There can be nothing new or original out of AI because all of its inputs are stolen from what already exists. Real creativity comes solely from humans. Also, that clip - the song, singing, and visual - is dreadful in every way.
This needs to be hammered into techbro's heads until they shut the fuck up about the so-called "AI" revolution.
I've been doing a lot of using, testing, and evaluating LLMs and GPT-style models for generating code and text/prose. Some of it is just general use to see how it behaves, some has been explicit evaluation of creative writing, and a bunch of it is code generation to test out how we need to modify our CS curriculum in light of these new tools.
It's an impressive piece of technology, but it's not very creative. It's meh. The results are meh. Which is to be expected since it's a statistical model that's using a large body of prior work to produce a reasonable approximation of what it's seen before. It trends towards the mean, not the best.
and a bunch of it is code generation to test out how we need to modify our CS curriculum in light of these new tools.
I'm curious if you've gotten anything decent out of them. I've tried to use it for tech/code questions, and it's been nothing but disappointment after disappointment. I've tried to use it to get help with new concepts, but it hallucinates like crazy and always give me bad results, some of the time it's so bad that it gives me answers I've already told it we're wrong.
That's where some of the significant advances over the past 12 months of research have been, specifically around using the fine tuning phase to bias towards excellence. The biggest advance there has been that capabilities in larger models seem to be transmissible to smaller models by feeding in output from the larger more complex models.
So while you are correct that the pretrained models come out with a regression towards the mean, there are very promising recent advances in taking that foundation and moving it towards excellence.
I'm excited for how these tools will be used by human creators to accomplish things they could never do alone, and in that aspect it is a revolutionary technology. I hate that their marketing calls it "AI" though, the only intelligence involved is the human user that creates prompts and curates results.
It's not the techbros leading this, it's the BBAs and MBAs that wouldn't know art if Michelangelo came to life and slapped them in the face with the sistine chapel.
I see it an more an inability to analyze, evaluate, and edit. A lot of "creativity" in the world of musical composition is putting together existing elements and seeing what happens. Any composer from pop to the very avant-garde, is influenced and sometimes even borrow from their predecessors (it's why copyright law is so complex in music).
It's the ability to make judgements, does this sound good/interesting, does this have value, would anyone want to listen to this, and adjust accordingly that will lead to something original and great. Humans are so good at this, we might be making edits before the notes hit the page (Brainstorming). This AI clearly wasn't. And deciding on value, seems wildly complex for modern day computers. Humans can agree on it (if you like Rock, but hate country for example).
So in the end, they are "creative" but in a monkey-typewritter situation, but who is going to sort through the billions of songs like this to find the one masterpiece?
but who is going to sort through the billions of songs like this to find the one masterpiece?
One of the overlooked aspects of generative AI is that effectively by definition generative models can also be classifiers.
So let's say you were Spotify and you fed into an AI all the songs as well as the individual user engagement metadata for all those songs.
You'd end up with a model that would be pretty good at effectively predicting the success of a given song on Spotify.
So now you can pair a purely generative model with the classifier, so you spit out song after song but only move on to promoting it if the classifier thinks there's a high likelihood of it being a hit.
Within five years systems like what I described above will be in place for a number of major creative platforms, and will be a major profit center for the services sitting on audience metadata for engagement with creative works.
Plenty of humans make those judgements about their own creations. And plenty of them get a shock when they release their creations to the masses and don't get the praise that they expected.
The problem for a lot of the companies behind these things, is that they've run into problems now their investors want them to turn meat into a black forest gateau.
I'm sceptical if they can manage that feat. But what do I know.
Still, AI is able to "create" new things by a combination of existing concepts. It can generate a Roomba in the style of Van Gogh for example, which is probably not something that currently exists.
Right just as soon as all the people proclaiming that can point to the soul bit of my brain. There is absolutely no reason to say that AI cannot be creative there's nothing fundamentally magic about creativity that means only humans can do it.
You're equating creativity to the soul. They're not the same thing. But we can definitely look at the brain and see what parts light up when perform creative tasks.
The belief that only humans can be creative is interestingly parallel to intelligent design creationism. The latter is fundamentally a religious faith, but it strongly appeals to the intuition that anything that happens needs a humanoid creator.
I don't think, the human brain is special either, but we are still two big steps ahead IMHO:
We can perceive what we've generated, to judge whether it's good or bad.
We perceive many, many inputs throughout our lives. Not just text, visuals, audio, but also taste, smell, touch and more. To be simultaneously creative and relatable to humans, AIs would need to be equipped with these concepts and would need to be given 'memories', which are fleshed out with all these kinds of input.
Yes, it is literally impossible for any AI to ever exist that can be creative. At no point in the future will it ever create anything creative, that is something only human beings can do. Anybody that doesn't understand this is simply incapable of using logic and they have no right to contribute to the conversation at all. This has all already been decided by people who understand things really well and anyone who objects is obviously stupid.
Except that it's wrong... AI is capable of creativity. It created the artist name. It's clearly not a very developed or robust sense of creativity because it clearly just hashed up the name Hanna Montana, and the song is probably likewise just a hashed up existing song, but I'm guessing it probably did a better job of creating an original work than vanilla ice...
I'm sorry, anyone who says these so-called "AI" are capable of creativity are being hoodwinked by marketing. This is an algorithmic probability engine, it doesn't think and it doesn't have an imagination. It just regurgitates probabilistic responses from its large data set.
How to make line assembled pop music even more sterile and devoid of soul. Now at one thousandth the cost! But wait, how are CEOs going to molest child artists when they aren't real?!
The song sucks, but here was the cutting edge of AI music just seven years ago.
That it's gone from some nightmarish fever dream mashup to wannabe pop influencer levels of quality in less than a decade is pretty crazy, and as long as there isn't a plateau in the next seven years we'll probably be in a world where AI generated musical artists have a popular enough following that they will have successful holographic concert performances by 2030.
I over and over see people making the mistake of evaluating the future of AI based on the present state while ignoring the rate of change between the past and present.
Yeah, most of your experiences of AI in various use cases is mediocre right now. But what we have today in most areas of AI was literally thought to be impossible or very far out just a number of years ago. The fact you have any direct experiences of AI in the early 2020s is fucking insane and beyond anyone's expectations a decade earlier. And the rate of continued improvement is staggering. Probably the fastest moving field I've ever witnessed.
Technically we already have things like Vocaloid, which aren't AI yet, but do have their own holographic concerts that are popular in places like Japan and China. So having an AI artist come on stage and sing be too farfetched for me, despite the fact I'd hate it because it's a soulless entity devised by the corporate fascists. As for the quality of AI generated songs, no clue, but I can totally see them just ripping off up and coming human artists and then sending cease and desist letters to them for "StEaLiNg Ai GeNeRaTeD mUsIc" that was originally stolen or just stealing popular vocaloid songs and piggybacking off of every single person they can for profit.
Keep in mind, though, AI progress is often more like punctuated equilibrium.
Each new approach gets you much further, and polishing each approach gets you slight improvements until the next approach comes along. Improvements to chatgpt might plateau until the next big breakthrough architecture. Or maybe not.
polishing each approach gets you slight improvements
Without the base model changing at all, research into better use of the models has, depending on the measurement, gone from around 35% success rates to 85% success rates.
The fact that AI can produce this is impressive as to where we have come with AI. But can this actually threaten human artists?
In the United States, a federal judge ruled in 2023 that AI artwork cannot meet federal copyright standards because “Copyright law is ‘limited to the original intellectual conceptions of the author’.” With no author, there is no copyright.
"The answer will depend on the circumstances, particularly how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final work," the office said.
Under current US law, that song is probably now in the public domain. If the law changes, that could mean that in the future, music charts potentially could be filled with AI songs. As it stands, this is most-likely a public domain music machine cranking out music that anyone can use royalty-free. It depends on the interpretation of the courts.
The threshold for how much human input counts as "authorship" is extremely low. Photographers get copyright over pictures they take when their sole contribution to the image is aiming the camera and pushing a button. Most AI-generated art involves a lot of human input in the form of prompting, selecting outputs, and then often tweaking or splicing them together in various ways.
But even if by some weird twist US courts do rule this sort of thing to be public domain, why wouldn't this "threaten human artists?" Having awesome AI-generated art being public domain seems like the best of both worlds to me - you get awesome art and it's legally unencumbered. How would a human artist compete with that? Their art would be more expensive and you'd have all kinds of limitations on what you can do with it.
If the autogenerated art becomes too close to copyrighted art, then you'll have humans suing AI generators.
George Harrison's My Sweet Lord is very similar to He's So Fine by the Chiffons. And that was an easy case. But some cases in requires deeper analysis, such as Lana Del Ray's Get Free.
In January 2018, singer Lana Del Rey claimed that Radiohead were suing her because of alleged similarities between their 1992 debut single Creep, and her song Get Free, from her 2017 album Lust for Life. The band's publishers Warner/Chappell subsequently denied taking legal action, but did confirm requesting credit for “all writers” of Creep.
The Guardian spoke to a professional composer to analyse the songs, who noted that the chords used are rare in pop music, and the melodies bear an uncanny resemblance, although in conclusion “imagined the similarities are unintentional”.
If AI is sampling, then how do you defend it being unintentional? While all Radiohead sought was credit on the writing (in this case), would humans (whose livelihood is being threatened) be so generous with an AI composition? And if the music industry is threatened by AI, they will lawyer up.
The mistake you are making is in thinking that the future of media will rely on the same infrastructure as what it's been historically.
Media is evolving from being a product, where copyright matters in protecting your product from duplication, to being a service where any individual work is far less valuable because of the degree to which it is serving a niche market.
Look at how many of the audio money makers on streaming platforms are defined by their genre rather than a specific work. Lofi Girl or ASMR made a ton of money, but there's not a single specific work that is what made them popular like with a typical recording artist with a hit song.
The future of something like Spotify will not be a handful of AI artists creating hit singles you and everyone else want to listen to, but AI artists taking the music you uniquely love to listen to and extending it in ways that are optimized around your individual preferences like a personalized composer/performer available 24/7 at low cost.
In that world, copyright for AI produced works really doesn't matter for profitability, because AI creation has been completely commoditized.
I mean, even if this song was coming from a human it'd be derivative, boring, and worthless.
If anything, the fact something comparable to mediocre human YouTube musical artists is being AI generated is the thing that is wild and impressive. The song itself in isolation is beyond meh.
Seriously, my thought was "I have friends who have Soundclouds that sound worse than this".
But I don't call my friends' music "just brutal" or "dreadful in every way".
People can call ai generated movie shit or boring or whatever all they want, but i heard for example Henry styles watermelon sugar high, that song was popular as hell, and it might as well just be ai generated mambo jambo
It's not as though the article is any better - bots just wrapping up a comment thread from twitter, cramming it with ads, and presenting it as an article.
Yeah, my blocked website list is growing everyday with websites that are literally just a 4 paragraph summary of a reddit post. 3 of the paragraphs are usually just "user 'spezcocksucker' says this but another person disagrees. Here's the reddit link and 27 ads.
I accidentally submitted early, but also, I wrote out the lyrics. It's the most bland version of those breakup-depression kind of songs imaginable. I guess people voted it as "feel-good" out of irony.
“Betrayed by this town / Let’s burn it all down “ might be the most relevant chorus of today’s music. It’ll be stuck in my head all night and would fit right in at most protests
Good thing the stuff people call AI now isn't and never will be capable of emotion, that way I can call it and things it generates stupid and bad and worthless without anyone getting offended :3
That picture is weird, there's some AI nonsense going on with the microphone shock mount, and her jaw doesn't line up with the rest of her face. Plus the usual uncanny valley weirdness of an AI generated image.
Not so much an expert rather than just parroting what I saw, but according to a cursory search, and a Twitter community note I saw from a friend, the voice used by this project is Synthesizer V, which is actually a perfectly legitimate piece of software for using digital voices in music production. If you've heard of Vocaloid, or know about Hatsune Miku, SynthV is basically a competitor in that space.
Going back to the community note, the voice used is actually called Natalie, and apparently the TOS of SynthV does not allow use of its voices using a name that's different to what was given. So they essentially can't present the Natalie voice as Anna, which they are.
EDIT: I want to clarify that these voice synthesisers like SynthV and Vocaloid are usually based on the recording of someone who has consented to the use of their voice in that regard and has been paid for it. It's not like the current AI voice cloning trend going on.
No prob! These digital voices have been around for over a decade now, maybe more. Some of them use "AI" to improve the sound of the voice (i.e. support more languages than actually recorded, make it sound realistic) but not in the way that current AI voice trends are going.
To me the biggest problem with it is that it doesn't understand the relationship between the meanings of the words and the melody of the song. It kinda makes it sound like a bad parody song. I think if you looked at just the lyrics or just the melody they would be quite convincing on their own.
I think in the context of K-Pop it makes total sense, the music and everything around is anyway just done after a formula which has proven to work very well to sell. While right now you need to put children and teenagers through years of rigorous training and expose them to immense stress and pressure so most of them break, with AI you can easily replicate the same formula and refine much quicker without throwing so many young people into the meat grinder of the music industry.
More money and control for the companies less people killing themselves.
The ones who really burn for the music will make music despite AI music being available. And they also will find an audience, even though it might be smaller.
While right now you need to put children and teenagers through years of rigorous training and expose them to immense stress and pressure so most of them break
Uh... I don't think that's a necessary part of the process to making k-pop, or any kind of music. Industry people may think it's critical to making themselves shit-loads of money, but it's not important for the creation music or even selling the music.
Yeah, that's what I meant with the rest of my text that people will make music still, and this corporate breaking the children and teenagers can be replaced by AI.
What I worry about this is mainstream becoming "accustomed" to assemblyline content by AI. What if eventually people start actually consider the conformity to be good thing and originality deviant? Of course there will always be people who dont care what other think but vast majority of people seems to at least on some level be very conscious about it.
Imagine being the weird one just because you don't like ai generated crap
Have you seen the movie WALL-E? The people on the space-ship they're consuming engaging content all day long, nobody is creating anything anymore, so all this must been created by the AI. I'm just trying to say that it's not a novel idea. Writers and artists have been imagining this future for ourselves for a long time.
Just looking at the picture this already seems like amateur work.
As for the music being ... Yes it's pretty flat and unexciting. Realistically lots of today's music is already a remix of a remix and honestly... quite generic.
Bands have been cast for looks for a long time, autotune has been here for ages, and with a better effort in the voice department I don't see AI artists being far off.
I don't think they will ever completely replace artists here, especially since live events really are a thing of their own but.. eh
Here I am just wondering how much automation went into tuning/tweaking the voice. I've made some stuff in Synthesizer V Studio and that's a big chunk of the work. Being able to load something into an AI and have it give a pass would be awesome.
I think everyone's being a bit unfair. I'm not saying it's remotely good but this is like the Clippy tool of of AI singing/songwriting. That, and everything is predictable...but imagine where this'll be in 10yrs!
This is just the beginning. I am looking forward to at least a decade of merry goalpost-shifting from the creative community before everyone comes to terms with the realization that human creativity may actually not be that special after all.