[HN Gopher] Fandom can't decide if leaked songs are real or AI-g...
___________________________________________________________________
Fandom can't decide if leaked songs are real or AI-generated
Author : wpietri
Score : 59 points
Date : 2023-09-12 15:10 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.404media.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.404media.co)
| lsy wrote:
| The behavior of the sellers described in the article makes me
| think it's all but certain the songs are AI-generated. Imagine
| telling a jeweler a diamond looks fake, and they first pull out
| their handy diamond faking machine to show you how bad a fake
| diamond looks in comparison to what they're selling, then curse
| at you and close the store.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| I like this analogy. To all intents and purposes, that's a
| diamond. To all intents and purposes, this is pop music.
| TheHappyOddish wrote:
| You can just tell looking at the article. $400 is a scam number
| for sure - too low for actual leaks (I assume news orgs etc
| would pay thousands), but enough that the grifter can walk away
| cashed up.
|
| It's got that scammy smell about it.
| solardev wrote:
| Few years from now, we'll all be all out of work, the earth will
| be burnt to a crisp, there'll be like 10 rich people and everyone
| else will be walking the deserts looking for the tiniest shred of
| green. But man, the soundtrack will be ROCKING!
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| londons_explore wrote:
| When real songs and AI songs can't be told apart even by groups
| of fans working together, the artists should be scared.
|
| If AI can be so convincing, then your publisher won't we wanting
| to pay you to make any new songs if they can just pay an AI guy
| for a few days to crank out a new song.
| rnk wrote:
| Artists are scared. We saw autotune caused some controversy.
| What happens when an artist releases ai voice songs themselves?
| What about an artist who loses her voice and then releases ai
| voice songs, is it real then?
|
| I think a person or artist should own their voice, but what is
| the threshold for an altered ones that is different? And for
| 'real' human voices someone can sing and sound just like you,
| that's not a crime. Would it be the same for an ai-generated
| voice, anyone can copy any of them?
|
| With the troubling to me decision that you can't copyright ai
| generated images, it feels natural to me that you could
| probably not copyright / control ai generated voices the same
| way. This is a mess, then I could take my ai generated video
| and voices of presidential candidates, politicians and they
| can't stop me maybe, because it's all got that magic adjective
| "ai" in front of it.
| bloat wrote:
| We know what happens when a pop group doesn't perform on
| their own records.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milli_Vanilli
| RajT88 wrote:
| This got me mulling over what would happen if AI became better at
| writing pop songs than humans.
|
| So let's game it out...
|
| Most of the pop hits of the last 30 years come from a small
| handful of songsmiths. Most pop stars already don't really write
| their own songs, they are more the 'Figurehead' of the whole
| experience. Their overall look and stage presence are the major
| selling point (some of them can't really sing without autotune,
| looking at you Britney).
|
| So a handful of songwriters will be out of work, and nothing much
| will change. Mayyybe a few artists will sign away their likeness
| and voice to churn out album after album, hoping the public is
| none-the-wiser. Pop music may become still more homogenous, since
| part of the huge pop hits is the unexpected twist worked in that
| makes it "pop".
|
| It'll be kind of a reverse Hatsune Miku, but things won't change
| that much. I think the appetite for a completely synthetic pop
| star is not there in the West - they'll have to be tricked into
| it. Pop stars are already arguably artificial in some form.
| IKantRead wrote:
| I think what you're describing is basically something I've
| pointed out in different contexts: for many areas concerned
| with AI, content is already effectively written by "AI", it's
| just humans following the algorithms rather than fully
| automated.
|
| - content marketting is _already_ AI writing, it 's just humans
| churning through the SEO optimized algorithms.
|
| - Mass digital stock photograph is AI generated "art". People
| that do that for a living have an exact formula for reproducing
| images that will sell en masse.
|
| - As you point out, a good chunk of generic pop music is
| churned out by musicians following algorithms behind the scenes
| and then manufactured to look like the work of a public
| performer.
|
| The parts of our content work threatened by AI are already
| cold, sterile, and machine generated.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Phrased a different way, but yes, we're saying the same
| thing.
|
| The AI revolution is actually just the next increment in
| automation of all these things.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| > It'll be kind of a reverse Hatsune Miku, but things won't
| change that much.
|
| I don't really agree with this for two reasons:
|
| 1. It is understood that vocal synths (e.g. Hatsune Miku) are
| not humans and that humans are not vocal synths. There are also
| humans covering songs originally sang by synths and vice versa,
| but everybody still understands what's going on. (Heck, there
| are even synths based on the voice of real human singers, e.g.
| KAFU; it's still understood that the singer and synth aren't
| the same thing.)
|
| 2. Vocal synths are not fully AI and require a significant
| amount of 'tuning' to sound good (with various producers
| generally having their own 'sound' due to differences in tuning
| style). They are also just a voice, they don't generate any
| instrumentals. Therefore, a human-produced song sang by a vocal
| synth is still a long way off from a fully AI-generated song.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Why do you think there will still be pop-stars? I'll just be
| able to generate music I like. Quite possibly I'll be able to
| provide AI generated avatars to help my meat brain associate
| menu options (with images) with a particular music. Possibly
| there will be curated such avatar/music generators, and more
| than likely, many of them will be naked. Hatsune Miku is a red
| herring I think. I expect we'll see more Milli Vanillis too.
| RajT88 wrote:
| You've said a lot of the things I was getting at.
|
| > Hatsune Miku is a red herring I think.
|
| I don't think we'll get more of these.
|
| > I expect we'll see more Milli Vanillis too.
|
| Completely agree, and definitely what I was saying.
|
| > Possibly there will be curated such avatar/music
| generators, and more than likely, many of them will be naked.
|
| I would make the case that pop musicians would be less
| popular if they freely got naked. The teasing of maybe being
| able to see a bit of rarified (and real) flesh is definitely
| a big part of the equation, which you're not likely to be
| able to reproduce with what people think is an AI.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| >I would make the case that pop musicians would be less
| popular if they freely got naked.
|
| If the system knows you are a prude, then they won't get
| naked _for you_. They 'll get very good at learning "how
| much is too much" for any given person, for any given
| "what" (skin, private messages, flirting, etc).
|
| Human pop stars can't have relationships with every fan. AI
| pop stars can.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > Human pop stars can't have relationships with every
| fan. AI pop stars can.
|
| I don't know if it will go that way, to be honest. But
| certainly, the film _Her_ does show us what that might
| end up looking like. (Even though she was just a
| disembodied voice)
| cortesoft wrote:
| > So a handful of songwriters will be out of work, and nothing
| much will change.
|
| It would be more than that, though, if AI truly becomes as good
| at writing pop songs as that handful of songsmiths.
|
| Currently, those songsmiths are the limiting factor for pop
| stars. As you said, there aren't many, and they can only write
| so many songs per year. Because of this, choosing which pop
| stars get to sing the songs they write is a big factor in
| determining who becomes successful. If suddenly AI can pump out
| as many pop hits as we like, that limiting factor goes away and
| the whole market changes.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >Currently, those songsmiths are the limiting factor for pop
| stars.
|
| Anything to support that conjecture?
|
| Pop songs take off because they're marketed properly AFAICT.
| Writers choose from many songs, all good, producers largely
| decide which songs and groups will make it. Songs can be
| around for years before being given to a star to make into a
| hit.
|
| Of course marketing now can be 'going viral', and that can be
| various degrees of organic and paid promotion.
| porkbeer wrote:
| All the marketing and production wont give the human impact
| of a well written song.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Yes, but the conjecture was that well-written songs are
| rare. Well enough written songs to be best-selling pop
| songs seem abundant?
| [deleted]
| lacrimacida wrote:
| Yeah, interesting to see how it plays out but my gut feeling is
| that it'll get from bad to worse. Hope I couldn't be more wrong
| and this will shake up the industry but with generated music
| and cloned voices I'm almost inclined to not even compare them.
| It's a new thing altogether.
| [deleted]
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'd take a step back, and ask what makes art (music, visual,
| etc) valuable.
|
| To that, I'd respond "scarcity."
|
| It's hard to imagine highly valued art (either culturally or
| monetarily) without scarcity.
|
| Consequently, I expect the next few decades will see similar
| progressions to the past, when technology encroached on
| scarcity (e.g. painting after the photograph, live performance
| after consumer video/music playback).
|
| Scarcity will reestablish itself in whatever guise remains
| technically feasible, and again become valued.
|
| In the case of LLMs and diffusion, I expect it will be creating
| things that are so novel they could not have come from AI.
|
| Hopefully skillful, deep parody and the absurd will reassert
| themselves, as post-JS-Daily-Show I think that's been missing
| in culture.
|
| But it sure as shit isn't generic pop music, which will be the
| first thing to be churned out of humanless hit factories and
| flood the market.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I think something can be valuable and abundant, what you
| really mean is what makes the value capturable. If truly good
| songs were cheap to create then people making good songs
| won't be able to charge as much as they do, but consumers
| will arguable experience more value through an abundance of
| good songs.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >consumers will arguable experience more value through an
| abundance of good songs.//
|
| It is people's shared experiences of a song that makes a
| song most valuable (it's not the only value, of course).
| Having more songs means less shared experiences, more is
| less.
|
| Imagine going to a club where the DJ can play any of a
| million songs but only one person knows that song; compared
| to them playing a setlist of floor-filling bangers ...
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| "It is people's shared experiences of a song that makes a
| song most valuable"
|
| You are definitely right that abundance leads to a
| decline in shared experiences. I'm the only person I know
| who listens to the music that I do, but of course I
| treasure that music. But beyond my anecdotal experience,
| from sites like Last.fm it appears that listeners really
| began to fragment by the 2010s; with so much on offer
| now, people don't necessarily listen to the same music as
| even their closest peers.
|
| DJs, too, have spoken about the decline of the well-known
| banger when they are being flooded with hundreds of new
| tracks every week. Moreover, computer mixing today means
| those tracks might get so cut up by DJs (e.g. taking a
| bass line from one track and a synth line from another)
| that they become well-nigh unrecognizable to even the
| savviest trainspotters.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The herd vs merit distinction is interesting, and I think
| they both have value. Maybe differently to different
| people, but non-zero.
|
| Imagine a handful of objectively "good" songs.
|
| Play them for a crowd where nobody knows them.
|
| Or, in a more humorous example, imagine the Beatles
| played tracks only from their second album, while touring
| for their first album. Would audiences be disappointed?
|
| I struggle to imagine an overly negative reaction. People
| love hearing songs they love, but they also fell in love
| with those songs for a reason. Well executed music is
| well-executed music.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Yes, agreed, music has a particular value to a person (I
| was going too say 'intrinsic' but it is personal) as
| well.
|
| But shared love of music, or shared experiences of music
| transcends this value IMO; and is largely orthogonal.
|
| "That song we danced to", "what we sang at the campfire",
| crab dance for LTT watchers, 'easy for ENZ' for CSGO
| players, a national anthem to a nationalist, ... the
| music matters a little but it's only really a rallying
| point for shared experiences.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >It's hard to imagine highly valued (either culturally or
| monetarily) art without scarcity.
|
| I disagree entirely. The Mona Lisa's value is greatly
| expanded by its free availability -- the one-off image on my
| wall is scarce, but it will never be a cultural icon, that is
| antithetical to scarcity.
|
| A value of art is reflection (the mental process), but this
| is magnified enormously if society can reflect on the work,
| reference it, abstract from it, view it and develop freely
| from it.
|
| Great pop songs are great because everyone has heard them and
| we have shared experiences around them. There is no such
| thing as a scarce pop song.
|
| (This is one of the great crimes that arise from copyright
| terms being great than a couple of decades, society doesn't
| get to riff on the important icons of its recent past.)
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Is the Mona Lisa print on your wall distinct from the
| original? I.e. Was her face shape changed in your print to
| a version you prefer?
|
| Arguments against against scarcity that point to copies of
| a singular work seem circuitous. There are innumerable
| copies _because_ the single, canonical version is so
| valued.
|
| Similarly, great pop songs are valued because everyone
| knows them, which is why individual song value peaked
| during the dawn of mass distribution (CD, then early
| digital) but before the market was flooded with volume.
|
| The scarcity in the pop sense is the limited number of
| songs that everyone knows. (Largely through sophisticated
| media campaigns and forced radio/channel placement, but I
| digress)
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| If the Mona Lisa didn't exist we'd elevate some other
| work more. If not Bo'Rap then Stairway to Heaven, etc.
|
| >Arguments against against scarcity that point to copies
| of a singular work seem circuitous.
|
| It's a good point, but I think it misses something. It is
| experiences of the effect of an artistic work that
| matter, not the work _per se_. Experiences of the work
| are 10-a-penny -- tens of millions have probably seen one
| of the 'originals', billions have probably experienced
| the effect of the artwork (which I will deftly avoid
| defining ;o)) through photos, copies, videos, imitations,
| and emulations.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| You can buy a copy of Vincent van Goghs Starry Starry Night
| for a few dollars, totally legally. There is no scarcity
| here.
|
| The only meaningful difference between it and the one in the
| Museum of Modern art is that it was painted by the Van Gogh
| directly. And sure it has a hefty price tag attached, but
| everybody who buys a copy buys it because they like it.
|
| Growing up music was rare, but with access to Spotify I can
| listen to so much more music. That has not meant I appreciate
| music less. Sabatons "Primo Victoria" is still going to pump
| me every time I hear it and Bethovens ninth is as uplifting
| as it ever was, no matter how many times I listen to it.
| shpx wrote:
| How much money have you spent on NFTs?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| $0
| greatwave1 wrote:
| > I'd take a step back, and ask what makes art (music,
| visual, etc) valuable.
|
| > To that, I'd respond "scarcity."
|
| What is your definition of valuable here?
|
| If you're referring to value to culture/society, I think
| you're very far off-base. The most culturally valuable
| artistic works are ubiquitous, the opposite of scarce. Art
| isn't really able to have any culture influence if it only
| impacts a small number of people.
|
| If you're referring to monetary value, you're also dead wrong
| lmao. Look at the top 100 most-paid artists of the last
| decade, and tell me how hard it is to find and appreciate
| their entire artistic catalogue for yourself.
|
| The argument that scarcity = artistic value doesn't have any
| basis in fact, and is the sort of thing that would only be
| shilled by someone trying to con you into buying an NFT.
|
| > It's hard to imagine highly valued art (either culturally
| or monetarily) without scarcity.
|
| hahahaha what? Compare the monetary and cultural impact of
| that one "ultra-scarce" Wu-Tang album (monetary: $2m,
| cultural: none) to the impact of Taylor Swift's last album,
| which is available on every streaming service (monetary:
| $200m+, cultural: very high)
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Valuable as in culturally significant and monetarily
| expensive.
|
| > _The most culturally valuable artistic works are
| ubiquitous, the opposite of scarce._
|
| Not so. _Copies_ of those works are ubiquitous, but there
| is a singular, definitive work.
|
| Name me a handful of world-famous works for which there are
| multiple, almost-indistinguishable but distinct copies.
|
| The Mona Lisa has a few original alternates, and yet they
| pale in value to the famous one. Which itself, ironically,
| became popular famous mostly through being stolen
| (scarcity).
|
| > _Look at the top 100 most-paid artists of the last
| decade, and tell me how hard it is to find and appreciate
| their entire artistic catalogue for yourself._
|
| > _[Once Upon a Time in Shaolin] vs [Speak Now (Taylor 's
| Version)]_
|
| Total artistic renumeration, especially in the modern
| period, is dominated by distribution volume.
|
| But if we're talking about single work valuation, the Wu
| Tang album costs $2M.
|
| Taylor's album costs $15.
|
| That's the premium for scarcity.
| greatwave1 wrote:
| > Copies of those works are ubiquitous, but there is a
| singular, definitive work.
|
| When referring to recorded music, this isn't a
| distinction that has ever actually mattered in the real
| world, just a fiction made up to shill NFTs.
|
| Are you going to pretend that anyone actually cares about
| a "singular, definitive FLAC file" that all of the
| streaming services' FLAC and MP3 playbacks are based on?
| This is pure fantasy, the copies are the same thing as
| the original piece.
|
| The idea that Mona Lisa's (or any other artwork's)
| cultural influence comes from its scarcity is hilarious.
| Literally anyone can visit the Louvre and appreciate it
| for themself. Do you think it would have anywhere near as
| much influence if it was hidden behind closed doors and
| only 1 person was able to see it?
|
| > But if we're talking about single work valuation, the
| Wu Tang album costs $2M. Taylor's album costs $15.
|
| Last time I checked, the sum of revenue from their
| discography is how artists and labels get paid, not based
| on the maximum amount that 1 person is willing to pay.
|
| Speak Now is a single work, and it generated like 100x as
| much monetary value as Shaolin (with like 10,000x as much
| cultural impact). And those estimates are extremely
| conservative, when you consider that you can tour and
| sell merch off an album that people can actually listen
| to lol.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| >> Name me a handful of world-famous works for which
| there are multiple, almost-indistinguishable but distinct
| copies.
| greatwave1 wrote:
| Literally every world-famous work has replicas and
| recreations, what's your point? Those copies are also
| part of the work's cultural influence, and in many cases
| (if the replicas are sold by the original artist) part of
| the monetary value as well.
|
| This doesn't provide any more credence to the falsity
| that art's scarcity is the source of its value (when
| overwhelming evidence proves that the exact opposite is
| true)
| ethbr1 wrote:
| That's not what I'm asking.
|
| Those replicas and recreations are recreations of a...
| single, scarce work.
|
| That's famous precisely because there is one original.
|
| But if that's not true, it should be possible to point
| to, say, a series of similar paintings or musical
| compositions that are _all_ famous.
|
| Generally, that's not the case though.
|
| Because people want _one_ thing.
|
| The _one_ Mona Lisa. The _one_ officially-blessed Taylor
| Swift album. The _one_ version of Beethoven 's Fifth.
|
| Complexity and variety confuses simple people and the
| market.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Voice cloning is a surprisingly underdicussed area of generative
| AI. It's also much more thorny: while text-generating AI and
| image-generating AI atleast help expand the creative sphere and
| tend to be more obvious, voice cloning _intentionally_ blurs the
| lines, which also professionally and impacts the source of the
| voice being cloned: https://www.axios.com/2023/07/24/ai-voice-
| actors-victoria-at...
|
| Last month, there was an incident where a prominent voice actor
| had their voice cloned for an AI parody video and the actor asked
| them to take it down; in response, the voice actor was harrassed
| off of social media for a bit.
| knodi123 wrote:
| There's a guy at work who has started using an AI avatar of
| himself, and an ai voice generator trained to his voice. He
| writes his daily standup notes in a text file and then lets his
| robot deliver the standup for him. I could tell something was a
| bit off with him, but after going through the "shitty zoom
| filter", honestly it was subtle and most people didn't notice.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| Whoa, how does one make a Zoom avatar of oneself? What tool
| is he using?
| rnk wrote:
| Yeah, how did you know it was really coming from them? ;-)
| knodi123 wrote:
| because after he was done, he derailed the meeting for
| like 5 minutes telling us how he set it up. I kid ,
| though, it was actually interesting.
| rnk wrote:
| I'd actually like to see how to do that. It would be cool
| to do it.
| morelisp wrote:
| > text-generating AI and image-generating AI atleast help
| expand the creative sphere
|
| I don't think these are as distinct as you think. Especially
| image-generating AI uses seem driven by the same impulse as
| voice cloning, virtually always "I want a picture like this
| picture I already have of X, but drawn like artist Y" (or "I
| want a picture of X for purely prurient reasons"), very rarely
| is it people struggling to put their own ideas into the world.
| minimaxir wrote:
| That was a stereotype from a year ago when Midjourney was
| first released, and hasn't been accurate for a very very long
| time particularly as new creative approaches have developed.
| morelisp wrote:
| > Data Scientist at BuzzFeed in San Francisco, creator of
| AI text generation tools
|
| Ah, I get it, AI tools which earn you money good and
| creative, AI tools which don't bad.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Or, alternatively, I am one of the few people who
| understands the many nuances in the generative AI space
| from experience.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Hopefully slightly less thorny when the voice cloned is of
| someone who died 40 years before the song they have it cover;
| e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jh7Jk3aSlo
| minimaxir wrote:
| That just makes it even more thorny because "who owns a
| voice" is legitimately a complicated legal question. Does the
| record label still own the cloned voice used for a song? What
| were the original samples used to clone the voice used from?
|
| With Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT you can argue that it's a
| massive amalgamation of inputs with no specific one having a
| huge impact, but voice cloning currently requires specific
| example(s).
|
| In the case of voice actors being unable to get their voices
| taken down from AI sites, they can't take legal action
| because the IP owners have the rights to their performance.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I think it's strictly less thorny because all of those
| things are issues with living artists, but you have lots of
| other added issues when the AI generated voice is also
| plausibly something that a living person might have done.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Aside: I'm not sure a banner saying 404 is the best idea. I
| opened the page and very nearly reflexively closed it thinking
| the site was down. Close the banner saying "404"and the content
| was then visible ... sigh.
| twic wrote:
| Given that it's a new venture continuing their work together at
| an old one, I thought 100 would be a more appropriate name, but
| that's pretty obscure even for an HTTP status.
| TheHappyOddish wrote:
| I reflexively hit my back button _twice_ after seeing a page
| littered with 404s.
| wpietri wrote:
| This is a really solid article, and has a lot more meat to it
| than I expected. It's also a great example of how "AI" is such a
| boon to bad actors because neither the LLMs nor scammers care
| about the truth.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| You could argue that in art it is folly to worry about
| authenticity and the real shame is when a masterful "fake"
| suddenly loses all its value when you find out it wasn't
| painted or recorded by the person you thought it was.
|
| Edit:
|
| I am torn about how I feel on the matter but here's a story
| worth sharing: I stayed up all night the day before the release
| of a much-awaited book in a series to read, leaked blurry jpeg
| by leaked blurry jpeg, hundreds of pages of the book that had
| just appeared online (I also went out and bought a copy the
| next day).
|
| While reading it, I knew there was no guarantee it was "real"
| and it could have been an elaborate hoax but the quality of the
| storytelling was such that I didn't care (at least in the
| moment) if it was fan fiction or the real deal: it was good and
| I wouldn't have regretted my time or enjoyed what I had read
| any less if it turned out to be a "fake."
| wpietri wrote:
| I could argue that, but it would be wrong. For me, art is
| about human connection. When I look at a work, I'm interested
| not just in the surface layer of the image, but what the work
| evokes in me and what was in the mind and context of its
| creator.
|
| If what I'm getting is just a synthetic, semi-random decoupe,
| then that is lost. Similarly, looking at randomly generated
| maps can be fun, but it's a pretty shallow fun unless there's
| a real territory represented there.
|
| That said, it can _also_ be interesting to look at the
| machinery that 's generating it, in the same way I enjoy
| videos of how things get made. But it's a different kind of
| interest and engages different parts of my mind.
| bitvoid wrote:
| > If what I'm getting is just a synthetic, semi-random
| decoupe, then that is lost.
|
| It certainly comes down to perception, interpretation, and
| a blind assumption though, right? Before generative AI, the
| blind assumption was that some human made a piece of art.
| That might be changing now, but if you didn't know (and
| couldn't know) a piece was artificial, feelings may still
| be evoked and you might still infer some meaning from it.
|
| With that said, not all art need be about human connection.
| I still enjoy mindless dubstep music on occasion despite
| not caring one bit about the artist or any meaning behind
| it (if any even exists beyond "it sounds cool"). The only
| value there is my enjoyment of it, but then again, I think
| enjoyment is the most valuable aspect of any piece.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| > When I look at a work, I'm interested not just in the
| surface layer of the image, but what the work evokes in me
| and what was in the mind and context of its creator.
|
| Let's put AI aside for a minute, then. When a suspected
| {Van Gogh, Vermeer, Picasso, etc} is found to actually be
| from a temporally coincident painter, perhaps one of his
| pupils, why can you no longer do that?
| mc32 wrote:
| To me it's the basic, "does a a tree falling in a forest
| with no one around to hear it make a sound?" Perception vs
| reality.
| arcticfox wrote:
| I don't really get the connection between the scenarios -
| and trying to think through it I just ran into one more
| realization of how LLMs have changed things. If I was
| sure a human wrote this I'd probably put some more effort
| to see things from that perspective, maybe it's a good
| way to think about it.
|
| But unfortunately now that this type of comment can be
| the rambling of an LLM, I don't want to put in the effort
| when it could simply be a mechanical fever dream...
| jnovek wrote:
| "For me, art is about human connection."
|
| I find the story of a human who makes an excellent fake
| pretty fascinating. There are noteworthy examples of
| forgery-as-art throughout history. I think art, as a
| concept, is a big enough space to house both things.
| viciousvoxel wrote:
| In fact, there's a museum of forgeries in Vienna
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Art_Fakes)
| hypeit wrote:
| > _I could argue that, but it would be wrong._
|
| You wouldn't be wrong, you would just be post-modern. As a
| post-modernist viewer, _I_ decide the context that I want
| to place media in.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Pretty sure the post-modern thinkers still care about
| authorship credit though, which is what we're discussing.
| hypeit wrote:
| I would argue that's not the case. The entire concept of
| "reality" is left to the individual in post-modern
| thought. I think eliminating the notion of authorship
| would be a solidly post-modern position to take.
| JohnFen wrote:
| For me, the value of art is in the communication between the
| artist and myself. If I don't care about the artist, the art
| has little meaning to me. In the case of music, it transforms
| art into just a sequence of interesting noises.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| Yep. A body of work reveals bits and pieces of some real,
| human perspective and _life_ and _mind_ that evolves and
| moves through the world between each work, adding even more
| richness to it. A new work from an artist I like isn't just
| exciting because I get more of a thing I like (that gets
| dull after a while) but because I'm excited about _what
| they want to show me and tell me this time_. How's their
| work changed? How does it reflect on their prior work?
| What's on their mind this, or last, year? Et c.
|
| I don't really care about having some equivalent
| "conversation" with an LLM.
| esafak wrote:
| In certain modern arts (esp. the visual ones) the connection
| between the art and the artist is valuable in itself. The
| creation is considered primarily in relation to its creator.
| It is curious why some arts are more susceptible to this
| thinking than others. I think it is a consequence of
| maturity; when technique is exhausted, the art seeks
| development in other avenues.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| So much of art's value is in originality, and what separates
| originality is first vs rest.
|
| There are likely thousands of people who can paint extremely
| high quality Monet-alikes, but they weren't there at the
| beginning of the impressionist movement.
|
| Granted, there's also name weight and limited supply due to
| creator death, but that "first!" can't be ignored.
|
| The artistic-economic tangle around originality wasn't
| something I'd thought about deeply until I saw some of
| Warhol's "X of Y" prints in person. Because he used an
| inexact process, there are subtle differences from frame to
| frame, which to me begged the question of whether a specific
| selection of frames and composition of them together was
| sufficient to re-establish a unique, original artistic work.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I have no firm position on the matter but I am nevertheless
| intrigued by the debate so I'll posit a question: let's
| grant the originality is certainly important.
| Hypothetically: Hitchcock releases his first masterful
| suspense film. It rightfully gets and deserves all praise.
| His compatriot releases a "knock off" and Hitchcock
| simultaneously releases a second film along the lines of
| his first. How do you measure originality here in the
| context of these latter two movies, neither of which was
| "the first" in its niche?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'd further tighten the scenario a bit before opining,
| while hopefully staying true to what you're asking.
|
| Let's imagine Hitchcock's compatriot releases a film that
| is Hitchcock-esque in _every_ way it can be (camera,
| lighting, themes, sound... the whole package), while
| featuring a novel plot.
|
| Then let's say Hitchcock also releases an equally-
| equivalent film to his first work.
|
| There is no non-plot innovation in either work, and the
| plot is as similar as can be while remaining distinct.
|
| What are the values these works could likely command?
|
| To me... I think the Hitchcock work would be more
| valuable, by virtue of his name, which in turn originated
| its value from his first masterful and original work.
|
| His compatriot's film would be valuable. After all,
| Hitchcock's original work was acclaimed, appreciated, and
| popular, so it stands to a reason an extremely similar
| work would be as well.
|
| But I can't see it approaching the value of Hitchcock's
| second, despite them being functionally identical
| artistic works. It's instead discounted by the lack of
| Hitchcock's name, itself valuable from the link to his
| first, original work.
|
| Interesting thought exercise!
|
| The follow-up would be what would happen if the market
| were flooded with first-alike films, either from
| Hitchcock or his compatriot!
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Thanks for playing! I'm pretty sure I feel the same way,
| but it is always good (and fun!) to stop and challenge
| yourself to see if there's a good reason for the way you
| feel about something or not.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I sympathize with this argument to some extent, but also
| would also warn that it conflicts with how many people
| consume art, to the point where they will respond almost
| hostilely.
| gumby wrote:
| A lot of people care about authenticity, but I'm with the
| crowd that couldn't care less. A book once owned by Issac
| Newton vs a used paperback with the same text are the same to
| me. A copy of a famous print vs one of the prints actualy
| made by the artist (or by someone in her studio!): I wouldn't
| pay extra for that. Really nice music by someone who likes
| the same famous musician as I do? Great!
|
| I'm not denying the appeal of "authenticity" but I can't for
| the life of me understand it.
| [deleted]
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| I don't think it's really that interesting that LLMs can lie.
| People have been lying with the written word since the written
| word existed. Hoaxes and scams are not new.
|
| I think what is new is that there are certain signals in text
| and creative work in general that would ordinarily demonstrate
| that some care and effort and resources have been used in the
| process of creating it, which makes it seem more likely that
| it's legitimate, and that now those signals are no longer
| valid. I think that people will rather quickly adjust from
| default credibility to default skepticism for text online, and
| will rely more on "provenance" for determining what to trust.
| fragmede wrote:
| I think that people actually _don 't_ lie about some of the
| things LLMs lie about, which is why it's so jarring that they
| do. I'm not saying people don't lie - they obviously do. It's
| that someone's not going to give me documentation about a
| Unix command line utility that doesn't exist, or a
| programming library API, and then have be believe them a
| second time, so when Guido tells me about awk one liners, I
| believe him. When Ellie the LLM comes around and feeds me
| lies in a way a person _wouldn 't_, it's really jarring.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Agreed, it's quite a crazy and fascinating article. Had me
| laughing cynically in a way that doesn't feel good.
|
| > no one is really sure what's real, what's fake, whether
| they're being scammed, or who or what made the songs that
| they're listening to.
|
| This is close to the definition of technologically induced
| societal madness Jaron Lanier sketched in an article about a
| year ago.
|
| Pop will eat itself. We always knew that. Pop is the spirit of
| whimsical, ephemeral, self-devouring, involuted art. It's to be
| expected.
|
| But so much else has become like Pop; news media, food,
| medicine, clothing, even the cars we drive... At some point AI
| combined with appalling cyber-security and our over-reliance on
| tech will start to tear all of these things apart. This kinda
| started in the pandemic, even before AI. Is it really
| government advice to drink bleach? Or a terrorist plot?
|
| Philip K. Dick would not know how to write this stuff.
| gumby wrote:
| > This is a really solid article, and has a lot more meat to it
| than I expected
|
| These guys have come out of the gate strong. I think they only
| launched in the last couple of weeks.
|
| Remains to be seen if they can sustain it.
| myelin wrote:
| My HN workflow is to open a bunch of tabs, then close the main
| page, and read through all the articles. When I got to this tab,
| I saw "404", figured I'd hit a bad link, and closed the tab...
| then realized that that was the name of the publication.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Yeah it's not a great brand choice.
| mecsred wrote:
| Maybe it's actually a genius brand choice. Most people
| wouldn't remember http error codes even if they've seen 404
| pages before. Only scrambles the nerds.
| rob74 wrote:
| Yup, the white popup that was shown when I opened the page made
| it look even more like an error message...
| [deleted]
| latchkey wrote:
| I do that, but I've pinned the main page tab so that all the
| new tabs open to the right of that one. Once I've read/closed
| them all, I just hit reload and keep the addiction going. =)
| rob74 wrote:
| [flagged]
| hypeit wrote:
| This seems like the most interesting thing to happen to pop music
| in quite some time. It's been about hoovering up as much cash as
| possible from teenagers for the past 70 years so putting label
| created bubblegum in a steelcage deathmatch with ai generated
| music actually gives the genre a perspective with a bit more
| depth.
| shawnc wrote:
| Great point. It's fascinating that the trend of the pop music
| industry has been towards more and more electronic control over
| vocals and instruments and everything else for a very long
| time... and now that AI can basically replicate it, and with
| all the auto-tune that we got used to, we can barely tell if
| it's 'real' or AI-generated.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It's almost like the capital/distribution forces of mass
| market media have been striving to devalue the human
| components of the art...
|
| ... but I can't imagine why that'd be attractive to them.
| greatwave1 wrote:
| I don't think this is accurate -- overt autotune in pop music
| peaked in the 00's, and has really not been as influential in
| the pop trends of the last decade or two.
|
| Many of the most popular artists today lean away from heavy
| electronic control, and go for a more acoustic/natural sound.
|
| I think that the AI vocals becoming indistinguishable from
| the real thing has more to do with the quality of the AI, and
| less to do with modern pop music sounding robotic.
| porkbeer wrote:
| Name a singpe pop tune without pitch correction in the last
| 20 years. A few exist, but go look. It will be
| enlightening, and perhaps disheartening.
| [deleted]
| mmaunder wrote:
| This is what nascent disruption looks and feels like.
| Screenwriters at the WGA stopping work to "prevent" AI taking
| their jobs or part of their jobs. AI music infringing on brands.
| You will see many Napster's and Kazaa's emerge and die, and
| ultimately lawsuits and regulation will evolve and stabilize the
| landscape. But fighting to go back to the way things have been is
| like trying to stop people from using electricity and creating
| power plants and appliances: With a fundamental breakthrough of
| this magnitude, things will change and you will see a surge in
| innovation, with many old world casualties.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Accepting the wholesale decimation of the entertainment system
| by indirect copyright infringement is a pretty big issue.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| The entirety of the horse-based industrial complex cries out
| in echos.
| kromem wrote:
| Except it won't be.
|
| Media is turning from a product into a service.
|
| The personalization impact of AI on media is going to be more
| profitable for the surviving media companies than static
| media ever was.
|
| You'll still have many of the roles currently in media, but
| the work will shift from creating a singular static media
| product to creating a media framework that's further extended
| by AI products.
|
| People have turned out to have rather binary thinking on the
| topic. Everything is cast as _either_ human or AI, with
| relatively little consideration for the much more likely
| scenario where it 's both in nuanced applications.
|
| We're nowhere near saturation in meeting demand for most
| things as much as we are constrained in supply which tempers
| and limits demand. AI supplementing human labor is going to
| result in much more tailored product offerings at similar
| costs, not the same offerings at lower costs.
|
| And any companies that invest in the latter instead of the
| former are going to be losing market share to those who do
| the opposite.
|
| I really hope people stop trying to forecast the future of
| disruption against the context of the status quo, and instead
| better recognize the ways that the status quo is going to be
| changing alongside that disruption.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| It's not a forecast. People already bought copyrighted-ish
| goods.
| hooverd wrote:
| If we extrapolate on current trends, a surge in slop.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| The writers strike has little to do with "AI" and a lot to do
| with getting paid for shows on streaming services. Tech media
| has ran wild with the AI angle because it's attention-grabbing,
| but it's far from being the most important demand.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| That, and writing teams getting hired for entire
| productions/seasons vs. treating each script and rewrite like
| one-off gig work.
| _sys49152 wrote:
| i mean, the vocals sound like they belong. the entire song sounds
| ai generated - bland, vacuous. sounds exactly like when i turn on
| the car radio in 2007. might as well just say fuck it, put out a
| full album of ai tracks. go wwe, its fake wrestling who cares.
|
| we're about 3 years away from ai making 5 star sounding tracks
| with vocals and lyrics.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-09-12 23:02 UTC)