7 ms·

When I see a lot of this voice replication I am reminded of something. (Dune series spoiler) For example, Duncan Idaho keeps being brought back with cloning t

• mjburgess 3y ago
  "Not making new things" is moreso the default, see: all mythology, religion, etc.
• galdosdi 3y ago
  This reminds me of something I noticed: disproportionately, the classics in a given field (ie, the work agreed upon to be particularly important, influential, etc) are disproportionately the ones that were made shortly after a new medium or technique was invented. For example, It's almost as if we default to tending towards imitation and recycling, and only each time a totally new technology changes what is possible do we really try new things -- but the well of newness is rapidly exhausted and so those artisans who are fortunate to be able to be the first to work with a new medium get to be the ones that create its classics. The question is why? Does a medium combined with a culture totally determine the kind of work that can be made? Or is the influence of the original classics impossible to escape? In other words, is this situation path dependent?
  • purpleflame1257 3y ago
    I'm not sure that's true. Look at the printing press. Sure, Shakespeare is a classic, but most of the rest of what we read as "classics" probably centers around the mid-1800s (at least in English-speaking countries)
    • galdosdi 3y ago
      Yes, that's exactly some of the time periods I was thinking of. The mid 1800s was a time when literacy was rapidly increasing and new serial magazines became popular. This new medium paved the way for the fame of authors like Dickens and Bronte, the sort you may be thinking of.
      • zeroonetwothree 3y ago
        This only works if you compress the entire 19th century into a single point. Otherwise you have, eg Sense and Sensibility from 1811 vs Heart of Darkness from 1899. If anything this claim merely shows the effect of “time compression” in which distant events feel like they happened around the same time.
        • Paul-Craft 3y ago
          Not to mention Frankenstein and Journey to the Center of the Earth, both of which are science fiction classics. And then, of course, you leave out the entirety of 20th century science fiction.
      • seanhunter 3y ago
        You're cherry-picking to establish your conclusion. Lots of classic authors from that period (George Eliot for example) didn't serialise their works in magazines. Also the 19th century is not by any means considered generally superior to any other period in English literary history. Eg Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are looking sternly in your direction from either side of that timeline for example.
    • coldacid 3y ago
      Shakespeare was about a century and a half after Gutenberg.
  • seanhunter 3y ago
    That seems just very obviously untrue. Take an example, say literature: Are you saying the classics of literature were produced shortly after the invention of the pen/paper (clearly untrue)? Or maybe after the invention of the printing press? (Also clearly untrue). It seems like a banal observation to say when there is a technological breakthrough there are new discoveries made. Like say astronomy, every time we invent a new method to see further/measure better we discover new stuff. And equivalently in art as new media and methods are discovered, artists take advantage of them to produce new work. It's obvious both that this is the case and why that should be so. Otherwise, we are clearly going to evaluate works that have stood the test of time to be "classics" and have difficulty making an objective evaluation in many fields of how new works stack up relative to them. History winnows out the things which aren't that great and then you have a new generation of classics that "by pure coincidence" (not really) are closer to when the new medium or technique than your time of observation.
  • Izkata 3y ago
    Or just the earlier works have been forgotten. It tends to surprise people when I mention the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie (one of the first(?) to showcase color and still known for that because of the transition) was an adaptation of just the first book of an older series.
  • 3seashells 3y ago
    Generations move on.. All familiar things are eaten by time, so it's familiar things in media from youth that provides an anchor. The city you grew up on is gone except for a few landmarks. There are always artist artists who experiment but that's not mainstream taste
• ljm 3y ago
  I feel like the novelty will wear off sooner or later. I certainly got bored of doing "X but as Y" pretty fast.
  • gosub100 3y ago
    I'm excited to see the first brand new content from an existing series. I really love the 80's cartoon Inspector Gadget. There are about 100 episodes and they are all pretty repetitive (so hopefully easy to train AI with). I would be enthralled if someone could create new episodes with: - AI generated storyline - Deepfake the original actors voices - Deepfake the animation, which should(?) be easier (more realistic) than the video deepfakes. This could be so cool, "hey AI, make an Inspector Gadget espisode where the dog gets lost in the forest and Uncle Gadget eats magic mushrooms he finds while trying to find him"
    • ljm 3y ago
      I'd actually find that quite disappointing. If you can generate practically infinite variations of a show using AI, it completely eliminates scarcity and makes the result meaningless. It's not even unique to AI really. The whole genre of games that depend on procedural generation are similar. Who cares if there are a thousand planets in Starfield if they're all just the output of RNG? There's no actual handicraft involved to set one environment apart from another. There's more music on Spotify than anyone could listen to in a lifetime; it just makes it harder to find new stuff that is actually good or else you stick to what you know.
      • gosub100 3y ago
        > There's no actual handicraft involved to set one environment apart from another one of the reasons I don't like modern animation is the lack of effort in the actual animating. South Park looks like it was drawn by 5-year-olds who traced the outline of a salt shaker for the characters. Inb4 "it's supposed to be that way, it's all computer assisted and has been for 20 years", yes I know that. The point is there's no art involved in it. 80's and 90's stuff was hand drawn (AFAIK) and often outsourced to animators in Japan, and yeah it's primitive, but its literally handicraft. The only scarcity of shows like southpark is people with squeaky annoying voices. Even the writing is so repetitive and predictable. It was novel and funny in the 90's-early 2000's, but "kid saying adult thing in exuberant voice" is tired and old. Simpsons were doing it in 1989 ffs.
• throwaway4aday 3y ago
  On the short term, yes. On the longer term (probably only a year or two at this rate) no because these models also allow you to generate entirely new voices. We'll likely see features like describing the voice you want with a prompt and getting several to choose from, remixing existing voices, combining voices and creating voices that are impossible for any human to have. The introduction of other forms of recording and reproduction didn't result in total monocultures, even music which gets a bad rap for all sounding the same only has this problem in the mainstream, scratch the surface and you'll find hundreds of weird new genres and styles. We could see a future where every commercial is narrated by Attenborough or Freeman but indie creators will be pumping out vast quantities of wild interpretations and new applications of the human voice.
  • cyanydeez 3y ago
    they're on the what, 56th marvel movie? novelty seems to be entirely about consumptive selection. humans crave familiarity.
    • autoexec 3y ago
      Humans crave familiarity a lot more when times are difficult and uncertain but at other times they crave novelty. We'll always have some of both.
    • throwaway4aday 3y ago
      That's basically what I said? Mainstream content will generally play it safe and still sell but there will be ever larger numbers of independent creators pushing the envelope.
  • 3seashells 3y ago
    We are moving towards the ultimate bass dad voice generator?
• seydor 3y ago
  The replication is the new culture. Pop culture has been refrigerated and reheated for the past 2 decades , and it will be gone with the boomers. The new entertainment will be new , both in medium and in message.
• Fluorescence 3y ago
  Attempts at cloning are often the dirty secret behind much lauded creativity. I like the stories of unique art/music that was created because someone was trying to clone something exactly... but despite their best effort, they just couldn't get it right and ended inventing something new that people loved anyway. We just have to make sure we are pretty bad at the cloning!
  • Lacerda69 3y ago
    everything in culture is based on previous work and sampling; it has nothing to do with cloning. If you can't speak the language of your field you can't produce something original. you have to master the basics first aka emulate others aka learn the language before you can become creative.
• mahogany 3y ago
  Related: "hauntology" Mark Fisher didn't create this word, but he wrote a lot in the 2000s about our inability to imagine a new future after the failure of our previous visions. Using electronic music - a "future-looking" genre - as an example, he wrote (second paragraph explains it more generally): "...Twenty-first-century electronic music had failed to progress beyond what had been recorded in the twentieth century: practically anything produced in the 2000s could have been recorded in the 1990s. Electronic music had succumbed to its own inertia and retrospection. It was also clear that this was more than a moment in a familiar pattern, in which, as one genre wanes, another emerges to take its place at the leading edge of innovation. There was no leading edge of innovation any more. In music, as elsewhere in culture, we were living, in Franco Berardi’s suggestive phrase, after the future. ... What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate. The futures that have been lost were more than a matter of musical style. More broadly, and more troublingly, the disappearance of the future meant the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live. It meant the acceptance of a situation in which culture would continue without really changing, and where politics was reduced to the administration of an already established (capitalist) system. In other words, we were in the "end of history" described by Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama’s thesis was the other side of Fredric Jameson’s claim that postmodernism — characterized by its inability to find forms adequate to the present, still less to anticipate wholly new futures — was the "cultural logic of late capitalism."" I don't know if I completely buy it or if it was Mark's (and other's) inability to cope with their ideals for the future not panning out. But it is interesting to think about, and I do see glimpses of it in most art forms. I don't know enough history to know how common this repetition of, and nostalgia for, the past is though. Perhaps a flurry of imaginings of a "new future" was the anomaly.
  • pixl97 3y ago
    [dead]
• seanhunter 3y ago
  > I ask: are we stuck as a monoculture, not making new, interesting things, but simply replicating older ones? I really don't understand how you go from this story to that question. There are two, new, interesting things here: 1. The dev has made something which narrates their life. That's new and interesting 2. David Attenborough actually is still producing new (and amazing) nature documentaries. Planet Earth III has just come out and is astounding https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0gjwxhv https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0gjwxhv
  • martinclayton 3y ago
    I fear an AI narrating my life would be less Attenborough and more Sir Robin's minstrels in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail".
    • swayvil 3y ago
      Sick reference, bro. Your references are out of control. Everyone knows that.
• swayvil 3y ago
  My thoughts about my memories - that "model" - is arguably realer than reality (this tapestry of sensations) to me. And it only gets stronger as I accrue more memories. Eventually, yes, it might dominate entirely. My whole life bent to reproducing an idealized past. I have become a possessed thing.
• afavour 3y ago
  > I ask: are we stuck as a monoculture, not making new, interesting things, but simply replicating older ones? I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It's such an interesting side effect of the streaming era that some of the biggest TV hits with teenagers are Friends and The Office. Not to knock either show but I'm fascinated by what it means for culture.
  • spacebanana7 3y ago
    Content creators now need to compete with the best that's ever been created, not just the best that happens to be broadcast at the same time. This will increase the inequality amongst general purpose evergreen content, the winners will be bigger than ever before and continue to be watched for decades - but getting into that winning bracket will be hard. Conversely it's easier than ever to get views on perishable content, that which has short relevancy to current affairs or rests on a particular cultural trend. Live streaming too, by it's nature resembles the rivalry dynamics of broadcast television.
    • CamperBob2 3y ago
      Good point, and it mirrors what happened with popular music. Growing up in the 80s, I was almost completely unaware of music from the 50s, and didn't care for what little I'd heard. But plenty of younger people today listen to even-older music from the 60s through the 90s without batting an eye. We'll see the same thing happen with movies before long. A cynic might say that, for various reasons, the best ones have already been made.
• optimalsolver 3y ago
  I've always though that "Duncan Idaho" is the silliest name in all of science fiction.
  • NikkiA 3y ago
    Sillier than 'Hero Protagonist'? e: or Ford Prefect ?
    • webmaven 3y ago
      "Hiro", not "Hero".
    • optimalsolver 3y ago
      The latter is simply genius.
• JKCalhoun 3y ago
  > I ask: are we stuck as a monoculture, not making new, interesting things, but simply replicating older ones? I think culturally we've done things like this many times in the past. It's why periods are described as neo, as in neoclassical. Eventually artists pull us in a new direction and we're willing to follow because we too have become tired of the old.
• Tallain 3y ago
  > I ask: are we stuck as a monoculture, not making new, interesting things, but simply replicating older ones? Probably, but I hope not (or at least not for long). I think it's normal for people to want to retell stories (see the way we pass jokes around like viruses, or the oral tradition, or the million "re-imaginings" of classics). I also think that inclination has been weaponized and turned against us. Producers -- movie, music, or other -- push or are pushed to maximize gain while minimizing risk. And what feels better than nostalgia? What feels better than a story that doesn't challenge you, doesn't prompt any sort of introspection, or hell, any inspection at all? I think it's a symptom of the push for profit over all else. I do think we ache for new things, but the ship of monoculture is a big one and takes a long time to steer. A lot of momentum is behind where we're at and it's going to take a lot to get away.
• make3 3y ago
  there like literally infinite amounts of new culture
• SergeAx 3y ago
  I believe it is a temporary state of things, thought a sad one. ML made making mockups and mashups effectively effortless, but they are boring and should fall out of public curiosity spot soon, I believe. At the time Hollywood lawyers figure out how to put synthetic clones of big stars into AAA-movies, people will be too tired with sequels, prequels, spin-offs and stuff like that.
• unsupp0rted 3y ago
  Duncan got significantly upgraded from time to time. Sometimes as a mentat. Or as a sex machine.
• tstrimple 3y ago
  > because Leto II just likes him. I mean, there's a whole lot more to it than just that. Duncan is a key figure to The Golden Path Leto's breeding program. Without Duncan, the success of creating Siona is hollow. It's their nine daughters and thousand sons who are the human protection from prescience.