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I also believe the Milli Vanilli argument to be flawed, but the other way around: music videos were all the rage back then and the two supposed singers were actually just performers for the cameras. Does this mean they had no part in the success of the music? I don't believe that. That's not to say they were right in misleading the public and their fans, but it seems to me that Milli Vanilli was a fruitful combination of the public-facing performers and the musical process behind them. Everyone is fine with ghostwriters, why is this so different? The entertainment industry is fake through and through, but nobody is actually taking offense from this fact. I often wondered if a similar project could find success if it were presented differently, as a cooperation of musicians and performers

actually, i am not fine with ghostwriters. i am fine with speechwriters, because public speeches are a shared product, so is music. performing someone else's music is normal and probably has been done ever since music existed. in that sense i would also not mind a performance of a song if that song was originally created using AI. if the song and the performance are good that it is no different from performing a traditional song. if you don't like AI music, that's fine, i also don't like every traditional song, but that's not the fault of the performer (beyond choosing a song you don't like). the problem with milli vanilli is that they violated the expectation that we know who the singers are. milli vanilli were dancers, not singers, and if that had been properly communicated, it would have been fine.

I'd challenge that assertion. LLMs still produce very bad results with greenfield work, so that seed was generated by people who had both creativity and skill a thousand times before. Having a glimmer of an idea that you've probably seen more or less intact somewhere else and getting an AI to take it from that point is much closer to Milli Vanilli than any actual creative work.

Good artists borrow; great artists steal. LLMs synthesizing previous works doesn't mean they're meritless, because humans do the same thing.

AI is like a camera. Photographs can be art, but they aren't always. If you prompt an LLM only with "write me a novel," you can't take credit for the result, any more than if you took a cell-phone snap of the Mona Lisa. But AI can be used intentionally to create art, same as a carefully planned portrait photoshoot is art.

Art isn't a binary. Art is a spectrum. A creation is art to the extent that it reflects an artist's unique vision, not because of the tools the artist used (or didn't use.)

> hey chatgpt give me a snarky response to this comment that would wittily refute the argument, make it funny and interesting, concise and to the point

Ah yes, the “tiny little seed” defense — because if I hum three notes and Quincy Jones writes the symphony, clearly we co-composed it.

Sure, prompting involves taste and direction. So does ordering at a restaurant. But if I tell the chef “spicy, but make it fusion” and then Instagram the plate as my culinary creation, I’m not suddenly Gordon Ramsay.

Nobody’s saying there’s zero input. We’re saying input isn’t authorship. A seed isn’t a forest — and picking your favorite output isn’t the same as growing it.

> There's a flaw in the Milli Vanilli argument.

That reference though! I never thought I'd ever read on HN a blog mentioning Girl you know it's true from Milli Vanilli. Wow the throwback in (exceptionally cheesy) time.

Yeah sorry, I can claim there's none, you can't stop me.

I could claim there's even less creativity than lip syncing, and I will.

And if there was any creativity, the use it is being put to is to do violence to artists. If you think you deserve someone else's work as your own, you better be prepared for the fact that you won't even really understand who you're ripping off, but someone else sure as shit will and they're going to be pissed as hell.

At least Milli themselves a) knew what they were doing, b) paid the real singers I presume and c) presented real art created by real people.

But still everyone was mad at the lie of it, at being asked to venerate an imposter. And being asked to believe that in the future "impostor" will be the most venerable role. No. Just no.