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Comment by dwnw | Hacker News Reader

Hardware is better at this: notebook, pencil, baseball bat.

"AI art" is plagiarism and not an art at all.

I’m interested in the plagiarism perspective.

I feel like LLMs are not too dissimilar to humans. We listen to a lifetime of music, read text, watch videos, etc. and when we come to create something all of that influences what we produce.

Like if you’ve listened largely to western music, and you look for a note to complete a provided two-note sequence, your choice is informed by that listening history. A non-western trained person is likely to pick a different note. Similar analogies can be made for eg English phrases, or even topics for songs.

There’s clearly a boundary between influenced by and copied. Is it the same for generative AI as it is for humans?

Art is about the human experience of the artist reflected in the art. LLMs have no human experience. They just try to statistically trick you into thinking they made art through mass plagiarism of art. It's an illusion, and also rather boring/lame/uncool.

You can do it, sure. But you'll probably also start to wonder why nobody really wants to listen to it, and you can count me out before I do.

I’m not disputing that human produced creative works have, at their best, qualities that computer generated works don’t, and maybe can’t.

I am however interested in the claim of plagiarism and how what generative AI does is different to what humans do. It’s not clear to me how it’s different.

I like music and poetry. While stealing from another composer/author/poet you "steal", using AI is not stealing. But to the point that dwnw is trying to make is that the product will not be from the heart. If/when your audience will learn that you never actually experienced "this or that" e.g. I don't like Taylor Swift's music - at all - but it is rumored that she writes about her own life experience and that makes her output relatable.

Will it fill up 60mins for one album? Yes. Will you sell out the MSG when your audience finds out that it was all ChatGPT (or some other LLM)? No. Never.

Another metaphor/analogy is like the Friends episode "The One With Phoebe's Cookies" where the magic disappears because the 'grandma's cookies' end up being Nestle cookies. And the magic is gone, and your audience will be gone.

You can make the weak argument all you want, it is still a weak argument. I get it, you think there is no such thing as an original thought therefore mass scale plagiarism (even for profit) is all cool and fine, like a technical loophole or something. Just like the music AI will create, the end result will be that nobody will want to listen to you.

Good for you. Enjoy your AI generated art. By yourself. You've missed the whole point of art.

Clearly I’ve hit on a sensitive topic. I’ll leave it here.

Nope, totally fine with me. I'll just assume you see the error of your ways.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42762755#42789029

> baseball bat

Could you expand on this? How does a baseball bat help you in songwriting?

I went to a Slipknot concert back in 2022. They had a "junk set", a bunch of trashcans and kegs that they hit with aluminum bats. Not completely the same, but it did have a dissonant sound!

Ah yes, I remember as a kid a common joke we would make when talking about easy jobs is that we wanted to be the guy from Slipknot whose job was simply to swing a baseball bat at a trash can. No need to rehearse for that!

Sure. With rock & roll, the pencil is sometimes not large enough to rage against the machine properly and a heftier implement is necessary.

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