the funny brief transitional stage where a musician or band would play for multiple recording devices multiple times to create consumable masters with very limited lifetimes.

toddmorey 4y ago

But it’s actually not a great song. It IS very impressive for the technical accomplishment of just how much it sounds like Drake & The Weekend. I think 15 million people have listened to it for that reason—to marvel at the likeness of artists they know like a digital audio wax museum. I think it will be important for artists to be able to copyright their appearance & sound; their visual & auditory identities.

HDThoreaun 4y ago
Most drake songs are repetitive and largely average. He's definitely got some with standout production, but don't kid yourself that he's some artistic virtuoso. The song became popular because it actually is a reasonably good imitation of early era Drake.
1attice 4y ago
Right ok so now we come to the crux of it. With song copyright, for example, the gold standard has been 'is the melody the same'. How do you define a voice specifically enough to copyright? What if some dude just happens to sound like Drake, because he won the punnet square of larynxes? Is his work now a copyright violation? What if he sounds like Drake when he puts on the Drake filter? Did the Drake filter violate copyright? Does his voice violate copyright only when filtered? The people deciding these questions are not philosophers of sound. They're lawyers and industry hacks. It's going to get messy.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> it’s actually not a great song It is now. That the labels reacted like so. They’ve shown it’s great, or the king has no clothes.
- asdfman123 4y ago
  It still doesn’t make it a great song. It’s plinky and repetitive. The technology is extraordinary, and there’s the possibility that it keeps going well past human ability. And the hype is there. But that doesn’t make it a good song by human musician standards.

fijiaarone 4y ago

Have you heard any hit single in the last 20+ years? AI couldn’t possibly come up with anything worse that every single one of them.

bottom999mottob 4y ago
Well back in my day prog rock and and jazz were all we had! My god, kids should be listening to fugues played on organs and Gregorian chants... Kids these days just don't know music gosh darnit

anonzzzies 4y ago

Won’t everyone at home in a few years not have this capability? Train on my fav music and make more. Doesn’t seem preventable anymore longer term.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago
That’s why they’re trying so hard to limit access. If you can run the model yourself, you can do anything.

baerrie 4y ago

Copyright shouldn’t exist by the simple fact that no creative work is made in a vacuum. Every song is derivative of its influences and only the big companies have the ability to enforce copyright, making it more of a tool of wealth consolidation rather than justice.

gumballindie 4y ago
If we lose our jobs to ai built by large entities using our content for free that’s going to solve wealth consolidation issues how? By making sure we are all equally poor?
- baerrie 4y ago
  There will always be an aspect of our culture ai cannot take away, that we are human. The invention of the radio spelled doom for the local musician but here we are a century later with live music still happening. The fact that musicians and record companies are such big business to me has done more damage to music than ai ever will
  - gumballindie 4y ago
    I am not blaming the tech, I am just cautious about how it's being used by the very same big businesses that you mention. If used right ai can be a powerful enabler. It has the potential to create opportunity by enabling vast numbers of people to perform blue collar jobs, or it can damage society by devastating said jobs and concentrating power in the hands of those who blatantly take what is not theirs. If those who generate the art that suddenly millions of people can use it to create their own products are paid then that's a win win. Similarly for any job that this insane marketing campaign claims will be replaced. Proper use of ai can lead to more independent work because everyone can be their own team.
    - baerrie 4y ago
      I think AI will mostly lead to an automation and ubiquity of mediocre content. The high quality stuff will still be rare and made by those with the ability, talented artisans.

tailspin2019 4y ago

I’ve just been searching for info on how much of this song is actually “AI generated”. The initial news reports I read described only “AI generated vocals” (ie. effectively musical TTS with accurate AI modelled voices). But the phrase “AI generated song” implies more than just the voices. Anyone have a non-clickbait source which provides more details?

BossingAround 4y ago

If you're curious, I believe this is the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNExdztAtWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNExdztAtWU

ProllyInfamous 4y ago
[heroes in the comments] edit: wow, if your link (i.e. the song) was AI-derived (and thus not-copyrightable) then I am gd speechless. Smooth background, great vocals — lyrics too, of course — but wowsers, my tenant was just realizing that "the AI shit you been talking non-stop about is actually real: DRAKE is upset, shit is crazy!" So, that and this and these are interesting datapoints upon insanity.timeline.