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”.
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!
Old man doesn’t understand how technology progresses. Tonight at 10pm.
It’s hilarious to me that young people think “AI” is intelligent or good at what it does. It’s a fucking toy. I’ve made my own little GANs and Markov chains and the are thousands of empty little parlor tricks we’ve invented to separate the young from their money.
I saw a thread where a few zoomers were going wild over an AI loli generated porn image that looked like an animal balloon, all oiled and shiny, vagina sideways, face of an eight year old smiling for a school photo, huge veiny cocks blasting gallons of cum onto a tiny kawaii face:
“Omg so fucking hot 🥵 I’m fucking diamonds!”
Your dumb ass will be listening to a “song” simulacrum constructed out of 100,000 product jingles and Max Martin B-sides, jacking off to deranging porn, having full blown emotional conversations with bots and crying when that bot’s creator gets busted for CP.
Anyone listening to false music that’s overly Fourier transformed, with impossible instrument voices and chords that make it unlistenable to actual musicians and then trying to make people feel ashamed for having a soul is just waving a massive red flag for everyone to see that says “I have no idea what it means to be a human with skin in the game”.
That movie Demolition Man totally called it in the 90s btw that not only would you all be listening to commercial jingles all the time but defending them and singing their “lyrics” loudly.
Thank you for loudly identifying yourself as yet another Elon-like who thinks they know so much more than Barack fucking Obama. You and yourself should get a room and listen to that shit all day and see who you become. If you can’t create your own, you kids will get the “art” you deserve and it will cost A LOT 😂
Following for the laughs!
This post is disturbing and weird, you have a very odd and creepy view of the world.
Obama is just a random person voicing a safe and middle of the road politically neutral option in response to a boring question, I wouldn’t put too much stock in his kneejerk responce to a new technology.
Anyway all I wanted to ask is what do you mean by it costing A LOT? The price of creating media has fallen insanely in the last five decades and is only continuing to plumet - processor power likewise, it’s very likely we’ll be able to not just run the models on consumer graphic cards as we can now but run them as background processes on our phones without noticing slowdown. Just like all other modern content we’re going to see the free stuff that people make and share displace the hacky old corporate stuff - people that like history documentaries don’t watch history channel they which YouTube and a couple of ken Burns level creations, same with science and tech and so many other types of content.
When a kid in their bedroom can make a movie that looks as good as marvel and has a powerful soundtrack that carries the action and moves the heart no one is going to care if they created the music in a weekend talking to AI or hired a generic studio musician to string together some standard progressions and pachelbell melodies - likely they’ll prefer the ai output anyway because it’ll fit the artist vision more than a hired chord ever could.
There are going to be creative geniuses that use AI to make amazing things and at some point you’re just going to have to accept that.
This thread is as much evidence of our failed educational system as is the entire state of Mississippi
why do i care what obama feels about either of these
I very rarely care for what most 62 year olds have to say about the capabilities about the theoretical limits of computation.
This isn’t much different.
If the 62 year old had studied computer science and had specialized in AI, I would listen closely to them.
But I definitely not care about a politician that has no idea about technology.
I mean — he’s defending human creativity and he’s kind of right. AI can recreate variations of the things it is trained on, but it doesn’t create new paradigms.
People always says AI do create only variations but many successful TV shows are variations. I started watching sitcoms from the 70s and many things were copied/adapted in recent shows.
Yeah, also I think there is something about the human connection and communicating personal ideas and feelings that just isn’t there with AI generated art. I could see a case for an argument that a lot of music today is recorded by artists who didn’t write that music, and that they are expressing their own feelings through their performance of someone else’s creation. And is it really all that different if an AI wrote something that resonated with an artist who ultimately performed it? Which for a good chunk of pop-culture regurgitations may be completely valid. But in my opinion, the best art, communicates emotion, which an experience unique to biology, AI might be able to approximate it, and sure there’s a human prompting the AI who might genuinely have those feelings, but there’s a hollowness to it that I struggle to ignore. But maybe I’m just getting older and will be yelling at clouds before long.
There is no way this ages well.
As someone who is doing software engineering and my company jumped on AI bandwagon and got us GitHub Copilot. After using it for a while I think overall experience is actually net negative. Yes, sometimes it gets things right, sometimes it provides a correct solution, but often I can write much more concise code. Many times it provides code that looks like it is correct, but after looking in more detail it actually is wrong. So now I’m need to be in guard what code it inserts, which kills all the time that it supposedly saved me. It makes things harder because the code does look like it might work.
It is like pair programming with a complete moron that is very good at picking patterns and trying to use them in following code. So if you do a lot of copy and paste I think it will help.
I think this technology can make bad programmers suck less at programming. I think the LLM problem is that it was trained with existing works and the way it works is that its goal is to convince other human that the result was created by another one, but it isn’t capable to do any actual reasoning.
Wow, my experience has been pretty much the exact opposite of this. Copilot is amazing and I’d rather not go without it ever again
Edit: for the life of me I’ll never understand people. This comment got a bunch of downvotes and yet some douchebag who blindly accuses me of being bad at my job gets upvoted. Fuck people.
Ignore them. At some point you gotta realize most people are losers trying to bring others down with them.
Do what works for you :)
What language you program in and what kind of code you develop? Before Copilot were you frequently searching answers on stackoverflow?
I don’t know. I think Obama kind of nailed it. AI can create boring and mediocre elaborations just fine. But for the truly special and original? It could never.
For the new and special, humans will always be required. End of line.
At this point I want a calendar of at what date people say “AI could never” - like “AI could never explain why a joke it’s never seen before is funny” (such as March 2019) - and at what date it happens (in that case April 2022).
(That “explaining the joke” bit is actually what prompted Hinton to quit and switch to worrying about AGI sooner than expected.)
I’d be wary of betting against neural networks, especially if you only have a casual understanding of them.
I mean the limitations of LLMs are very well documented, they aren’t going to advance a whole lot more without huge leaps in computing technology. There are limits on how much context they can store for example, so you aren’t going to have AIs writing long epic stories without human intervention. And they’re fundamentally incapable of originality.
General AI is another thing altogether that we’re still very far away from.
AI can create boring and mediocre elaborations just fine.
Now.
A year ago even the boring stuff was impossible. Six months ago it’d do everything okay but fumble the details. Today? Sometimes the only reason AI art stands out is that models like central framing and eye contact.
Six months from now, I don’t know and you don’t either. You can posture about the indomitable human et cetera and ignore how it mirrors past declarations about what’s possible right now. The joke goes, “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.” And buddy, that category never gets bigger.
If there are rules, a deep enough network can discern them. And we are a lot less complex than we’d like to think.
Now who’s trying to predict the future?
I’ll believe it when I see it, and all of the bravado of all of the Internet strangers isn’t going to suddenly make me “believe“. Just because you can’t tell it’s a fake doesn’t mean others won’t be able to discern the difference. 
I think, it will eventually become obsolete, because we keep changing what ‘AI’ means, but current AI largely just regurgitates patterns, it doesn’t yet have a way of ‘listening’ to a song and actually judging whether it’s good or bad.
So, it may expertly regurgitate the pattern that makes up a good song, but humans spend a lot of time listening to perfect every little aspect before something becomes an excellent song, and I feel like that will be lost on the pattern regurgitating machine, if it’s forced to deviate from what a human composed.
I have seen a couple successful artists in different genres admit to using AI to help them write some of their most popular songs, and describe it’s use in the songwriting process. You hit the nail on the head with AI not being able to tell if something is good or bad. It takes a human ear for that.
AI is good at coming up with random melodies, chord progressions, and motifs, but it is not nearly as good at composing and producing as humans are, yet. AI is just going to be another instrument for musicians to use, in its current form.
Yeah, I do imagine, it won’t be just AIs either. And then, it will obviously be possible to take it to an excellent song, given enough human hours invested.
I do wonder, how useful it will actually be for that, though. Often times, it really fucks you up to try to go from good to excellent and it can be freeing to start fresh instead. In particular, ‘excellent’ does require creative ideas, which are easier for humans to generate with a fresh start.
But AI may allow us to start over fresh more readily, if it can just give us a full song when needed. Maybe it will even be possible to give it some of those creative snippets and ask it to flesh it all out. We’ll have to see…
I think the statement was more about the impact, which will depend on each person’s subjective experience
Personally I agree. Even if AI could produce identical work, the impact would be lessened. Art is more meaningful when you know it took time and was an expression/interpretation by another human (rather than a pattern prediction algorithm Frankenstein-ing existing work together). Combine that with the volume of AI content that’s produced, and the impact of any particular song/art piece is even more limited.
People are social, if enough people feel the same way about one thing it’ll succeed. It doesn’t matter where it came from or how it was made, like how people can still admire and appreciate nature. Or maybe the impact will be that it reduces all impacts. Every group and subgroup might be able to have their own thing.
