An AI Singer-Songwriter Just Debuted Her Original Song—And The Responses Are Just Brutal

ghosthand@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 209 points –
An AI Singer-Songwriter Just Debuted Her Original Song—And The Responses Are Just Brutal
comicsands.com

AI singer-songwriter 'Anna Indiana' debuted her first single 'Betrayed by this Town' on X, formerly Twitter—and listeners were not too impressed.

201

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'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.

This'd explain why inexperienced users of ai would inevitably get mediocre results. Still takes creativity to get stolen mediocrity.

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.

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.

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.

What version are you using?

GPT-4 is quite impressive, and the dedicated code LLMs like Codex and Copilot are as well. The latter must have had a significant update in the past few months, as it's become wildly better almost overnight. If trying it out, you should really do so in an existing codebase it can use as a context to match style and conventions from. Using a blank context is when you get the least impressive outputs from tools like those.

I've used gpt 3/3.5, bing, bard and copilot, and I'm not super stoked. Copilot gave me PS DSC items that don't actually exist, which was my most recent attempt at using a LLM.

I might see about figuring out if it can hook into my vs code instance so it's a bit smarter at some point.

I might see about figuring out if it can hook into my vs code instance so it's a bit smarter at some point.

There's an official plug-in to do this that takes like 15 minutes to set up.

am use for end of year ai project for school

It trends towards the mean, not the best.

That's where some of the significant advances over the past 12 months of research have been, specifically around using the fine tuning phase to bias towards excellence. The biggest advance there has been that capabilities in larger models seem to be transmissible to smaller models by feeding in output from the larger more complex models.

Also, the process supervision work to enhance CoT from May is pretty nuts.

So while you are correct that the pretrained models come out with a regression towards the mean, there are very promising recent advances in taking that foundation and moving it towards excellence.

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.

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

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.

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?

but who is going to sort through the billions of songs like this to find the one masterpiece?

One of the overlooked aspects of generative AI is that effectively by definition generative models can also be classifiers.

So let's say you were Spotify and you fed into an AI all the songs as well as the individual user engagement metadata for all those songs.

You'd end up with a model that would be pretty good at effectively predicting the success of a given song on Spotify.

So now you can pair a purely generative model with the classifier, so you spit out song after song but only move on to promoting it if the classifier thinks there's a high likelihood of it being a hit.

Within five years systems like what I described above will be in place for a number of major creative platforms, and will be a major profit center for the services sitting on audience metadata for engagement with creative works.

Right, the trick will be quantifying what is 'likely to be a hit', which if we're honest, has already been done.

Also, neural networks and other evolutionary algorithms can inject random perturbations/mutations to the system which, operate a bit like uninformed creativity (something like banging on a piano and hearing something interesting that's worth pursuing). So, while not 'inspired' or 'soulful' as we would generally think of it, these algorithms are capable of being creative In some sense. But it would need to be recognized as 'good' by someone or something...and back to your point.

What you described in your second paragraph is basically how image generation AI works.

Starting from random noise and gradually moving towards the version a classifier identifies as best matching the prompt.

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.

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.

"Generative" is such a misleading term. It's not generating anything, it is replicative.

For now.

And don't forget, humans are also trained on the inputs of others.

The difference is everyone has a different prospective, remembers some parts forgets others. Some journalists found a trick which revealed ChatGPT training data and it was literally just verbatim stolen data which literally contained a real person's information. You could hack into someone's brain and they wouldn't be able to directly recreate anything from memory alone, just watch any "from memory" youtube video.

While it's true there's nothing stopping AI from having human-like experiences, the content laundering is the thing corporations actually want.

Hate to break it to you but human creativity doesn't exist in a vacuum. You call it theft, artists call it inspiration.

4 more...

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.

Are you saying the idea of a unicorn wasn't new and original because it was drawing on the pre-existing features of a horse and narwhal?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, it is literally impossible for any AI to ever 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.

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.

I believe a real AI would be able to generate its own inputs without humans to give it input. It would have an actual subjective experience, able to actually imagine new things with zero external inputs. It could experience the redness of the color red.

Is this how you see human intelligence? Is human intelligence made without the input of other humans? I understand that even babies have some sort of spark before they learn anything from other people, but dont they have the human dna input from their human parents? Why should the requirement for AI intelligence require no human input when even human intelligence seemingly requires human input to be made?

Sorry, lots of questions, just food for thought I suppose.

The very fact that "babies have some sort of spark before they learn anything from other people" shows there's something missing.

I think intelligence requires the ability to think about your own thoughts and then draw new conclusions. LLMs can't do that.

Yeah, to be clear, I'm not arguing that current LLMs are as creative and intelligent as people.

I am saying that even before babies get human language input, they still get input from people to be made, the baby's algorithm to make that spark is modled on previous humans by the human data that is DNA. These future intelligent AIs will also be made by data that humans make. Even our current LLMs are not purely human language input, they also have an algorithm that is doing stuff with that data in order to show to us its, albeit relatively weak, "intelligent spark" that it had before it got all that human language input.

Chatbots are not new. They started around 1965. Objectively, gpt4 is more creative than the chatbots of 1965. The two are not equally able to create. This is an ongoing change, in the future AI will be more creative than today's most creative AIs. AI will most likely continue on its trajectory and some day, if we dont all get destroyed, it will eventually be more intelligent and creative than humans.

I would love to hear an rebuttal to this that doesn't just base its argument on the fact that AI needs human language input. A baby and its spark is not impressively intelligent. What makes that baby intelligent is its initial algorithm plus the fact that it gets human language data. Requiring that AI must do what the baby does without the human language data that babies get makes no sense to me as a requirement.

2 more...
2 more...
2 more...
2 more...
2 more...
2 more...
2 more...
2 more...
2 more...
2 more...

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

Alright, no big deal. But yeah, your're gut instinct was correct when you assumed there was a missing /s. I don't really like the /s that much, especially in situations where it is so obvious.

If you had read down through this thread first then you would have seen the obviousness of the /s. I don't think my comment history outside of this thread would have done much since I don't generally talk about this stuff. I just meant if you had looked more than a couple comments in this particular back and forth discussion.

2 more...

Except that it's wrong... AI is capable of creativity. It created the artist name. It's clearly not a very developed or robust sense of creativity because it clearly just hashed up the name Hanna Montana, and the song is probably likewise just a hashed up existing song, but I'm guessing it probably did a better job of creating an original work than vanilla ice...

I'm sorry, anyone who says these so-called "AI" are capable of creativity are being hoodwinked by marketing. This is an algorithmic probability engine, it doesn't think and it doesn't have an imagination. It just regurgitates probabilistic responses from its large data set.

Can you prove your brain is more than a algorithmic probability engine albeit a powerful one?

And here come the techbros to dehumanize themselves.

You and I feel. We don't just generate outputs from inputs, we experience them. The color red isn't just a datapoint recorded by photoreceptors, it's a phenomenal experience that "I", the self, experience as a being-in-the-world. Further, the color red that I experience is not the same as the color red you experience, even though it's the same color at the same wavelength. Everything we think and feel relates to everything else, and while I can imagine how you might experience the color red and you can provide me with data points to make it easier for me to imagine it, that imagination will always be tainted by my own subjective experience.

To me it looks like you hold a lot of pride in being a human and consider humanity special. Im here to tell you we are no different from amoebas and giraffes. We just specialize in our complex meat computers.

If you took a psychedelic or a cognitive psychology class you would understand through feel that feel is just the result of you being a meat calculator. Our feelings are the cumulative result of all the inputs and outputs. All at once. Slap some lived experience filters for subjectivity and bam.

Feel is subjective. Not everyone’s a vicious crypto tech bro. Open your mind its a good time ❤️

What I'm saying is LLMs do not actually do that. They're less creative than most animals, even if they're more technically capable.

I'm not just a meat calculator, I'm also feedback loop of meat endlessly calculating itself. That's what subjectivity is. When LLMs do this they hallucinate, and ironically while this is considered undesirable I think that's actually closer to creativity than the song this AI wrote.

1 more...
1 more...
1 more...

... what do you think imagination is? A gift from God? The probabilities are probably more chaotic, and the data set more biased... but they're the basic foundation of human imagination.

Machine based "creativity" is nascent, and far less unique... but that doesn't mean it isn't a form of creativity.

The human imagination also involves the phenomenal experience. You do not just record the data coming at you and regurgitate it, you experience it and then your experience further changes the data itself. We call this "subjectivity" and it's where creativity comes from.

I am not saying that machine creativity is impossible. What I'm saying is these LLMs are not creative because they don't even know what they're doing and they don't even know "they" are doing it. There's no "there" there. No more creative than rolling dice.

and experience is ongoing learning, so if an LLM were training on things after the pretraining period then that’d allow it to be creative in your definition?

but in that case, what’s the difference between doing that all at once, and doing it over a period of time?

experience is just tweaking your neurons to make new/different connections

This. Humans are just meat calculators when you zoom out.

Experience is ongoing learning through the subjective self. When you experience the color red you do not just record it with your photoreceptors, and your experience of the color red is different from mine because we don't just record wavelengths of light. We don't just continue to learn from continual exposure to new data, we also continue to learn from generating our own data. In this way our subjective experience is qualitative, not simply quantitative. I don't just see the specific light wavelengths, I experience the "redness" of red.

When LLM is trained on that kind of data it just starts to hallucinate. This is promising! I think the hallucination phenomenon is actually a precursor to creativity and gives us great insights into the nature of subjective experience. In a sense, my phenomenal experience of the color red is actually much like a hallucination where I am also able to experience the color's "warmth" and "boldness". Subjectivity.

it’s only qualitative because we don’t understand it

when an LLM “experiences” new data via training, that’s subjective too: it works its way through the network in a manner that’s different depending on what came before it… if different training data came before it, the network would look differently and the data would change the network as a whole in a different way

When an LLM feeds on its own outputs, though, it quickly starts to hallucinate. I think this is actually closer to creativity, but it betrays the fundamental flaw behind the technology - it does not think about its own thoughts and requires a curator to help it create.

I'll believe something is an AI when it can be its own curator and not drive itself insane.

that’s a lack of understanding of concepts though, rather than a lack of creativity… curation requires that you understand the concept that you’re trying to curate: this looks more like a dog than this; this is a more attractive sunset than this

current LLMs and ML don’t understand concepts, which is their main issue

id argue that it kind of does “think about its own thoughts” to some degree: modern ML is layered, and each layer of the net feeds into the next… one layer of the net “thinks about” the “thoughts” of the previous layer. now, it doesn’t do this as a whole but neither do we: memories and neural connections are lossy; heck even creating a creative work isn’t going to turn out exactly like you thought it in your head (your muscle memory and skill level will effect the translation from brain to paper/canvas/screen)

but even we hallucinate in the same way. don’t look at a bike, and then try and draw a bike… you’ll get general things like pedals, wheels, seat, handlebars, but it’ll be all connected wrong. this is a common example people use to show how our brains aren’t as precise and we might like to think… drawing a bike requires a lot of very specific things to be in very specific places and that’s not how our brain remembers the concept of “bike”

current LLMs and ML don’t understand concepts, which is their main issue

This is a relevant issue to the question!

If I take a dose of LSD and paint the colors I hallucinate, is that creative? I'd argue it's not.

Only when I, the subjective self, curate my own thoughts and sensations can I engage in a creative process. I can think about my own thoughts without going insane (how do the colors make me feel, what do the colors mean?) and that's a fundamental part of creativity and intelligence. Conceptualization is key to subjectivity.

I don't think this is far off. I just don't think we're there, either, and we should be skeptical of marketing hype.

i don’t agree with that definition of creative… there’s lots of engineering work that’s creative: writing code and designing systems can be a very creative process, but doesn’t involve feeling… it’s problem solving, and thats a creative process. you’re narrowly defining creativity as artistic expression of emotion, however there’s lots of ways to be creative

now, i think thats a bit of a strawman (so i’ll elaborate on the broader point), but i think its important to define terms

i agree we should be skeptical of marketing hype for sure: the type of creativity that i believe ML is currently capable of is directionless. it doesn’t understand what it’s creating… but the truth lies somewhere in the middle

ML is definitively creating something new that didn’t exist before (in fact i’d say that its trouble with hallucinations of language are a good example of that: it certainly didn’t copy those characters/words from anywhere!)… this fits the easiest definition of creative: marked by the ability or power to create

the far more difficult definition is: having the quality of something created rather than imitated

the key here being “rather than imitated” which is a really hard thing to prove, even for humans! which is why our copyright laws basically say that if you have evidence that you created something first, you pretty much win: we don’t really try to decide whether something was created or imitated

with things like transformative works or things that are similar, it’s a bit more of a grey area… but the argument isn’t about whether something is an imitation; rather it’s argued about how different the work is from the original

The same could be said of a lot of creatives. You speak of greater creativity, that which evokes depth and gravity. There is still more shallow creativity. Learning creativity. That which you do before you learn to do better. Kind of what these are doing.

I'm not saying it's good or bad, though the people who hold the reigns definitely don't have the best intentions for their use, but underestimating it is the first step to allowing them to run rampant.

"Never attribute to malice that which you can attribute to stupidity" is the slogan of those who do nothing but look down on others... who underestimate the horrible things the "stupid" can do. Don't assume stupidity just because you don't like something. It makes it that much easier for it to bite you on the ass in the future.

I don't think I'd actually call that shallow thought "creativity".

Think of a word association game. I don't think the first word that pops up in my head is creative at all, it's just a thoughtless reaction.

That's what LLMs are doing. Without that reflection and depth it's just a direct input->output

1 more...

hashed up

capable of creativity

2 more...
15 more...

How to make line assembled pop music even more sterile and devoid of soul. Now at one thousandth the cost! But wait, how are CEOs going to molest child artists when they aren't real?!

That's pretty amazing.

The song sucks, but here was the cutting edge of AI music just seven years ago.

That it's gone from some nightmarish fever dream mashup to wannabe pop influencer levels of quality in less than a decade is pretty crazy, and as long as there isn't a plateau in the next seven years we'll probably be in a world where AI generated musical artists have a popular enough following that they will have successful holographic concert performances by 2030.

I over and over see people making the mistake of evaluating the future of AI based on the present state while ignoring the rate of change between the past and present.

Yeah, most of your experiences of AI in various use cases is mediocre right now. But what we have today in most areas of AI was literally thought to be impossible or very far out just a number of years ago. The fact you have any direct experiences of AI in the early 2020s is fucking insane and beyond anyone's expectations a decade earlier. And the rate of continued improvement is staggering. Probably the fastest moving field I've ever witnessed.

Call me crazy but I absolutely preferred the fever dream mashup that you posted.

Well, the Beatles and Beach boys are better than emo YouTube influencers as a genre.

But the quality of the production of the fever dream is dramatically worse.

Technically we already have things like Vocaloid, which aren't AI yet, but do have their own holographic concerts that are popular in places like Japan and China. So having an AI artist come on stage and sing be too farfetched for me, despite the fact I'd hate it because it's a soulless entity devised by the corporate fascists. As for the quality of AI generated songs, no clue, but I can totally see them just ripping off up and coming human artists and then sending cease and desist letters to them for "StEaLiNg Ai GeNeRaTeD mUsIc" that was originally stolen or just stealing popular vocaloid songs and piggybacking off of every single person they can for profit.

A useful razor for the near future:

Copyright exists to encourage human creativity.

Copyright originally existed for this reason. It no longer exists for this reason, and hasn't for a long time.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

here

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Keep in mind, though, AI progress is often more like punctuated equilibrium.

Each new approach gets you much further, and polishing each approach gets you slight improvements until the next approach comes along. Improvements to chatgpt might plateau until the next big breakthrough architecture. Or maybe not.

polishing each approach gets you slight improvements

Without the base model changing at all, research into better use of the models has, depending on the measurement, gone from around 35% success rates to 85% success rates.

I wouldn't define that as slight.

Hold up. This sounds WAY better!

Is my opinion wrong?

Blue Jeans and Bloody Tears was the best AI song ever.

The fact that AI can produce this is impressive as to where we have come with AI. But can this actually threaten human artists?

In the United States, a federal judge ruled in 2023 that AI artwork cannot meet federal copyright standards because “Copyright law is ‘limited to the original intellectual conceptions of the author’.” With no author, there is no copyright.

https://www.makeuseof.com/copyright-rules-ai-art/ See u/Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 's article below.

"The answer will depend on the circumstances, particularly how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final work," the office said.

Under current US law, that song is probably now in the public domain. If the law changes, that could mean that in the future, music charts potentially could be filled with AI songs. As it stands, this is most-likely a public domain music machine cranking out music that anyone can use royalty-free. It depends on the interpretation of the courts.

The threshold for how much human input counts as "authorship" is extremely low. Photographers get copyright over pictures they take when their sole contribution to the image is aiming the camera and pushing a button. Most AI-generated art involves a lot of human input in the form of prompting, selecting outputs, and then often tweaking or splicing them together in various ways.

But even if by some weird twist US courts do rule this sort of thing to be public domain, why wouldn't this "threaten human artists?" Having awesome AI-generated art being public domain seems like the best of both worlds to me - you get awesome art and it's legally unencumbered. How would a human artist compete with that? Their art would be more expensive and you'd have all kinds of limitations on what you can do with it.

If the autogenerated art becomes too close to copyrighted art, then you'll have humans suing AI generators.

George Harrison's My Sweet Lord is very similar to He's So Fine by the Chiffons. And that was an easy case. But some cases in requires deeper analysis, such as Lana Del Ray's Get Free.

In January 2018, singer Lana Del Rey claimed that Radiohead were suing her because of alleged similarities between their 1992 debut single Creep, and her song Get Free, from her 2017 album Lust for Life. The band's publishers Warner/Chappell subsequently denied taking legal action, but did confirm requesting credit for “all writers” of Creep.

The Guardian spoke to a professional composer to analyse the songs, who noted that the chords used are rare in pop music, and the melodies bear an uncanny resemblance, although in conclusion “imagined the similarities are unintentional”.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190605-nine-most-notorious-copyright-cases-in-music-history

If AI is sampling, then how do you defend it being unintentional? While all Radiohead sought was credit on the writing (in this case), would humans (whose livelihood is being threatened) be so generous with an AI composition? And if the music industry is threatened by AI, they will lawyer up.

The mistake you are making is in thinking that the future of media will rely on the same infrastructure as what it's been historically.

Media is evolving from being a product, where copyright matters in protecting your product from duplication, to being a service where any individual work is far less valuable because of the degree to which it is serving a niche market.

Look at how many of the audio money makers on streaming platforms are defined by their genre rather than a specific work. Lofi Girl or ASMR made a ton of money, but there's not a single specific work that is what made them popular like with a typical recording artist with a hit song.

The future of something like Spotify will not be a handful of AI artists creating hit singles you and everyone else want to listen to, but AI artists taking the music you uniquely love to listen to and extending it in ways that are optimized around your individual preferences like a personalized composer/performer available 24/7 at low cost.

In that world, copyright for AI produced works really doesn't matter for profitability, because AI creation has been completely commoditized.

With no author, there is no copyright.

So old characters such as Mickey Mouse are all fine to use as the authors are dead?

I bet they didn't consider this one when writing the law!

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.

I mean, even if this song was coming from a human it'd be derivative, boring, and worthless.

If anything, the fact something comparable to mediocre human YouTube musical artists is being AI generated is the thing that is wild and impressive. The song itself in isolation is beyond meh.

I mean, even if this song was coming from a human it’d be derivative, boring, and worthless.

Quite a lot of music pumped out by labels is.

Just because the other kids are doing it, that doesn't make it ok

or we will just have an AI vs humans War and get our assess kicked

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".

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

Looking at the hateful comments gives me shivers when thinking how humans will proceed with machines on an emotional level.

If we ever reach sentinent AI, it will go towards I-Robot plot. Ill bet.

Edit typos

I don't hate the technology, I hate the corporate fascists using it to further erode human culture and turn the planet into generic brand toothpaste.

Or Battlestar Galactica. Create a new species, make them humanoid, make them sentient, and then treat them like shit. Great.

iRobot and WALL-E soon to be facts

iRobot [...] soon to be facts

Beware the sinister Roomba, what are they doing with all the dirt they steal from our floors?

I have been thinking the exact same.

Better movie comparison: A.I. Artificial Intelligence by Steven Spielberg

Good thing the stuff people call AI now isn't and never will be capable of emotion, that way I can call it and things it generates stupid and bad and worthless without anyone getting offended :3

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

It's not as though the article is any better - bots just wrapping up a comment thread from twitter, cramming it with ads, and presenting it as an article.

Late stage capitalist media is a dumpster fire.

Yeah, my blocked website list is growing everyday with websites that are literally just a 4 paragraph summary of a reddit post. 3 of the paragraphs are usually just "user 'spezcocksucker' says this but another person disagrees. Here's the reddit link and 27 ads.

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.

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.

EDIT: I want to clarify that these voice synthesisers like SynthV and Vocaloid are usually based on the recording of someone who has consented to the use of their voice in that regard and has been paid for it. It's not like the current AI voice cloning trend going on.

::: spoiler 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.

I've used Synthesizer V Studio and the clip in the video definitely showed that's what they used.

It looks like they should be disclosing ALL the tools they used to make this. Probably part of the TOS of the other programs too.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Watching the video and the head movement all I see is the Balenciaga ai meme

YouTube link for those that want to see it for themselves. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3T175LTQFnw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l71Hh1gPkE

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.

What the fuck WHY WOULD THEY PIN THAT??

channel pinned a comment containing fascist dogwhistle

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.

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.

. I think it sounds the same as other shitty music I hear all the time.

That's because it's literally a machine made to copy exactly that.

All I hear is profit for the record labels.

But yeah, AI will be able to evolve too. We will have some good AI music soon also.

In a decade, high budget movies will have some AI actors in them and people won't notice. :)

If it gets democratized enough Labels will go the way of the dodo I think, barring legal intervention of course. Why would a radio station pay a label for something they can churn out themselves, heck they need user metrics for adverters anyways, so just set up voting for your favorite songs and get a radio station fine tuned to your audience.

At least better than the same process but done by some mega Corp trying to make a song that can be universally accepted...

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.

Here I am just wondering how much automation went into tuning/tweaking the voice. I've made some stuff in Synthesizer V Studio and that's a big chunk of the work. Being able to load something into an AI and have it give a pass would be awesome.

Just looking at the picture this already seems like amateur work.

As for the music being ... Yes it's pretty flat and unexciting. Realistically lots of today's music is already a remix of a remix and honestly... quite generic. Bands have been cast for looks for a long time, autotune has been here for ages, and with a better effort in the voice department I don't see AI artists being far off. I don't think they will ever completely replace artists here, especially since live events really are a thing of their own but.. eh

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?

I think everyone's being a bit unfair. I'm not saying it's remotely good but this is like the Clippy tool of of AI singing/songwriting. That, and everything is predictable...but imagine where this'll be in 10yrs!

but imagine where this'll be in 10yrs!

Do I have to? I feel bad enough as it is

I can't wait for Commander Data's Greatest Love Songs collection. He sings with such soullessness!

Music already has no meaning. The quicker we completely break it down and start over, the better.