Barack Obama: “For elevator music, AI is going to work fine. Music like Bob Dylan or Stevie Wonder, that’s different”::Barack Obama has weighed in on AI’s impact on music creation in a new interview, saying, “For elevator music, AI is going to work fine”.
Why would people think he knows anything about AI?
Because you can teach a teen to do it in two weeks. He was a constitutional law professor, as well as the first elected African-American president in the United States. I learned LLMs in a couple months and I never used a comp until 2021. Why are you gatekeeping?
Using the end product and having any idea how it works are two VERY different things.
I agree, my argument is that both aren’t challenging for even the average person if they really want/need to understand how these models produce refined noise informed by human patterns.
There are electricians everywhere you know.
This isn’t a random person thoughtlessly yelling one-sentence nonsense pablum on the Internet like you.
You think this person can’t understand something as straightforward as programming, coming from law?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama
Please link your Wikipedia below 🫠
It’s a bit more complicated than you’re making it out to be lmfao, there’s a reason it’s only really been viable for the past few years.
The principles are really easy though. At its core, neural nets are just a bunch of big matrix multiplication operations. Training is still fundamentally gradient descent, which while it is a fairly new concept in the grand scheme of things, isn’t super hard to understand.
The progress in recent years is primarily due to better hardware and optimizations at the low levels that don’t directly have anything to do with machine learning.
We’ve also gotten a lot better at combining those fundamentals in creative ways to do stuff like GANs.
Why are you acting like it’s at all difficult to understand?
Because he’s a world leader and AI programs are answering search engine queries with what you want to hear now, not actual answers. Ain;t no way hes unaware that.
Because we often look up to public figures for stuff they are not qualified to comment on.
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Can we get a second opinion from Dre?
Are you saying that Barack Obama and Dr. Dre both are equally unqualified to talk about “AI”? What other similarities do they share that makes you reach for Dr. Dre so quickly? Do you believe that Obama or Dre are incapable of interacting with computers or understanding computer science? Do you think that people who look like “thugs” to a person like you might be capable of learning and performing complex tasks?
But what does ja rule think?
If he’s an unqualified bystander, then what the fuck are you?
I’m always surprised that the people with all the answers only share them with thirty other assholes on the Internet.
I’m confident a 14 year old can write their own AI, maybe even a smart 10 year old.
Here’s instructions for kids:
https://youtu.be/XJ7HLz9VYz0?si=1QN3fqT03HSMufib
You think Obama can’t wrap his head around a little algebra?
Why, when speaking intelligently and thoughtfully in the subject, is he so wrong in his assessment, when you, in one lazy sentence, are so right?
I’m really worried about would-be wise people just throwing in the towel cause they don’t know how much better they could be with a little discipline, and settle for being clever here and there.
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Why, when speaking intelligently and thoughtfully in the subject, is he so wrong in his assessment, when you, in one lazy sentence, are so right?
Obama is employing good old human exceptionalism and moving the goal post. A tried and true method of argumentation that has continued to fail for the last 50+ years when it comes to AI. “AI is good at X, but not Y” becomes “AI is good at X and Y, but not Z” the next year. Focus on a tiny niche that AI hasn’t covered yet, while ignoring the pace at which AI is advancing. Wasn’t too long ago that people where proclaiming that computers could never be creative. Nowadays that switched to “but it can’t beat the human masters”. Well, guess what? That did neither hold true for Chess nor Go and it won’t work out for Bob Dylan music either. Be prepared for a future where AI is better at everything. It will come and much sooner than people expect.
It’s also worth keeping in mind the quantity of AI generated content. I still hear tons of artists talk as if AI were competing with them on a level playing field. But in the time they finish one image, AI finished thousands or even millions. This is not just about AI replacing the human, but completely shifting how we deal with information in general. Something like ChatGPT isn’t interesting because it can write better websites than a human, but because it completely bypasses the need to visit websites in the first place. You ask the AI and the AI delivers the answers. There is no intermediate step where knowledge needs to get dumped into a static website or a book.
As far as I know, Obama has nothing to do with IT and doesn’t have a big interest in it. A lot of people on here are probably more qualified than he is when it comes to these topics simply because they spent a lot of their free time learning about it.
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AI researcher (PhD) here and for what it’s worth, Obama got it extremely right. I saw this and went “holy shit, he gets it”
If you don’t think ai will get there and surpass everything humans have done in the past, you should change career.
I’m saying this because I do this for a living. It has become obvious to everyone in research (for example - https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00059) that "AI"s don’t understand what they are outputting. The secret sauce with all these large models is the data scale. That is, we have not had real algorithmic breakthroughs - it’s just model scale and data scale. So we can make models that mimic human language and music etc but to go beyond, we need multiple fundamentally different breakthroughs. There is a ton of research attention now so it might happen, but it’s not guaranteed - the improvements we’ve seen in the past few years will plateau as data plateaus (we are already there according to some, i.e we’ve used all the data on the Internet). Also, this - https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2
You do it for a living and you can’t even understand what a general ai is. Alas I long since understood that mostly everyone is profoundly incompetent at their own jobs.
Yeah I dont believe you at all. I got my master in AI 8 years ago and have been working in the field ever since and no one with any knowledge would agree with you at all. In fact I showed a couple of my colleagues the headline of this article and they both just laughed.
Wow, a word from a global expert on AI, Barrack Obama. I hope he’s a bit better at it than he is at world peace!
Definitely need more people to tell me about ai and what it will be capable of. Make a daily show so that every shitty celebrity can tell us about ai, there might still be plenty of word combinations that haven’t been used!
Obama must not have heard There I Ruined It.
While I agree, it’s also the case that those …Creations… are extremely human directed. As far as I know the maker is not only training the models for the voices, but also specifying each output word, and then its timing and pitch(s)
And of course placing the siren whistle.
But do we really need AI to generate art?
Why can’t AI be used to automate useful work nobody wants to do, instead of being a way for capital to automate skilled labor out of high-paying jobs?
I don’t think it’s really helpful to group a bunch of different technologies under the banner of A.I. but most people aren’t knowledgeable enough to make the distinction between software that can analyze a medical scan to tell me if I have cancer and a fancy chat bot.
Because AI is unpredictable. Which is not a big issue for art, because you can immediately see any flaws and if you can’t, it doesn’t matter.
But for actually useful work, you don’t want to find out that the AI programmer completely made up a few lines of code that are only causing problems when the airplane is flying with a 32° bank angle on a saturday with a prime number for a date.
Was that the Boeing 737 Max issue?
Not exactly, no.
That was the point. Was not even AI but complex systems are complex.
RIP Kenny G
He’s survived many mockeries over the years haha
Andre 3000 is taking the wheel for him.
I thought he died for a moment
Is the joke that he makes elevator music
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Jesus this is terrible. The accuracy is incredible!
(/s, I ain’t fighting fans of the good lord Bob)
“You don’t get it. This song is very deep!”
This thread is as much evidence of our failed educational system as is the entire state of Mississippi
Wow, coming outta nowhere to sideswipe Mississippi for no apparent reason, great work you’re doing here.
Yeah fuck Mississippi all my homies hate Mississippi
Already likely to be untrue, but honestly I’d happily sign up for a world wear “hold music” isn’t the same 20sec loop of shit jazz
The Opus hold track slaps though
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Good bot!
Can’t imagine good art coming from something that’s incapable of giving a shit about things.
Young tech can’t tell real from simulacrum
Is muzak your idea of good art?
What is good art? Stuff like this can be produced with zero effort in a couple of seconds. ChatGPT wrote the prompt. And to my eye at least that looks “good enough”, it’s not like I frequently see human art that looks better. If we get AI that can write elevator music at that level, I’d probably be fine with that too.
What is good art? Stuff like this can be produced with zero effort in a couple of seconds.
Lol, not that.
Could you please answer the question: What is good art?
Sure, I am after all the sole arbiter of what good art is. /s
I’ll answer like a supreme court justice: I know it when I see it.
Examples are welcome.
I thought some of the early banksy stuff was pretty good.
I’m sure AI can generate an original one of those that’s as evocative because it deeply understands the human experience, has the ability to spray paint on public walls, is aware of trends and culture, and is similarly concerned about the rise of modern fascism and surveillance states.
Ain’t perfect, but close enough for now: https://imgur.com/a/mHHeJyn
🤣
For art to be good it needs to leave an impression on people. Can’t imagine anyone taking anything away from Generic Pretty Girl #372
For art to be good it needs to leave an impression on people.
It’s leaving an impression on me. What do you consider good art?
Can’t imagine anyone taking anything away from Generic Pretty Girl #372
Well, you can have it with robots, cows and horses too. That’s the fun of it, it’s endlessly remixable.
I don’t think you’re going to remember that particular image in a week.
That’s just due to the lack of repetition, not due to a lack in the art. If I print it out and hang it on the wall, I am sure remembering it. In the digital realm it’s just one image out of hundreds. That’s the fun with AI art, the act of creation and consumption blur together. The individual image is little more than a starting point for further creation.
It’s an infinite crap generator, which I can see why people are so enamored with it. Because people seem to want a seeming variety of generic junk almost instinctually. Just take a look at the variety of garbage available on all streaming platforms right now, the variety of garbage on YouTube, or even worse a single aisle in any grocery store: shelves full of crap that’s often the same thing with different labels, substances that are utter shit on almost a molecular level but seem appealing or better than others based upon packaging.
Edit: Amazon is nearly a perfection of the instant, endless crap business model. Just imagine when someone hooks up one of these things to a 3d printer. You can then have infinite crap generated entirely based upon your search queries. Now if you’ll excuse me I have a patent application to file…
Just take a look at the variety of garbage available on all streaming platforms right now
Yeah, and that was created by humans. Guess why I like AI art? It can produce way more interesting stuff than that. The bar for “human art” is pretty f’n low. What do you consider “good art”?
It’s not even infinite
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-world-is-running-out-of-data-to-feed-ai-experts-warn
I think your generation’s the first to be totally pink for this sort of thing and I’m worried for ya
I’m gutted that you can’t tell the difference. Or that you don’t care to. It’s sad you think this toy is an idol.
I’m gutted that you can’t tell the difference.
Then fucking enlightenment. Everybody keeps talking “AI art bad” yet nobody keeps showing what good art is supposed to be.
The same can be said about any random piece of human created art.
Most stuff looks pretty generic, you’re right. But there’s actually been a couple times when I’ve been baffled by the output. For this one, for example, I just gave it my username
That takes a steaming hot dump on what the vast majority of people can do.
It’s why people are scared. They should be.
That takes a steaming hot dump on what the vast majority of people can do.
I’d argue that it is a steaming hot dump of random, deviant art quality junk, but to each their own.
I’d argue people like you are going to hold it under much more scrutiny knowing it’s made by AI instead of humans.
I’d also argue you will do this without admitting it.
Nah I barely looked at it, and wouldn’t care who made it because it looks like tarot card garbage.
This thread is the gift that keeps in giving 🤣
HAHA that’s crazy you think that that is so great.
I was like this in the 90s with MDs.
You probably think AI porn is “stunning” 🤣
‘So great’ would be inaccurate.
I said it “takes a steaming hot dump on what the vast majority of people can do.”
Tell me you feel called out without telling me you feel called out. Lol.
Why would I feel called out by a pattern I’ve seen a few times before and the generation before me saw even more than that?
You’re like the dude in the other 20s, “you fools! Look to the sky! The dirigible has conquered the realm once enjoyed freely only by the birds and angels! I’ll take a streaming hot DUMP on you from here! One golden ticket onto the glorious Hindenburg!”
Flies are just consequences of shit; I don’t feel much of anything about flies I figure 🤷♂️
I think magicians love when audiences are willing to both believe in magic and maintain a respect for the secrecy of their trade.
I’ll tell you what I know for sure: people from my generation are working like their lives depend on it to separate the new generations from their money using our triumphant new invention; so of course this looks like impressive art to younger people and no one else; you’ll love the AI music we sell you too! And wait till you meet all the AI characters we’ve trained for you! You can sit, jaw dropped stifling laughter to hear the next joke designed to make you cackle so hard you piss yourself, in a room full of tailored friends.
There are still tons of real things in this world: they still inspire more fruitful wonder than we do for ourselves and our contraptions.
so of course this looks like impressive art to younger people and no one else;
So what exactly do you consider “impressive art”?
you’ll love the AI music we sell you too!
The money argument is frankly a bit pointless at the moment, since nobody has figured out how to make money with AI art. Any new AI tool is replicated by another company within months. The AI art itself is essentially worthless, since everybody can just generate it by themselves for free. A lot of the tools are also Open Source and can run on your own PC locally.
Maybe one day we’ll have some AI-TikTok with an endless stream of user-targeted AI content and ads in between, but that doesn’t exist yet. For the time being, AI is just costing companies money.
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It’s reassuring that this opinion is based on many years of experience reading scientific papers, implementing these models and following the trends closely!
I was really hoping the comments would be some sort of “what the fuck does he know?”
I scrolled a bit and there are many like these, yep
There is no way this ages well.
I don’t know. I think Obama kind of nailed it. AI can create boring and mediocre elaborations just fine. But for the truly special and original? It could never.
For the new and special, humans will always be required. End of line.
At this point I want a calendar of at what date people say “AI could never” - like “AI could never explain why a joke it’s never seen before is funny” (such as March 2019) - and at what date it happens (in that case April 2022).
(That “explaining the joke” bit is actually what prompted Hinton to quit and switch to worrying about AGI sooner than expected.)
I’d be wary of betting against neural networks, especially if you only have a casual understanding of them.
I mean the limitations of LLMs are very well documented, they aren’t going to advance a whole lot more without huge leaps in computing technology. There are limits on how much context they can store for example, so you aren’t going to have AIs writing long epic stories without human intervention. And they’re fundamentally incapable of originality.
General AI is another thing altogether that we’re still very far away from.
Nearly everything you wrote is incorrect.
As an example, rolling context windows paired with RAG would easily allow for building an implementation of LLMs capable of writing long stories.
And I’m not sure where you got the idea that they were fundamentally incapable of originality. This part in particular tells me you really don’t know how the tech is working.
A rolling context window isn’t a real solution and will not produce works that even come close to matching the quality of human writers. That’s like having a writer who can only remember the last 100 pages they wrote.
The tech is trained on human created data. Are you suggesting LLMs are capable of creativity and imagination? Lmao - and you try to act like I’m the one who’s full of shit.
That’s like having a writer who can only remember the last 100 pages they wrote.
That’s why you pair it with RAG.
The tech is trained on human created data. Are you suggesting LLMs are capable of creativity and imagination?
They are trained by iterating through network configurations until there’s diminishing returns on how accurately they can complete that human created data.
But they don’t just memorize the data. They develop the capabilities to extend it.
So yes, they absolutely are capable of generating original content that’s not in the training set. As has been demonstrated over and over. From explaining jokes not found in the training data, solving riddles not found in it, or combining different concepts to result in a new synthesis not found in the original data.
What do you think it’s doing? Copy/pasting or something?
I think, it will eventually become obsolete, because we keep changing what ‘AI’ means, but current AI largely just regurgitates patterns, it doesn’t yet have a way of ‘listening’ to a song and actually judging whether it’s good or bad.
So, it may expertly regurgitate the pattern that makes up a good song, but humans spend a lot of time listening to perfect every little aspect before something becomes an excellent song, and I feel like that will be lost on the pattern regurgitating machine, if it’s forced to deviate from what a human composed.
I have seen a couple successful artists in different genres admit to using AI to help them write some of their most popular songs, and describe it’s use in the songwriting process. You hit the nail on the head with AI not being able to tell if something is good or bad. It takes a human ear for that.
AI is good at coming up with random melodies, chord progressions, and motifs, but it is not nearly as good at composing and producing as humans are, yet. AI is just going to be another instrument for musicians to use, in its current form.
Yeah, I do imagine, it won’t be just AIs either. And then, it will obviously be possible to take it to an excellent song, given enough human hours invested.
I do wonder, how useful it will actually be for that, though. Often times, it really fucks you up to try to go from good to excellent and it can be freeing to start fresh instead. In particular, ‘excellent’ does require creative ideas, which are easier for humans to generate with a fresh start.
But AI may allow us to start over fresh more readily, if it can just give us a full song when needed. Maybe it will even be possible to give it some of those creative snippets and ask it to flesh it all out. We’ll have to see…
As someone who is doing software engineering and my company jumped on AI bandwagon and got us GitHub Copilot. After using it for a while I think overall experience is actually net negative. Yes, sometimes it gets things right, sometimes it provides a correct solution, but often I can write much more concise code. Many times it provides code that looks like it is correct, but after looking in more detail it actually is wrong. So now I’m need to be in guard what code it inserts, which kills all the time that it supposedly saved me. It makes things harder because the code does look like it might work.
It is like pair programming with a complete moron that is very good at picking patterns and trying to use them in following code. So if you do a lot of copy and paste I think it will help.
I think this technology can make bad programmers suck less at programming. I think the LLM problem is that it was trained with existing works and the way it works is that its goal is to convince other human that the result was created by another one, but it isn’t capable to do any actual reasoning.
Wow, my experience has been pretty much the exact opposite of this. Copilot is amazing and I’d rather not go without it ever again
Edit: for the life of me I’ll never understand people. This comment got a bunch of downvotes and yet some douchebag who blindly accuses me of being bad at my job gets upvoted. Fuck people.
What language you program in and what kind of code you develop? Before Copilot were you frequently searching answers on stackoverflow?
Typescript, JavaScript, php, bash, scss/css… And isn’t every dev on SO or at least a search engine with some frequency?
I don’t actually think the reason I like it is dependent on the language at all. The reason I like it is that it will often basically notice what I’m doing and save me from typing a repetitive 3-5 line block. Things like that and if I can’t remember a specific syntax, I’ve found that I can write a comment saying what the following code will do and boom, suddenly copilot writes a version of that code close to what I would’ve written.
I mean you’re right that it can write stuff that doesn’t work, I just find that I can usually filter that out pretty quickly. The times I can’t, I’m a bit stuck anyway and it’s worth a shot to try their mysterious solution. But since I always treat its solutions with skepticism I haven’t been bitten yet.
For me, copilot just takes the monotony out of the job. Instead of spending as much time writing boring stuff I get to focus on the more interesting parts
Maybe you aren’t that good at writing code
Maybe you aren’t that good at being a human, this comment being good evidence of that
Ill blindly accuse you of being bad at your job too, bud.
Thanks for block request. Appreciate reducing douchebags in life
Ignore them. At some point you gotta realize most people are losers trying to bring others down with them.
Do what works for you :)
I appreciate this comment. You inspire me to not only ignore more assholes, but maybe I’ll also be one myself less often :)
I think the statement was more about the impact, which will depend on each person’s subjective experience
Personally I agree. Even if AI could produce identical work, the impact would be lessened. Art is more meaningful when you know it took time and was an expression/interpretation by another human (rather than a pattern prediction algorithm Frankenstein-ing existing work together). Combine that with the volume of AI content that’s produced, and the impact of any particular song/art piece is even more limited.
I’d say art is more meaningful when it’s a unique experience. It’s like those myths about glassmakers being
killedblinded after the cathedral is finnished so that no one can replicate the glass color… without the killing.People are social, if enough people feel the same way about one thing it’ll succeed. It doesn’t matter where it came from or how it was made, like how people can still admire and appreciate nature. Or maybe the impact will be that it reduces all impacts. Every group and subgroup might be able to have their own thing.
Where are they getting the training data from for AI music models? I guess it’s the same issue as art and language models, but wouldn’t they need to only use royalty free music?
Kidz Bop and Max Martin’s drunk voicemails
Okay, I love the elevator music idea as a gag in media.
But I’ve never been in an elevator that has ever played music, and I can completely understand why. Elevator music sounds obnoxious.
Same
It tends to be in upscale hotels, generally around the holidays, but isn’t incredibly common anymore.
If I think back on it, I’m not sure I have heard it since the 90s.
Wait a minute. Me neither. I never questioned it, yet…
Lots of people play lowfi hiphop as background noise. It’s the modern equivalent of late 80s smooth jazz elevator music.
I’ve never understood why people think so highly of Bob Dylan and/or his music
Have you read his lyrics while listening to the music? He’s quite the poet.
Yeah the lyrics and music are just ok while his singing voice is awful
The whole thing with folk music and punk rock is that it can be good whilst not technically sounding good.
As an example, Johnny Hobo is perfectly situated between folk and punk rock. Horrible chain-smoking voice pushed to its max, shitty acoustic guitar just being beat on, and it sounds so like it was recorded on a laptop.
But it’s completely unique, authentic, and heart wrenching.
You can feel his despair and a lot of it is precisely because of these things. I don’t think any high-quality version of this song would make nearly the same impact. In fact it would probably sound like shit.
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Name someone better so we can pick it apart and tell you how wrong and dumb your opinions are.
I mean, Dylan is an amazing lyricist and musician. But the technical prowess of his voice is known to be average at best, this is a common opinion even among musicians.
Dylan changed the game, but there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging there are much better singers (from the technical point of view): Mike Patton, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin, Jeff Buckley.
No need to call someone dumb for a simple opinion, especially in something this subjective.
