> Tennessee State University suggested AI was "rewriting production as we sit here" and told his audience to "deal with it" as they jeered him in response.
Guess it doesn't take much to see what's under the mask.
Guess it doesn't take much to see what's under the mask.
I wouldn't be surprised if a huge percentage of concept artists are out of jobs or changing specialization these days (Creating a throwaway image for a pitch or imaging document can probably be as easily conveyed through a prompt and the people looking at them are probably often not savvy enough to appreciate the difference).
Where the music industry goes will be interesting, knowledgeable musicians are way too into fiddling/toying to feel any need for AI tools, but since music is pretty much an industry these days fed by promotion, it isn't far fetched that bedroom "AI" artists can leapfrog established ones.. the question is if it'll stick if they can't reach the pinnacles (megahits is part of it, but concerts still seem to matter quite a bit, and an AI won't help you perform even if Milli Vanilli might disagree).
As soon as tools came about that socialized their skill, opened it to everyone, they immediately and violently opposed it. Which is totally understandable, except when your core ideology you have been pushing for your whole life is to socialize everything.
The hypocrisy is so suffocating that it was like a 9.0 earthquake in my moral landscape.
And yes, before you come at my throat, free local image generation tools get no hatred exemption.
But anybody can buy a Suno subscription in no time at all.
I'd say gatekeeping "real" behind faux barriers is regressive, but a lot of "progressives" seem to disagree...
Gee, I wonder why artists have such negative reactions to this technology. I’m actually baffled by your comment to the point where I have to wonder if you’re posting in good faith.
The only new music I'm willing to buy is music that I've seen the artists perform live, or is from established artists that I know and trust are keeping it human.
I have no idea how rare or common my perspective on this is, but it's not impossible that the music industry may see a decline as a result.
Maybe it's a silly analogy, but you wouldn't buy unlabelled eggs in a supermarket if you are against cage farming because you don't want to accidentally support it.
So the music industry could go hard into AI or whatever the business folks deem appropriate, with various consequences, while the musicians will continue to music and who knows maybe the rent will be covered.
- you all like music enough to go to a four year program and spend lots of money to study it.
- you all probably have been creating music since you were a child and really love it.
- well....
- people don't actually like music like you, and just want content; non-stop content.
- we now have a magic button that can make content by ripping off every previous artist we've trained our models on.
- now that everyone has access to this magic button, music has become even more worthless and the only people that'll make money from it are the people running the streaming services like spotify.
- if you do happen to create some original content, we'll just suck it into our giant copy machine and use it to out you you.
- good luck, have fun, and make sure to pay those student loans back.
This is the big thing that artists are going through right now.
They're realizing that most consumers of art don't care about the process or the artist. They just want music as background noise, or an aesthetically pleasing picture on their wall.
I wanted to listen to heavy metal songs about office life. I'm not going to spend years learning how to play guitar in order to record it, not to mention that I have a voice fit for old school silent movies. I'm certainly not going to spend money on commissioning a song. But 5 minutes in ChatGPT to write and refine some lyrics, followed by 15 minutes in Suno playing with various prompts, and eventually I got "Per My Last Email"[0], and I was happy.
Let the musicians rage against my shortcut. I don't care. Let them rage against some notion of "quality" and how AI doesn't provide it. Don't care, it's good enough for me.
The problem is when people spend 20 minutes prompting up a song and then attempt to make a career out of slop, and in the process drown out all the new creative works that aren't just remixed slop.
Well...it's a year and a half old and I still listen to it on a regular basis.
> and in the process drown out all the new creative works that aren't just remixed slop.
It might be shocking to you, but maybe people actually like "remixed slop".
If you want to listen to nothing but slop I can't stop you.
Disagree. Gp didn't make anything.
I told a waiter in a restaurant what I wanted to eat, and I got it. But I did not make the food : )
At some point you have to be OK with accepting "I made this" as meaning "my vision was executed under my supervision".
No one has to be ok with this.
It's like oneshotting an app with Lovable or cc and bragging about what "I made"
As the GP, I actually agree. I will never claim to have written the song, and I generally try to avoid claiming I "made" the song unless I include the "with Suno" caveat. I prefer to say that I "generated" the song.
> I told a waiter in a restaurant what I wanted to eat, and I got it. But I did not make the food : )
Then can we also stop giving credit to CEOs for the products their company makes? Elon Musk doesn't make EVs or rocket ships.
Absolutely! CEOs does many and difficult things, but they don't build anything
The issue is really the people who fill the streaming platforms with slop to make a quick buck, drowning out the real artists and producers in the process. (As if the Spotify model wasn't already bad enough for artists...)
> You need to make a world. So you have a rollercoaster in your backyard. And it’ll be the hot thing in the neighborhood for about a week. But once everyone’s had a go… they’ll lose interest, go home n play Sega instead. What you need then, is a fuckin’ theme park… and you AND your music are the theme. People come into your theme park…..check out all this shit… buncha rides, no 2 the same, some merch here and there, special events, dolphins through hoops and all that whack shit. You want people to come to your theme park and feel like they’re a part of this world of yours.
Franz Lizst was a rockstar in 1840 because he could write and play the piano really well. But culture and technology has progressed.
A popstar today can usually sing, dance, write, produce, act. They're business people with a marketing vision and gimmicks to go with it. Polymath performers, creators, and multi-instrumentalists. Technology marches forward and the next generation of artists will be those who adapt the tools available.
We're certainly losing something culturally. Just like this guy[1], who spent 1906 lamenting that the mechanical music machine (phonograph) will ruin music, was somewhat right in his prediction that fewer and fewer people would learn instruments and sing well.
"Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? ... When a mother can turn on the phonograph with the same ease that she applies to the electric light, will she croon her baby to slumber with sweet lullabys, or will the infant be put to sleep by machinery? Children are naturally imitative, and if, in their infancy, they hear only phonographs, will they not sing, if they sing at all, in imitation and finally become simply human phonographs -- without soul or expression?"
When I was a really young kid, I used to hum to myself with a buzzing sound to try and copy the early EDM sounds I grew up listening to. I went on to do electronic music production myself. (And that love of electronic music was the fuel that kept me interested in learning classical piano, jazz, music history and more, and why I still have a piano next to my desk now).
Personally, I'm excited to see what the next generation art and artists end up looking like.
[1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/21m-380-music-and-technology-con...
For the readers who are not aware: John Philip Sousa is, of course, not just some random guy, but the most famous composer of US-American marching music ("The Stars and Stripes Forever", "Washington Post March", etc.) I didn't know that he wrote essays for magazines.
This is really a fascinating document of a bygone era! Thanks for sharing!
When I left my eduction I could sequence 200 basepairs using gels. Now I process terabytes of NGS data on supercomputers. I dealt with it, I enjoyed it.
Edit: Not saying these kids have nothing to rage against, they can't afford houses, are uninsured, they face a huge wealth gap in the population, possible a war, the country is tearing apart... But why so anti AI specifically?
"AI is going to upend your nascent adulthood and career" is pretty tone-deaf when delivered by a semi-retired billionaire who was was neck-deep in a conspiracy to reduce wages in his industry barely 20 years ago.
The tools are just changing. But everything is always changing.
Again: Sure they have much to boo about, but AI? Gen AI can run on your own machine even, you can fully own the means to your production. How is this wasting the time they spent studying? You still need knowledge and understanding of a field to be active in it. When the tools change your internal "world model" is not suddenly corrupt. I hope these kids were taught how to think, not what to think.
To me it's a tool. It helps me accomplish my goals with less effort. That's the definition of a tool right? What is AI to you then? Perhaps I'm being dumb, but not sarcastic.
Or ok, perhaps laws are in order that state that AIs need to pay taxes too, and do some wealth redistribution that way…
Maybe capitalism is now broken and we need something new to help us deal with post scarcity socially.
I for one welcome our new Starfleet overlords.
Any maybe that's where we are today, but AI is rapidly improving and while we don't know what's going to happen there's very clearly a real possibility that instead of just people doing the same jobs but with a better tool, that tool will actually completely replace their jobs. Maybe a significant fraction of the jobs in society. That's no mere tool.
So the question is in what way ai is a tool to these kids.
Said farm workers have also been noticing headlines over the last years like:
"Crop harvester CEO predicts crop harvesting machine will wipe out millions of jobs within months"
"Crop harvester CEO: 'the crop harvester could destroy the world economy'."
"Farm lays off half its employees, pivots to crop harvester" (repeat this one about 10 times a week for months)
Then some idiot walks up to a crowd of farm hands talking about how awesome the crop harvester is.
No shit he's going to get booed lmao. He's fucking lucky they're not beating his ass into a shallow grave.
Who’s to say AI is not a democratizing force? Like the Internet? And book printing before that? Suddenly we all have a Personal Assistant, suddenly we can all build tools to make the computer do what we want.
Hey where is Stephen Fry with his podcasts when you need him!
Either we find something better to do than work for -or glue our eyeballs to the products off- our tech overlords or they go down with us. (I used that dash myself thank you).
Because society is structured so that every time some labor-saving innovation comes along, it's used as a tool to drive down wages and reduce workers' bargaining power. And they leaders of these industries aren't exactly hiding it.
You might be able to game it in the short term, but It's not like anyone is seriously thinking this will reduce the totality of our efforts in the long term. Employers are already champing at the bit to reduce headcount and increase output targets.
The only hope these people have to offer in their bleak future is that if you play your cards right, you might be one of the few crabs to climb over the other crabs and escape the bucket before it's dumped into the kettle. It's giving "we need one person from each department to stay on and train the India team after the layoffs" vibes.
There's an argument to be made that this is a necessary component of an economy that can reinvent itself. Maybe. But even if we accept this convenient and self-serving and suspicious premise, there can then be no concession on the point that structuring it this way creates an obligation on the part of the person receiving 200% to "spread it around" and that attempts to dodge this obligation are morally repugnant, socially unacceptable, and ought to be met with harsh political backpressure.
For the last while, that hasn't been the thinking. Instead we have gone for "blame mexicans and let's see if we can't make it 300%!" The response of the kids gives me hope that people might be coming back to their senses on the matter.
It results in the output becoming available to people at a lower price point.
It's not some artificial social system like unions guilds or cartels, it's a tangible thing that actually produces more output with less (or different) workers.
Unless you believe that we are actually close to making humans generally obsolete.
In the short term, basket adjustments are lagged and modest in impact, but in the long term they are everything. CPI is a good model of consumer price inflation vs last year but a terrible model when compounded. This is before going down the chained CPI and hedonic adjustment tangents, which both reliably adjust CPI in the wrong direction. Funny how all the dubious methodology points in one direction, that of understating inflation.
Worse, the very focus on consumer prices itself is highly misleading. Assets and liabilities matter in an economy that has a middle class and isn't just hand-to-mouth serfs. When assets inflate and paychecks don't and the response is dissaving and debt, that's a problem too. The American Dream isn't to Owner's Imputed Rent a house.
Couldn't be any more ironic than being delivered at a graduation ceremony. An equal message could be:
"You know all that time, effort and money you just spent learning something over the last few years? It's useless now. Lamo. Congrats on wasting your life."
How delusional do you have to be to give a pro-AI speech to the generation most likely to be directly fucked over by AI if your other predictions are true?
because they just spent $200k on an education that this man is telling them is worthless now, and how that's a good thing for them.
Maybe these "thought leaders" should be showing the kids unsure about their future a path forward instead of just spouting the AI hype.
> But why so anti AI specifically?
also, because one college did it and got famous on the internet , and now all the kids want in on it.
That's not even accounting for AI's unique ability to trick CEOs.
I think maybe AI is just the last straw for many people. If capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production, AI represents the ultimate dream of the capitalist: the elimination of the need of human labor entirely. Whether or not it can achieve that is secondary to the goal itself.
Grads are facing a brutal job market where much of what they just spent several years of their lives learning is going to have little to no value to employers. It's not like your gradual transition from sequencing with gels to using supercomputers over the long course of a career.
It's like you just spent 4 years learning to sequence with gels, and now someone is telling you that was a waste of time, and you should just stop complaining and deal with it.
this. I don't understand why people here are pretending like its not a big deal.
I know I'm being privileged, but not by much, I'm self employed and the world is changing like crazy and it scares me as well, how will I gather my income in a year (luckily I do live in a "socialist" country, but not so socialist for entrepreneurs)? No idea, but I set up Open Claw and Claude Code and it's opening my eyes to different ways of doing things. The primitives to do this are the same as always (Linux). Sure, if you're doing medicine you won't know how to do this, but you never did, you relied on people like me/us.
Well, perhaps the only difference between me and the younglings is that over time I've come to trust my intellect. I'll deal with it, as they say.
Btw, if you're really suggesting that "this time it's different" (as in AI is different from electricity, the internet, ubiquitous computing), then you agree with the elites: you're going to have to deal with it, the genie is out of the box and it happened faster than ever.
I'll add again, they the younglings have many reason to boo the tech elites, and I'd join them if I were there, I'm just trying to understand what is exactly going on in the minds of our precious new generation, this is important (Hey, I watched Altered Carbon!).
and I'm in a similar situation, although I'm younger
and I do think in a way this time is different, because AI by nature is very "generic", its not just one domain, rather everything is affected
plus there is a kind of mindset that the youth is entitled and that thank God we don't have to hire them anymore etc etc. it doesn't help.
and even though I believe things will get better, the question is "when" and if there will be a new "lost generation" or whatever.
maybe that makes sense? on one hand I'm able to do way more, but I also know what that means at least in the short term. I don't know where the demand will be to meet this new exponential supply.
Decreasing human toil for the same level of production should be the dream of _everyone_. If it's only capitalists in favor then that's a massive indictment of the non-capitalists.
This reminds me of the famous Bastiat quote: "If, then, the utility of any branch of industry is to be estimated not by the amount of satisfactions it is fitted to procure us with a determinate amount of labour, but, on the contrary, by the amount of labour which it exacts in order to yield us a determinate amount of satisfactions, what we ought evidently to desire is, that each acre of land should yield less corn, and each grain of corn less nourishment…"
The misunderstanding that labor and not production is the basis of prosperity leads to some pretty silly conclusions.
nothing bad would happen, no one would lose anything
How to deal with it. Spitting "deal with it" at the audience just says he was so unprepared that he didn't even realize he was literally hired to give them that send-off guidance. But being skilled and notable in a field doesn't make people insightful.