I’m glad that we’ll hopefully see the end of content as an industry, where people churn out text and images and posts trying to monetize attention by the penny. It’s inevitable as content becomes effectively free. How long before TikTok makes AI generated videos without creators? I’m pretty sure medium can be replaced in entirety today.
That said, there’s plenty of people who work hard and are immensely talented and contribute a lot to society. Technology and automation has slowly taken away many jobs that brought people satisfaction and we’re anything but BS jobs. My classic example is musicians. It’s something people love to be, but in a world with recorded audio, you don’t need as many musicians as you once needed (and it was actually a fairly common job).
I don’t have the answers, but I hope that automation can start replacing BS jobs through AI.
I do wonder if people are going to start valuing in-person experiences more and more, as anything on the internet can now be faked (or AI-generation, which, artistically speaking, is close to the same thing). If we do, might we see a boom of live performers? Will minstrels make a comeback? An interesting possibility, if still not reassuring.
Seems like big capture of peoples minds by comporations.
When I listen to a recording of a 18th century Danish fiddle tune, is it a bunch of notes and chords that can be imitated? Sure. And it can certainly be imitated by a professional human style imitator or an AI.
But I'm not just looking for a string of pleasant chords and tones to massage my feelings. The context is part of what it is. It's not really "content", it's communication. The guy who made it, wanted to say something. Something that was important to him, which he thought better put into music than into text. He's dead almost 300 years ago, but I want to hear what he wanted to say.
Which isn't to say there isn't room for AI-generated (or professional composer-generated) imitations. They're trained on the real stuff, it's the echo of real people we hear. But that's why it's valuable, not as generic "content".
But what if upcoming generations see it just as something antique? Old concept thats dead because their concept of art/media has always been tailor made and generated for them.
Also who says the AI wont also generate the context. You will get some medival music with authors backround and everything. You might not even know the person didnt exist. The way AI is developing now nobody will care about AI just making things up on the way.
But that's just it, Irish trad. Frenchies have something similar with balfolk, but not so epic, and while there are other strong European folk scenes, none of them is on the scale of Irish trad. Alas.
Source: I play jigs and reels for fun.
(... for anyone who's curious - "trad" usually means traditional dance music like jigs and reels, "ballads" mostly means Irish-y sounding songs sung in English)
Probably not.
If I like some content, why would I care it it is "fake"?
People prefer to be in their houses on their computers and to interact with “others” (people, bots, videos of people doing things) from their favorite chair.
I don’t think in-person experiences are coming back any time soon unless there is some sort of major cultural shift that nobody could predict. A lot has been written about this trend.
The word "content," when applied to digital media, usually carries some implications of artlessness. Content is something that fills a container.
Music that moves you and changes you is art, and is unlikely to be automated any time soon. Music that plays in an elevator (or fills the silence in an elevator) is Content, and is highly likely to be automated soon.
But if you're in a conversation with an a filmmaker, a musician, a novelist, or a painter, and you try to call their artistic output "content," they might take some offense, because you're kind of reducing their work to a mere consumable product.
Yes, art can be packaged up and put on a platform and distributed and profited off of, or bought and sold on an online store like toasters and dish soap, but that's not the reason it exists - it's form of human expression.
Just as not all digital content is art (e.g. NBA games), and not all digital art is content.
This. And when I hear creative types use the word "content" to refer to their own work, I feel pity for them. And am much less inclined to check their work out, because it it seems that their mindset is to produce a product rather than art.
Especially if they refer to their audience as "consuming" their "content".
I can tell you don't use TikTok and don't understand how quickly the trends adapt and depend on human understanding of hyper niche cultural trends.
Nothing about GPT indicates it can engage in this without heavy human interference.
At most it'd at least depend on being able to replicate human generated videos on prompt (which it's far from doing without horror show uncanny valley but sure... one day eventually in the indefinite future, which is the least interesting problem) let alone all the niche cultural stuff... and critically reputation signals already strongly required. Humans are deeply intwined in all of these, with automation playing a marginal optimisation role not anything near replacement.
Cheap imitations will remain a novelty for a long time. Just like how deepfakes and GPT news articles were oversold as a serious problem in the near term but haven't borne out beyond niche failures and journalist FUD posting.
People are bad at modeling and scale. LLMs don't suffer from that, but the way people interact with LLMs obviously doesn't indicate they can conceptualize what a billion people interacting with the same model with the same parameters and having a billion unique experiences implies.
How we interface with LLMs is a deceptive reflection, and if you don't recognize the depth in them, you'll be caught off guard when you fall in, or something larger than you expect comes out.
I am not sure I agree with this. The barrier to entry to selling your own music (streaming, youtube) is so low that we see more and more people giving it a shot. Maybe they are not professionnel with a title, but they are musicians. Sure, maybe there are less orchestra performers but there are far more (smaller) groups to choose from. Did they really disappear?
> but they are musicians
I think the GP meant professional musicians.
In a modern Casablanca remake Bogart wouldn't say "Play it, Sam", he would just select a song from his Spotify playlist and hit play.
In a similar fashion, you don't need to hire a full band for a wedding. A single DJ will provide enough entertainment.
It used to be that if you wanted your voice to be heard, you had to either have something unique to say, or some unique way to say it.
We'll likely revert to the status quo - only people whose content will be consumed online will be original voices.
I think that as we're progressing into a world where anyone can press a few buttons and get a dubstep banger in 30 seconds, culture will place higher value on different types of expression and experiences.
"We went to see a band play an entirely improvised performance, capacity was limited to 20 people and all recording devices were confiscated upon entry."
LLMs use reinforcement learning once they have a base understanding of words. It's like how modern chess engines don't analyze games, just play against themselves.
LLMs go even further where they train a model to judge what people would deem to be high quality, so it's another layer
You're describing RLHF (Reinforcement learning with Human Feedback) used by ChatGPT, right.
I wouldn't say that LLMs use it, but RLHF is used to create a higher level model on top of a LLM.
and the spammers realise they can influence its output by producing more spam