The top-rated comment on "Grimes Invited Anyone to Make A.I. Grimes Songs. Here Are Her Reviews. The producer and pop singer, long a proponent of technological experimentation, has 'open-sourced' her voice using new A.I. tools. She’s been impressed by the results" (NYT).
Here's a page full of the labor of artists using Grimes AI and competing for a $10,000 prize.
Here's one example that was embedded over at the NYT and commented on by the true winner of this game, Grimes:
She said: "I love how weird this song is — it sounds really inhuman.... You can hear the technology very profoundly. What I like about the early A.I. stuff is that you can hear the technology very profoundly. I think people will appreciate that more in five years when they realize people only made stuff like this for a couple months."
So don't worry. This seems inhuman, but later AI will seem human. You'll be nostalgic for this in the future. You'll think something like: Remember when what was inhuman felt sweetly and tragically inhuman? We've lost touch with the poignancy that was the inhumanity of early AI. It's all just uniformly "human" now.
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28 comments:
transhuman (i.e. species-correlated attributes): sights, sounds, also transhumane (e.g. character)
Ebony Musk has terrible preference in women. Money can't buy you taste, just look at the woman Jeff Bezos runs around with.
Ah, Althouse. Clip that last paragraph. Bring it out every month or so. Give it its own tag. The utter idiocy of Grimes has led you to construct a piece of genius.
I fail to understand the controversy. We are in an era where people spend money to watch others play video games for hours on end. We have millions of creators on TikTok, Youtube, and elsewhere putting a hand out for donations via Patreon or Ko-fi.
Furthermore, Grimes is a computer-based musician. If you've seen her "live", producing sound involves a lot of keyboards and knobs. She's also a certified artistic weirdo in the fashion of Prince, Bjork, and Phil Spector. IMO nothing she does should be taken as cynical capitalism. Commercial yes, but she does need to earn a living too.
This could be a story about neo-colonialism and Green fields across Africa and other instances of progress through labor and environmental arbitrage.
Medical progress through enlisting free subjects, a lot of them children, under the guise of therapy with an empathetic appeal to virtue.
Perhaps a handmade tale of #CecileTheCannibal.
The sweatshop metaphor doesn't quite work as she isn't making anybody work. Her "employees" are entirely voluntary, coming and going as they please. What Grimes is doing seems more like trying to find a half-way point between Prince's copyright maximalism and the free-for-all of The Grateful Dead.
She's trying to monetize free-riding while still encouraging the behavior. Personally, I think the prohibition against free-riding is one of the bogus aspects of copyright law, something the court's should not be involved in. But I far prefer her approach to somebody trying to stamp it out as the law allows. For that reason, I wish her luck.
Creepy music with bad lip-syncing to the video. Impressive!
What Kate said. Nailed it.
It's way ahead of us, and Grimes is closer to it than you or me.
We're just trying to catch up, and we're way ahead of 9 of every 10 folks out there. We'll be nostalgic for this. If that's NOT frightening, I don't know what WOULD be frightening.
@Althouse: We've lost touch with the poignancy that was the inhumanity of early AI. It's all just uniformly "human" now.
8 Bit Art is a big thing (Lego-like)
Minecraft is a huge thing (Lego-like)
https://www.freepik.com/free-photos-vectors/8-bit-art
https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Minecraft
We seem to like the inhumanity of early arcade video games, as they never die and as people stuff modern tablet PCs into wooden boxes to relive the 1980s.
Indeed, all technology becomes less interesting as time goes on.
1) I hate Musk.
2) Grimes is associated with Musk.
3) I hate Grimes.
4) Launch attack at Grimes.
It worked for the Huffington Post, why not Grimes? And Huff was abusing adults, many of them journalists, who shoulda known better. I recall the sale price was $300,000,000 with exactly zero going to the contributors.
Did the pope have a dream about music played in hell? this could be it.
Blastfax Kudos: "Ebony Musk has terrible preference in women"
Not everyone shares the same preference in women.
"she's playfully bringing up taking one of the AI-sampled songs someone made, and making her own version."
Is this not simply a modern and more efficient way for songwriters to attract the attention of a music star?
For many decades, aspiring songwriters have flooded star musicians with new songs to consider recording. I suppose one could view this as free labour for the stars, although I've never heard anyone describe it this way.
Seems to me like a great opportunity for all those labourers to have a better shot at success without needing to make connections, pay off various middlemen, etc. And also a way for them to show the star not just a song, but why that song is a great match for that performer.
AI is robbing 'artistes' of their specialness. A good name for an AI engine would be "Baal," and the artistes want to burn it on pyre to regain their lost influence. If she is offering her fans a way to make money doing something that they would be perfectly happy to do for free, I can't see the problem with it, other than butt hurt labor ideologues who can't stand to see other people having fun.
What Enigma said. This is Facebook/YouTube/any social media business model. Nobody signs up to view ads, even for free.
Cool cartoon.
"...a virtual sweatshop..." It's like a regular sweatshop except you work from home and don't actually have to show up at all.
“So don't worry. This seems inhuman, but later AI will seem human.”
Not for long...prepare to welcome the superhuman!
For me, the beauty of AI apps like ChatGPT is that they're so much faster than The Infinite Monkey Theorem.
The future of AI will be to enhance the music of average humans until everyone can sound great, in real time.
Then, as in the Vonnegut novel, children of talent will need to be isolated to prevent the contamination of their talent by AI, so that music can progress.
What's a Grimes?
How is this Grimes? Never heard of her before.
What Kate says at 9:25 am
where have i been all day?
our civilizational moment:
"So don't worry. This seems inhuman, but later AI will seem human. You'll be nostalgic for this in the future. You'll think something like: Remember when what was inhuman felt sweetly and tragically inhuman? We've lost touch with the poignancy that was the inhumanity of early AI. It's all just uniformly 'human' now."
Ann Althouse, May 2023
"We've lost touch with the poignancy that was the inhumanity of early AI. It's all just uniformly 'human' now."
Fuck you, pay me!
It's a nice gig...you do the work and I'll only take half.
People often invoke risk to children to give themselves a say in something that's none of their business.
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