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by Melting_Harps 1458 days ago
> Over the last 20 or so years musicians have gotten used to using a lot of prerecorded riffs and samples. It's now possible for someone that can't play any instruments to create very goods songs. Unfortunately, the use of these same samples has given us a situation where lots of modern music sounds the same[1].

Coming form various EDM genres and spending time online and in the clubs with many of the producers growing up and now also studying AI and ML I think this is the closest analogue: but it fails short to encompass the entire scope of the situation; I think for now it's apt, but in time it will be able to do much more and that and that is what I think is what we are in for a hard landing.

I don't think it will be 'the bots took our jobs' but more like moating will be ever more precocious and wide-spread as a means to maintain relevance, 'if you can't moat then you can't float' will be a common maxim which was always implied in startup land if you wanted to go the VC route, but is difficult for 99% of projects for who that is impossible. This has dire implications that I'm not entirely sure we can really be aware of until it happens.

To follow the earlier mentioned music analogy: why learn to learn 10 different instruments to compose when you can jump on youtube and learn how to sample and add the effects you're looking for and then be on your way?

I think this will also apply to various things in the Arts, and possibly in the Sciences (like co-pilot is for programming) which in theory should lower the barrier of entry to produce: people keep going on about Elon, but Grimes has been talking about this for sometime, too.

She attributes her entire music career to being able to get on Ableton and sampling and harmonizing ad-hoc to create her compositions, I don't follow her but I've met people who have and her live stuff is more performance art than it is a typical musical concert and she has managed a way to stay relevant even in a sea of similar sounding artists--I've since seen similar acts, many of whom I think are far more talented than Grimes (Sierra or Meg Myers) who simply don't get the recognition they deserve because of other factors like PR.

But in the end: you can auto-tune a IG influencer all you want, but if they aren't able to make a connection using the medium it doesn't matter how polished the product is if it just plain sucks. They could probably be used for commercial teen idol pop stuff to sell stuff, but that isn't a very high barrier of entry, either. The 90s boy band craze proved just how low that bar is, while still being a commercial success.

My point is, that while the barrier of entry may be lowered if the art itself doesn't have appeal it won't suddenly be comparable to Led Zeppelin or Mozart.

I remember in the early days of Bitcoin, like 2010, their were a ton of programmers (mainly who wrote in C+) who wanted to contribute but had no direction or idea of where to begin, they had all the skills to be able to jump on a project but because they lacked any vision they didn't know where to begin.

I think the advent GPT and Dall-E is comparable, though it must be noted that very few have actual access to it right now: the access seems to have some non-chronological factor, and apparently you have to provide social media and linkedin accounts, which makes it all the more creepy.

Personally speaking, I really wish Altman had just focused on how to best deploy this instead coming up with World Coin, he could have raised so much more awareness and funding maybe even launched his own token within this ecosystem and maybe even created a real usecase for 'web3,' instead he will always be seen as the guy trying to scam you for your biometrics. And as cool as this is, I doubt it has that potential anymore because of that.