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> It's also a prototype, you are numb and spoiled by the speed of technological advancements. > Like with good art, you need to learn how to appreciate it, see

> It's also a prototype, you are numb and spoiled by the speed of technological advancements. > Like with good art, you need to learn how to appreciate it, see it not for whether it can be useful to you for 10$, but for what it can be in the future with a cost structure so cheap they can afford to run it on 10$ subscriptions. Nonsense. This isn't a university research team or a FOSS project-- it's a commercial art product and the gee whiz factor doesn't put it beyond critique of its artistic merit. The person being disappointed for what they got for $10 is a whole lot less spoiled than the tech industry that feels entitled to charge people money for a product and only expect positive feedback. If you want to buy this because of the novelty factor, go nuts; other people need to see if products are useful to them before they buy things, and other people's experiences are the primary way we determine that.

fennecbutt 3y ago
It's like you've never played an early access game
- chefandy 3y ago
  > It's like you've never played an early access game It's like you've never thought about why we in the game industry release early access games. Getting critical feedback from people invested enough to buy into a beta test is the whole point. Even if we don't agree with any given critique, knowing that a non-zero number of players hate some mechanic, thinks something is unbalanced, or encounter irritating usability problems is invaluable for guding both creative and a technical strategies.
  - chefandy 3y ago
    Though apparently not gude enough for guding my speling.
  - fennecbutt 3y ago
    Apply the same logic to this service? Isn't that the point, mass testing to find areas for improvement, many users = many combinations and prompts that could never be thought of by QA alone, in exchange the users pay for a novelty for a while. Nobody's forcing anybody to pay.
    - chefandy 3y ago
      > Nobody's forcing anybody to pay. I never even implied that they were, or that they shouldn't be charging for the service. I was responding to a typical dismissive tech crowd response to criticism of its capability. > Isn't that the point, mass testing to find areas for improvement, many users = many combinations and prompts that could never be thought of by QA alone Yes, which is why I responded to the person calling the critic "numb" and "spoiled" for saying negative things about what this service produced for them. > Apply the same logic to this service? That was my point. > in exchange the users pay for a novelty for a while. What people get out of it is not prescriptive, and being early access doesn't change that. Playing a game is almost always a terminal experience where the end user creates a novel experience for themselves. Self-entertainment. Even then, issuing critique of that end product is very important to the people with more skin in the game, so to speak. (Yet so many fans get so defensive about it when they gain a lot from the increased scrutiny.) Beyond that, generative AI platforms are fundamentally different in that many people don't use them purely for self-entertainment. Working in the entertainment business, generative AI tools like this impact the work that I do every day. They make things possible that previously weren't, kill jobs, add others, make potentially good things bad and potentially bad things good, among many other things, and all of this has been true for quite some time. The current tech culture is weirdly aggressive about trivializing the value and difficulty of commercial creative work, and dismissing the perspective of those that make it; I'll always explicitly point that out when I see someone do it. Starry-eyed SV tech optimists just want to feel cool about being involved in such a pivotal moment in our culture, and people trying to ride the gee whiz neato vibes are excited by the prospect of creating things that were beyond their reach. Many of them feel insecure when anyone challenges that and they attempt to discredit critics by calling them names like "spoiled" and "numb." Would picking at its artistic merits be obnoxious if it was proof of concept code for university research? Of course. If this was a FOSS project too new to even meaningfully address output quality? Sure. But that's not what's happening here. One of the first comments in this comment section was a professional music producer recreating this service's output using professional tools, and I'll eat my hat if this isn't already being used in many studios for commercial work as a cost saving measure. Anybody that cares about these media, cares about the business viability of these services, cares about the business viability of commercial art, cares about people who stand to gain or lose something from generative AI in the very near future, cares about the sustained quality of our artistic culture, and cares about the people whose professional lives are being tossed into a vitamix and remolded because of these tools should be very, very fucking happy to see vigorous critique of what these things produced. The people who get defensive about it and start calling people names rather than actually engaging in any useful way should probably just close their browser tab because they're not helping.
bangaroo 3y ago
I'm not even necessarily disappointed, I'm just observing that ultimately there's a lot that needs to happen for this to really be what they're marketing it as. I had a great time with it, generated a bunch of goofy music and got value out of it, but there's nothing it made that I'd actually listen to casually for my own enjoyment and lots of the songs are "music shapes." When I actually tried to drive toward a specific outcome I had to tweak the lyrics manually to make them rhyme and fit in meter and then generate about 12 variations before I got a single one where things were in time and it sounded like A Song.

fennecbutt 3y ago

It's like you've never played an early access game

chefandy 3y ago
> It's like you've never played an early access game It's like you've never thought about why we in the game industry release early access games. Getting critical feedback from people invested enough to buy into a beta test is the whole point. Even if we don't agree with any given critique, knowing that a non-zero number of players hate some mechanic, thinks something is unbalanced, or encounter irritating usability problems is invaluable for guding both creative and a technical strategies.
- chefandy 3y ago
  Though apparently not gude enough for guding my speling.
- fennecbutt 3y ago
  Apply the same logic to this service? Isn't that the point, mass testing to find areas for improvement, many users = many combinations and prompts that could never be thought of by QA alone, in exchange the users pay for a novelty for a while. Nobody's forcing anybody to pay.
  - chefandy 3y ago
    > Nobody's forcing anybody to pay. I never even implied that they were, or that they shouldn't be charging for the service. I was responding to a typical dismissive tech crowd response to criticism of its capability. > Isn't that the point, mass testing to find areas for improvement, many users = many combinations and prompts that could never be thought of by QA alone Yes, which is why I responded to the person calling the critic "numb" and "spoiled" for saying negative things about what this service produced for them. > Apply the same logic to this service? That was my point. > in exchange the users pay for a novelty for a while. What people get out of it is not prescriptive, and being early access doesn't change that. Playing a game is almost always a terminal experience where the end user creates a novel experience for themselves. Self-entertainment. Even then, issuing critique of that end product is very important to the people with more skin in the game, so to speak. (Yet so many fans get so defensive about it when they gain a lot from the increased scrutiny.) Beyond that, generative AI platforms are fundamentally different in that many people don't use them purely for self-entertainment. Working in the entertainment business, generative AI tools like this impact the work that I do every day. They make things possible that previously weren't, kill jobs, add others, make potentially good things bad and potentially bad things good, among many other things, and all of this has been true for quite some time. The current tech culture is weirdly aggressive about trivializing the value and difficulty of commercial creative work, and dismissing the perspective of those that make it; I'll always explicitly point that out when I see someone do it. Starry-eyed SV tech optimists just want to feel cool about being involved in such a pivotal moment in our culture, and people trying to ride the gee whiz neato vibes are excited by the prospect of creating things that were beyond their reach. Many of them feel insecure when anyone challenges that and they attempt to discredit critics by calling them names like "spoiled" and "numb." Would picking at its artistic merits be obnoxious if it was proof of concept code for university research? Of course. If this was a FOSS project too new to even meaningfully address output quality? Sure. But that's not what's happening here. One of the first comments in this comment section was a professional music producer recreating this service's output using professional tools, and I'll eat my hat if this isn't already being used in many studios for commercial work as a cost saving measure. Anybody that cares about these media, cares about the business viability of these services, cares about the business viability of commercial art, cares about people who stand to gain or lose something from generative AI in the very near future, cares about the sustained quality of our artistic culture, and cares about the people whose professional lives are being tossed into a vitamix and remolded because of these tools should be very, very fucking happy to see vigorous critique of what these things produced. The people who get defensive about it and start calling people names rather than actually engaging in any useful way should probably just close their browser tab because they're not helping.

bangaroo 3y ago

I'm not even necessarily disappointed, I'm just observing that ultimately there's a lot that needs to happen for this to really be what they're marketing it as. I had a great time with it, generated a bunch of goofy music and got value out of it, but there's nothing it made that I'd actually listen to casually for my own enjoyment and lots of the songs are "music shapes." When I actually tried to drive toward a specific outcome I had to tweak the lyrics manually to make them rhyme and fit in meter and then generate about 12 variations before I got a single one where things were in time and it sounded like A Song.