Having very other side of the tidal wave feelings about my hobby (instrumental music production) being automated away even being considered from being used in others’ workflows. sure, I guess I wouldn’t have had time to do it, would have said no, and so given that I’m not actually proposing that there’s a better counterfactual where I (or probably anyone else) spent the time to produce the backing tracks, it’s not awful for there to be a tool like this… probably… I think. But I and many others in the community could have done better given time we don’t have, since there’s a world to save… and also the danger from which we have to save it is in fact ais like these taking over all of human life. Sigh. Oh well.
I also feel similarly weird about the AI generated visual art on the website. It’s like… I like ai generated visual art a lot, and in a utopia I’d hope to keep getting to use the current era of ais, because it’s fun to get the art style of “ai that doesn’t quite get it but is trying and fucks up a lot”. but it’s when that is used by humans to replace something they would have had to commission a human in order to get before… well, maybe it’s cheaper and fits in a tight budget, but maybe the budget for human generated art simply should be higher, in order to actualize the value of humans making art? similarly I don’t dislike the idea of ai being used as a tool to make music… but when one outsources artistic agency to an ai rather than tightly winding your and the ai’s agency together… idk. and even then, maybe there is something sus about the ai’s agency actually just being entirely repackaging of copyrighted fragments. There are a few AI visual art regenerators out there that are entirely trained on uncopyrighted stuff, and I personally find their output much less, idk, let’s just say bad (edit: as in, their output looks less distorted/oversaturated/hyperstimuli/disneydystopia/strange) than other stuff. but really, I just want humans involved. I want to see what their souls make if they put in the time to do it, not the funhouse mirror of their souls make. If there really isn’t time or money, I won’t completely object to AI art, but… I don’t feel shy saying that, though I am not world class, I am muchmuchmuchmuch better at thepartsofmusicalartthatIcareabout than any AI music generator.
My (optimistic?) expectation is that it ends up (long run) a bit like baking. You can go into a supermarket and buy bread or cakes, but many people enjoy baking at home and there is a wonderful social sharing aspect to all tucking into a cake that someone at the table baked. In this context a human using an AI tool but applying some prompt changes or edits is maybe (depending on the level of AI use and human intervention) somewhere like using packet-mix, or premade pastry, or even just one of those already-made cakes that is intended for you to decorate with icing.
As a consumer, if I am listening to the Beatles say, I don’t think the fact that they were human is relevant to the enjoyment I derive from it. I never expect to meet any of them, some of them died before I was born. The same notes composed and synthesised from a computer would be the same notes and affect me the same way. But, when my wife plays me a song she wrote on the piano then that is something special that I would certainly not automate.
Many musicians on radio interviews or similar try and show more of who they are out to the audience (or at least a persona), presumably to try and make it feel more like the “song by someone I know” thing. At that scale its more “celebrity-following”, but that is also something the AI would not have—I don’t know how big a deal that is.
My (optimistic?) expectation is that it ends up (long run) a bit like baking.
Home/local music performance also transitioned into more of a niche already with the rise of recorded music as a default compared to live performance being the only option, didn’t it?
At that scale its more “celebrity-following”, but that is also something the AI would not have—I don’t know how big a deal that is.
While I doubt it will be the same thing for a transformer-era generative model due to the balance of workflow and results (and the resultant social linkages) being so different, it seems worth pointing out as a nearby reality anchor that virtual singers have had celebrity followings for a while, with Hatsune Miku and the other Crypton Future Media characters being the most popular where I tread. In fact, I fuzzily remember a song said to be about a Vocaloid producer feeling like their own name was being neglected by listeners in favor of the virtual singer’s (along the lines of mentally categorizing the songs as “Miku songs” rather than “(producer) songs”), but I can’t seem to source the interpretation now to verify my memory; it might’ve been “Unknown Mother-Goose”.
The “Disneyland without Children” short story? Yeah, I did. I’d read it before, and found it a nice fleshing-out of Bostrom’s phrase. I do find it dystopic, but don’t consider it illustrative of a likely future.
I don’t think my disagreement is particularly insightful, but sure: if the painting is beautiful, I don’t care if the artist is ugly or blind. With AI/ML image generation, we now have “beauty too cheap to meter” (Scott Alexander’s phrase), and I don’t see that as a bad thing. What “being human” means is something you construct for yourself, and a worry that it will somehow be lost or replaced is misguided.
Less high-mindedly, the (overwhelming majority of) human artists in power, writing novels, playing music, making movies, creating video games, translating anime/manga, have been telling me loudly and repeatedly for several years now that they despise me and everything I value, so fuck ’em (especially the anime/manga localizers); anything that democratizes their power, diminishes their status, throws open the gates they keep, is good, both for my community as a whole, as well as for me in particular.
what are these things you value that artists despise?
is being a human body not an artistic pursuit, a way of applying artistic intent to negentropy?
what futures seem likely?
do you really not have any interest in the art being the result of an artistic process, does the past not have artistic value to you?
if you could be high on heroin all the time without it interfering with your ability to continue existing, would you, or is that a dissatisfaction of your values?
if someone could make an identical clone of you and torture it, would you wish to prevent it?
what about if the clone was a mini-you, identical in every way but smaller?
what if the clone is only awoken for an hour of torture every day, and is otherwise in cryostasis or some similar instant-frozen thing?
what if the clone is only awoken once a year?
what about if there’s a new clone made every day, and so every time you wake up there’s a 50% probability you’re the torture-clone?
what about if the torture-clone is only a shallow clone?
I don’t know what that is. Genetically identical but not possessing my memories?
2. I wouldn’t use the term “art” for that, no.
4. I don’t have a constructive definition for what counts as an “artistic process,” but I certainly wouldn’t say the past holds no value for me: I like ancient sculptures and the like more than the next guy, and generally loathe iconoclasts and book burners. But if, say, the Library of Alexandria had books that had been printed instead of scribed by hand, I would not consider its burning any less of a loss.
5. No, I wouldn’t. I have never used heroin, but its effects on others don’t seem like the kind of thing I’d wish for myself permanently.
6–10 are easy. I’d consider the clone at least family.
Yeah, I’m not gonna get baited into getting rate-limited by downvotes that easily. All you need to know, if you care to, is that my values and goals differ drastically from most other people here.
EDIT: A mod rate-limited me anyway, perfectly illustrating the stark value difference: I consider that kind of abuse of power an atrocity.
a day later, I can post again: we were both rate limited from this conversation, me presumably because I got annoyed and antagonized you. sorry about that—I was jumping to conclusions, and should have had more uncertainty about what your reasoning was, rather than assuming it’s because you think the things I want in my life should not be in my life. I’ve undone my downvotes of you.
I suspect our values do not differ very much in any deep way, and that the shallow way they differ is a short term difference in what we think is higher priority, rather than anything about what outcome we want. It’s of course possible I’m wrong about this; but, if you read my user profile and pinned comments, it will likely give insight about this, and you can then comment where you disagree about facts or have different preferences. I intend to not downvote you for honest and emotionless description of how our intentions differ.
I generally consider the existence of people having authority over other people a significant negative externality that would ideally be replaced with people knowing how to do peer to peer co-protection. I don’t think that can be done successfully until we get the math right, and until then I am simply focused on understanding the math of distributed systems.
Having very other side of the tidal wave feelings about my hobby (instrumental music production) being automated away even being considered from being used in others’ workflows. sure, I guess I wouldn’t have had time to do it, would have said no, and so given that I’m not actually proposing that there’s a better counterfactual where I (or probably anyone else) spent the time to produce the backing tracks, it’s not awful for there to be a tool like this… probably… I think. But I and many others in the community could have done better given time we don’t have, since there’s a world to save… and also the danger from which we have to save it is in fact ais like these taking over all of human life. Sigh. Oh well.
fwiw I am also feeling some stuff about this (having been involved with some of the music generation process).
I’m hoping to write up some more thoughts soon, but I’m still kinda confused about it.
I also feel similarly weird about the AI generated visual art on the website. It’s like… I like ai generated visual art a lot, and in a utopia I’d hope to keep getting to use the current era of ais, because it’s fun to get the art style of “ai that doesn’t quite get it but is trying and fucks up a lot”. but it’s when that is used by humans to replace something they would have had to commission a human in order to get before… well, maybe it’s cheaper and fits in a tight budget, but maybe the budget for human generated art simply should be higher, in order to actualize the value of humans making art? similarly I don’t dislike the idea of ai being used as a tool to make music… but when one outsources artistic agency to an ai rather than tightly winding your and the ai’s agency together… idk. and even then, maybe there is something sus about the ai’s agency actually just being entirely repackaging of copyrighted fragments. There are a few AI visual art regenerators out there that are entirely trained on uncopyrighted stuff, and I personally find their output much less, idk, let’s just say bad (edit: as in, their output looks less distorted/oversaturated/hyperstimuli/disneydystopia/strange) than other stuff. but really, I just want humans involved. I want to see what their souls make if they put in the time to do it, not the funhouse mirror of their souls make. If there really isn’t time or money, I won’t completely object to AI art, but… I don’t feel shy saying that, though I am not world class, I am much much much much better at the parts of musical art that I care about than any AI music generator.
That sounds pretty close to what I read the subtext of the original post to be.
well, I guess I sure am having the feeling about it then
I certainly understand this feeling.
My (optimistic?) expectation is that it ends up (long run) a bit like baking. You can go into a supermarket and buy bread or cakes, but many people enjoy baking at home and there is a wonderful social sharing aspect to all tucking into a cake that someone at the table baked. In this context a human using an AI tool but applying some prompt changes or edits is maybe (depending on the level of AI use and human intervention) somewhere like using packet-mix, or premade pastry, or even just one of those already-made cakes that is intended for you to decorate with icing.
As a consumer, if I am listening to the Beatles say, I don’t think the fact that they were human is relevant to the enjoyment I derive from it. I never expect to meet any of them, some of them died before I was born. The same notes composed and synthesised from a computer would be the same notes and affect me the same way. But, when my wife plays me a song she wrote on the piano then that is something special that I would certainly not automate.
Many musicians on radio interviews or similar try and show more of who they are out to the audience (or at least a persona), presumably to try and make it feel more like the “song by someone I know” thing. At that scale its more “celebrity-following”, but that is also something the AI would not have—I don’t know how big a deal that is.
Home/local music performance also transitioned into more of a niche already with the rise of recorded music as a default compared to live performance being the only option, didn’t it?
While I doubt it will be the same thing for a transformer-era generative model due to the balance of workflow and results (and the resultant social linkages) being so different, it seems worth pointing out as a nearby reality anchor that virtual singers have had celebrity followings for a while, with Hatsune Miku and the other Crypton Future Media characters being the most popular where I tread. In fact, I fuzzily remember a song said to be about a Vocaloid producer feeling like their own name was being neglected by listeners in favor of the virtual singer’s (along the lines of mentally categorizing the songs as “Miku songs” rather than “(producer) songs”), but I can’t seem to source the interpretation now to verify my memory; it might’ve been “Unknown Mother-Goose”.
Every toaster a Mozart, every microwave a Newton, every waffle iron a Picasso.
@Shankar Sivarajan care to elaborate on your disagree—in particular, did you click through the middle link?
The “Disneyland without Children” short story? Yeah, I did. I’d read it before, and found it a nice fleshing-out of Bostrom’s phrase. I do find it dystopic, but don’t consider it illustrative of a likely future.
I don’t think my disagreement is particularly insightful, but sure: if the painting is beautiful, I don’t care if the artist is ugly or blind. With AI/ML image generation, we now have “beauty too cheap to meter” (Scott Alexander’s phrase), and I don’t see that as a bad thing. What “being human” means is something you construct for yourself, and a worry that it will somehow be lost or replaced is misguided.
Less high-mindedly, the (overwhelming majority of) human artists in power, writing novels, playing music, making movies, creating video games, translating anime/manga, have been telling me loudly and repeatedly for several years now that they despise me and everything I value, so fuck ’em (especially the anime/manga localizers); anything that democratizes their power, diminishes their status, throws open the gates they keep, is good, both for my community as a whole, as well as for me in particular.
what are these things you value that artists despise?
is being a human body not an artistic pursuit, a way of applying artistic intent to negentropy?
what futures seem likely?
do you really not have any interest in the art being the result of an artistic process, does the past not have artistic value to you?
if you could be high on heroin all the time without it interfering with your ability to continue existing, would you, or is that a dissatisfaction of your values?
if someone could make an identical clone of you and torture it, would you wish to prevent it?
what about if the clone was a mini-you, identical in every way but smaller?
what if the clone is only awoken for an hour of torture every day, and is otherwise in cryostasis or some similar instant-frozen thing?
what if the clone is only awoken once a year?
what about if there’s a new clone made every day, and so every time you wake up there’s a 50% probability you’re the torture-clone?
what about if the torture-clone is only a shallow clone?
I don’t know what that is. Genetically identical but not possessing my memories?
2. I wouldn’t use the term “art” for that, no.
4. I don’t have a constructive definition for what counts as an “artistic process,” but I certainly wouldn’t say the past holds no value for me: I like ancient sculptures and the like more than the next guy, and generally loathe iconoclasts and book burners. But if, say, the Library of Alexandria had books that had been printed instead of scribed by hand, I would not consider its burning any less of a loss.
5. No, I wouldn’t. I have never used heroin, but its effects on others don’t seem like the kind of thing I’d wish for myself permanently.
6–10 are easy. I’d consider the clone at least family.
I don’t care to answer 1. and 3.
then I don’t know what this thing is that artists have been saying is bad, and I don’t know how you disagree with me about the future. have a good one
Yeah, I’m not gonna get baited into getting rate-limited by downvotes that easily. All you need to know, if you care to, is that my values and goals differ drastically from most other people here.
EDIT: A mod rate-limited me anyway, perfectly illustrating the stark value difference: I consider that kind of abuse of power an atrocity.
a day later, I can post again: we were both rate limited from this conversation, me presumably because I got annoyed and antagonized you. sorry about that—I was jumping to conclusions, and should have had more uncertainty about what your reasoning was, rather than assuming it’s because you think the things I want in my life should not be in my life. I’ve undone my downvotes of you.
I suspect our values do not differ very much in any deep way, and that the shallow way they differ is a short term difference in what we think is higher priority, rather than anything about what outcome we want. It’s of course possible I’m wrong about this; but, if you read my user profile and pinned comments, it will likely give insight about this, and you can then comment where you disagree about facts or have different preferences. I intend to not downvote you for honest and emotionless description of how our intentions differ.
I generally consider the existence of people having authority over other people a significant negative externality that would ideally be replaced with people knowing how to do peer to peer co-protection. I don’t think that can be done successfully until we get the math right, and until then I am simply focused on understanding the math of distributed systems.