[janalsncm]

I like Benn Jordan because he’s clearly got a grasp on a functional understanding of machine learning, but that’s not his primary background. He comes from a music production background, so his focus is more practical and results-oriented.

It will be really interesting as this knowledge percolates into more and more fields, what domain experts do with it. I see ML as more of a bag of tricks that can be applied to many fields.

[dingnuts]

>He comes from a music production background, so his focus is more practical and results-oriented

It's his art and his livelihood too, so it's also personal. These people want to steal his art and create a world full of soulless cheap muzak, while simultaneously putting him out of work.

Get 'em, Benn! I should go buy one of his albums.

[kjkjadksj]

They’ve been doing that since the recording studio process developed the model in the 1920s or so. They would hire songwriters to make generic pop music with generic lyrics, and keep it in the vault until you have some attractive young singer you want to use for marketing then you give them an album of these songs to sing. And they are sure to sell because you’ve been priming the american ear for these chord progressions for a long time, and you fill all the air in the room with your marketing for this singer leaving people little option but to hear the latest carefully crafted earworm. Still happens today maybe even more perfected with psychological studies intersecting with music and marketing. The best musicians have never and will never be a product of that machine. Seek out live music.

[visarga]

Are you sure you mean "stealing"? As in deprive him of his own recordings?

I am curious if anyone read Harry Potter in bootleg form from a LLM. I mean, LLMs are the worst tools for infringing - they are approximate, expensive and slow, while copying is instant, perfect and free. You can apply the same logic for other modalities.

Moreover, who's got the time to see someone else's AI shit when they can generate their own, perfectly customized to their liking? I personally generated a song about my cat and kid. It had zero commercial value but was fun for 2-3 people to listen.

[mitthrowaway2]

I can steal a company's codebase without depriving them of their code.

I can steal an invention without wiping the inventor's memory.

These are other kinds of stealing, which deprives the creator not of the art itself, but the other benefits of having created it.

[visarga]

The logic "gen AI is theft" is pretty careless. Let's say I use gen-AI to identify a skin sore, and seek appropriate treatment. Who's copyright was being violated? How about if I ask it to make a story where my kid is a protagonist? In fact the more I put into a prompt, the less it looks like anything in the training set, the longer the discussion, the greater the divergence.

[mitthrowaway2]

I'm saying that training gen-AI on Benn Jordan's art against his will, without permission, and without remuneration, is theft. You can train on a suitably licensed database of medical images if you want.

[visarga]

It depends, is it a LoRa focused on Benn? Is it intended to replicate his style? Or is Benn one of the billion authors in the training set? In that case his impact will be minimal, and the generated images/texts will be very different from any training example, mostly reflecting the prompt.

[rideontime]

How about you write a story where your kid is the protagonist, instead? I'm sure they'll look back on it with far more appreciation than something an LLM shit out.

[ToucanLoucan]

> The logic "gen AI is theft" is pretty careless.

No, it isn't. It is a widely understood if not explicitly stated and frankly, so easy to understand concept that I'm forced to conclude people as yourself who refuse point blank to understand it are merely doing so out of sheer determination.

When you post things online, be it art, be it music, be it photographs, be it the idle thoughts of your mind: you do this to share it with other people. That's the point. Why you want to share it can certainly change and explanations range from desiring an online following/clout to making money to simply the fact that you are driven to create and share whatever it is you do. This is the entire basis of the proto-Internet, to a degree where it predates the whole notion of extracting wealth from others via the Internet, and to a large degree, also predates the notion of a following.

If you desire to counteract this premise, then I would suggest you must somehow explain the existence of BBSes, newsgroups, anonymous web forums, blogs, etc. that are some of the oldest, dustiest pillars of the Internet, that our modern Internet would not exist without, and moreover, tons of these existed when analytics, statistics, etc. were barely conceived of. Some websites had a guest book, and some had visitor counters, and that was literally it. If you published on a blog like I did in the 90's, you had no fucking clue if anyone at all was actually reading it.

Or to put it shortly: The Internet and it's constituent communities existed long before there was a financial motive to publish, and absent that, what possible explanation could there be to publish apart from have your thing seen by people?

Ergo, to then take those intellectual products, shared in good faith for the enjoyment of others, run them through an industrial shredder, identify the most common patterns in their underlying structure, and sell it back to the public to whom it's existence simply must be credited, is perverse. It is self-expression without the self; it is merely expression, for the sake of expression. Noise. And we all kind of know this, prior to LLMs, the most common experience of this phenomenon was spam. Because if you simply posted links to whatever thing you were hocking it would be deleted immediately, spammers had to get clever. They would write what were ostensibly "blog posts" but they were not sincere expressions of anything apart from avaricious greed and a desire to camouflage it. Websites rose that were nothing but endless pages of this shit, designed to be optimally crawled by Google and other engines, linking back to sites seeking favor in search engines. Web forums at that time had to regularly moderate away content not for being hateful, but for being openly fucking stupid, irrelevant to topic, and simply seeking to drive traffic to other sites. Anywhere there was an unprotected text input who's contents may, eventually, arrive at a page was, to a spammer, a perfectly valid place to park their shit that nobody wanted, and park it they did.

And this is exactly what LLMs make. Soulless nothing who's primary reason to exist is to occupy space. Image generators are the same; their outputs exist because an image, no matter how generic or mediocre, would look better in this spot than a blank color. Music, without motivation or drive behind it, as a convenient alternative to silence. Video because an image would be boring. Functional, purposeless, driveless, motivation-free content to occupy the otherwise empty void around whatever thing you're actually trying to get eyes on: Text to cloak your links, mediocre art to cloak your sales pitch, etc.

And the reason the business parasite class is so thrilled about it's existence is that it finally allows people who have not nurtured creativity within themselves for whatever reason you'd care to assign access to creative outputs. They have sneered derisively at people who feel the drive to create and learn the ability to do so because fundamentally they do not believe creative products have value, that the attention, the adoration, and more than anything the money that said creatives are given so freely by their fans would be far better in their pocket instead. You can hear this in the way they talk: "I'm making a movie with AI!" said as though it's a revolutionary statement, as though great directors announce "I've started production on my next picture using Red Digital Cameras" like anyone from the public would give an ounce of a shit how a thing was made. They don't even consider "will someone want to see this movie?" because other people seeing it isn't the point, their elevation is the point. The promotion of their brand is the point. They have nothing at all to say, and it will doom anything they make to abject failure.

AI permits capital to access skill without requiring at all that skill be permitted to access capital.

[emporas]

Yeah, but when money becomes information then everyone has money. When music becomes information then everyone has music. When food, medicine and narcotics become information with genetic engineering, then everyone has food, medicine and narcotics. When weapons become information, everyone has weapons. When skyscrapers become information, then everyone has skyscrapers.

Also information wants to be sorted and compressed. See for example personal wikis using org-roam, personal databases of text files using org-mode in emacs and so on.

What good is for me, 10 songs which each one has 10 seconds of a part i like, and i am indifferent to the rest of the song. I take these 100 seconds in total and compress them down to a new song which is totally to my liking.

[viraptor]

See the AI generated music channels on YouTube. They get lots of views and a significant part of them would be an actual song stream instead. So yeah, they're taking money away from the artists with content learned from the artists.

[briandear]

Soulless cheap Muzak already exists and has for a long time.

Any musician these days that thinks there is money in music by selling songs is delusional. Sad but true.

[EvanAnderson]

Not only that, but if you do have success "selling" songs you increasingly run the risk of litigating from the interest who already "own" the corpus of existing work.

[pogue]

I would encourage you guys to watch his video before going down the argument of saying that there's no money in music creation. There's also just enjoyment in the act of creation and even if you're doing it for free, why should GenAI companies then be able to take your artwork, incorporate that into their dataset and profit of the artist's unpaid labor?

https://youtu.be/xMYm2d9bmEA

[EvanAnderson]

I love making music. I haven't written a ton, and I haven't done it recently, but for a time in the early 2000's I participated in a fun Internet songwriting "competition"[0], played some live shows in various places around the country, and met a lot of cool people.

I hear enough incidental similarities in what I've written to make me wary of ever actually trying to make money from it. The Marvin Gaye lawsuit for "Blurred Lines" was ridiculous.

All the music and lyrics I've written (crap though it all is) has always been distributed as public domain (or as close as I can get away w/ Creative Commons CC0 for those asinine jurisdictions where you can't waive your rights). (I have a lyric "You can't own the beat and you can't own the rhyme" in one song, because I believe it very strongly.)

[0] http://www.songfight.org/