Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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These strike me as momentary throes from a technological/cultural realignment.

Back in the day there were tons of people who were totally opposed to the rising genre of "electronic" music. Today you couldn't call electronic music "not music" without drawing the ire of lots of people.

In the same vein, people opposed the internet, digital drawing tablets, digital cameras.

AI is interesting because it can be use to "just prompt", and those outputs can't be called art. But actual artists are using the technology as just another tool to accomplish even bigger things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_SgA6ymPuc

https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1ihq048/i_was_ai_l...

Of course AI will still be used for slop and fan fiction, and people will endlessly try to fix Star Wars and Game of Thrones [1]. But that shouldn't be used to detract from the medium, because there will be an abundance of people doing amazing work that stands on its own legs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfPeixY_I3w

When doing an image search there are times you specifically don't want AI images, ever, period. If I search the name of a real artist I want to see their their works, not a diffusion models half-remembered knock-off of their style. If I'm looking for reference photos then I want reference photos, not synthesized images which resemble photos but may or may not reflect reality. If I'm looking for historical photos then no, a generated image vaguely drawing on the stereotypical vibes of that era isn't going to cut it.

This is a temporary problem that the market will solve for. Either the search companies will fix their algorithms, or curated websites and platforms will arise.

One way or another, this bug will be fixed in time.

> The statistical likelihood is that other civilisations will arise. There will one day be lemon-soaked paper napkins.

> ‘Till then, there will be a short delay. Please return to your seats.

>Today you couldn't call electronic music "not music"

I'm not sure anyone is calling AI music "not music." It's just so far a bit rubbish. It mostly gets called AI slop which is kind of fair.

Maybe we'll get a Donna Summer - I Feel Love moment but I don't think it's arrived yet. I Feel Love was probably the first big electronic music hit and did stuff you couldn't do with regular instruments.

I don't think the parallel quite fits.

There's always resistance to new genres of music. Rock'n'roll was considered evil, a bad influence on children, by the establishment of its day. People didn't like electronic music because they thought it wasn't creative enough, and that it was just "noise".

AI generated music -- at least the current iteration of it -- is different. For the most part it's created in order to flood platforms with low-effort content in order to win advertising dollars. It's spam, plain and simple.

I'm not saying that all AI generated music is spam, or that it won't turn into an art form that people appreciate. But right now, the majority of it is not the result of creative endeavor. EDM and other new genres didn't really go through this initial spam period.

It's maybe not a great fit, but early home console video games were garbage until Nintendo led by example.

Even if this doesn't look the same as other new tech, it still rhymes with a lot that's happened to us before.

Hell, even reading was decried as a way to wreck your memory - why remember when you could always open a book?

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