this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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Barack Obama: “For elevator music, AI is going to work fine. Music like Bob Dylan or Stevie Wonder, that's different”::Barack Obama has weighed in on AI’s impact on music creation in a new interview, saying, “For elevator music, AI is going to work fine”.

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[–] [email protected] 171 points 1 year ago (3 children)

why do i care what obama feels about either of these

[–] [email protected] 60 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I very rarely care for what most 62 year olds have to say about the capabilities about the theoretical limits of computation.

This isn't much different.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If the 62 year old had studied computer science and had specialized in AI, I would listen closely to them.

But I definitely not care about a politician that has no idea about technology.

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[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I mean — he’s defending human creativity and he’s kind of right. AI can recreate variations of the things it is trained on, but it doesn’t create new paradigms.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

People always says AI do create only variations but many successful TV shows are variations. I started watching sitcoms from the 70s and many things were copied/adapted in recent shows.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Yeah, also I think there is something about the human connection and communicating personal ideas and feelings that just isn't there with AI generated art. I could see a case for an argument that a lot of music today is recorded by artists who didn't write that music, and that they are expressing their own feelings through their performance of someone else's creation. And is it really all that different if an AI wrote something that resonated with an artist who ultimately performed it? Which for a good chunk of pop-culture regurgitations may be completely valid. But in my opinion, the best art, communicates emotion, which an experience unique to biology, AI might be able to approximate it, and sure there's a human prompting the AI who might genuinely have those feelings, but there's a hollowness to it that I struggle to ignore. But maybe I'm just getting older and will be yelling at clouds before long.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

If he got super wild and crazy by wearing a tan suit again to work would you?

[–] [email protected] 114 points 1 year ago (8 children)

...so I've been on a shit load of elevators, and I don't recall a single one of them having music. For as common a trope as it is, you'd think elevator music would be more common in actual elevators.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's like porn, they all used to have music, and now people still make jokes about how bad it was but it's just gone now

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Elevators used to have porn? :o /s

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

It's not as common as it used to be, but I think the point was kind of that you're not supposed to notice it?

Look into "muzak" (the style of music. Apparently it's also a brand according to Google), and some of Brian Eno's ambient albums like "Music for Airports" (which is definitely a bit more sparse than elevator music, which was often like smooth jazz versions of classic songs), but along similar lines.

I don't like to think I'm that old, and I 100% remember elevator music.

Edit: was possibly thinking of "musique concrete" rather than muzak.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah they always go with awkward silence

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (13 children)

There is no way this ages well.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I think the statement was more about the impact, which will depend on each person's subjective experience

Personally I agree. Even if AI could produce identical work, the impact would be lessened. Art is more meaningful when you know it took time and was an expression/interpretation by another human (rather than a pattern prediction algorithm Frankenstein-ing existing work together). Combine that with the volume of AI content that's produced, and the impact of any particular song/art piece is even more limited.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'd say art is more meaningful when it's a unique experience. It's like those myths about glassmakers being ~~killed~~ blinded after the cathedral is finnished so that no one can replicate the glass color... without the killing.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

I don’t know. I think Obama kind of nailed it. AI can create boring and mediocre elaborations just fine. But for the truly special and original? It could never.

For the new and special, humans will always be required. End of line.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think, it will eventually become obsolete, because we keep changing what 'AI' means, but current AI largely just regurgitates patterns, it doesn't yet have a way of 'listening' to a song and actually judging whether it's good or bad.

So, it may expertly regurgitate the pattern that makes up a good song, but humans spend a lot of time listening to perfect every little aspect before something becomes an excellent song, and I feel like that will be lost on the pattern regurgitating machine, if it's forced to deviate from what a human composed.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Do people actually care what Obama has to say about AI? I'm just having a hard time seeing where his skillset overlaps with this topic.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (23 children)

Probably as much as I care about most other people's thoughts on AI. As someone that works in AI, 99% of the people making noise about it know fuck all about it, and are probably just as qualified as Barack Obama to have an opinion on it.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (17 children)

But do we really need AI to generate art?

Why can't AI be used to automate useful work nobody wants to do, instead of being a way for capital to automate skilled labor out of high-paying jobs?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Because AI is unpredictable. Which is not a big issue for art, because you can immediately see any flaws and if you can't, it doesn't matter.

But for actually useful work, you don't want to find out that the AI programmer completely made up a few lines of code that are only causing problems when the airplane is flying with a 32° bank angle on a saturday with a prime number for a date.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

We currently have the same problem with human programmers. That's why good companies always test the shit out of their code.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (5 children)

It's virtually guaranteed that at some point, robots and/or AI will be capable of doing almost every human job. And then there will be a time when they can do every job better than any human.

I wonder how people will react. Will they become lazy? Depressed? Just have sex all the time? Just have sex with robots all the time?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

The last one

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Why would people think he knows anything about AI?

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (3 children)

While reassuring for many to hear, that's only going to be true for so long. Eventually it's going to be real fucking good at making "real" music. We need to be preparing for those advancements rather than acting like they'll never come.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I feel very reassured to hear that from the AI expert / musical virtuoso himself, 62 year old, former United States President Barack Obama.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Obama must not have heard There I Ruined It.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (8 children)

One of my jobs involved updating blogs for small businesses. I had a Shutterstock subscription for the images that goes along with these blog posts. For this task, I think AI generated images work a lot better than stock photography.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Jesus this is terrible. The accuracy is incredible!

(/s, I ain't fighting fans of the good lord Bob)

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Young people think all this AI stuff is great and older folks are suspicious. I think older folks are right this time.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Definitely need more people to tell me about ai and what it will be capable of. Make a daily show so that every shitty celebrity can tell us about ai, there might still be plenty of word combinations that haven't been used!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Elevator music as well as the mainstream music that majority of people listen to like pop etc.

That music is already very formulaic and almost as if it is generated by Ai.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Already likely to be untrue, but honestly I'd happily sign up for a world wear "hold music" isn't the same 20sec loop of shit jazz

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That actually might make elevator and phone hold music survivable - continual compositions that never repeat

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

24h/7d elevator music that never repeats itself. I think you've described Hell.

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

Cheaper to generate 30s and loop it

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Okay, I love the elevator music idea as a gag in media.

But I've never been in an elevator that has ever played music, and I can completely understand why. Elevator music sounds obnoxious.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Where are they getting the training data from for AI music models? I guess it's the same issue as art and language models, but wouldn't they need to only use royalty free music?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In before obligatory republican outrage and 24x7 media coverage explaining how this comment will doom democrats in 2024

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