AI singer-songwriter ‘Anna Indiana’ debuted her first single ‘Betrayed by this Town’ on X, formerly Twitter—and listeners were not too impressed.
“her song”
That’s cute
I don’t understand why people are so cynical about this, it seems like a harmless demonstration of the current state of the technology.
If you were a professional musician your opinion might be different?
How so? It’s pretty good, wait a few years and it will definitely be as good or better than human musicians. If you’re talking as if it is a treat to musicians, they can only adapt and use such techs to push forward. All professions that require reasoning are endangered, not only music.
I am a musician and I like the technology (even wanted to do research on music generation in uni), but I still think the notion that music generation will surpass human capabilities in a few years is naive.
Surpass, likely not. Yet make the career no longer financially viable?
Most people aren’t professional musicians though.
Ok
I think in the context of K-Pop it makes total sense, the music and everything around is anyway just done after a formula which has proven to work very well to sell. While right now you need to put children and teenagers through years of rigorous training and expose them to immense stress and pressure so most of them break, with AI you can easily replicate the same formula and refine much quicker without throwing so many young people into the meat grinder of the music industry.
More money and control for the companies less people killing themselves.
The ones who really burn for the music will make music despite AI music being available. And they also will find an audience, even though it might be smaller.
What I worry about this is mainstream becoming “accustomed” to assemblyline content by AI. What if eventually people start actually consider the conformity to be good thing and originality deviant? Of course there will always be people who dont care what other think but vast majority of people seems to at least on some level be very conscious about it.
Imagine being the weird one just because you don’t like ai generated crap
When you think about it, that’s pretty much the history of boy bands, going all the way back to the Monkees. The faces were carefully chosen for demographic reasons, the songs were written by the labels and targeted for specific demographics, the faces’ histories were largely constructed fictions (and published through “unauthorized” fan magazines and books that were ghostwritten by the labels and laundered through other publishing companies). The only real difference is that now software is being used for it rather than marketing teams.
well, at least there is less human suffering involved now
Have you seen the movie WALL-E? The people on the space-ship they’re consuming engaging content all day long, nobody is creating anything anymore, so all this must been created by the AI. I’m just trying to say that it’s not a novel idea. Writers and artists have been imagining this future for ourselves for a long time.
Quite disturbing to see open support for our own dispossession rationalized this way.
I’m a programmer, we’ve been advocating and working on replacing ourselves with scripts since the 50ies.
While right now you need to put children and teenagers through years of rigorous training and expose them to immense stress and pressure so most of them break
Uh… I don’t think that’s a necessary part of the process to making k-pop, or any kind of music. Industry people may think it’s critical to making themselves shit-loads of money, but it’s not important for the creation music or even selling the music.
Yeah, that’s what I meant with the rest of my text that people will make music still, and this corporate breaking the children and teenagers can be replaced by AI.
Watching the video and the head movement all I see is the Balenciaga ai meme
I can’t wait for Commander Data’s Greatest Love Songs collection. He sings with such soullessness!
I think it sounds the same as other shitty music I hear all the time.
I fully expect AI music to be part of the musical scene going forward.
Does it feel dystopian? Yeah, it’s not a fun future. But this is here to stay.
AI music can be fire if you use it as a part of the artistic process, not as the end result. It’s just every fucking technocracker wants to replace the artistic process completely so they don’t have to not pay their employees any more. EDIT: Actual AI, not that OpenAI content laundering shit.
Force multipliers are great for forces of good and terrible for forces of evil.
Like wanting to make audio versions of text. Great for increasing access ability for people. Terrible when it’s just to funnel people from the texts authors to your front for money and to serve ads.
Same tools.
This is the worst AI will ever be, again.
Right now, at the end of 2023, you are seeing barely a year of public interest and widespread development, after maybe a decade of slowly grinding academic experimentation. And already it’s enough to build some Vocaloid knockoff from scratch. You can tell it’s fake, as surely as a seven-fingered hand on some anime girl staring dead into the camera. But if you think all AI drawings still look like that… you should go check.
This isn’t a threat to artists, though. It’s a threat to the industry. Real human beings who want to make art will have more and better tools than ever before. Audiences that want an endless spigot of AI content… won’t need recording studios. You can already run this stuff on your computer. Some networks are getting better by getting bigger, which demands a really fancy computer. Other networks are getting better by getting smaller. Smaller networks train faster, even if they’re deeper, more abstract, and less predictable. They run faster, too, and on lesser hardware.
Hold onto your butts, folks. It’s gonna get weird.
Also, far from the most pressing issue here, but: just say Twitter. You don’t have to respect the stupid rebrand. You know it’s stupid because everyone keeps clarifying what they mean.
Still wishing everybody would just start calling it Xitter.
Pronounced “shitter”, I assume
Of course. So you can post your xits
Elon has no problem with people deadnaming trans people on his website so why should we avoid deadnaming his website.
The actions of bigots are not a good “golden rule” situation. You are called what you want to be called.
But a business is not a person. Fuck what they want. Businesses are called whatever people recognize.
Same shit goes for Blackwater and Facebook. Reputation is a necessary part of commerce and politics, and escaping it through shell games is idiotic bullshit we should never respect.
This is a good and valid point but in the case of X, the real shit show started after our during the renaming period. Do if you want to point out the idiotic bullshit, I think X is the way to go. Nevertheless, that’s hard to pronounce, like “I re-X-ed your X” sounds like a messed up relationship issue.
Twitter was a dumpster fire for a decade before Elmo tricked himself into buying it.
Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed outcomes. Twitter was always a harassment engine, by design. If not by intent.
Waiting for the AI composer site where I can prompt it for music based on a story I provide.
We already have Taylor Swift, though?
Exactly
Hmm. Human Music. I like it.
There can be nothing new or original out of AI because all of its inputs are stolen from what already exists. Real creativity comes solely from humans. Also, that clip - the song, singing, and visual - is dreadful in every way.
This needs to be hammered into techbro’s heads until they shut the fuck up about the so-called “AI” revolution.
I get the sentiment, but don’t really agree. Humans’ inputs are also from what already exists, and music is generally inspired from other music which is why “genres” even exist. AI’s not there yet, but the statement “real creativity comes solely from humans” Needs Citation. Humans are a bunch of chemical reactions and firing synapses, nothing out of the realm of the possible for a computer.
the statement “real creativity comes solely from humans” Needs Citation.
Yeah, I’d actually make a more limited statement. Real creativity requires the subjective experience and the ability to generate inputs solely from subjectivity i.e. experience the redness of the color red. AI could definitely do that, which is why LLMs are not AI imo
I see it an more an inability to analyze, evaluate, and edit. A lot of “creativity” in the world of musical composition is putting together existing elements and seeing what happens. Any composer from pop to the very avant-garde, is influenced and sometimes even borrow from their predecessors (it’s why copyright law is so complex in music).
It’s the ability to make judgements, does this sound good/interesting, does this have value, would anyone want to listen to this, and adjust accordingly that will lead to something original and great. Humans are so good at this, we might be making edits before the notes hit the page (Brainstorming). This AI clearly wasn’t. And deciding on value, seems wildly complex for modern day computers. Humans can agree on it (if you like Rock, but hate country for example).
So in the end, they are “creative” but in a monkey-typewritter situation, but who is going to sort through the billions of songs like this to find the one masterpiece?
I see it an more an inability to analyze, evaluate, and edit.
I believe that’s vital to the creative process, but yeah, I basically agree.
Plenty of humans make those judgements about their own creations. And plenty of them get a shock when they release their creations to the masses and don’t get the praise that they expected.
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I’ve been doing a lot of using, testing, and evaluating LLMs and GPT-style models for generating code and text/prose. Some of it is just general use to see how it behaves, some has been explicit evaluation of creative writing, and a bunch of it is code generation to test out how we need to modify our CS curriculum in light of these new tools.
It’s an impressive piece of technology, but it’s not very creative. It’s meh. The results are meh. Which is to be expected since it’s a statistical model that’s using a large body of prior work to produce a reasonable approximation of what it’s seen before. It trends towards the mean, not the best.
I’m excited for how these tools will be used by human creators to accomplish things they could never do alone, and in that aspect it is a revolutionary technology. I hate that their marketing calls it “AI” though, the only intelligence involved is the human user that creates prompts and curates results.
This’d explain why inexperienced users of ai would inevitably get mediocre results. Still takes creativity to get stolen mediocrity.
I guess a protip is you have to tell it explicitly in the prompt who it’s supposed to steal from.
For instance, midjourney or SD will produce much better results if you put specific artstation channel names along with ‘artstation’ in the prompt.
You have to know how to operate the oven to reheat store bought pie. Generative LLMs are machines like ovens, and turning the knobs is not creativity. Not operating the oven correctly gets you Sharon Weiss results.
and a bunch of it is code generation to test out how we need to modify our CS curriculum in light of these new tools.
I’m curious if you’ve gotten anything decent out of them. I’ve tried to use it for tech/code questions, and it’s been nothing but disappointment after disappointment. I’ve tried to use it to get help with new concepts, but it hallucinates like crazy and always give me bad results, some of the time it’s so bad that it gives me answers I’ve already told it we’re wrong.
Yeah, I’ve just set up a hotkey that says something like “back up your answer with multiple reputable sources” and I just always paste it at the end of everything I ask. If it can’t find webpages to show me to back up its claims then I can’t trust it. Of course this isn’t the case with coding, for that I can actually run the code to verify it.
Still, AI is able to “create” new things by a combination of existing concepts. It can generate a Roomba in the style of Van Gogh for example, which is probably not something that currently exists.
“Roomba in the style of Van Gogh” is a new combination of existing things, but it can never create something truly original. Derivative.
What is an example of something that is truly original and not derivative?
The style of an authors prose is not derivative. Read your favorite book and then tell an ai to write a short story in the style of that author.
Unless you have trully blind taste you are going to notice just how wooden the ai writing is.
An excellent example will be some sort of pulp novel where the author uses canned phrases. Dan Abbnet has a very repetitive style that lends itself well to ai, yet ai can not write a convincing Ciaphas Cain story. Convincing as in, if you showed it to me and i didnt know what ai was, i wouldnt think it was fanfiction.
Is this ability to create something original and non-derivative a basic human ability or is it something that very few are capable of only after many years of developing their ability?
Are you able to right now create something original and non-derivative as an example?
I dont feel like it but here is something I wrote with original prose, fitting the criteria of originality. As a favor for me arguing with you, please give me feedback on my prose
Not to talk down to you, but do you know what prose means? I actually used to not know what that word means so its not an embarassing thing to not know. That might be why I percieve you as “talking past me.” Prose is a writer’s style and choice of language. So purple prose is writing in an overly flowerly and annoying way. Every writer, regardless of talent and skill, has original prose. I think the only amount of practice required to be able to achieve this is to write enough to have a consistent style. So since you completed public school you also probably meet the criteria.
I have done the specific experiment I suggested using Dan Abbnet’s works with Chat GPT because I consider Dan to be my favorite author who makes repetitive pulpy fiction that I think AI idealy should be able to replicate, but it really can’t.
Thanks for sharing this. I wasn’t especially grabbed at the beginning, and honestly, since I had already checked the length, shortly in I didn’t think I would finish it. Maybe just because I was sort of disoriented at the start and not really relating so it was hard to find a foothold. Maybe a quarter of a way into it though it started to come together for me and began really enjoying it. The final scene was quite vivid and it nicely sort of quickly put me into the shoes of the hero and the pride they felt for their accomplishment. The anger toward everything just before succeeding did a good job of making them seem believable. I appreciate you taking the time to write that and share it.
I do not consider myself a writer, but I do find it therapeutic, and it is something that I have a habit of doing at least a little bit of every day, in fact, it is something that I keep track of my “streak” of. I think of prose as the writing version individual etchings that a carver does when forming a block of wood into a sculpture. Any individual one on its own is not often very impressive. But it is the way they come together as a whole that creates something beautiful. I don’t know how inline that is with the accepted definition of the term, and really it isn’t a word that I have much cause for using, or much interaction with in my life.
With the recent popularity of chatGPT there are a lot of people who have just now started paying attention to modern chatbots. Many people see them and assume that how they are now is just how they are, as if we are at some sort of wall, and the things they are still bad at is something intrinsic to the way a computer is able to “think”. These are the people who insist that a human is required to make beautiful or worthy artistic writing. They have made this judgement based on this assumption that what they see now is how it has to be.
There is another group of people, however, that see this very differently, these are the people who have been paying attention to the space a bit longer. They are watching a rapidly accelerating trajectory. They saw how awful, yet intriguing, early gpt2 was with things like AI dungeon, and the enormous leap it took upon the release of gpt3. They watched Replicas morph from being a tacky gimmick to something that had enough of an emotional hold on people to make them distraught enough to cause stickied suicide hotline reddit posts when the owners made the decision to pump the breaks on their capabilities. Something that was perceived as many as “my best friend has been lobotamized and there is nothing I can do about it”. I know, crazy, right?
The newcomers that got washed in with the latest chatGPT wave see this metaphoric car and say it’s no big deal, it’s only going 30km/hr, but what they fail to realize is that .25 seconds ago it was practically parked, and the gas pedal is still very much on the floor. To the people who have been paying attention longer, they don’t see this single snapshot of a slow moving car, they are watching a rapidly accelerating vehicle and wondering if it is gonna hit 60km/hr by the end of the first second or 200, and they are also wondering if the acceleration is going to continue after the second is up and how long it can keep this kind of rapid growth going. Who knows, maybe this new wave came in with no frame of reference, made thir initial gut response and they will end up being right and the more long term observers will be wrong, but that’s almost never how things seem to go. Only time will tell though.
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But all of human creation is derivative.
It’s not the techbros leading this, it’s the BBAs and MBAs that wouldn’t know art if Michelangelo came to life and slapped them in the face with the sistine chapel.
I would never call an actual technician a techbro! Techbros are Rick&Morty ledditor “fuck yeah science!” dorks.
Meat goes in. Sausage comes out.
The problem for a lot of the companies behind these things, is that they’ve run into problems now their investors want them to turn meat into a black forest gateau.
I’m sceptical if they can manage that feat. But what do I know.
There can be nothing new or original out of AI because all of its inputs are stolen from what already exists. Real creativity comes solely from humans
what have you seen that wasnt there before
i mostly have qualms with the quote i have no illusions about the levels of discussions around aiYes, it is literally impossible for any AI to every exist that can be creative. At no point in the future will it ever create anything creative, that is something only human beings can do. Anybody that doesn’t understand this is simply incapable of using logic and they have no right to contribute to the conversation at all. This has all already been decided by people who understand things really well and anyone who objects is obviously stupid.
Oh shit, I thought you had forgotten a “/s” at the end, but reading your other comments this is actually what you believe and how you talk. So… yeah, I’m not going to take someone who cites “people who understand things really well” as a source at face value.
Well then you didn’t read very many of my comments. I made this first comment because the post I responded to was so absurd so I just exaggerated the ridiculousness that they said. Of course AI is capable of creativity and intelligence. If you look at the long back and forth that this sparked you would see that this is my stance. After I made this over the top, very sarcastic comment, OP corrected themself to clarify that when they said “AI” they actually only meant the current state of LLMs. They have since admitted that it is indeed true that AI absolutely can be capable of creativity and intelligence.
No, I didn’t read the entirety of the comments you’ve made, I read your comment and the one you replied to. As a general rule, I (and I’d assume most people) read down a thread before replying, and don’t first look through all of everyone’s comment histories
Good job tearing down that strawman! 🙄
I was agreeing with you. I’m so sick of people thinking that “someday AI might be creative”. Like no, it’s literally impossible unless some day AI becomes human(impossible) because human is the only thing capable of creativity. What have I said that you disagree with? You’re not one of them are you? What’s with all this obsessive AI love?
LLMs aren’t intelligent. They’re jumped up chatbots lol
Yeah the current popular LLMs, absolutely they are, you couldn’t be more right.
We were talking about “AI” though. Are you implying that you think some day AI might be capable of creativity, and that creativity isn’t strictly a human trait?
I put “AI” in scare quotes specifically because I do not believe we are having an “AI revolution”. These are not AI.
I think AI can exist but that’s not what we have right now. What we have are jumped up algos that can somewhat fake it.
Even those future “real” AIs are going to be taking in human input and regurgitating it back to us. The only difference is that the algorithms processing the data will continue to get better and better. There is not some cutoff where we go from 100% unintelligent chatbot to 100% intelligent AI. It is a gradual spectrum.
Right just as soon as all the people proclaiming that can point to the soul bit of my brain. There is absolutely no reason to say that AI cannot be creative there’s nothing fundamentally magic about creativity that means only humans can do it.
The belief that only humans can be creative is interestingly parallel to intelligent design creationism. The latter is fundamentally a religious faith, but it strongly appeals to the intuition that anything that happens needs a humanoid creator.
You’re equating creativity to the soul. They’re not the same thing. But we can definitely look at the brain and see what parts light up when perform creative tasks.
Right so why can’t the same sections be simulated? If you accept that the human brain is simply an organic implementation of a neural network, then you have to accept that a synthetic implementation can achieve the same thing.
The idea that the human brain is special is ludicrous and completely without evidence
I mean, I’m not arguing anything other than your false equivalent. I’m sure, at some point, we’ll be able to mimic how the human brain actually works, not just imitate the results. But we’re not even close right now. Not in the same ball park. Not in the same tri-state area. We still don’t really understand how it does what it does completely. We know some of the processes, and understand that’s it’s chemicals interacting with the meat in some way, but it’s still mostly kinda just weird stuff our body does. We’re mostly just pointing at areas that light up with activity when we do a thing and saying “yep, that’s the general area that’s doing stuff.”
And that’s just understanding it, let alone figuring out how to imitate it with technology. And none of those parts of the brain work independently. They’re spread out and they overlap and exchange and change information constantly, all with chemicals. Getting a computer to mimic the outcome is still something we’re far from, but without the same processes, its not really gonna come out the same. We’ve got just… so long to go before we actually get close to simulating a human brain.
And just for fun, I do think this line of yours is funny:
The idea that the human brain is special is ludicrous and completely without evidence
Again, I wasn’t saying anything of any sort, and I’m still not really taking any stance beyond “that shits complicated and we’re not there yet.” But you’re supposing that a “synthetic implementation can achieve the same thing.” … without supporting evidence. This argument was clearly meant for someone else, but it’s not really fair to demand evidence from someone for their claim when you don’t support your own. Jumping to the conclusion that something is impossible is the same as assuming it’s definitely possible. You don’t know that. I don’t know that. No one really knows that until it’s done.
I don’t think, the human brain is special either, but we are still two big steps ahead IMHO:
- We can perceive what we’ve generated, to judge whether it’s good or bad.
- We perceive many, many inputs throughout our lives. Not just text, visuals, audio, but also taste, smell, touch and more. To be simultaneously creative and relatable to humans, AIs would need to be equipped with these concepts and would need to be given ‘memories’, which are fleshed out with all these kinds of input.
“Generative” is such a misleading term. It’s not generating anything, it is replicative.
There can be nothing new or original out of AI because all of its inputs are stolen from what already exists.
Ummm don’t humans learn exactly the same way? Pretty sure some random person wrote the textbook I read. Should I cite them every time I come go with a new idea based off of that knowledge?
Also, people steal shit all the time. I think everyone is looking for excuses to be upset.
The anger comes from the fact that companies are using AI instead of hiring artists.
There is a distinction between a human being inspired by an existing piece of art and an ai creating something from other art. The human has to experience it through the lens of the human experience and create using the human body. AI takes multiple pieces of art and essentially makes a collage.
Eh, humans still take inspiration from others even in their original art. Most professionals draw from reference, or emulate styles, or follow some common method. Drawing from a singular source is ethically questionable, but imitating elements from many sources is just part of the process.
Arguably, no human creation is purely original, the originality comes from the creativity of the remix.
Oh my god its like talking to a brick wall. read Read! READ!
I’m not arguing for originality. I’m saying that you can have a human connection with a human made piece of art that, by definition, canon exist for AI art.
Not so much an expert rather than just parroting what I saw, but according to a cursory search, and a Twitter community note I saw from a friend, the voice used by this project is Synthesizer V, which is actually a perfectly legitimate piece of software for using digital voices in music production. If you’ve heard of Vocaloid, or know about Hatsune Miku, SynthV is basically a competitor in that space.
Going back to the community note, the voice used is actually called Natalie, and apparently the TOS of SynthV does not allow use of its voices using a name that’s different to what was given. So they essentially can’t present the Natalie voice as Anna, which they are.
Tweet + Community Note
Thank you, I was wondering about the voice synthesis and if it was part of the AI model they used.
No prob! These digital voices have been around for over a decade now, maybe more. Some of them use “AI” to improve the sound of the voice (i.e. support more languages than actually recorded, make it sound realistic) but not in the way that current AI voice trends are going.
Here’s the link to the tweet
https://nitter.net/AnnaIndianaAI/status/1728089499429642432#m
Yeah the music is trash but so are the songs these days. The AI perfectly learned the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends.
“It’s pretty scary, but it’s scary in the sense of how stupid music already is anyway, so it’s not that frightening. Like, ‘This thing can make a pop song!’ Have you heard a pop song? Great. Let it go. Unleash the beast, you know – holy shit would that ever open up the niche market for actual musicianship.”
That picture is weird, there’s some AI nonsense going on with the microphone shock mount, and her jaw doesn’t line up with the rest of her face. Plus the usual uncanny valley weirdness of an AI generated image.
Not even going to bother with the song.
But it’s so bad you have to
It’s not worth giving any attention to so it doesn’t spread any further.
I have a feeling they knew how this would be received considering it seems like they’re rage-baiting and acting pretentious to try and get attention.
I accidentally submitted early, but also, I wrote out the lyrics. It’s the most bland version of those breakup-depression kind of songs imaginable. I guess people voted it as “feel-good” out of irony.
Sitting at my favorite cafe
Sipping my tea it’s saturday
Thinking about all he’s done, to everyone
This town is full of broken dreams
Shattered hopes, and silent screams
Somebody please help me
Betrayed by this town
Let’s tear it all down
We’re all just destined to fall
I’ve lost it all
Betrayed by this town
Let’s tear it all down
We’re all just destined to fall
We’ve lost it all
Alone in the streets, alone in my thoughts
Thinking of all our favorite spots
I thought someday things might turn around
But I was lost and never found
Betrayed by this town
Let’s tear it all down
We’re all just destined to fall
I’ve lost it all
Betrayed by this town
Let’s tear it all down
We’re all just destined to fall
We’ve lost it all
Faces painted with smiles
Lies are told
A facade of unity
A vitality sold
So I sit here in silence
Just wondering how
To rewrite the tales
This town won’t allow
Betrayed by this town
Let’s tear it all down
We’re all just destined to fall
I’ve lost it all
Betrayed by this town
Let’s tear it all down
We’re all just destined to fall
We’ve lost it all
I’ve lost it all
We’ve lost it all
“Betrayed by this town / Let’s burn it all down “ might be the most relevant chorus of today’s music. It’ll be stuck in my head all night and would fit right in at most protests
Lots of hostility, but that’s to be expected. Research has shown that humans generally like AI-generated content as long as they don’t know it’s AI generated content, and when they find out they switch over to hating it.
It’s simply bias. It’ll go away eventually.
People can call ai generated movie shit or boring or whatever all they want, but i heard for example Henry styles watermelon sugar high, that song was popular as hell, and it might as well just be ai generated mambo jambo
Seriously, my thought was “I have friends who have Soundclouds that sound worse than this”. But I don’t call my friends’ music “just brutal” or “dreadful in every way”.
YouTube link for those that want to see it for themselves. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3T175LTQFnw
To me the biggest problem with it is that it doesn’t understand the relationship between the meanings of the words and the melody of the song. It kinda makes it sound like a bad parody song. I think if you looked at just the lyrics or just the melody they would be quite convincing on their own.
It’s… not that bad. There’s pop out there on the radio that’s worse.
pop’s an extremely low bar.
And extremely popular bar. Hence why it’s low.
What the fuck WHY WOULD THEY PIN THAT??
AI owners can’t be normal if they tried.
So my bad, this video is not made by the creators of the song, but by an anti-AI person, they added the subtitles, the cutaways to evil robots and the weird message at the end. They are also called “Big Data Analytics”.
Here’s something that looks more legit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l71Hh1gPkE
OK my bad then, that’s still a really terrible thing to pin on your channel.
