Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

motohagiography

The best analogy would be that AI will do to culture today and over the next decade or so what pop music did to culture in the 1950's onward. The criticisms of pop music were widely mocked as superstitious religious fundamentalism, "devil music," etc, but even as an afficianado for rock'n'roll and alternative music, it really does give you a head full of garbage. Punk was fun, but I could probably do without exalting the sniveling self pity that made it appealing. For example, if your beliefs about love and relationships come from 20th century love songs, you're likely a rube, or worse, needy and codependent. Arguably, the cliche of the boomer narcissist is the direct result of being relentlessly propagandized by the music industry to believe in similarly inferior things. Folk music is mostly dialectic materialist conspiracy theorists singing hymns to their oppressors. Pre-internet, young people fully tribalized based on their taste in pop music. Sure, it's culture, it's entertaining, and some of it is even beautiful, but it was designed to exploit your sentimentality. If you think pop music tugged at the heart strings, just wait until the kids get ahold of AI platforms.

Imo, the products of AI will be at least as ecstatic and even addictive as pop music and social media, and the cultural consequences will likely rhyme. The antidote to all these trends was always the counterfactual that maybe, just maybe, people will find some higher principle to form their identities around and be able to experience these amusements objectively without imagining themselves as "becoming" something as a result of using them, but who are we kidding, they'll believe whatever entertains them. Imagine all the people.

> Folk music is mostly dialectic materialist conspiracy theorists singing hymns to their oppressors.

This is probably the most insane piece of music criticism I've ever read. I guess the crazification AI has claimed its first victim.

> The criticisms of pop music were widely mocked as superstitious religious fundamentalism, "devil music," etc

Almost always with a strong racial bias.

> > Folk music is mostly dialectic materialist conspiracy theorists singing hymns to their oppressors.

> This is probably the most insane piece of music criticism I've ever read. I guess the crazification AI has claimed its first victim.

Eh, it's a concise expression of an idea Charlie Brooker (of Black Mirror) and others have been promoting in their work for years. The famous-at-least-on-here Meditations on Moloch covers it, IIRC. Not really out-there or new. Capitalism learned to pull the teeth of any new counterculture, and turn it into a product, and the history of postwar pop culture is basically its learning to do that, then doing it over and over. The same observation dates to at least the '80s, from actual humans, it's not some gibberish mash-up created by an AI.

The devil music accusation predated rock'n'roll with early blues artists taking gospel music they learned in church and making the words about day to day life. Stories about Robert Johnson meeting the devil at the crossroads and adapting the minor pentatonic (and ancient) scale but adding the flat blue notes have a very rich history. It was something that got in your head and changed how we experienced the world.

I can see how people could think folk music had some kind of altruistic purity, but it's still a viral expression of a certain kind of animus that distinguished it from country. I also think this kind of folk-animus is related to how it may be worth reflecting on why others tolerate it when you imply someone is racist or insane, almost to the point of ignoring it altogether.

I would bet LLMs are already able to create similar "scissor statements" that are as viral as pop songs, and comments like mine in the previous sentence that are structured to provoke specific anxieties and reactions in their readers. It's one thing for an LLM to write little essays, but once we train it on literary fiction - which is designed to speak the language of memory and provoke strong emotional repsonses - it becomes much more viral and dangerous socially. Imagine a catchy song we can't get out of our heads, but instead of dancing or laughter, it provokes humiliation and cruelty? My asshole-statement was manually calibrated, and it has the same abstract form and structure as a joke, but with the edge of that negative form. An LLM can do it at scale. Someone using an AI model to produce those won't be doing it to improve human discourse and relations. That's the risk I think is worth addresing.

> My asshole-statement was manually calibrated, and it has the same abstract form and structure as a joke, but with the edge of that negative form. An LLM can do it at scale.

Right, so now we've dealt with the initial trolling and callout, and moved on from weird statements about art ..

> Someone using an AI model to produce those won't be doing it to improve human discourse and relations. That's the risk I think is worth addresing.

This I actually agree with. We're going to drown in automated trolling. Human discourse is going to get worse, which usually happens in ways that get people killed.

I mean, it's not completely off-base.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdVMGKOFIwY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=413Fl0ScUsc

I've had some eye-opening moments where I went back to music I listened to growing up and was revolted with myself when I actually read through the lyrics and thought about what they meant. It really is like there is something like a spell that comes over you when listening to certain music that opens you up to hearing and helping propagate messages you wouldn't otherwise.

The internet irony culture uses the same mechanism of passing the message off as "only a joke". But the fact is that even if you say that, there is only so far words can be divorced from their meanings. And even if the network that propagates them originally is just doing it ironically, eventually someone will take the message seriously. There is a quote I wish I could remember along the lines of "what the father accepts as a lie, the son will accept as a truth".

Great comment. Don't wish to agree with the final conclusion on mostly sentimental reasons.

Parental 'prompting' may be effective. Possibly, whoever gets to first frame a given dynamic will establish a lasting bias. "Songs can be pleasing but take care to filter out the lyrics. It is much easier to write mushy sentimental nonesense. Keep that in the back of your mind as you listen." That, imo, should certainly be a part of responsible parenting and innoculating against ideational viruses.

I'm 100% on board with the first paragraph. There has to be some mid- or late- century philosopher who described the phenomenon, how pop music creates a dependency or need out of thin air, and then half-fills it. Like how junk food is just salty and fatty enough to keep you wanting more. It overpromises, building up a flattering epic narrative.

Ends up nudging value systems towards vapid, shallow, needy modes of being.

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