4 ms·

I like Benn Jordan because he’s clearly got a grasp on a functional understanding of machine learning, but that’s not his primary background. He comes from a mu

I like Benn Jordan because he’s clearly got a grasp on a functional understanding of machine learning, but that’s not his primary background. He comes from a music production background, so his focus is more practical and results-oriented. It will be really interesting as this knowledge percolates into more and more fields, what domain experts do with it. I see ML as more of a bag of tricks that can be applied to many fields.

dingnuts 2y ago
>He comes from a music production background, so his focus is more practical and results-oriented It's his art and his livelihood too, so it's also personal. These people want to steal his art and create a world full of soulless cheap muzak, while simultaneously putting him out of work. Get 'em, Benn! I should go buy one of his albums.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  They’ve been doing that since the recording studio process developed the model in the 1920s or so. They would hire songwriters to make generic pop music with generic lyrics, and keep it in the vault until you have some attractive young singer you want to use for marketing then you give them an album of these songs to sing. And they are sure to sell because you’ve been priming the american ear for these chord progressions for a long time, and you fill all the air in the room with your marketing for this singer leaving people little option but to hear the latest carefully crafted earworm. Still happens today maybe even more perfected with psychological studies intersecting with music and marketing. The best musicians have never and will never be a product of that machine. Seek out live music.
- visarga 2y ago
  Are you sure you mean "stealing"? As in deprive him of his own recordings? I am curious if anyone read Harry Potter in bootleg form from a LLM. I mean, LLMs are the worst tools for infringing - they are approximate, expensive and slow, while copying is instant, perfect and free. You can apply the same logic for other modalities. Moreover, who's got the time to see someone else's AI shit when they can generate their own, perfectly customized to their liking? I personally generated a song about my cat and kid. It had zero commercial value but was fun for 2-3 people to listen.
  - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
    I can steal a company's codebase without depriving them of their code. I can steal an invention without wiping the inventor's memory. These are other kinds of stealing, which deprives the creator not of the art itself, but the other benefits of having created it.
    - visarga 2y ago
      The logic "gen AI is theft" is pretty careless. Let's say I use gen-AI to identify a skin sore, and seek appropriate treatment. Who's copyright was being violated? How about if I ask it to make a story where my kid is a protagonist? In fact the more I put into a prompt, the less it looks like anything in the training set, the longer the discussion, the greater the divergence.
      - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        I'm saying that training gen-AI on Benn Jordan's art against his will, without permission, and without remuneration, is theft. You can train on a suitably licensed database of medical images if you want.
        visarga 2y ago
        It depends, is it a LoRa focused on Benn? Is it intended to replicate his style? Or is Benn one of the billion authors in the training set? In that case his impact will be minimal, and the generated images/texts will be very different from any training example, mostly reflecting the prompt.
        mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        If the impact is really so minimal that the appropriate compensation is zero, then surely your AI would also be just fine without training on those works?
        2y ago
- briandear 2y ago
  Soulless cheap Muzak already exists and has for a long time. Any musician these days that thinks there is money in music by selling songs is delusional. Sad but true.
  - EvanAnderson 2y ago
    Not only that, but if you do have success "selling" songs you increasingly run the risk of litigating from the interest who already "own" the corpus of existing work.
    - pogue 2y ago
      I would encourage you guys to watch his video before going down the argument of saying that there's no money in music creation. There's also just enjoyment in the act of creation and even if you're doing it for free, why should GenAI companies then be able to take your artwork, incorporate that into their dataset and profit of the artist's unpaid labor? https://youtu.be/xMYm2d9bmEA https://youtu.be/xMYm2d9bmEA
      - EvanAnderson 2y ago
        I love making music. I haven't written a ton, and I haven't done it recently, but for a time in the early 2000's I participated in a fun Internet songwriting "competition"[0], played some live shows in various places around the country, and met a lot of cool people. I hear enough incidental similarities in what I've written to make me wary of ever actually trying to make money from it. The Marvin Gaye lawsuit for "Blurred Lines" was ridiculous. All the music and lyrics I've written (crap though it all is) has always been distributed as public domain (or as close as I can get away w/ Creative Commons CC0 for those asinine jurisdictions where you can't waive your rights). (I have a lyric "You can't own the beat and you can't own the rhyme" in one song, because I believe it very strongly.) [0] http://www.songfight.org/ http://www.songfight.org/

dingnuts 2y ago

>He comes from a music production background, so his focus is more practical and results-oriented It's his art and his livelihood too, so it's also personal. These people want to steal his art and create a world full of soulless cheap muzak, while simultaneously putting him out of work. Get 'em, Benn! I should go buy one of his albums.

kjkjadksj 2y ago
They’ve been doing that since the recording studio process developed the model in the 1920s or so. They would hire songwriters to make generic pop music with generic lyrics, and keep it in the vault until you have some attractive young singer you want to use for marketing then you give them an album of these songs to sing. And they are sure to sell because you’ve been priming the american ear for these chord progressions for a long time, and you fill all the air in the room with your marketing for this singer leaving people little option but to hear the latest carefully crafted earworm. Still happens today maybe even more perfected with psychological studies intersecting with music and marketing. The best musicians have never and will never be a product of that machine. Seek out live music.
visarga 2y ago
Are you sure you mean "stealing"? As in deprive him of his own recordings? I am curious if anyone read Harry Potter in bootleg form from a LLM. I mean, LLMs are the worst tools for infringing - they are approximate, expensive and slow, while copying is instant, perfect and free. You can apply the same logic for other modalities. Moreover, who's got the time to see someone else's AI shit when they can generate their own, perfectly customized to their liking? I personally generated a song about my cat and kid. It had zero commercial value but was fun for 2-3 people to listen.
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  I can steal a company's codebase without depriving them of their code. I can steal an invention without wiping the inventor's memory. These are other kinds of stealing, which deprives the creator not of the art itself, but the other benefits of having created it.
  - visarga 2y ago
    The logic "gen AI is theft" is pretty careless. Let's say I use gen-AI to identify a skin sore, and seek appropriate treatment. Who's copyright was being violated? How about if I ask it to make a story where my kid is a protagonist? In fact the more I put into a prompt, the less it looks like anything in the training set, the longer the discussion, the greater the divergence.
    - mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      I'm saying that training gen-AI on Benn Jordan's art against his will, without permission, and without remuneration, is theft. You can train on a suitably licensed database of medical images if you want.
      - visarga 2y ago
        It depends, is it a LoRa focused on Benn? Is it intended to replicate his style? Or is Benn one of the billion authors in the training set? In that case his impact will be minimal, and the generated images/texts will be very different from any training example, mostly reflecting the prompt.
        mitthrowaway2 2y ago
        If the impact is really so minimal that the appropriate compensation is zero, then surely your AI would also be just fine without training on those works?
        2y ago
briandear 2y ago
Soulless cheap Muzak already exists and has for a long time. Any musician these days that thinks there is money in music by selling songs is delusional. Sad but true.
- EvanAnderson 2y ago
  Not only that, but if you do have success "selling" songs you increasingly run the risk of litigating from the interest who already "own" the corpus of existing work.
  - pogue 2y ago
    I would encourage you guys to watch his video before going down the argument of saying that there's no money in music creation. There's also just enjoyment in the act of creation and even if you're doing it for free, why should GenAI companies then be able to take your artwork, incorporate that into their dataset and profit of the artist's unpaid labor? https://youtu.be/xMYm2d9bmEA https://youtu.be/xMYm2d9bmEA
    - EvanAnderson 2y ago
      I love making music. I haven't written a ton, and I haven't done it recently, but for a time in the early 2000's I participated in a fun Internet songwriting "competition"[0], played some live shows in various places around the country, and met a lot of cool people. I hear enough incidental similarities in what I've written to make me wary of ever actually trying to make money from it. The Marvin Gaye lawsuit for "Blurred Lines" was ridiculous. All the music and lyrics I've written (crap though it all is) has always been distributed as public domain (or as close as I can get away w/ Creative Commons CC0 for those asinine jurisdictions where you can't waive your rights). (I have a lyric "You can't own the beat and you can't own the rhyme" in one song, because I believe it very strongly.) [0] http://www.songfight.org/ http://www.songfight.org/