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> I am not buying it. Coincidentally: Just in the last few weeks, D'addario, one of largest guitar string manufacturers, posted on Instagram what is clearly a

• scotty79 2mo ago
  People online post timelapses for their AI generated artwork, that are also AI generated.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  • the_af 2mo ago
    I've been thinking about this. Almost every way we have to tell human from AI apart can be adopted and automated by AI. It's sort of a corollary of "every metric can be gamed". It's disheartening for those of us who intrinsically value human authorship.
    • TeMPOraL 2mo ago
      Well, we don't have Star Trek holograms yet, so you can trust what you can see performed in person. (Good luck getting close enough to actually tell if the live performance is real or faked, though, for anything other than small, local or super niche bands...)
    • wvbdmp 2mo ago
      Maybe all “content” will just end up devalued and some prestige will move to more physical, local things like live performances, growing your own tomatoes and giving good massages. Nobody will care about showing off their tomatoes online and all that matters is sharing them with real people…
      • weakened_malloc 2mo ago
        I hope so. I've got no issue with AI, but "influencers" are broadly a net negative on the world. Anything that reduces the amount of power/status/attention they get is a plus for me.
• tomashubelbauer 2mo ago
  Reminds me of politicians and public figures saying they got "hacked" after doing/posting something stupid and getting backlash for it. I guess "AI did it" is the new iteration on that.
  • bookofjoe 2mo ago
    Appears to have replaced "fake news" as the go-to response
    • jasonjayr 2mo ago
      "The dog ate my homework" Just blame the next thing down the chain that can't defend itself, so you don't have to take responsibility.
      • detourdog 2mo ago
        Crazy but my dog once ate half my homework.
        • 361994752 2mo ago
          Did you submit the other half? Which definitely would prove "dog ate my homework"
          • TeMPOraL 2mo ago
            "If you put even half as much effort into homework, as you put into faking dog bite marks, ..."
        • macintux 2mo ago
          My mother was a teacher, and she once had to go to school and tell her students our dog ate their homework.
    • cyanmoonx 2mo ago
      So true. “AI slop” is the new “Fake news”
• 27183 2mo ago
  > The worker claimed it was "his first time using AI" and "he didn't know" This is not the defense they think it is.. If your mechanic rotates your tires and improperly torques the lug bolts "it was my first time using a torque wrench" isn't excusable. It's good to experiment and learn new things. It's not good to throw your little self-study project out into the world with your employer's name behind it and present it as production worthy material.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    Before last year, I might've thought it was okay to throw out silly things as advertisements.
  • voxic11 2mo ago
    Do we know if it was the worker who presented it as such? Everyone has to learn and if they are learning on the job its up to their employer to ensure that the work product is reviewed or overseen by someone with adequate experience.
    • whstl 2mo ago
      In this case, the author exchanged messages with someone, and he indeed claimed as such, according to the screenshots.
  • axus 2mo ago
    Oh...
• imdsm 2mo ago
  The solution is clear: yes we use AI, and we're okay with it. There's no way Claude/AI recreated another persons app exactly, with the same name and branding, without being told to do so in some way. I just don't believe it. And him not using it and calling out AI is just him covering his ass
  • kibwen 2mo ago
    > The solution is clear: yes we use AI, and we're okay with it. Except that some portion of D'addario's customers--presumably those that actually buy their guitar strings to create music via real guitars--aren't okay with it.
    • InsideOutSanta 2mo ago
      Yeah, I think that case is absolutely wild, because ostensibly the point of the recorded music was to showcase the strings.
      • TeMPOraL 2mo ago
        Wouldn't this be basically fraudulent advertising?
        • wvbdmp 2mo ago
          AFAIK, a lot of commercials, particularly for cars, haven’t really shot the physical product in decades and instead used CGI. I think Ikea also makes heavy use of renderings. It’s all kind of insane. OTOH, a hundred years ago ads all used illustrations… I guess you’d have to show that the real strings don’t sound or behave as shown in the video, however it was created.
          • TeMPOraL 2mo ago
            In this case there's a difference between CGI and generative AI. However they came up with arrangement of pixels on the screen, the product is still portrayed accurately. Now, unless the company in question got their new strings into Sona training data, I wager that the generated output has little casual connection with the product being advertised. If I found out IKEA's newest product looks nothing like on the commercial, because the ad was using generative AI and hallucinated something approximating the product, I'd be looking at it as fraudulent too.
• dofm 2mo ago
  The already embattled Fender CEO said the other day that he plans for Fender to be at the "forefront" of AI, and that covering others' songs was "analogue AI". The simple truth of the matter is that contempt for your customers is now normal. I expect this from Fender, now; they are utterly without soul. But D'Addario are really one of the most analogue companies ever and they are still family-owned; they should have understood the magnitude of this problem right at the beginning and just apologised. At least one of my three guitars will likely continue to have their PB strings, probably, because they still sound the best on my cheap Weissenborn clone. But it is very disappointing and it leaves a bad taste. Perhaps I will revisit Rotosounds (wound in a factory very near where I grew up) for my PBs. The UK also has Newtone strings so I really have no reason to continue to support D'Addario (though the low-tension Aloha set I really like for the Weissenborn copy that lets me have a 15 on the high D is always backordered).
  • tpmoney 2mo ago
    > The already embattled Fender CEO said the other day that he plans for Fender to be at the "forefront" of AI, and that covering others' songs was "analogue AI". >The simple truth of the matter is that contempt for your customers is now normal. I expect this from Fender, now; they are utterly without soul. I think to some degree this is going to be inevitable for a while. No matter what people think about the ethics of AI or AI use, the fact of the matter is it exists, and it is shaking up and going to shake up a lot of the world. I personally think "AI" isn't really a product anymore than "The Internet" is a product. It's infrastructure in the same way the internet is, or to quote "Halt and Catch Fire", it's "the thing that gets us to The Thing". The problem is no one really knows what The Thing looks like, so everyone is throwing anything they can think of at the wall and hoping to see what sticks. And they're dong this because they remember Sears and they remember Blockbuster. No one wants to be the next company that was positioned perfectly to integrate the new technology into their business model and missed the boat completely for short sightedness or lack of speed. "$foo but with AI" is the current generation's "$foo but on the internet", and everyone is scrambling hard to not be the next company that someone writes a "whatever happened to them" youtube video about. Incidentally, this "AI as infrastructure" view I have is also why I really think governments should be getting into the space of building and distributing training data sets and models. Not only because it could reduce the overall amount of bot scraping and traffic if everyone who wants to build could go to a known good and clean source of training data, but also because nominal usage fees could help manage the copyright concerns. I've pitched it before in more detail, but I imagine something akin to radio broadcast royalty licenses, where people whose copyrighted works are part of the government training sets are paid out "royalties" from the pool of money brought in from licensing the training sets.
• rdiddly 2mo ago
  Jeeeeezus. It's lies all the way down. Did we ever arrive at a true statement from them or is that where they left it? The irony is how unnecessary it was. They could've just said, yeah you're right, we used AI. This is a level of lying you reserve for covering up a murder or something. Maybe they're just worried (and they're right to be worried) that it's easier to make music with AI than with their strings.
  • whstl 2mo ago
    Lie and doubling down. And a lot of employees and endorsers fighting people in the comments, and calling people names. Not a good look.
• avaer 2mo ago
  Think about all of the cases that don't come out. Everyone hates AI, yet everyone is using AI. I refuse to believe nearly 100% of game developers aren't using AI, but how many put the tag of shame on the Steam store page? It's a very strange situation.
  • teamonkey 2mo ago
    Steam doesn’t need a AI disclosure label for things that are not player-facing IIRC.
  • WhrRTheBaboons 2mo ago
    >I refuse to believe nearly 100% of game developers aren't using AI Do you refuse to believe nearly 100% of written content isn't made by AI? Was your comment? I struggle to imagine thinking that no one does things themselves, for fun. What a nihilistic view.
    • dghlsakjg 2mo ago
      I don’t believe they are saying that 100% of the entire game or content is ai, they are saying that they believe that a huge percentage of titles have used AI for at least one part of the game, however small. I can absolutely believe it, and I think it’s fine. If you have AI code up the logic for something boring but necessary (the setting screen ui, for one example. Don’t argue against this one example, that isn’t the point) it will leave a developer to work on the parts of games that actually make a difference to the experience. Frankly, it would be silly not to use ai for some things. The trouble is that if it’s a binary “used ai” flag, there is no way to distinguish a one shot Claude slop game from someone who uses AI for internationalization
      • cptroot 2mo ago
        > Don’t argue against this one example, that isn’t the point What is the point then? The best games have all of their elements working together in service of their intended experience. > someone who uses AI for internationalization Do you think this would be an ok use of AI for a game? Did you not see the outrage over Hollow Knight: Silksong's translation last year? How every time a game is discovered to have used AI for translation there is an immediate backlash?
• SadErn 2mo ago
  [dead]
• spacedcowboy 2mo ago
  It's an easy "out" for those without the self-respect to admit when they do wrong. It's like "The computer did it" from the 80's and 90's. Blame the tool for the operator usage. It's pathetic.
• duped 2mo ago
  What bothers me about the D'Addario thing is that it never crossed the mind of that employee or the company what they're doing was wrong. Their customers are musicians. They want to hear what the strings sound like in a demo. What they did was not just dishonest, it's contrary to literally everything their customers do. Whoever did it has no sense and shouldn't be working in that business. Full stop. I say this as a D'Addario customer of 20+ years that will never buy their strings again.
  • whstl 2mo ago
    Marketing has become so disconnected from reality that such things have been normalized and trivialized. For example: since a few years now, it became extremely common for apps and games to be advertised with fake screenshots, fake gameplay, and fake interactions. AI just put all that on turbo mode. A marketing manager coming from apps/games (or other industry where this is common) joining D'addario will just push for AI music to be used because "that's how things are done".
• ljm 2mo ago
  You're calling it ass covering but I kinda see it as buck-passing too. Seems like D'addario didn't want to hold the buck so they kept passing it down until it made its way back to the worker who did it. Seems to me like that worker's ass wasn't covered at all and now everyone's all up in his shit on his socials, and the layers of management get to wash their hands, even though it's the management and executive that are pushing AI at all costs.
  • munificent 2mo ago
    Going forward, I suspect one of the main employment opportunities left for humans in the AI era is "scapegoat". Corporations don't want to take any responsibility for anything. AI can't be responsible. So there's a market opportunity for a person who is willing to take a job where their main value-add is to receive the blame when something goes sideways. What a sad dystopia we are creating.
    • rmnclmnt 2mo ago
      Time for Benjamin Malaussène to strike again!
    • bigiain 2mo ago
      Every staff member with a ChatGPT account gets a complimentary promotion to CISO...
  • whstl 2mo ago
    Not sure if I agree. Until people started getting technical, they weren’t really passing the bucket to anyone. It was only partially with the LANDR lie, and then with the final accusation that they really “passed the bucket”. Blocking commenters, having employees and endorsers mock customers, all that was 100% Daddario. In fact a lot of people commended them for not throwing employees under the bus before it happened.