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Comment by ImprobableTruth | Hacker News Reader

Calling him "the person hired to build Stable Audio" seems a bit misleading? He was in a executive position (VP of product for Stability's audio group). An important position, but "person hired to build" to me evokes the image of lead developer/researcher.

I think that also helps in understanding his departure, since he's a founder with a music background.

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It isn't unusual for those in leadership positions to use such phrasing when talking about projects and products. It's not a "taking credit" from the engineers sort of thing, but rather about the leadership of the engineers.

Managing a group of people is not synonymous with doing the actual knowledge work of researching and developing innovations that enabled this technology. I find it hard to believe that the contribution of his management somehow uniquely enabled this group of engineers to create this using their experience and expertise.

A captain may steer the ship, but they're not the one actually creating and maintaining the means by which it moves.

> A captain may steer the ship, but they're not the one actually creating and maintaining the means by which it moves.

And yet virtually everyone will go along with a statement like "The captain sailed the ship across the ocean" or "Captain Kirk charted the Gamma Quadrant" or whatever, so I'm not sure how this serves as an objection to the original phrasing.

Depending on the work, an equal level of technical competency can be very beneficial for leadership to have, if not required in some situations. To debate his contribution as a counterfactual exercise without the context of his leadership is entirely non-productive. HN is always quick to dismiss leadership, despite evidence of good and poor leadership being tautologically debated about nearly constantly here. A talented group of engineers can self-organize, but their collective technical expertise does not translate to business acumen.

The crux of the debate appears to rest on the fact that context matters. If an engineer says to another engineer "I built the spam detection system", it is understood that they mean they either wrote the code or had some direct part in producing it. If an executive says to another executive "I made the Mac", neither is interpreting that as them literally building the thing. They know they are in leadership, the meaning is assumed to be "as a leader".

Person A gets hired to write the software that is the company's actual product.

Person B gets hired to observe Person A working, check email, and be the audio output buffer for Jira.

Person B says "I built this."

That's dishonesty no matter what the titles are or how important the emails were.

Agreed. Leadership can sometimes bring actual value ;)

And to be clear, I’m not sure Ed would call himself that. Those are my words, not his.

Ed here. Saw this thread and thought I'd weigh in.

Agreed, I wouldn't say I was hired to build Stable Audio. Crazy talented team of research engineers / software engineers / designers did the building.

Also wanted to clarify that I didn't quit due to concerns around the training data used for Stable Audio. I was proud of the approach we took to training data - a rev share with rights holders. I quit because of the prevailing view on training data at the wider company, as documented in its public response to the copyright office, where it argues that training on people's work without consent is fair use.

FWIW, I am a rightsholder for a number of published songs and recordings. I once spent $12k of my own money on a record and made about $1000 back.

I have spent more blood, tears and money on art than most of you would find even remotely bearable.

I not only consider my songs to be fair use for training a model but I would also honored if my works were included and influenced further musicians in a way that my records probably never will.

The best songwriters I know have other careers and keep on going otherwise. If you actually care about musicians you should make it a habit to go see local live music!

Thanks for setting the record straight! People tend to put a singular face to things, especially if they have strong feelings about it. Leads to a lot of misrepresentation, especially when the context doesn't accompany the message.

Thanks for the clarification, Ed. That’s quite interesting.

Also congrats on the new company!

HN is usually allergic to recognizing the value of leadership, which always struck me as ironic considering it's leadership that made plenty of startups work.

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