Barack Obama: “For elevator music, AI is going to work fine. Music like Bob Dylan or Stevie Wonder, that’s different”::Barack Obama has weighed in on AI’s impact on music creation in a new interview, saying, “For elevator music, AI is going to work fine”.
Can’t imagine good art coming from something that’s incapable of giving a shit about things.
Is muzak your idea of good art?
Young tech can’t tell real from simulacrum
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For art to be good it needs to leave an impression on people. Can’t imagine anyone taking anything away from Generic Pretty Girl #372
Most stuff looks pretty generic, you’re right. But there’s actually been a couple times when I’ve been baffled by the output. For this one, for example, I just gave it my username
I think magicians love when audiences are willing to both believe in magic and maintain a respect for the secrecy of their trade.
I’ll tell you what I know for sure: people from my generation are working like their lives depend on it to separate the new generations from their money using our triumphant new invention; so of course this looks like impressive art to younger people and no one else; you’ll love the AI music we sell you too! And wait till you meet all the AI characters we’ve trained for you! You can sit, jaw dropped stifling laughter to hear the next joke designed to make you cackle so hard you piss yourself, in a room full of tailored friends.
There are still tons of real things in this world: they still inspire more fruitful wonder than we do for ourselves and our contraptions.
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That takes a steaming hot dump on what the vast majority of people can do.
It’s why people are scared. They should be.
That takes a steaming hot dump on what the vast majority of people can do.
I’d argue that it is a steaming hot dump of random, deviant art quality junk, but to each their own.
I’d argue people like you are going to hold it under much more scrutiny knowing it’s made by AI instead of humans.
I’d also argue you will do this without admitting it.
This thread is the gift that keeps in giving 🤣
Nah I barely looked at it, and wouldn’t care who made it because it looks like tarot card garbage.
HAHA that’s crazy you think that that is so great.
I was like this in the 90s with MDs.
You probably think AI porn is “stunning” 🤣
‘So great’ would be inaccurate.
I said it “takes a steaming hot dump on what the vast majority of people can do.”
Tell me you feel called out without telling me you feel called out. Lol.
Why would I feel called out by a pattern I’ve seen a few times before and the generation before me saw even more than that?
You’re like the dude in the other 20s, “you fools! Look to the sky! The dirigible has conquered the realm once enjoyed freely only by the birds and angels! I’ll take a streaming hot DUMP on you from here! One golden ticket onto the glorious Hindenburg!”
Flies are just consequences of shit; I don’t feel much of anything about flies I figure 🤷♂️
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I don’t think you’re going to remember that particular image in a week.
The same can be said about any random piece of human created art.
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It’s an infinite crap generator, which I can see why people are so enamored with it. Because people seem to want a seeming variety of generic junk almost instinctually. Just take a look at the variety of garbage available on all streaming platforms right now, the variety of garbage on YouTube, or even worse a single aisle in any grocery store: shelves full of crap that’s often the same thing with different labels, substances that are utter shit on almost a molecular level but seem appealing or better than others based upon packaging.
Edit: Amazon is nearly a perfection of the instant, endless crap business model. Just imagine when someone hooks up one of these things to a 3d printer. You can then have infinite crap generated entirely based upon your search queries. Now if you’ll excuse me I have a patent application to file…
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It’s not even infinite
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-world-is-running-out-of-data-to-feed-ai-experts-warn
I think your generation’s the first to be totally pink for this sort of thing and I’m worried for ya
I’m gutted that you can’t tell the difference. Or that you don’t care to. It’s sad you think this toy is an idol.
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What is good art? Stuff like this can be produced with zero effort in a couple of seconds.
Lol, not that.
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Sure, I am after all the sole arbiter of what good art is. /s
I’ll answer like a supreme court justice: I know it when I see it.
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I thought some of the early banksy stuff was pretty good.
I’m sure AI can generate an original one of those that’s as evocative because it deeply understands the human experience, has the ability to spray paint on public walls, is aware of trends and culture, and is similarly concerned about the rise of modern fascism and surveillance states.
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🤣
Everything is always a matter of time
I suppose I’m happy that he is no longer president if he has strong opinions on topics he is clueless.
I don’t think they’re strong opinions
People often get asked to weigh in on things, and then news headlines run with the responses. Sure everyone could say “I don’t know enough so I won’t say anything”, but that’s a little unproductive.
I find it annoying especially when some news agency asks a loaded question, and then regardless of the response they have some story to run with
While reassuring for many to hear, that’s only going to be true for so long. Eventually it’s going to be real fucking good at making “real” music. We need to be preparing for those advancements rather than acting like they’ll never come.
To make “real” music, AI will probably need a lot of help. Image generators and chat bots seem to have their own, very boring style. I’ve seen videos of artists using AI tools in their workflow, but it’s still a very involved process. I think it will just be another tool for musicians and sound engineers.
I’m the immediate term, yeah I 100% agree. However, I’m not thinking we bank on that being true forever.
I feel very reassured to hear that from the AI expert / musical virtuoso himself, 62 year old, former United States President Barack Obama.
Right? That said, I care about his opinion on AI about as much as I care about the opinions of all the anonymous loudmouths on Lemmy.
Yeah Barrak should just shut up. That idiot hasn’t even listened to music before.
Wow, a word from a global expert on AI, Barrack Obama. I hope he’s a bit better at it than he is at world peace!
Can’t believe Obama dropped Eminem’s verse 😭💀
…so I’ve been on a shit load of elevators, and I don’t recall a single one of them having music. For as common a trope as it is, you’d think elevator music would be more common in actual elevators.
Some hotel elevators have it.
But yeah, I don’t recall the last time I heard music in a residential elevator.
It’s like porn, they all used to have music, and now people still make jokes about how bad it was but it’s just gone now
Elevators used to have porn? :o /s
Up and down that shit all day long pal.
Brown chicken brown cow.
Yes, but it was bad, so now they don’t. Keep up!
Fuck, I’m old. :(
I don’t think I can actually recall one either.
Maybe in a department store or mall in the 80s. It was just so deliberately bland I never noticed when it became less common.
Yeah they always go with awkward silence
The quiet fart is king.
It’s not as common as it used to be, but I think the point was kind of that you’re not supposed to notice it?
Look into “muzak” (the style of music. Apparently it’s also a brand according to Google), and some of Brian Eno’s ambient albums like “Music for Airports” (which is definitely a bit more sparse than elevator music, which was often like smooth jazz versions of classic songs), but along similar lines.
I don’t like to think I’m that old, and I 100% remember elevator music.
Edit: was possibly thinking of “musique concrete” rather than muzak.
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I may have been thinking of “musique concrete” rather than muzak
I’ve been in a few that played music (or more recently, ads) in them. But, yeah, it’s like quicksand in that I was led to believe it would be pretty uniquitous.
or more recently, ads
Try this one trick to get me to take the stairs every single time.
I worked in an office that installed music in the bathrooms. It wasn’t there for a long time, and then they added it. An email went out at one point instructing people to stop turning off the music (someone figured out where the Sonos controls were I guess). Someone at the top had decided it was IMPERATIVE to have something to listen to other than the coworker grunting next to you.
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That actually might make elevator and phone hold music survivable - continual compositions that never repeat
Cheaper to generate 30s and loop it
That’s the current state of fuckery and makes self immolation a tempting option
24h/7d elevator music that never repeats itself. I think you’ve described Hell.
It doesn’t need to be shitty though.
And it really couldn’t be worse than the current state of shit on a loop hold musak that drills into your brain.
I mean Obama is not wrong, but I hope the rest of his thoughts are that it will be as good as the artists he quoted as it absolutely will one day. Unsure when as there is an uncanny valley to cross. He did say this right and it was not just a get off my front lawn comment…right?
He’s wrong in the sense that Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder are just as much cultural reflections as they are artists. Popular art and celebrity are effectively inseparable. This is why each generation often doesn’t “get” the popular art of others.
The reality is that there’s nothing stopping an AI from becoming a celebrity, and I’m a bit surprised it hasn’t happened yet. Once that happens, the art it produces will be lauded, and people who are not the direct participants in mainstream popular culture will be confused and in some cases upset or offended by it. And the wheel will continue to turn.
Very good points. Art is in the eye/ear of the beholder sort of thing and our taste is for sure influenced by our culture/generation.
AI is new and already performing in office to a second year law student level.
That’s what I got from this.
Also the Secret Invasion intro looked really cool and I hate it but it did. When it comes to depth and meaning it may be a while yet before AI can simulate or bullshit it’s way through that but for now it can definitely create interesting and noteworthy pieces.
What is notable that there is a unique culture of making human covers of popular AI based songs. Especially in the vocaloid scene. Same with auto tune and similar tools.
AI isn’t going to take the jobs of musicians. It’ll just give them more material to work with because people will always seem out “authentic” versions of things they like.
We need a Boomer Music AI then I guess.
Could you even imagine the necessary programming to create a thing like Bobby Zimmerman, a brilliant songwriter that can’t even sing, but made of go of it anyways and is regarded as one of the best singers of the last half of the previous century regardless?
Lol, no one thinks he’s “one of the best singers of the last half of the previous century,” WTF are you smoking?
That’s Captain Beefheart you are talking to…
If I can get some more legit-sounding 60s rock, I’m in.
Why would people think he knows anything about AI?
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AI researcher (PhD) here and for what it’s worth, Obama got it extremely right. I saw this and went “holy shit, he gets it”
Yeah I dont believe you at all. I got my master in AI 8 years ago and have been working in the field ever since and no one with any knowledge would agree with you at all. In fact I showed a couple of my colleagues the headline of this article and they both just laughed.
If you don’t think ai will get there and surpass everything humans have done in the past, you should change career.
I’m saying this because I do this for a living. It has become obvious to everyone in research (for example - https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00059) that "AI"s don’t understand what they are outputting. The secret sauce with all these large models is the data scale. That is, we have not had real algorithmic breakthroughs - it’s just model scale and data scale. So we can make models that mimic human language and music etc but to go beyond, we need multiple fundamentally different breakthroughs. There is a ton of research attention now so it might happen, but it’s not guaranteed - the improvements we’ve seen in the past few years will plateau as data plateaus (we are already there according to some, i.e we’ve used all the data on the Internet). Also, this - https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2
You do it for a living and you can’t even understand what a general ai is. Alas I long since understood that mostly everyone is profoundly incompetent at their own jobs.
Because he’s a world leader and AI programs are answering search engine queries with what you want to hear now, not actual answers. Ain;t no way hes unaware that.
Because we often look up to public figures for stuff they are not qualified to comment on.
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But what does ja rule think?
Are you saying that Barack Obama and Dr. Dre both are equally unqualified to talk about “AI”? What other similarities do they share that makes you reach for Dr. Dre so quickly? Do you believe that Obama or Dre are incapable of interacting with computers or understanding computer science? Do you think that people who look like “thugs” to a person like you might be capable of learning and performing complex tasks?
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/Mo-ddYhXAZc?si=S9-XF-cwCnR5G_ZW
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
If he’s an unqualified bystander, then what the fuck are you?
I’m always surprised that the people with all the answers only share them with thirty other assholes on the Internet.
I’m confident a 14 year old can write their own AI, maybe even a smart 10 year old.
Here’s instructions for kids:
https://youtu.be/XJ7HLz9VYz0?si=1QN3fqT03HSMufib
You think Obama can’t wrap his head around a little algebra?
Why, when speaking intelligently and thoughtfully in the subject, is he so wrong in his assessment, when you, in one lazy sentence, are so right?
I’m really worried about would-be wise people just throwing in the towel cause they don’t know how much better they could be with a little discipline, and settle for being clever here and there.
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As far as I know, Obama has nothing to do with IT and doesn’t have a big interest in it. A lot of people on here are probably more qualified than he is when it comes to these topics simply because they spent a lot of their free time learning about it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/XJ7HLz9VYz0?si=1QN3fqT03HSMufib
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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Why are you acting like it’s at all difficult to understand?
Because you can teach a teen to do it in two weeks. He was a constitutional law professor, as well as the first elected African-American president in the United States. I learned LLMs in a couple months and I never used a comp until 2021. Why are you gatekeeping?
Using the end product and having any idea how it works are two VERY different things.
I agree, my argument is that both aren’t challenging for even the average person if they really want/need to understand how these models produce refined noise informed by human patterns.
There are electricians everywhere you know.
This isn’t a random person thoughtlessly yelling one-sentence nonsense pablum on the Internet like you.
You think this person can’t understand something as straightforward as programming, coming from law?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama
Please link your Wikipedia below 🫠
It’s a bit more complicated than you’re making it out to be lmfao, there’s a reason it’s only really been viable for the past few years.
The principles are really easy though. At its core, neural nets are just a bunch of big matrix multiplication operations. Training is still fundamentally gradient descent, which while it is a fairly new concept in the grand scheme of things, isn’t super hard to understand.
The progress in recent years is primarily due to better hardware and optimizations at the low levels that don’t directly have anything to do with machine learning.
We’ve also gotten a lot better at combining those fundamentals in creative ways to do stuff like GANs.
“AI can’t do [thing]” *AI does thing* “Well AI can’t do [other thing]” *AI does other thing* “Yeah, well AI doesn’t have soul (or some other nebulous thing)”
We can’t just dismiss rapidly improving AI and ignore the coming consequences. Things like “soul” or any other element that is considered human never mattered when it came to commercial music. A lot of radio hits are quickly-produced trash, with perhaps a catchy tune, and little in the way of meaningful lyrics. If it’s considered “good enough” (i.e. it makes money) then that’s all that is needed for a company. Don’t fool yourself into thinking the artistry ever mattered in this context.
This is the reality a lot of people don’t want to face, a huge amount of popular music is just established patterns put together in the way music school teaches is the right way then pushed with endless hype from the money hungry corporations.
We are absolutely going to see a kid in his bedroom use AI to make a concept album that resonates with people and garners popular acclaim - I don’t know when it will happen but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it’s this decade.
People used to say that same nonsence about samplers and drum machines, it’s the same trend as when people said Shakespeare isn’t poetry because he hadn’t been trained in Latin and Greek enough or Cezanne wasn’t a real artist, or a million other times people have confidently declared we’re at the end of history and nothing new will ever be good.
What people need to remember is when they see Rick Astley singing his heart out it’s lyrics written by Pete Waterman and music from session artists put together by university trained professionals to shift units - soulless music has been a thing for a long time and no one ever cared before.
Obsessive kids have been making great music in their bedroom for decades now, aphex twin gets industry acclaime for twiddling some knobs and so will whoever gets popular doing the equivalent interesting things with AI.
LMAO, what an absolutely god awful take.
Ill see you in 2 years when we have our first AI Grammy winner
