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from the is-it-live-or-is-it-Auto-Tune? dept.
Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve has become a woke, sanitized shell of its former self. The crowd of rowdy, inebriated locals and tourists is long gone. What you see now is bouncing and screaming for the latest flash-in-the-pan artists while industry veterans like Duran Duran barely elicit a cheer.
Youtuber and music industry veteran Rick Beato recently posted an interesting video on how Auto-Tune has destroyed popular music. Beato quotes from an interview he did with Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan where the latter stated, "AI systems will completely dominate music. The idea of an intuitive artist beating an AI system is going to be very difficult." AI is making inroads into visual art as well, and hackers, artists and others seem to be embracing it with enthusiasm.
AI seems to be everywhere lately, from retrofitting decades old manufacturing operations to online help desk shenanigans to a wearable assistant to helping students cheat. Experts are predicting AI to usher in the next cyber security crisis and the end of programming as we know it.
Will there be a future where AI can and will do everything? Where artists are judged on their talents with a keyboard/mouse instead of a paintbrush or guitar? And what about those of us who will be developing the systems AI uses to produce stuff? Will tomorrow's artist be the programming genius who devises a profound algorithm that can produce stuff faster, or more eye/ear-appealing, where everything is completely computerized and lacking any humanity? Beato makes a good point in his video on auto-tune, that most people don't notice when something has been digitally altered, and quite frankly, they don't care either.
Will the "purists" among us be disparaged and become the new "Boomers"? What do you think?.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2023, @12:14AM (4 children)
One has to remember that current "AI" only knows what it's taught. There's no creativity or novelty. All they can produce are essentially remixes of existing works.
Will "AI" automate the lowest-common-denominator mainstream conveyor belt of popular genres? Possibly. Will they drive truly creative and inventive artists out of the industry? Not for a while yet.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2023, @02:23AM (3 children)
So, pretty much like humans then. Everything you think or say has been done, nothing new under the sun.
The current "AI" is creating random eldritch combinations that no sane human would ever dream up. If not truly novel, it can still inspire creativity in humans.
I acknowledge the limitations and that human creativity is going into the application of these tools and curation of their output, but people are just scratching the surface with the current, dumb "AI". Maybe we will never consider it creative, but it could be directed to create something coherent and not clearly derivative of existing styles and works, due to sheer randomness. Possibly requiring an entirely new approach not being taken by the current diffusion models, but not requiring a sentient machine.
With respect to job elimination, you are right, but it could decimate the number of artists a few times while driving income down. A rat race with global competition will become worse. You can already find alleged artists suicidal over this stuff. Some of them might be trolls, but not all of them.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday January 09 2023, @09:52AM (1 child)
> Everything you think or say has been done, nothing new under the sun.
Speak for yourself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2023, @12:45PM
Heard that one before, meatbag.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2023, @12:31PM
One has to admit there is some creative force in the universe. Even if it's trial and error, the stuff that "sticks" ends up incredibly complex and ingenious. I guess for me the remarkable thing is that these things are inevitable owing to being the lowest energy arrangement - or somehow trading local low entropy for global high entropy in such a way that it finds a lower energy state. Utterly baffling.