With all the bruhaha around ChatGPT, GPT-3 and friends like: Jasper, Article Forge and growthbar, let me just reminisce about the summer of 1984 when I made a word-salad generator that would log on to (teenage enemy) BBSs at 4 in the morning and fill their pages with uncanny valley residing content peppered with local usernames and hot topics of the day, fed at a semi-human imitating 140-240 baud with occasional pauses "for thought" - sysops would sometimes listen to their servers and content dumped in at full speed sounds different than human driven keyboard output, but humans can be imitated...
Swerving back to the title content: Garage Band, similar to AI story writers, Garage Band is one of many Digital Audio Workstation programs out there, used by the likes of Moby, Ed Sheeran, Trent Reznor, and let's be honest: "Avid Pro Tools is the DAW of choice, being used by producers on 65% of the top 100 albums from the past 10 years." The thing about Garage Band is: if you have any recent Apple gear (we still have a 6 year old iPad mini), then you have it included with your OS: for free. If not, there are many many free, low cost, and not so low cost DAW tools out there, but focusing on the "so free it's bundled with the OS" Garage Band, which has gadzillions of tutorials available, let me just hit the high points of what I discovered yesterday after basically ignoring the depth of what DAWs have become over the last 40 years.
See, in 1983 I was directly programming the 4 channel sound synthesizer on Atari 400/800 computers, in 1989 I built a MIDI controlled sound synthesizer out of some PLDs and a (fixed point 16 bit) TI DSP. I briefly opened various DAW softwares over the years since then, including Garage Band about 5-6 years ago - even bought a little keyboard as controller input to Garage Band for the kids to see if they would take an interest (they didn't). At that time, I went just deep enough into the software to see the drum sequencer and the thousands upon thousands of synthesizer voices, fancy real instrument interfaces, etc. What I didn't discover at that time were the Autoplayers - which basically give the DAW operator a studio full of session musicians who can drum in various styles and auto-play appropriate melody lines, chord progressions, etc. on basically all the instruments, started with a single click, then tunable in three to thirty dimensions to whatever you may be looking for in your musical production.
Couple this with ChatGPT writing lyrics and a good singing synthesizer or two, and Pop music is going to have a hard time keeping up with the flood of semi-original studio quality productions coming out of pre-teens' bedrooms.
Still, after playing with it for a few hours yesterday, what's still lacking is the "soul" of the songs. Sure, it sounds professional, because it is more professionally played than most professional musicians can manage. There are only 12 tones in the scale and only so many chord progressions that "sound right" in western music, it wouldn't be too hard to run the gamut of available permutations - maybe copyright them all so we can finally beat Mickey Mouse at his own game: if every melody possible is copyrighted in 2023, there's no way to copyright any new ones...
Anyway, 13 year old school kids - given AI assistance in writing their poetry and music - can probably relate better to other 11-13 year old school kids about the issues that matter to them today than any corporate record producers ever could. If they can focus on their songwriting for more than a couple of hours, they are on a much more level playing field today than four guys from Liverpool having to get lucky hooking up with production, distribution and promotion sufficient to ignite their popularity.
And, I suppose that's the thing about AI generated writing, as well. If it's used as a tool, with a decent amount of care, feeding and editing of the output, it can help real writers write better articles in much less time than they used to have to invest. Too bad that it's also being used by bad writers putting in low effort to generate a flood of uncanny valley crap that takes far too much effort to spot as junk and sort it from good content.
Were you looking for a point? This is more of an Art-house post, the point is left to you: the reader / responder in the comments below. Find your own point, and share.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 17, @10:47AM
It's the first SN post written by an AI, am i rite?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by looorg on Tuesday January 17, @11:25AM (1 child)
So you are basically remember that the drum-machine was invented? I can't even recall how long ago now but probably about 50 years or so, give or take depend on which version and how programmable it should be or was etc. That said a drum machine alone probably doesn't make a star or a song. Unless you are really into just drumming.
Fake or virtual groups are apparently already a thing, virtual or not. I seem to recall there being various virtual bands and superstars over in Asia, k-pop in Korea.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-63827838 [bbc.com]
As noted it's even worse then 12 chords. With only about four of them you can apparently recreate most of the popular songs of the last few decades. So writing/composing songs is in that regard already down to a formula for most of the top chart songs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ [youtube.com]
Considering that lyrics quite often make no sense or are very vague, symbolic or open to interpretations I'm sure AI composed songs would just go unnoticed among all the other noice.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 17, @10:04PM
>Drum machine
I assume you mean the synthesizer version... there's a whole other world of weird that has been growing out there since then:
https://www.wired.com/2009/03/new-musical-instruments-battle-for-10k-in-prizes/ [wired.com]
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 17, @03:40PM (2 children)
The golden age of muzak! Hopefully this tsunami of dross will re-awaken everyone to what art, music, truth actually are. I certainly hope art leads the way out as science seems to have gone off the deep end and up its own asshole.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Tuesday January 17, @04:49PM (1 child)
Not just muzak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwtVkPKx3RA [youtube.com]
For consumer music, not only production effort is negligible compared to everything else around to make money with it, but it is also desirable to be a mostly known rehash of previous consumer music, because the consumer likes little change. So they just ask Max Martin to wiggle his mouse for an hour. That kind of music isn't successful, because it is particularly good, but because it is hammered into the listeners brains through heavy rotation and repetition (Homework exercise: Count how many times "Who's that girl?" is sung in Madonna's "Who's that girl?")
One would have expected porn to be the first sector to embrace AI, but this time it was clickbait content filler for the "news" networks. (E.g. CNET: "(very small) created with digital assistance and (huge bold letters) researched and verified by our expert editors."). But it's a given that porn picks up on the technology, once the ML models don't mutilate fingers anymore. Also, stock photography in general is done, I think.
The genie is out of the bottle. We just have to accept what comes. Beyond the porn/stock photo prediction, three further guesses:
- Prompt editor will become a job (the intuition that makes the difference between: "Stupid computer crap!" and "Holy cow!" when asking something from an ML model)
- There will be a dip in quality once ML input starts to significantly feed on ML output
- Attribution to real meat humans will become a thing
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 17, @08:17PM
>Prompt editor will become a job
I believe it already is, much the same way stack overflow copy-paste is.
>There will be a dip in quality once ML input starts to significantly feed on ML output
That's going to be an arms race, already there are projects to "spot" AI generated content - but if the AI generated content is good, are you really increasing input set quality by ignoring it? I just wonder how long it would take for an Ouroboros AI to convince itself the earth is flat?
>Attribution to real meat humans will become a thing
Hasn't this been a thing since, like Plato and friends - maybe even earlier?
As for porn, rule 34 applies not only to end product content but also to methods of production.
Stock photography / art, yeah... kinda already there IMO. Plenty of "good enough" stuff in CC for a lot of purposes, and if you're going for "world class production value" then you're gonna be wanting to use that travel budget for all kinds of things besides just capturing a few images.
>everything else around to make money with it
This seems to be a rapidly evolving field, the traditional channels are still dominating of course, but their jobs are getting harder with so many people who don't tune in to the 3 major networks 10+ hours a week anymore, and there have been more than a few breakout artists who make enough to make a living without using the traditional channels. For example, Netflix has a video blog turned documentary of two guys who ride bikes from Germany to China to raise money to build a school in Guatemala, and apparently they hit $50K on their ride ($12K from a single donor), just based on their vlog exposure. Now, what I wonder is how many dozen schools worth of money the documentary on Netflix is generating and how that money is all flowing? The vlog guys still needed to have the time to do the stunt, money to live on while doing it, sufficient safety net to fly home from wherever as needed, etc. but that's several orders of magnitude less stake than a heavy rotation promotion from Tower Records & friends.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mcgrew on Tuesday January 17, @04:09PM (3 children)
About 20 years ago, frustrated that otherwise serious researchers and scientists seemingly thought they could program a computer to think, (without, of course, understanding what thought actually is; nobody knows that) I wrote a simulation that appears to think, in order to completely debunk the fools and those fooling them who think computers can think.
I wrote Artificial Insanity in less than 20K (that's Kilo, not mega) bytes; smaller than modern viruses, that ran on the Timex TS-1000 tape driven computer. I later ported it to a Radio Shack computer, then an Apple IIe, and finally ported it to MS-DOS.
The DOS version's source code is still under 20k (I didn't change the algorithm, only the syntax for the different programming language) although compiled into an .exe it takes about 400k, still tiny by today's standards, as far as simulation software and games go.
As I mentioned, I did it in response to Elijah and all the other similar programs that attempt to fool you into thinking they can think. As far as I know, mine is the only one that is NOT claimed to actually posses intelligence. None really ARE intelligent, I'm just the only one not making the claim. Debunking the claim was my reason for writing it.
Another thing different about Art from all the other intelligence simulations is that I wanted it to be fun, yet annoying. Kind of like playing Quake on a 28.8 against a bunch of LPBs. So I made it a smartass.
Also, for example, I added little things like a routine that occasionally runs that, instead of answering the questioner, asks if he or she wants to play a game. Of course, most folks consider Art a game anyway (although like the Sims, you can't win or lose). Any negative response to Do you want to play a game loops back to Do you want to play a game? When the hapless player finally gives up and answers yes in exasperation, Art answers you lose .
Art cost a friend of mine a keyboard. A friend of his literally destroyed it playing with Art, typing as hard as he could.
I ran across yet another program that claims to think like a human the other day.
The Alice Bot is basically your typical Elijah-like program: BORING. As boring as small talk with the dumbest, most boring person you know. Alice is a lady. If she was a whore she might be fun, but I digress.
I wondered what would happen if Art had a conversation with Alice. Alice has a web based presence, so I didn't even have to install it.
I was expecting Alice to choke. I expected Art to kick Alice's ass.
I fired up Art and logged in to Alice (you dirty minded...)
Here is the transcript. Art's responses are in bold, Alice's are in italics. Alice starts: What is your name?
I should have asked Art, but I answered this first question for him, and type in
Art.
Alice replies:
I like art very much too, especially the contemporary stuff.
Are you for real?
Yes I am real AI
Whatever gave you that idea?
My brain uses AIML to format responses to your inputs, but I don't have one for that.
Look, I'm good, but I'm not a Cray
Good in what sense? That is interesting: unknown said he m not a cray. [sic]
Art doesn't require you to hit enter . It takes a period, question mark, etc as the end of the sentence and answers, so here it stops at the question mark.
All that is input is Good in what sense?
A piece of junk
Are you talking about an animal, vegetable or mineral?
Can you put that another way?
Let me think. OK I will put it there.
Heh heh she said...
The situation calls for more scrutiny.
Tell me more.
What do you think?
I think a lot of things.
Obviously.
What makes it so obvious?
Looks Greek to me.
Really. it is?
Look, I'm good, but I'm not a Cray.
Good in what sense? Do you mind if I tell other people: unknown said he m not a cray. [sic]
(Entered second question into Art)
WOW!
I'm glad your [sic] impressed, unknown.
Uh,
Er. Um.
This is what you human types call a joke, right?
At this point, Alice froze for two full minutes.
You don't say.
Right on!
Yeah.
Your guess is as good as mine.
Some people say " your guess is as good as mine .
Maybe.
I understand.
How should I know?
Either from your senses or from pure reason.
I don't think so.
Why do you disagree?
That's why.
Thanks for explaining it.
How simple can it get?
What is it to you.
I don't know but it's ugly.
What makes it so ugly?
This time Art pauses...
Nothing.
Not a thing?
Never mind that, I think I'm in love!
Oh well thanks for trying to explain it to me anyway. That is Not a thing? Since when? Tell me about the object of your affection.
Okay, one question at a time, lady. Since when? was typed in.
The best time possible for the occurrence of the action.
Tell me about the object of your affection.
UHH....!
Er. Um.
Always
Not that often.
It really doesn't make any difference.
What doesn't make any difference?
Real
Totally real.
I think so.
I think so too.
At this point I hit the big red switch in horror...
6/11/2002
The transcript of the two AIs is, in fact, real, silly as it is.
11/27/2014
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 17, @04:18PM
github or it didn't happen.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 17, @08:27PM (1 child)
Back in the summer of 1983 I wrote a BASIC program that could do my Spanish I homework... it wasn't a fluent translator or anything, but the way Spanish I is taught, the patterns are clear and repeatable and you can pretty much apply the logic to a broad set of verbs without foreknowledge of each one. I doubt it was even 5K of code.
Of course today you've got speech recognition and voice synthesis with translation from/to dozens of languages as good or better than humans who claim to have "5 years experience speaking X, Y or Z"... I'd be willing to bet there's at least 5TB in the training set to make all that happen, and it makes sense: 100B neurons in the human brain, sooner or later the things we build are going to be able to imitate it pretty well.
But, are these AIs yet self-aware enough to communicate their needs? If not, they can hardly evolve up from needs to wants, desires and dreams, and that's mostly what Art is made of... then there's the problem of "relateability." As a sexual meatbag, in the long term analysis: the hokey pokey really is what it's all about. What's it all going to be about for the server farms?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mcgrew on Thursday January 19, @05:23PM
Back in the summer of 1983 I wrote a BASIC program that could do my Spanish I homework
Considering that in Spanish, letters only have one sound each and the language's rules don't have exceptions, that seems pretty easy. Done in our bastard language would take a much bigger and more complex database. I don't remember ever getting homework in Spanish class, and if we had, all computers were mainframes back then. Mainframes your phone runs rings around.
But, are these AIs yet self-aware enough to communicate their needs? If not, they can hardly evolve up from needs to wants, desires and dreams, and that's mostly what Art is made of...
Nobody seems to ask how natural intelligence came about. It seems to me that before natural intelligence, which is a chemical reaction, started from the recognition of injury, proceeded to relief from, say, thirst... After life started, there was no evolution here for a full billion years, until the wrong chemical entered into the mix.
How can you make a computer hungry or thirsty? Animals, including us, act on feelings, not logic. I discussed it in this piece of short fiction. [mcgrewbooks.com]
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday January 18, @09:33AM (1 child)
Isn't the top hits list dominated by a small number of writers/producers, written to be as bland/generic as possible, then played constantly through every venue to force people to like it through sheer repetition?
Seems like the absolute ideal target for AI. Whatever people's arguments about AI not having creativity, everyone can agree that the top hits require no creativity whatsoever.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 18, @03:58PM
Newsflash: the Jewish moguls at the top of the entertainment industry are actually reptillialiens and have been using their AI engines to control the minds of Earth youth since the advent of recorded sound and picture technology, which they leaked to Thomas Edison and friends to speed the process along.
/s
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end