[frb]

IMHO shrugging it off as “superficially plausible text” is the extreme to the other side.

We’re past plausible text since GPT-2 and it’s undeniable that the technology is making waves right now and is having an impact.

As you can’t judge the impact of the Industrial Revolution by the first steam engines, you can’t dismiss the impact the technology is having right now.

[xg15]

In writing code, yes. But has there been an actual positive impact in other fields?

[cdrnsf]

No. It ruins art, ruins music, ruins communication and on and on. It's cancerous with respect to anything related to art or cultural value.

[pixel_popping]

Why "ruins"? just because it's not made by a human?

AI-made music is frankly pretty good, do you actually listen to it?

[piva00]

What's the point of listening to purely AI-generated music?

I don't mean music that has AI-generated stems as part of an arrangement, where a human actually created it and used AI for bits and pieces, I don't see absolutely any point on listening to purely AI-generated music. The fundamental essence of music is emotion, listening to something generated without emotion has no point, it might sound good but it's hollow and devoid of meaning.

I've tried to listen to it, it doesn't even make me "sad", it makes me feel... Nothing. I'm a hobby musician and I incorporated some AI-generated parts in some tracks where I mangled/processed them but my idea was exactly to express how hollow AI-generated music is without the human aspect.

[Leonard_of_Q]

> What's the point of listening to purely AI-generated music?

For formulaic music-as-a-product (McMusic™) it arguably makes no difference whatsoever whether it is totally machine-made or assembled out of vat-grown parts in the musack factory . This says far more about this category of music than it does about the value of machine-made music. Insta-pop, a large fraction of hiphop, supermarket country, plastic metal, there's plenty of formulaic thrash made by both man as well as machine. Even the supposedly man-made stuff was often half machine-made already before the advent of generative models so that other half did not make much of a difference.

If you're looking for music which makes you feel things (other than 'comfortably numb' to borrow a phrase from some real musicians) you're probably looking in the wrong area. It is the new music for airports, elevator music, hold-the-line music, slide-show-music, acoustical filler.

[pixel_popping]

Many music that are in autoplay on Spotify are AI and I literally didn't know until I checked, the emotion was triggered successfully, I don't really see why only a human could be able to trigger you an emotion? Like if I'm at a party, let say I don't know the artist and everything is AI made and everybody is vibing, then what's "wrong" with it?

I think this is more of a musician side which I respect, but a lot of people would simply not care who created it (or what).

[piva00]

Most people don't care about music, as most don't care about art in general. People like entertainment though.

What you are describing is more akin to a form of hollow entertainment through the medium of music, a lot of pop music can also fall into that category (no, not all, there is also a lot of artistry is many pop artists/songs).

If AI-generated music triggers emotions on you then keep consuming it but knowing that it's a hollow form of the art, there's no one on the other side communicating with you, it's basically like having a conversation with a chatbot, it might sound human but you know that there's no one on the other side listening to you. AI music is the other way: there's no one on the other side telling you a story, or a feeling they went through, it's just a mimesis of it.

[cdrnsf]

I have. It's overly polished, formulaic and dull. It's devoid of any of the qualities that make music interesting. There's nothing a human is trying to communicate. Perhaps it could be used as elevator or hold music.

[pixelpoet]

I agree, it's shockingly good these days; we can argue about morality etc, fine, but burying one's head in the sand and claiming it's bad puts you at odds with reality, which isn't a good place to be.

It's pretty silly that so many people take as an axiom that the human brain basically has a monopoly on certain patterns of electrical signals, and have semi-religious beliefs that this will always be the case.

[unconed]

It's not that AI can't convince a novice that what comes out is passible.

It's that experts in a field generally agree that what comes out is insidiously hollow garbage.

This isn't a "semi-religious" belief. It's linear token soup and diffusion bakes running headfirst into actual expertise, second and third order effects, refined skill and taste, and so on.

If you actually want to see civilization advance, you cannot rely on machines that merely mash up existing intellectual output while pretending to have expertise.

We already had that in the form of art school avant-gardism. AI is just style transfer of that, with corporate sycophancy and valley hyperbole as a veneer.

[bobbean]

It's not the experts that are going to be listening to the music. It's not made for the experts to pick apart and analyze.

[pixel_popping]

But you really believe it will stay that way? What do you think models will be 10 years from now? (not only models, we must include processes and tools in it) - developers were thinking this until recently there is some sort of sudden switch where "shit, it's good enough" and then pass this in a 50x loop and suddenly it becomes "shit, it's actually great" which proves it's a matter of time imo before it's not hollow garbage but actually innovative and expert in its field.

[frb]

Medicine?

There was recently an article shared around here that an LLM diagnosed ER patients more accurately than doctors.

Looking beyond LLMs image analysis to detect cancer and other diseases.

Like in coding, AI can and should be a useful tool for the human who decides and is ultimately responsible.

[grebc]

If you read more than the headline it was not how doctors diagnose patients in an ER(small text only description of symptoms).

[bogzz]

Remember when IBM claimed the same about Watson?

[hellisothers]

“In producing textiles but has there been actual positive impact in other sectors?” I’m sure the Industrial Revolution didn’t just happen all at once, it started somewhere and crept.

[pixel_popping]

support of all kind (including voice), marketing, real-estate, financial... yes, a ton of fields are being very impacted right now but right now doesn't even matter, what matter is what we know it will reach as theory will become practice.

[bojan]

Generally, people don't care about "fields being impacted", and the students certainly don't. People care about the impact certain technology has on their daily lives, on their welfare and the ability to pay off their mortgage and provide a decent life for their children.

The AI as it is today isn't really doing any of those things. At most, it's a sort of reliable replacement fot Google Search. Worden ehen, it's being presented as threat to all those things the people care about.