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”.
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!
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.
why do i care what obama feels about either of these
If he got super wild and crazy by wearing a tan suit again to work would you?
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.
Alphafold?
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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.
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.
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…
Fully agreed, hence the “most” :^)
One of my jobs involved updating blogs for small businesses. I had a Shutterstock subscription for the images that goes along with these blog posts. For this task, I think AI generated images work a lot better than stock photography.
There’s some recruitment company advertising jobs on LinkedIn. All the pictures are clearly AI generated and they’re terrifying. Uncanny Valley freaks grinning at you from your screen.
My office is using AI to do this years xmas card. It’s pretty cool.
you can already api into chatgpt and dall-e 3 as one cohesive service, and make a system in an afternoon’s work that reads the article, decides on a thumbnail, and automatically generates one. the whole thing costs like 8 cents per article.
You could also self host Stable Diffusion to save some money
Edit: Or is it free to use with ChatGPT Premium (or whatever it’s called)? Then that would actually be cheaper
no, the premium stuff doesn’t give you api access. which is total bs, but yeah, it’s only for that grey interface. (i’m also quite salty that the playground has no easy to access image inputs but that’s beside the point)
you’re completely right about self-hosting sd, it’s just a matter of prompting. sd workflows tend to get a little more experimental but i guess you could still make chatgpt write a few prompts that are close to correct and just manually rerun if an image failed
Maybe ChatGPT knows how to write SD prompts at this point. You could try just telling it to generate a prompt specifically for SD.
yup, and when in doubt, just do some few-shot prompting
I still need to set up my computer to do the AI generated images.
LMAO, what an absolutely god awful take.
Ill see you in 2 years when we have our first AI Grammy winner
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.
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?
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.
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Because we often look up to public figures for stuff they are not qualified to comment on.
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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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?
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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 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?
AI: the new boogie man.
Can’t imagine good art coming from something that’s incapable of giving a shit about things.
Is muzak your idea of good art?
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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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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
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.
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.
Young tech can’t tell real from simulacrum
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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
Old man doesn’t understand how technology progresses. Tonight at 10pm.
It’s hilarious to me that young people think “AI” is intelligent or good at what it does. It’s a fucking toy. I’ve made my own little GANs and Markov chains and the are thousands of empty little parlor tricks we’ve invented to separate the young from their money.
I saw a thread where a few zoomers were going wild over an AI loli generated porn image that looked like an animal balloon, all oiled and shiny, vagina sideways, face of an eight year old smiling for a school photo, huge veiny cocks blasting gallons of cum onto a tiny kawaii face:
“Omg so fucking hot 🥵 I’m fucking diamonds!”
Your dumb ass will be listening to a “song” simulacrum constructed out of 100,000 product jingles and Max Martin B-sides, jacking off to deranging porn, having full blown emotional conversations with bots and crying when that bot’s creator gets busted for CP.
Anyone listening to false music that’s overly Fourier transformed, with impossible instrument voices and chords that make it unlistenable to actual musicians and then trying to make people feel ashamed for having a soul is just waving a massive red flag for everyone to see that says “I have no idea what it means to be a human with skin in the game”.
That movie Demolition Man totally called it in the 90s btw that not only would you all be listening to commercial jingles all the time but defending them and singing their “lyrics” loudly.
Thank you for loudly identifying yourself as yet another Elon-like who thinks they know so much more than Barack fucking Obama. You and yourself should get a room and listen to that shit all day and see who you become. If you can’t create your own, you kids will get the “art” you deserve and it will cost A LOT 😂
Following for the laughs!
This post is disturbing and weird, you have a very odd and creepy view of the world.
Obama is just a random person voicing a safe and middle of the road politically neutral option in response to a boring question, I wouldn’t put too much stock in his kneejerk responce to a new technology.
Anyway all I wanted to ask is what do you mean by it costing A LOT? The price of creating media has fallen insanely in the last five decades and is only continuing to plumet - processor power likewise, it’s very likely we’ll be able to not just run the models on consumer graphic cards as we can now but run them as background processes on our phones without noticing slowdown. Just like all other modern content we’re going to see the free stuff that people make and share displace the hacky old corporate stuff - people that like history documentaries don’t watch history channel they which YouTube and a couple of ken Burns level creations, same with science and tech and so many other types of content.
When a kid in their bedroom can make a movie that looks as good as marvel and has a powerful soundtrack that carries the action and moves the heart no one is going to care if they created the music in a weekend talking to AI or hired a generic studio musician to string together some standard progressions and pachelbell melodies - likely they’ll prefer the ai output anyway because it’ll fit the artist vision more than a hired chord ever could.
There are going to be creative geniuses that use AI to make amazing things and at some point you’re just going to have to accept that.
He certainly understood how to drone strike schools weddings and hospitals. He was really good at it.
Obama is old
Yes but did you know he did drone strikes
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.
No…you agree with him?
I mean no, it shouldn’t be used to make any music, least of all shitty elevator music.
Yeah, that’s fair.
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. 🤦
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.
There is no way this ages well.
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 :)
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
Ill blindly accuse you of being bad at your job too, bud.
Thanks for block request. Appreciate reducing douchebags in life
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.
