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”.
It’s more or less only (that is mainly) useful for building components that you then use in your man-made tracks. It’s a tool, just like AI image generators are tools albeit there the replacement use-case is substantial. AI-generated voice also needs to be considered in this context I think.
Yeah generative music has been a thing for a long time, Brian Eno is probably the household name recognizable for generative compositions, but most sequencers have had randomization elements built in for a long time now. I use one where you feed it a scale of notes and can define the chance a certain note will play and chances around the quality of the note like duration, velocity, etc. Even my entry level MicroFreak has a randomization option which you can use to get musical ideas from. There’s some cool eurorack modules like Mutable Instruments Grids which function like this for drum sequencing, where you have this axis to explore and can control via an lfo if you want.
I realize generative and AI are a technically different, I think AI is much better at “can you create a synth preset to make x sound” or “write a specific genre of melody/chord progression/etc.” It’s a lot better at factoring in the broader context.
No, people need to start being creative and to make their own shit again.
I mean, people are doing that. It’s just that it’d be a hell of a lot cheaper to program an AI to be creative than to pay actual creative people.
This thread is as much evidence of our failed educational system as is the entire state of Mississippi
Yeah fuck Mississippi all my homies hate Mississippi
Wow, coming outta nowhere to sideswipe Mississippi for no apparent reason, great work you’re doing here.
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!
And now human music.
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.
Everything is always a matter of time
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 :)
Ill blindly accuse you of being bad at your job too, bud.
Thanks for block request. Appreciate reducing douchebags in life
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
In before obligatory republican outrage and 24x7 media coverage explaining how this comment will doom democrats in 2024
“The libs are trying to pussify our AI!”
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!”
I suppose I’m happy that he is no longer president if he has strong opinions on topics he is clueless.
I don’t think they’re strong opinions
People often get asked to weigh in on things, and then news headlines run with the responses. Sure everyone could say “I don’t know enough so I won’t say anything”, but that’s a little unproductive.
I find it annoying especially when some news agency asks a loaded question, and then regardless of the response they have some story to run with
We need a Boomer Music AI then I guess.
Could you even imagine the necessary programming to create a thing like Bobby Zimmerman, a brilliant songwriter that can’t even sing, but made of go of it anyways and is regarded as one of the best singers of the last half of the previous century regardless?
Lol, no one thinks he’s “one of the best singers of the last half of the previous century,” WTF are you smoking?
That’s Captain Beefheart you are talking to…
If I can get some more legit-sounding 60s rock, I’m in.
why do i care what obama feels about either of these
I mean — he’s defending human creativity and he’s kind of right. AI can recreate variations of the things it is trained on, but it doesn’t create new paradigms.
Yeah, also I think there is something about the human connection and communicating personal ideas and feelings that just isn’t there with AI generated art. I could see a case for an argument that a lot of music today is recorded by artists who didn’t write that music, and that they are expressing their own feelings through their performance of someone else’s creation. And is it really all that different if an AI wrote something that resonated with an artist who ultimately performed it? Which for a good chunk of pop-culture regurgitations may be completely valid. But in my opinion, the best art, communicates emotion, which an experience unique to biology, AI might be able to approximate it, and sure there’s a human prompting the AI who might genuinely have those feelings, but there’s a hollowness to it that I struggle to ignore. But maybe I’m just getting older and will be yelling at clouds before long.
removed by mod
Literally the world’s oldest, continuous civilization. Pretty sure they got one or two things out there in the last 4000 years
Alphafold?
People always says AI do create only variations but many successful TV shows are variations. I started watching sitcoms from the 70s and many things were copied/adapted in recent shows.
99% of everything people create is a variation.
Truly innovative anything is RARE.
There’s just stuff and things people haven’t thought to combine with stuff yet.
That just muzak for a visual medium.
If he got super wild and crazy by wearing a tan suit again to work would you?
I very rarely care for what most 62 year olds have to say about the capabilities about the theoretical limits of computation.
This isn’t much different.
If the 62 year old had studied computer science and had specialized in AI, I would listen closely to them.
But I definitely not care about a politician that has no idea about technology.
Fully agreed, hence the “most” :^)
Unfortunately when it comes to medical experts, many ignore them and listen to their aunt with the healing crystals, or their buddy that skipped most of his high school science classes to go smoke behind the school instead…
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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