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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2023, @02:41AM
Ignoring the idea of deepfaking an entire concert in video form, what happens when you can't tell that an audio recording of some obscure rock band's live performance is actually generated by AI? Like a fake band playing fake songs, or a real band's real songs being imitated. Imperfections and all, including 3D spatial audio for a room that never existed. Do you enjoy music because it sounds good or because it's what you expected?
It's the new Turing Test. When we reach the point where you can't reliably tell if some piece of art or music was AI generated, you have no leg to stand on and will be turned into a cyborg.