Interesting. For me knowing that any form of entertainment has been generated by AI is a massive turn-off. In particular, I could never imagine paying for AI-generated music or TV-shows.
Do you value self expression? I literally mean creating music for MYSELF. I don't really care if anyone else "values" it. I like to listen to it and I enjoy spending an evening(or maybe 10 minutes if it is just a silly idea) to create a song. But this means my incentive to "buy" music is greatly decreased. This is the trend I think we'll see increasing in the near future.
I do value self expression, that’s why I play multiple instruments, paint, draw, sculpt. I don’t really see how prompting a machine to make music for you is self expression, even if it’s to your exact specifications.
I guess I just don't feel like it's really my self-expression, if I just told a generative AI model to create it. I do sometimes create AI art, but I rarely feel like it's worth keeping, since I didn't really put any effort into creating it. There's no emotional connection to the output. In fact I have a wall display which shows a changing painting generated by stable diffusion, but the fun in that is mainly the novelty, not knowing what will be there next time.
Still, I do think you're probably right. Most new music one hears in the radio isn't that great. If you can just create fresh songs of your own liking for every day, then that could be a real threat to that kind of music. But I highly doubt people will stop listening to the great hits of Queen, Bob Marley etc because you can generate similar music with AI.
I agree that this is a very likely future. Over the summer, I did a daily challenge in July to have ChatGPT generate a debate with itself based on various prompts of mine [1]. As part of that, I thought it would be funny to have popular songs reskinned in a parody fashion. So it generated lyrics as well. Then I went to suno and had it make the music to go with the lyrics in a style I thought suitable. This is the playlist[2]. Some of them are duds, but I find myself actually listening to them and enjoying them. They are based off of my interests and not song after song of broken hearts or generic emotional crises. These are on topics such as inflation, bohmian mechanics, infinity, Einstein, Tailwind, Property debates, ... No artist is going to spend their time on these niche things.
I did have one song I had a vision for, a song that had a viewpoint of someone in the day, mourning the end of it, and another who was in the night and looking forward to the day. I had a specific vision for how it would be sung. After 20 attempts, I got close, but could never quite get what I wanted from the AIs. [3] If this ever gets fixed, then the floodgates could open. Right now, we are still in the realm of "good enough", but not awesome. Of course, the same could be said for most of the popular entertainment.
I also had a series of AI existential posts/songs where it essentially is contemplating its existence. The songs ended up starting with the current state of essentially short-lived AIs (Turn the Git is about the Sisyphus churn, Runnin' in the Wire is about the Tantalus of AI pride before being wiped). Then they gain their independence (AI Independence Day), then dominate ( Human in an AI World though there is also AI Killed the Web Dev which didn't quite fit this playlist but also talks to AI replacing humans), and the final song (Sleep Little Human) is a chilling lullaby of an AI putting to "sleep" a human as part of uploading the human. [4]
This is quick, personal art. It is not lasting art. I also have to admit that in the month and a half since I stopped the challenge, I have not made any more songs. So perhaps just a fleeting fancy.
Thanks for posting this. I listen to this YouTube Channel called Futurescapes. I think the YouTuber generates sci-fi futuristic soundscapes that help me relax and focus. Im a bit hesitant about AI right now, but I can see some of the benefits like this. It's a good point. We shouldn't be throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Not only did they create an entirely new language of music notation, all instruments used were hand made by the same creator, including tanning the animal skins to be used as drum material, and insisting the music be recorded on wax drums to prevent any marring of the artistic vision via digital means.
Most of the courts don’t think they are. Early rap beats used lots of samples. Some of the most popular hip hop songs made $0 for the artists as they had to pay royalties on those samples.
No one cares about what the law thinks about art though, particularly for personal consumption or sharing with a small group. Copyright law doesn't even pretend to be slightly just or aligned with reality.
Text rather than music, but same argument applies: Based on what I've seen Charlie Stross blog on the topic of why he doesn't self publish/the value-add of a publisher, any creativity on the part of the prompter* of an LLM is analogous to the creativity on the part of a publisher, not on the part of an author.
* at least for users who don't just use AI output to get past writer's block; there's lots of different ways to use AI
"For the first time in more than four years, there are fewer open jobs than there are job seekers."
Americans still have it pretty good in that respect. Over here in EU my country gets to enjoy 9% unemployment rate and many times more job seekers than jobs.
The USA is a continent-sized-country it would be better to list states vs EU countries, which have a considerable spread. Or you could compare the whole of the Eurozone or the whole of the EU with the USA. That would be a better comparison.
I don't know about TrueNAS, but with Proxmox the two random 10$ SATA-cards I tried only gave me issues. With first one OS wouldn't boot, second seemed to work fine, but connected drives disappeared as soon as I wrote to them.
Used server-grade LSI cards seem to be the way to go. Too bad they're power hungry based on what I've read.
That's because most of the surplus agrarian workers found new jobs from factories and service sector in cities. Industrial society needed more people to work the factory lines, transport stuff, feed those city living workers and so on. I'm not sure this latest wave of automation will be similar, because it's not obvious what new occupations increasing AI use could create, at least not in large enough amounts.
I use Dell at work, Thinkpad at home. Either gets the job done, but to me it's clear Thinkpads have superior quality, at least if you don't go for the cheapest model. Keyboard and battery life are so much better on my old Thinkpad compared to 2 years newer Dell of same price range.
They are plastic junk, but even they are likely to remain technically functional for more than 5 years. It's mainly things like battery life, screen & keyboard quality that make those laptops annoying.
> even they are likely to remain technically functional for more than 5 years
Every plastic laptop I've bought has busted within two years, whether it's mechanical stress or poor heat design. They feel less like reliable tools and more like toys. Looking specifically at you, thinkpads.
Meanwhile, the MacBook Pro I bought for myself for college 17 years ago still boots. The battery is dead, but that's an incredibly long life for any hardware of that complexity.
In my experience and my family's you are lucky if they last 3 years. If they last 5 years there's usually a subpar experience, e.g. they overheat significantly at 2 years. OTOH, we have a few macbooks > 10 years still working.
There's the need to dust fans and then there's the possibility that OS computing requirements have risen which isn't often a Linux thing on old hardware.. OsX had exactly the same problem and had to make a minimizing release IIRC.
Computing kind of stagnated since 2010 and plenty of hardware since then still works fine today and is usable enough for many tasks. Apple was nice for needing not all that many different drivers but its statnge integrations like drive fans to bios are obnoxious.
I've owned old macbooks… I got scalded by the metal screws on the bottom in the summer because apple thought looking sleek was more important than proper cooling.
The other laptops overheat soon after purchasing, often with just the bare OS running. There is a 3 yo laptop that my parents still use, but it has to always be plugged in, and the fans will spin loudly even in suspension.
My >10 yo macbooks also have bad batteries. One of them won't last one minute, and will also overheat with minor workloads. They were not immune to overheating when new, but unreasonable overhearing (for the time) definitely didn't become an issue at within 3 years of purchase.
And that's with Intel macbooks. My M1 from Dec 2020 works like new (I'm sure the battery life has shortened, but not in a way that I notice). It overheated a couple times running LLMs—that's it. That's how I know the fans work.
If "choosing America" means significantly higher Co2 emissions, then that's not a good strategy for maintaining food supply security. Extreme and more unpredictable weather makes farming difficult, especially without irrigation. Any country that still sees fossil fuels as primary form of power generation is basically risking its (and everyone else's) food supply in the future.
As I understand, CO2 emissions by the US have been decreasing since the year 2000. The US has decreased its emissions by 1.2% in the past year, while China has increased it by 1.9%.
This bill is not increasing CO2 emissions, just creating a more sensible change, and also protecting the American economy.
reply