this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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AI singer-songwriter 'Anna Indiana' debuted her first single 'Betrayed by this Town' on X, formerly Twitter—and listeners were not too impressed.

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[–] [email protected] 150 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (78 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 76 points 11 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

I would never call an actual technician a techbro! Techbros are Rick&Morty ledditor "fuck yeah science!" dorks.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (5 children)

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?

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

For now.

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

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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?!

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago

They just molest regular childer I reckon

[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (9 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (8 children)

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/[email protected] '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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You should cite this article instead. It's more up-to-date.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 31 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (7 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

iRobot and WALL-E soon to be facts

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

“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

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (7 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

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.

Tweet + Community Note


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[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (7 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (8 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (6 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Waiting for the AI composer site where I can prompt it for music based on a story I provide.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

Hmm. Human Music. I like it.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (6 children)

I don't understand why people are so cynical about this, it seems like a harmless demonstration of the current state of the technology.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Sounds like a broken autotune.

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