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”.
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
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.
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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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.
To make “real” music, AI will probably need a lot of help. Image generators and chat bots seem to have their own, very boring style. I’ve seen videos of artists using AI tools in their workflow, but it’s still a very involved process. I think it will just be another tool for musicians and sound engineers.
I’m the immediate term, yeah I 100% agree. However, I’m not thinking we bank on that being true forever.
I feel very reassured to hear that from the AI expert / musical virtuoso himself, 62 year old, former United States President Barack Obama.
Right? That said, I care about his opinion on AI about as much as I care about the opinions of all the anonymous loudmouths on Lemmy.
Yeah Barrak should just shut up. That idiot hasn’t even listened to music before.
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.
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
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.
LMAO, what an absolutely god awful take.
Ill see you in 2 years when we have our first AI Grammy winner
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
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…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.
Yeah they always go with awkward silence
The quiet fart is king.
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.
I don’t think I can actually recall one either.
Maybe in a department store or mall in the 80s. It was just so deliberately bland I never noticed when it became less common.
It’s not as common as it used to be, but I think the point was kind of that you’re not supposed to notice it?
Look into “muzak” (the style of music. Apparently it’s also a brand according to Google), and some of Brian Eno’s ambient albums like “Music for Airports” (which is definitely a bit more sparse than elevator music, which was often like smooth jazz versions of classic songs), but along similar lines.
I don’t like to think I’m that old, and I 100% remember elevator music.
Edit: was possibly thinking of “musique concrete” rather than muzak.
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I may have been thinking of “musique concrete” rather than muzak
I’ve been in a few that played music (or more recently, ads) in them. But, yeah, it’s like quicksand in that I was led to believe it would be pretty uniquitous.
or more recently, ads
Try this one trick to get me to take the stairs every single time.
Some hotel elevators have it.
But yeah, I don’t recall the last time I heard music in a residential elevator.
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!
Fuck, I’m old. :(
Up and down that shit all day long pal.
Brown chicken brown cow.
Can’t imagine good art coming from something that’s incapable of giving a shit about things.
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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
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I don’t think you’re going to remember that particular image in a week.
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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.
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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…
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It’s not even infinite
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-world-is-running-out-of-data-to-feed-ai-experts-warn
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
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.
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That takes a steaming hot dump on what the vast majority of people can do.
It’s why people are scared. They should be.
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 🤷♂️
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 🤣
What is good art? Stuff like this can be produced with zero effort in a couple of seconds.
Lol, not that.
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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.
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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.
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🤣
Is muzak your idea of good art?
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Young tech can’t tell real from simulacrum
RIP Kenny G
He’s survived many mockeries over the years haha
I thought he died for a moment
Is the joke that he makes elevator music
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Andre 3000 is taking the wheel for him.
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“The libs are trying to pussify our AI!”
I mean Obama is not wrong, but I hope the rest of his thoughts are that it will be as good as the artists he quoted as it absolutely will one day. Unsure when as there is an uncanny valley to cross. He did say this right and it was not just a get off my front lawn comment…right?
He’s wrong in the sense that Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder are just as much cultural reflections as they are artists. Popular art and celebrity are effectively inseparable. This is why each generation often doesn’t “get” the popular art of others.
The reality is that there’s nothing stopping an AI from becoming a celebrity, and I’m a bit surprised it hasn’t happened yet. Once that happens, the art it produces will be lauded, and people who are not the direct participants in mainstream popular culture will be confused and in some cases upset or offended by it. And the wheel will continue to turn.
Very good points. Art is in the eye/ear of the beholder sort of thing and our taste is for sure influenced by our culture/generation.
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.
No…you agree with him?
I mean no, it shouldn’t be used to make any music, least of all shitty elevator music.
Who else should made elevator music then?
Actual human beings. Or just use music already made by people.
But why, I don’t think any artist has ever thought:
“Creating elevator music is so fulfilling! I would never take a different job and express myself in unique and creative ways, bland repeating background noise music is my passion!”
Believe it or not, they do.
Like take hold music for example: the hold music you hear most of the time is actually called Opus No. 1 and was written by two teens in their garage in 1989, and when one of them went to work for Cisco ten years later, he offered it to them for their hotline. True facts, look it up.
Don’t ask me how the hell I just know this shit. 🤦
Yeah, that’s fair.
There is no way this ages well.
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…
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.
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.
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
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 :)
