AI singer-songwriter ‘Anna Indiana’ debuted her first single ‘Betrayed by this Town’ on X, formerly Twitter—and listeners were not too impressed.

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150 points
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There can be nothing new or original out of AI because all of its inputs are stolen from what already exists. Real creativity comes solely from humans. Also, that clip - the song, singing, and visual - is dreadful in every way.

This needs to be hammered into techbro’s heads until they shut the fuck up about the so-called “AI” revolution.

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76 points

I’ve been doing a lot of using, testing, and evaluating LLMs and GPT-style models for generating code and text/prose. Some of it is just general use to see how it behaves, some has been explicit evaluation of creative writing, and a bunch of it is code generation to test out how we need to modify our CS curriculum in light of these new tools.

It’s an impressive piece of technology, but it’s not very creative. It’s meh. The results are meh. Which is to be expected since it’s a statistical model that’s using a large body of prior work to produce a reasonable approximation of what it’s seen before. It trends towards the mean, not the best.

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15 points

This’d explain why inexperienced users of ai would inevitably get mediocre results. Still takes creativity to get stolen mediocrity.

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24 points

You have to know how to operate the oven to reheat store bought pie. Generative LLMs are machines like ovens, and turning the knobs is not creativity. Not operating the oven correctly gets you Sharon Weiss results.

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4 points

I guess a protip is you have to tell it explicitly in the prompt who it’s supposed to steal from.

For instance, midjourney or SD will produce much better results if you put specific artstation channel names along with ‘artstation’ in the prompt.

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9 points

and a bunch of it is code generation to test out how we need to modify our CS curriculum in light of these new tools.

I’m curious if you’ve gotten anything decent out of them. I’ve tried to use it for tech/code questions, and it’s been nothing but disappointment after disappointment. I’ve tried to use it to get help with new concepts, but it hallucinates like crazy and always give me bad results, some of the time it’s so bad that it gives me answers I’ve already told it we’re wrong.

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6 points

Yeah, I’ve just set up a hotkey that says something like “back up your answer with multiple reputable sources” and I just always paste it at the end of everything I ask. If it can’t find webpages to show me to back up its claims then I can’t trust it. Of course this isn’t the case with coding, for that I can actually run the code to verify it.

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3 points

What version are you using?

GPT-4 is quite impressive, and the dedicated code LLMs like Codex and Copilot are as well. The latter must have had a significant update in the past few months, as it’s become wildly better almost overnight. If trying it out, you should really do so in an existing codebase it can use as a context to match style and conventions from. Using a blank context is when you get the least impressive outputs from tools like those.

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1 point
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am use for end of year ai project for school

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3 points

It trends towards the mean, not the best.

That’s where some of the significant advances over the past 12 months of research have been, specifically around using the fine tuning phase to bias towards excellence. The biggest advance there has been that capabilities in larger models seem to be transmissible to smaller models by feeding in output from the larger more complex models.

Also, the process supervision work to enhance CoT from May is pretty nuts.

So while you are correct that the pretrained models come out with a regression towards the mean, there are very promising recent advances in taking that foundation and moving it towards excellence.

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1 point

I’m excited for how these tools will be used by human creators to accomplish things they could never do alone, and in that aspect it is a revolutionary technology. I hate that their marketing calls it “AI” though, the only intelligence involved is the human user that creates prompts and curates results.

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20 points

I get the sentiment, but don’t really agree. Humans’ inputs are also from what already exists, and music is generally inspired from other music which is why “genres” even exist. AI’s not there yet, but the statement “real creativity comes solely from humans” Needs Citation. Humans are a bunch of chemical reactions and firing synapses, nothing out of the realm of the possible for a computer.

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2 points

the statement “real creativity comes solely from humans” Needs Citation.

Yeah, I’d actually make a more limited statement. Real creativity requires the subjective experience and the ability to generate inputs solely from subjectivity i.e. experience the redness of the color red. AI could definitely do that, which is why LLMs are not AI imo

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15 points

It’s not the techbros leading this, it’s the BBAs and MBAs that wouldn’t know art if Michelangelo came to life and slapped them in the face with the sistine chapel.

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12 points

I would never call an actual technician a techbro! Techbros are Rick&Morty ledditor “fuck yeah science!” dorks.

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12 points

I see it an more an inability to analyze, evaluate, and edit. A lot of “creativity” in the world of musical composition is putting together existing elements and seeing what happens. Any composer from pop to the very avant-garde, is influenced and sometimes even borrow from their predecessors (it’s why copyright law is so complex in music).

It’s the ability to make judgements, does this sound good/interesting, does this have value, would anyone want to listen to this, and adjust accordingly that will lead to something original and great. Humans are so good at this, we might be making edits before the notes hit the page (Brainstorming). This AI clearly wasn’t. And deciding on value, seems wildly complex for modern day computers. Humans can agree on it (if you like Rock, but hate country for example).

So in the end, they are “creative” but in a monkey-typewritter situation, but who is going to sort through the billions of songs like this to find the one masterpiece?

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3 points

but who is going to sort through the billions of songs like this to find the one masterpiece?

One of the overlooked aspects of generative AI is that effectively by definition generative models can also be classifiers.

So let’s say you were Spotify and you fed into an AI all the songs as well as the individual user engagement metadata for all those songs.

You’d end up with a model that would be pretty good at effectively predicting the success of a given song on Spotify.

So now you can pair a purely generative model with the classifier, so you spit out song after song but only move on to promoting it if the classifier thinks there’s a high likelihood of it being a hit.

Within five years systems like what I described above will be in place for a number of major creative platforms, and will be a major profit center for the services sitting on audience metadata for engagement with creative works.

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3 points

Right, the trick will be quantifying what is ‘likely to be a hit’, which if we’re honest, has already been done.

Also, neural networks and other evolutionary algorithms can inject random perturbations/mutations to the system which, operate a bit like uninformed creativity (something like banging on a piano and hearing something interesting that’s worth pursuing). So, while not ‘inspired’ or ‘soulful’ as we would generally think of it, these algorithms are capable of being creative In some sense. But it would need to be recognized as ‘good’ by someone or something…and back to your point.

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1 point

Plenty of humans make those judgements about their own creations. And plenty of them get a shock when they release their creations to the masses and don’t get the praise that they expected.

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-2 points

I see it an more an inability to analyze, evaluate, and edit.

I believe that’s vital to the creative process, but yeah, I basically agree.

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11 points

“Generative” is such a misleading term. It’s not generating anything, it is replicative.

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9 points
Deleted by creator
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2 points

The anger comes from the fact that companies are using AI instead of hiring artists.

There is a distinction between a human being inspired by an existing piece of art and an ai creating something from other art. The human has to experience it through the lens of the human experience and create using the human body. AI takes multiple pieces of art and essentially makes a collage.

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3 points

Eh, humans still take inspiration from others even in their original art. Most professionals draw from reference, or emulate styles, or follow some common method. Drawing from a singular source is ethically questionable, but imitating elements from many sources is just part of the process.

Arguably, no human creation is purely original, the originality comes from the creativity of the remix.

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-5 points

Ummm don’t humans learn exactly the same way?

For the thousandth fucking time, NO.

‘AI’ doesn’t feel joy, sadness, pity, entertained, or inspired when learning from others. Not even inspired to steal.

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2 points

I think this is an important distinction. AI can be creative in that it can develop something new and unique, but it will have arrived at it by chance - through random inputs to the algorithm designed to minic evolutionary mutations that end up beneficial.

I agree that (at least for now) it would not be able to develop something out of inspiration or emotion. But that’s because we don’t understand enough about how emotion and inspiration are developed to create an algorithm that cultivates it.

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8 points

For now.

And don’t forget, humans are also trained on the inputs of others.

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-1 points
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The difference is everyone has a different prospective, remembers some parts forgets others. Some journalists found a trick which revealed ChatGPT training data and it was literally just verbatim stolen data which literally contained a real person’s information. You could hack into someone’s brain and they wouldn’t be able to directly recreate anything from memory alone, just watch any “from memory” youtube video.

While it’s true there’s nothing stopping AI from having human-like experiences, the content laundering is the thing corporations actually want.

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7 points
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Meat goes in. Sausage comes out.

The problem for a lot of the companies behind these things, is that they’ve run into problems now their investors want them to turn meat into a black forest gateau.

I’m sceptical if they can manage that feat. But what do I know.

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6 points
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Deleted by creator
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-4 points
Removed by mod
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0 points

Such a wonderful, thoughtful, creative retort. You must be an AI chat-bot.

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-2 points
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Deleted by creator
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4 points

Are you saying the idea of a unicorn wasn’t new and original because it was drawing on the pre-existing features of a horse and narwhal?

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4 points

Still, AI is able to “create” new things by a combination of existing concepts. It can generate a Roomba in the style of Van Gogh for example, which is probably not something that currently exists.

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-7 points

“Roomba in the style of Van Gogh” is a new combination of existing things, but it can never create something truly original. Derivative.

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13 points

What is an example of something that is truly original and not derivative?

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8 points

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1 point

But all of human creation is derivative.

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3 points
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There can be nothing new or original out of AI because all of its inputs are stolen from what already exists. Real creativity comes solely from humans

what have you seen that wasnt there before
i mostly have qualms with the quote i have no illusions about the levels of discussions around ai

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2 points

Right just as soon as all the people proclaiming that can point to the soul bit of my brain. There is absolutely no reason to say that AI cannot be creative there’s nothing fundamentally magic about creativity that means only humans can do it.

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7 points

You’re equating creativity to the soul. They’re not the same thing. But we can definitely look at the brain and see what parts light up when perform creative tasks.

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-1 points

Right so why can’t the same sections be simulated? If you accept that the human brain is simply an organic implementation of a neural network, then you have to accept that a synthetic implementation can achieve the same thing.

The idea that the human brain is special is ludicrous and completely without evidence

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2 points

The belief that only humans can be creative is interestingly parallel to intelligent design creationism. The latter is fundamentally a religious faith, but it strongly appeals to the intuition that anything that happens needs a humanoid creator.

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0 points

I don’t think, the human brain is special either, but we are still two big steps ahead IMHO:

  • We can perceive what we’ve generated, to judge whether it’s good or bad.
  • We perceive many, many inputs throughout our lives. Not just text, visuals, audio, but also taste, smell, touch and more. To be simultaneously creative and relatable to humans, AIs would need to be equipped with these concepts and would need to be given ‘memories’, which are fleshed out with all these kinds of input.
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-10 points
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Yes, it is literally impossible for any AI to ever exist that can be creative. At no point in the future will it ever create anything creative, that is something only human beings can do. Anybody that doesn’t understand this is simply incapable of using logic and they have no right to contribute to the conversation at all. This has all already been decided by people who understand things really well and anyone who objects is obviously stupid.

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3 points
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Good job tearing down that strawman! 🙄

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-4 points

I was agreeing with you. I’m so sick of people thinking that “someday AI might be creative”. Like no, it’s literally impossible unless some day AI becomes human(impossible) because human is the only thing capable of creativity. What have I said that you disagree with? You’re not one of them are you? What’s with all this obsessive AI love?

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1 point

Oh shit, I thought you had forgotten a “/s” at the end, but reading your other comments this is actually what you believe and how you talk. So… yeah, I’m not going to take someone who cites “people who understand things really well” as a source at face value.

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1 point

Well then you didn’t read very many of my comments. I made this first comment because the post I responded to was so absurd so I just exaggerated the ridiculousness that they said. Of course AI is capable of creativity and intelligence. If you look at the long back and forth that this sparked you would see that this is my stance. After I made this over the top, very sarcastic comment, OP corrected themself to clarify that when they said “AI” they actually only meant the current state of LLMs. They have since admitted that it is indeed true that AI absolutely can be capable of creativity and intelligence.

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-12 points

Except that it’s wrong… AI is capable of creativity. It created the artist name. It’s clearly not a very developed or robust sense of creativity because it clearly just hashed up the name Hanna Montana, and the song is probably likewise just a hashed up existing song, but I’m guessing it probably did a better job of creating an original work than vanilla ice…

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7 points

I’m sorry, anyone who says these so-called “AI” are capable of creativity are being hoodwinked by marketing. This is an algorithmic probability engine, it doesn’t think and it doesn’t have an imagination. It just regurgitates probabilistic responses from its large data set.

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10 points
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Can you prove your brain is more than a algorithmic probability engine albeit a powerful one?

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3 points

… what do you think imagination is? A gift from God? The probabilities are probably more chaotic, and the data set more biased… but they’re the basic foundation of human imagination.

Machine based “creativity” is nascent, and far less unique… but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a form of creativity.

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7 points

Would you say that a random name generator is a creative algorithm?

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0 points

That’s a hella skimpy example, but yes.

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2 points

hashed up

capable of creativity

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