As one of the meatsacks whose job you're about to kill... eh, I got nothin, it's damn impressive. It's gonna hit electronic music like a nuclear bomb, I'd wager.
As a listener, I think you're probably still safe. Can you use this to help you though? Maybe.
It's impressive what it produces, but I think it probably lacks substance in the same way the visual AI art stuff does. For the most part, it passes what I call the at-a-glanceness test. It's little better than apophenia (the same thing that makes you see shapes in clouds, faces in rocks, or think you've recognised a familiar word in a foreign language; the last one can happen more often though).
So, I think these tools will be used to do background work (ie for visuals maybe help with background tasks in CGI or faraway textures in games). I know less about audio, but I assume it could maybe help a DJ create a transition between two segments they want to combine, as opposed make the whole composition for them, but idk if that example makes sense.
Now, onto a more human point: I think that people often listen to music because it means something to them. Similar for people who appreciate visual art.
I also love interactive and light art, and I love talking to other artists at light festivals who make them because of the stories and journeys behind their art too. Humans and art are a package deal, IMO.
Edit: typos and to add: Also, I think prompt authorship is an art unto itself. I'm amazed what people can craft with it, but I'm more impressed by the craft itself than the outputs. Don't get me wrong, the outputs are darn cool, but not if you look closer. And it's impossible to look beneath the surface altogether, as there is nothing in the output but the pixels.
I think this type of generative stuff opens up entirely new possibilities. For the longest time I've wanted to host a rowing or treadmill competition, where contestants submit a music track. The tracks are mashed up with weighting based on who is in the lead and by how much.
I don't know of existing tech that can generate actual good mashups in realtime given arbitrary mp3s, but this has promise!
It says all StableDiffusion capabilities work, so you can prompt it with an image (either "img2img" or "textual inversion"). Their UI just doesn't expose it.
In general all this stuff is chopping the bottom off the market. AI art, code, writing, music, etc. can all generate passable "filler" content, which will decimate all human employment generating same.
I don't think this stuff is a threat to genuinely innovative, thoughtful, meaningful work, but that's the top of the market.
That being said the bottom of the market is how a lot of artists make their living, so this is going to deeply impact all forms of art as a profession. It might soon impact programming too because while GPT-type systems can't do advanced high level reasoning they will chop the bottom off the market and create a glut of employees that will drive wages down across the board.
Basic income or revolution. That's going to be our choice.
Basic income or revolution. That's going to be our choice.
Evolution.
We have such vast wealth and our historic methods for trying to make sure most people are taken care of are failing us. Those methods were rooted in the nuclear family with a head of household earning most of the money and jobs designed with an assumption that he had a full-time homemaker wife buying the groceries, cooking the meals etc so he could focus on his job.
We need jobs to evolve. In the US at least, we need to move away from tying all benefits (such as medical benefits and retirement) to a primary earner. We need to make it possible to live a comfortable life without a vehicle. We need to make it possible for small households to find small homes that make sense for them, both financially and in terms of lifestyle.
There is a lot we can do to make this not a disaster and make it possible for some people to survive on very little while while pursuing their bliss so that we stop this trend of pitting The Haves against The Have Nots and make the current Have Nots a group that has real hope of creating their own brilliant tech or such someday while not being utterly miserable if they aren't currently wealthy.
Those making the decisions can very well just say "WE and a 10-20% still needed just need to live comfortably, and the rest 80% can live in slums in the edge of town".
> Basic income or revolution. That's going to be our choice.
So many menial jobs are kind of like basic income anyway - you put in 2 hours of actual work to pad out the entire day at some shitty low end job, knowing all the time that your contribution isn't valued and that if your employer ever got their shit together your job wouldn't even be needed, and the robots are coming for it anyway. You get paid a small amount for doing nothing much useful.
The rich today are rich largely because they or their ancestors were plunderers. Perhaps they plundered the planet, exploiting the cheap energy that fossil fuels provide. Perhaps they plundered our social cohesion building skinner boxes that manipulate the minds of millions just to gain eyeballs and clicks.
Why should the bill for these past excesses fall on those who never benefited from them? In previous times, a young person of average intellect could get a job on a farm or factory and be a valued contributor. What happens when automation removes the last of these jobs - do we really expect people to put up with more and more menial and slavish existences?
Basic income is, like carbon taxes, an obvious solution. Maybe it will take off when a tipping point arrives - when the rich class decides that their repugnance to giving someone a "free ride" is overtaken by their need to have masses dulled and stupified, sitting at home with blinds drawn in front of their playstations, so they don't revolt at the obvious unfairness of the world.
Paying people to stay home and play on social media led to the mass explosion of conspiracy theories at the beginning of covid. Ultimately, unemployment and covid checks go a long way toward explaining the January 6th insurrection. Which is just to say that giving a free ride and narcotic forms of entertainment to the masses isn't necessarily the safety valve for "the rich" that it's made out to be.
Work gives people dignity. And idle hands are the devil's plaything. Put that together and UBI would be a disaster. Also, it's not "the rich class" who decides whether or not to bestow such a lifestyle on the masses... that in itself is a conspiratorial line of thought. Right down that road is the thought "hey, this UBI isn't enough!"
Jobs disappear. Other jobs replace them. Often, jobs are not fun, and often they feel meaningless, but working is still much more dignified than not working. Raising generations who've never worked and simply take their UBI and breed - what would even be the point of educating such people? Eventually they'd just be totally disposable and, no doubt, be disposed of.
Plunderers; well put. Capitalists cant lie their way to infinite growth forcasts and suck all the wealth into 401ks that do nothing but rob everyone elses grand children. Its a cycle that has been going on since existance itself, an ebb and flow that accelerates, crashes, and takes off again leaving its wake humanity as we know it.
Chopping the bottom off makes things higher up the ladder more accessible though. The original Zelda took six people multiple years to build, but one person could develop something similar but much better looking in a few weeks with Unity and AI generated assets. It obviously won't be a AAA title, but people have shown that they're happy to play slightly rough, retro games if they're fun. All this holds true for writing, music, art and other areas as well.
The big problem is that it's hard to filter through the huge amount of content being produced by humans to find things that you'll like, so we rely on kingmakers curating the culture. This means a few huge winners taking all and a lot of great creative work at the same level going unrewarded. If we can solve the content discovery problem in a more personalized and fair way and make it easier for people to support creators they like that would go a long way towards cushioning the job losses that AI will create.
> Basic income or revolution. That's going to be our choice.
Third option. Mandatory 4 day weeks.
Although I'd specify it as no one can work more than X hours a week.
And then adjust X down - or up in short timescales but likely down overall - as needed.
The competition is for "work". If AI is taking large chunks of "work" off the table. Spread the rest of it around.
Now notionally people will tell you that there is no finite "work" limit. You are effectively limiting competition.
To which I say - good. The rat race IS the competition. Don't we all want to slow it down a little? If F1 can put limits on a race, we should too for humanity.
The only thing that affects whether you have a job is the Federal Reserve, not how good productivity tools are. You always have comparative advantage vs an AI, so you always have the qualifications for an entry level job.
There will never be a revolution and there's no such thing as late capitalism. Well, not if the Fed does their job.
I see a lot of AI naysayers neglecting the comparative advantage part.
If AI completely eliminates low skill art labour from the job pool, it's not like those affected by it are gonna disintegrate, riot, and restructure society. They have the choice of filling an art niche an AI can't or they can spend that time learning other, more in-demand skills. This also ignores that fact that some companies would rather reallocate you to more profitable projects even if your art skills don't change.
Selling a product with relative value like a painting or a sculpture will always be an uphill battle. Now that there's more competition from AI, it just gives artists/businesses incentive to find what people want that an AI can't deliver. Worst case scenario, employment rates in this sector are rough while the market recalibrates. Interested to see how these technologies develop.
People don't have unlimited ability to learn new skills. Training takes time, and someone who spent several years honoring their craft won't be able to pick up a new skill overnight.
On top of that, people have preferences regarding their work – even if someone has the ability to do a different work, they might find it less meaningful and less satysfing.
Finally, don't ignore the speed at which AI capabilities improve. Compare GPT-1 with the current model, and how quickly we got here. Eventually we'll get to a point where humans just won't be able to catch up quickly enough.
Agree 100%. When I was young and idealistic I believed in the "learn new skills" mantra, but learning completely new skills would look a lot different at 50 than it did at 20. When career choices were being made 30 years ago it would have been hard to predict the current & upcoming AI-driven destruction of lower-end "thinking" jobs. Attempting to retrain after ~30 years puts you at a massive disadvantage vs a new graduate (I mentor some of our companies graduates & trainees & I've been assigned a guy in his mid-40s, after a few months I just don't see how he'll get to a point where he's adding value).
Not really a personal whinge, as my skillset isn't under immediate threat from any AI I've heard about, though the rate of change in the field is something to behold.
I think specifically in the area of creative "products" such as art and music you have to think about the customer as well. I have zero interest in AI-created art or music. None. The value of art is its humanity; its expression of the artist's message, vision, and passion. AI doesn't have that, so it's not of any interest to me.
I don't know how many custoners feel the same way, but I won't be purchasing any AI art or music or knowingly giving it any of my attention.
The AI is a tool the human used to make it. Sometimes clumsily, but sometimes they write poems as text prompts and it's an illustration, or things like that. If an AI is making and selling art by itself, it's probably become sentient and not patronizing it would be speciesism.
Although personally, I think using "AI art" to create impossible photographs is more interesting and doesn't compete with illustrators as much.
I think it's an interesting perspective but I will be very surprised if it's one that is common when this becomes more of a real choice. If there's two mp3s and one of them is more enjoyable to listen to, very few people will stick with the song they enjoy less because it's not AI generated.
Maybe a parallel would be furniture; there are people who buy hand crafted furniture but it's kind of a luxury. Most people just have Ikea and wouldn't pay more for the same (or have less good furniture) just to get some artisanal dinner table chair.
How would you even know? Vast majority of art you don't purchase directly, but as a part of some product. At most you get a line in the credits and what's stopping anyone from inventing a pseudonym for AI.
I’ve been trying to play through the scenario in my head. At least in terms of software developers being replaced by AI, I think we’re going to first see AI doing work in parallel or under monitor by humans. Basically, Google will take AI and send it off to do work that they lack the staff to do. Now, on the other hand, they could also temporally play it out where first they feign an inability to staff people due to finances so there are layoffs/terminations, and then maybe a quarter later they replace those people with low cost AI compute time that is orders of magnitude more productive.
In any case, AI disrupting people’s ability to feed, shelter, and clothe themselves is sure to trigger a pretty brutal and hostile response, which would be grounds for legislation and perhaps a class war.
The weird part is that if the potential of AI is truly orders of magnitude expansion beyond what we already have, then the longterm surely has room for a tiny little mankind fief. But, in order to get to the long term our hyper-competitive technocratic overlords may strangle out part of or all of the rest of us while justifying accelerating through the near-term window to achieve AI-dominance.
> Basic income or revolution. That's going to be our choice.
I fear you are right. But neither of those is going to be an easy transition, if only because the effects of all this innovation is felt disproportionally by people in countries where such a revolution will not do anything to give solace.
Basic income assumes that the funds to do this are available and revolution assumes that the powers that be are the parties that are in the way of a more equitable division of the spoils. Neither of those are necessarily true for all locations affected.
>Basic income or revolution. That's going to be our choice
Basic income sounds good in theory in some imaginary futuristic society of harmony and grace.
In real life, it's a way for the masses be controlled down to your very substinence by the state. Where the state is basically an intermediary for big private interests and lobbies.
It gets better very quickly and we have no idea where its limitations are. In other words, we have no idea when the development will slow down significantly and how much of the bottom will it have chopped down by then. Whether it's 10% or maybe a 100.
> Basic income or revolution. That's going to be our choice.
I'm definitely pro basic income, but I've heard an interesting remark a few weeks ago. And that's that COVID was kind of a UBI experiment (in the US), albeit very limited, and it turned out that if people don't have to worry about making a living and don't have a job to work in then they'll start do stupid things on the internet. Like make up stupid conspiracy theories about vaccines. I can't remember who said this, it was one of the guests on Lex Fridman's podcast. I'm also not sure if it's a valid analogy but reminds me of Vonnegut's Player Piano.
As a musician and listener i'm inclined to agree. There were a couple cool examples i bumped into, but some prompts generate results that don't represent any single word or combination of words that were presented to the AI.
What this means for the future is maybe a little more unsettling however.
I fully agree with what you wrote. This AI-generated music, while a great achievement, still sounds soulless. It's one thing to look at AI-generated pictures for a few seconds, but listening to this music with its gibberish "lyrics" for minutes really creeps me out - it's the "uncanny valley" all over again, I guess.
Regarding "can you use this to help you through?" - yeah, you could probably use it as a source of inspiration, but at the risk of getting sued by someone whos music you didn't even know you were copying...
With Stable Diffusion and similar generative systems we have seen a leap in generative art/media, partially with significant improvements within a few months. What makes you think this was the last or only leap in the next 5 to 10 years? As if progress would just stop here? Huh?!
Do you think we hit a ceiling were progress is only tangential? A line which is impossible to cross? Otherwise I dont get this mindset in the face of these modern generative AI systems popping up left and right.
I think this is a good point. To make this useful for music creators, and to make music creation more generally accessible, the output needs to be more useful. We are working on that at https://neptunely.com
These are tools. Don't think of them as replacements, they aren't. But as tools that will help us be creative. As smart as these apps seem, they will still need a human to decide where and how to use them. They won't replace us but we need to adapt to a new reality.
I hear this a lot (in relation to various jobs) and I still don't get it. Yes, it is a tool. Yes, if it can, it will replace humans. That's the whole point.
For some reason people tend to think that these tools/AI/ML systems will never be good enough to do their job (or a specific job). This argument can take different forms, sometimes stating that it will just do the boring part of the work (e.g. with programming) or that it will still need human creativity (maybe, but not necessarily and that's not the point) or that it will just replace low level, unskilled or mediocre professionals. And somehow everyone thinks they are not mediocre (i.e. average). But even these assumptions are unfounded. Why would anyone think that these systems will top out below their skill levels? Why would anyone think that they can't become superhuman?
They did in chess, go, I think poker too. Not to mention protein folding. And without much of a hitch between mediocre/good enough and superhuman. Because that difference is just interesting for us, but doesn't necessarily mean that there is huge step, that the system needs to undergo serious development and that it would take a long time. (Like decades or so.) People thought that was the case when AlphaGo beat Fan Hui saying that Lee Sedol was a completely different level. Which, of course, he is. Still, it just took DeepMind half a year to improve alphago to that level.
So yeah, you can be pretty sure that if this track (no pun intended), if this solution is good enough then it will quickly evolve into something that will replace some music creators.
It already is a replacement. You can make a visual novel video game with AI generated character art, backgrounds, music, run your dialogs though AI if you can't write well yourself - and your game will have higher production level than 90% of competition. All those artist you would normally hire or commission the above stuff from are now out of the process if you want. Sure, it's not a particularly high bar, but it's only going to raise from here.
I love simple generative approaches to get ideas, and go from there. This seems like an extension of that (well, it's what I'm going to try - sample the output, make stems, pull MIDI etc). Will make the creative process more interesting for me, not less.
Having said that, it's not my job, and I can see where the issues lay there.
I can't think of a genre that would embrace it faster. The pay-for-knock-off rap beat market will feel more pressure from this kind of tool, especially as loop-oriented as it already is.
I am an active musician, but I don't actually make money at it, I was mostly joking, but: I believe that we are (one determined smart person + six months) away from bots on Youtube and other streaming platforms that generate endless "new" music that follows those simple formulas (beat, bass, sample = loop, several loops connected up = song) 24/7.
Raves that have no human DJs and never stop.
Good? Bad? Not for me to say, really, the most I make at it is a couple hundred bucks for two nights in a bar playing FM radio hits, and there's lots of people younger than me who like that music, so obviously I'm doing it for different reasons and I don't anticipate losing access to as many bar gigs as I want for the rest of my life.
But certain genres are very tolerant of low-effort music, and I think the people who are monetizing low-effort music are gonna lose their income streams. I do different things than those people, but I still consider them compatriots, even if I don't care for their art.
It's impressive what it produces, but I think it probably lacks substance in the same way the visual AI art stuff does. For the most part, it passes what I call the at-a-glanceness test. It's little better than apophenia (the same thing that makes you see shapes in clouds, faces in rocks, or think you've recognised a familiar word in a foreign language; the last one can happen more often though).
So, I think these tools will be used to do background work (ie for visuals maybe help with background tasks in CGI or faraway textures in games). I know less about audio, but I assume it could maybe help a DJ create a transition between two segments they want to combine, as opposed make the whole composition for them, but idk if that example makes sense.
Now, onto a more human point: I think that people often listen to music because it means something to them. Similar for people who appreciate visual art.
I also love interactive and light art, and I love talking to other artists at light festivals who make them because of the stories and journeys behind their art too. Humans and art are a package deal, IMO.
Edit: typos and to add: Also, I think prompt authorship is an art unto itself. I'm amazed what people can craft with it, but I'm more impressed by the craft itself than the outputs. Don't get me wrong, the outputs are darn cool, but not if you look closer. And it's impossible to look beneath the surface altogether, as there is nothing in the output but the pixels.