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 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.
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.
That just muzak for a visual medium.
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.
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.
…so I’ve been on a shit load of elevators, and I don’t recall a single one of them having music. For as common a trope as it is, you’d think elevator music would be more common in actual elevators.
It’s like porn, they all used to have music, and now people still make jokes about how bad it was but it’s just gone now
Elevators used to have porn? :o /s
Yes, but it was bad, so now they don’t. Keep up!
Up and down that shit all day long pal.
Yeah they always go with awkward silence
The quiet fart is king.
Some hotel elevators have it.
But yeah, I don’t recall the last time I heard music in a residential elevator.
I worked in an office that installed music in the bathrooms. It wasn’t there for a long time, and then they added it. An email went out at one point instructing people to stop turning off the music (someone figured out where the Sonos controls were I guess). Someone at the top had decided it was IMPERATIVE to have something to listen to other than the coworker grunting next to you.
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?
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.
We currently have the same problem with human programmers. That’s why good companies always test the shit out of their code.
It’s virtually guaranteed that at some point, robots and/or AI will be capable of doing almost every human job. And then there will be a time when they can do every job better than any human.
I wonder how people will react. Will they become lazy? Depressed? Just have sex all the time? Just have sex with robots all the time?
The last one
Why should we stifle technological progress so people can still do jobs that can be done with a machine?
If they still want to create art, nobody is stopping them. If they want to get paid, then they need to do something useful for society.
Nobody’s calling to stifle technology or progress here. We could develop AI to do anything. The question is what should that be?
There’s a distinction to be drawn between ‘things that are profitable to do and thus there isn’t any shortage of’ and ‘things that aren’t profitable and so there’s a shortage of it’ here. Today, the de facto measure of ‘is it useful for society?’ seems to be the former, and that doesn’t mean what’s useful for society, it’s what’s usefuI for people that have money to burn.
Fundamentally, there isn’t a shortage of art, or copy writers, or software developers, or the things they do- what there is, that AI promises to change, is the inconvenient need to deal with (and pay) artisans or laborers to do it. If the alternative is for AI vendors to be paid instead of working people, is it really the public interest we’re talking about, or the interests of corporate management that would rather pocket the difference in cost between paying labor vs. AI?
🧠🤸
You talk like AI I’d a singular entity that can only do one thing?
We don’t need it. It’s just cool tech. I’ve messed around with stable diffusion a lot and it’s a cool tool.
AI is an enabler. I have not patience for sitting and drawing for hours on end to make extremely detailed art but I’m a creative individual and would love to have the power to bring my ideas into reality. That’s what AI art does.
The problem with that, of course is it means that if I’m really serious about an idea I won’t be paying some artist(s) to make it happen. I’ll just whip open an AI art prompt (e.g.Stable Diffusion or any online AI art generators) and go to town.
It often takes a lot of iteration and messing with the prompt but eventually you’ll get what you want (90% of the time). Right now your need a decent PC to run Stable Diffusion (got 8GB of VRAM? You too can generate all the AI images you want 👍) but eventually people’s cell phones in their pockets will be even better at it.
Civitai is having a contest to make a new 404 error page graphic using AI. Go have a look at some of the entries:
https://civitai.com/collections/104601
I made one that’s supposed to be like the Scroll of Truth meme:
I made that on my own PC with my limited art skills using nothing but automatic1111 stable diffusion web UI and Krita. It took me like an hour of trying out various prompts and models before I had all the images I wanted then just a few minutes in Krita to put them into a 4-panel comic format.
If I wanted to make something like that without AI it just would never have happened.
Not that it really matters in this case, but AI art just seems inconsistent in silly ways. That girls shirt changes each frame, her hair gets more braided, and the 3rd frame has 2 left hands. I guess at first glance you don’t really notice, but it’s not hard to spot and it hurts my brain once I do.
Also her face expression is so generic it doesn’t convey the meaning like the original did.
Honestly if I didn’t know the original I wouldn’t understand the point of this one.
Not that it really matters in this case, but AI art just seems inconsistent in silly ways.
It’s to be expected given that the AI has no access to the previous image.
I almost immediately noticed the shirts and frame 4s 8 fingered hand
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The whole point of AI is that those systems aren’t fundamentally different. There is little to no human expertise that goes into those systems, it’s all self learned from the data. That’s why we are getting AIs that can do images, music, chess, Go, chatbots, etc. all in short order. None of them are build on decades worth of human expertise in music or art, but simply created by throwing data at the problem and letting the AI algorithms figure out the rest.
There is little to no human expertise that goes into those systems, it’s all self learned from the data.
The human expertise is in the data. There’s no such thing as spontaneous AI generation of expertise from nothing. If you train up an AI on information that doesn’t have it, the AI won’t learn it. In a very real way, the profit margins of AI-generated content rest wholly on its ability to consume and derive output from source material developed by unpaid experts.
Also, when the data is the output of people with biases, the AI will do the same.
The human expertise is in the data.
There are no art lessons in the training data, just labeled images. How to actually draw the AI has to figure out by itself. Even the labels on the data aren’t strictly needed, they are just there so the humans can interact with the AI by text.
Same with AlphaZero, it didn’t learn playing Go from humans, it learned that by playing against itself and not only beat humans, but previous versions that were still based on recording human Go games.
That’s the bitter lesson of AI research: Throwing data and computation at the problem gives you much better results than human experts.
And we have barely even begun to explore this. What ChatGPT does is still just reciting information from books and websites, it can’t interact with the real world to learn by itself. It being based on books written by human experts is not a benefit, but what’s holding it back.
Why would people think he knows anything about AI?
Why are you acting like it’s at all difficult to understand?
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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
While reassuring for many to hear, that’s only going to be true for so long. Eventually it’s going to be real fucking good at making “real” music. We need to be preparing for those advancements rather than acting like they’ll never come.
Young people think all this AI stuff is great and older folks are suspicious. I think older folks are right this time.
Eh. Hard to take people’s opinion on art seriously considering what’s popular.
This is an interesting crossroads where greedy creators have to fight against greedy owners.
I agree with the conclusions of the boomers, but for very different I think long-term AI will produce vastly more harm than good. Just this week we got a headline about google, which is a serious and grown company which already makes billions was up to some fuckery against firefox, facebook has been fined a million times for not respecting privacy and amazon workers have to pee in bottles. To my sadness, all movement against the integration of AI in weapons basically to “kill people” will be very noble but won’t do jackshit. Do we think china/rusia are going to give a single fuck about this? Even the US will start selling AI-drones when it becomes normalized. And that’s just AI in war, but there’s another trillion things where AI will fuck things up, artists will be devalued, misinformation will reach a new all-time high, capchas are long dead making the internet a more polluted place, surveillance will be more toxic, the list goes on
That actually might make elevator and phone hold music survivable - continual compositions that never repeat
RIP Kenny G
He’s survived many mockeries over the years haha
Andre 3000 is taking the wheel for him.
Elevator music as well as the mainstream music that majority of people listen to like pop etc.
That music is already very formulaic and almost as if it is generated by Ai.
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!”
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
And now human music.
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.
Everything is always a matter of time
