How depressing that’s sounds. Kind of like cheap cattle feed or something.
Are you only here to be entertained?
I’d like to contribute that music is not just entertainment. One of the best, and accessible, books on the subject was recently The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan.
What ever happened to automating the boring things? Instead we’re hearing thousands of software developers celebrating what they perceive as the end of art (it’s not, sorry, just mass noise being injected into human communication). If only it was done with a little more discourse and less blind superiority then we might have something to talk about. This is the saddest trend in some time.
Let’s go back to automating our taxes. Leave playing and writing music for all the time we create for ourselves instead.
That was once the promise.
Personally, yes. I'm counting down the days until we have the movie from Infinite Jest.
And yes, absolutely, I know people who would cut off parts of themselves (or others) to get to their phone, after a period of deprivation.
GP said "for the masses."
Popular media is just that: Cattle feed. It doesn't really matter if the next Marvel movie or the next Drake song is AI generated as long as it has its intended effect.
Do we need unrestrained, automated more of that? Or should we leave art to do what it does best: nurture the soul and wake people from their sedated dream-like lives and into lives more conscious and more fully-lived?
Drowning art in noise is going to have resounding effects on society. Cutting people off even further from their own souls is heinous. Doing so wittingly is nothing short of evil.
For example, currently playing a golf simulator is a little like the movie 28 days later. The simulation is amazing, but the vibe is an empty barren world. AI could generate crowd chatter and interaction, just as if one was playing in front of a real crowd of opiniated, semi-informed and possible semi-drunk patrons.
You can rope friends in too, but it would be amazing to only need a couple of friends to play with but still feel like the whole world was populated.
What would be used as the training set though? All that player input is long gone.
The space of possible interesting videogame experiences, even involving old videogames, just expanded.
Or even "don't leave the town or you'll be attacked by bears" or "your job is to stand in this building and let the player character shoot you with a gun".
The Grateful D-AI-d?
I think I know some people who might enjoy that.
I've easily put thousands of hours on the Flying Fortress option - both my kids slept better with the low background rumble of WWII bombers thundering away in their rooms (the womb is very loud, and, yes, there's a womb noise simulator too), and I love it for office background noise, though my office doesn't have other people in it (typically).
I'm far, far more comfortable paying for this sort of thing, where he's gone and sampled stuff in person, than with something that's just "scraped the internet" and replicated something or another.
I’ve never heard of someone enjoying a song more after the 100th time. I’d say there’s a sweet spot around the 3rd or 4th play for me, after that I enjoy the song less on each play.
The actual numbers are quite a bit higher since not all of the listens have been tracked.
I still listen to this artist daily.
One thing that would be innovative / creative:
Imagine if an artist writes a song, then trains an AI on their own new song.
After doing that, they could have the AI produce a hundred variations of the song, and crowdsource which one is the best.
I understand they do something with commercials, but in a manual way. They basically publish multiple commercials and then measure the response to gauge which commercial resonates the most.
If the result is too same-y and you get bored of it, no problem, just hit the big red button. The AI also knows how to make a new song which is just different enough to excite you again, but still familiar enough to grab you in all the right ways.
We've tried it with social media (a feed generated and tuned to keep your brain clicking on ads), and the end result seems close enough to an utter disaster (in terms of impacts on society and humans) to try to avoid doing that thing again, in a different space.
Therefore, I'm sure it will happen quickly, and someone will make a lot of money on it. Feedback chambers are clearly profitable.
The interesting parts of being human, though (IMO...), are finding the different things you like. In the musical realm, conversations with other people about music where you have somewhat different tastes, find overlap, and have to be able to describe music in forms they'll understand (I personally prefer doing this without any actual music available to listen to...) is just fun.
As is tossing on something with a lot of randomness in the mix, finding something interesting, and going and exploring their catalog. I'll suggest Unleash the Archers, Northwest Passage, should you be interested in the "metal Canadian folk covers" category.
The smooth drug of AI-generated brain-rut music... sorry. I'll pass.
What if AI consumes the masterpieces of history, and then generates something even better, like how chess AI surpassed human chess masters?
(same idea as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35632879 )
AI increasing the music in the world and lowering the bar to creation will mean it can both generate music specific to a few people's tastes and guaranteed top 100 hits in some regions. Much like many human artists can do today.
That seems rather at odds with how I would define it, "The computers create a customized compelling reality for each person to keep them from considering anything interesting."
Can't stand suburbs and cities, though. I live rural and only leave the hill a few times a week.
I used to gloss over the words representing "constructs" as I had used in my last sentence. I finally groked what was being referred to while listening to some lectures by Alan Watts during my recent sabbatical from burnout.
He was able to explain the differences between eastern and western philosophy in a way that made me see things in a completely different light. It was like waking up from the matrix.
Since then, I've been constantly aware of the constructed nature of reality and have had to re-evaluate many of my assumptions. For example, just learning that words are just abstractions and don't always accurately reflect reality was something I had never considered before. Now I try to be more careful with my word selection, but nobody's prefect :)
I think using a word like the matrix in a strict sense when it comes from a movie about just about all the evocative ideas in Western thought is ludicrous. It's pedanticism on steroids.
Future if entertainment is going to be wild.
I wonder if article titles will never again be factual or even correlate with the article text
Not at Ticketmaster prices.