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”.
Can’t imagine good art coming from something that’s incapable of giving a shit about things.
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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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🤣
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.
The same can be said about any random piece of human created art.
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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…
It’s not even infinite
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-world-is-running-out-of-data-to-feed-ai-experts-warn
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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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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.
This thread is the gift that keeps in giving 🤣
Nah I barely looked at it, and wouldn’t care who made it because it looks like tarot card garbage.
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.
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Young tech can’t tell real from simulacrum
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Is muzak your idea of good art?
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
Why would people think he knows anything about AI?
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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”
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.
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.
Because we often look up to public figures for stuff they are not qualified to comment on.
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?
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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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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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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.
Why are you acting like it’s at all difficult to understand?
Everything is always a matter of time
AI: the new boogie man.
RIP Kenny G
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.
He’s survived many mockeries over the years haha
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.
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
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!
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?
But do we really need AI to generate art?
No, but we want it to. It’s probably only a matter of time untill AI can do better anything that humans can, including art. Now if there’s an option to view great art done by humans or amazing art done by AI I’ll go with the latter. It can already generate better photographs than I can capture with my camera but I couldn’t care less. Takes zero joy out of my photography hobby. I’m not doing it for money.
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.
Was that the Boeing 737 Max issue?
Not exactly, no.
That was the point. Was not even AI but complex systems are complex.
Pretty much every major airline incident in the modern age is the result of businesses cutting corners to maximize profit.
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?
It depends if the government introduces universal basic income or not. If they do I couldn’t care less if I don’t have a job. Any reason I have a job is so that I have money. I don’t do it so I have some kind of fulfillment in my life because it isn’t a fulfilling job.
Just have sex all the time?
I’m confused about how this one tracks. Is the AI going to make me more attractive or is it just going to lower everyone else’s standards?
Like all other animals, humans evolved to be more likely to procreate. There is an argument that all of that other stuff we do is just in support of procreation. But in a way, it’s also a distraction and an impediment to procreation. It just so happens that we’ve been unable to avoid doing that other stuff so far.
Even animals do other things though they play and socialise.
Personally if AI makes working irrelevant I’m just going to spend most of my time in Disneyland.
It’ll be funny if we avoid post-scarcity because we want people to keep working for each other.
The last one
You talk like AI I’d a singular entity that can only do one thing?
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.
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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.
I almost immediately noticed the shirts and frame 4s 8 fingered hand
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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.
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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.
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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?
🧠🤸
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!”
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AI is new and already performing in office to a second year law student level.
That’s what I got from this.
Also the Secret Invasion intro looked really cool and I hate it but it did. When it comes to depth and meaning it may be a while yet before AI can simulate or bullshit it’s way through that but for now it can definitely create interesting and noteworthy pieces.
What is notable that there is a unique culture of making human covers of popular AI based songs. Especially in the vocaloid scene. Same with auto tune and similar tools.
AI isn’t going to take the jobs of musicians. It’ll just give them more material to work with because people will always seem out “authentic” versions of things they like.
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.
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Literally the world’s oldest, continuous civilization. Pretty sure they got one or two things out there in the last 4000 years
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.
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.
Alphafold?
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…
If he got super wild and crazy by wearing a tan suit again to work would you?
…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.
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.
I love Eno’s ambient music but it’s really distinct from the cheesy musak you’re referring to.
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.
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
Brown chicken brown cow.
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.
Some hotel elevators have it.
But yeah, I don’t recall the last time I heard music in a residential elevator.
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.
