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”.
Why would people think he knows anything about AI?
Because we often look up to public figures for stuff they are not qualified to comment on.
If he’s an unqualified bystander, then what the fuck are you?
I’m always surprised that the people with all the answers only share them with thirty other assholes on the Internet.
I’m confident a 14 year old can write their own AI, maybe even a smart 10 year old.
Here’s instructions for kids:
https://youtu.be/XJ7HLz9VYz0?si=1QN3fqT03HSMufib
You think Obama can’t wrap his head around a little algebra?
Why, when speaking intelligently and thoughtfully in the subject, is he so wrong in his assessment, when you, in one lazy sentence, are so right?
I’m really worried about would-be wise people just throwing in the towel cause they don’t know how much better they could be with a little discipline, and settle for being clever here and there.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/XJ7HLz9VYz0?si=1QN3fqT03HSMufib
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
As far as I know, Obama has nothing to do with IT and doesn’t have a big interest in it. A lot of people on here are probably more qualified than he is when it comes to these topics simply because they spent a lot of their free time learning about it.
Can we get a second opinion from Dre?
But what does ja rule think?
Are you saying that Barack Obama and Dr. Dre both are equally unqualified to talk about “AI”? What other similarities do they share that makes you reach for Dr. Dre so quickly? Do you believe that Obama or Dre are incapable of interacting with computers or understanding computer science? Do you think that people who look like “thugs” to a person like you might be capable of learning and performing complex tasks?
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Why are you acting like it’s at all difficult to understand?
Because you can teach a teen to do it in two weeks. He was a constitutional law professor, as well as the first elected African-American president in the United States. I learned LLMs in a couple months and I never used a comp until 2021. Why are you gatekeeping?
Using the end product and having any idea how it works are two VERY different things.
I agree, my argument is that both aren’t challenging for even the average person if they really want/need to understand how these models produce refined noise informed by human patterns.
There are electricians everywhere you know.
This isn’t a random person thoughtlessly yelling one-sentence nonsense pablum on the Internet like you.
You think this person can’t understand something as straightforward as programming, coming from law?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama
Please link your Wikipedia below 🫠
It’s a bit more complicated than you’re making it out to be lmfao, there’s a reason it’s only really been viable for the past few years.
The principles are really easy though. At its core, neural nets are just a bunch of big matrix multiplication operations. Training is still fundamentally gradient descent, which while it is a fairly new concept in the grand scheme of things, isn’t super hard to understand.
The progress in recent years is primarily due to better hardware and optimizations at the low levels that don’t directly have anything to do with machine learning.
We’ve also gotten a lot better at combining those fundamentals in creative ways to do stuff like GANs.
Because he’s a world leader and AI programs are answering search engine queries with what you want to hear now, not actual answers. Ain;t no way hes unaware that.
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Eh. Hard to take people’s opinion on art seriously considering what’s popular.
This is an interesting crossroads where greedy creators have to fight against greedy owners.
I agree with the conclusions of the boomers, but for very different I think long-term AI will produce vastly more harm than good. Just this week we got a headline about google, which is a serious and grown company which already makes billions was up to some fuckery against firefox, facebook has been fined a million times for not respecting privacy and amazon workers have to pee in bottles. To my sadness, all movement against the integration of AI in weapons basically to “kill people” will be very noble but won’t do jackshit. Do we think china/rusia are going to give a single fuck about this? Even the US will start selling AI-drones when it becomes normalized. And that’s just AI in war, but there’s another trillion things where AI will fuck things up, artists will be devalued, misinformation will reach a new all-time high, capchas are long dead making the internet a more polluted place, surveillance will be more toxic, the list goes on
As any tool, it’s as great as its user. I think younger generations are probably more eager to explore and expand, but it’s ok to be suspicious when used incorrectly.
AI is great when used for some specific applications, but I had a discussion last week with someone asking chatgpt about immigration advice… Ehh no thanks, I rather talk to an actual expert.
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.
I feel very reassured to hear that from the AI expert / musical virtuoso himself, 62 year old, former United States President Barack Obama.
Right? That said, I care about his opinion on AI about as much as I care about the opinions of all the anonymous loudmouths on Lemmy.
Yeah Barrak should just shut up. That idiot hasn’t even listened to music before.
To make “real” music, AI will probably need a lot of help. Image generators and chat bots seem to have their own, very boring style. I’ve seen videos of artists using AI tools in their workflow, but it’s still a very involved process. I think it will just be another tool for musicians and sound engineers.
I’m the immediate term, yeah I 100% agree. However, I’m not thinking we bank on that being true forever.
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.
There’s some recruitment company advertising jobs on LinkedIn. All the pictures are clearly AI generated and they’re terrifying. Uncanny Valley freaks grinning at you from your screen.
you can already api into chatgpt and dall-e 3 as one cohesive service, and make a system in an afternoon’s work that reads the article, decides on a thumbnail, and automatically generates one. the whole thing costs like 8 cents per article.
You could also self host Stable Diffusion to save some money
Edit: Or is it free to use with ChatGPT Premium (or whatever it’s called)? Then that would actually be cheaper
no, the premium stuff doesn’t give you api access. which is total bs, but yeah, it’s only for that grey interface. (i’m also quite salty that the playground has no easy to access image inputs but that’s beside the point)
you’re completely right about self-hosting sd, it’s just a matter of prompting. sd workflows tend to get a little more experimental but i guess you could still make chatgpt write a few prompts that are close to correct and just manually rerun if an image failed
My office is using AI to do this years xmas card. It’s pretty cool.
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!
There is no way this ages well.
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.
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.
I have seen a couple successful artists in different genres admit to using AI to help them write some of their most popular songs, and describe it’s use in the songwriting process. You hit the nail on the head with AI not being able to tell if something is good or bad. It takes a human ear for that.
AI is good at coming up with random melodies, chord progressions, and motifs, but it is not nearly as good at composing and producing as humans are, yet. AI is just going to be another instrument for musicians to use, in its current form.
Yeah, I do imagine, it won’t be just AIs either. And then, it will obviously be possible to take it to an excellent song, given enough human hours invested.
I do wonder, how useful it will actually be for that, though. Often times, it really fucks you up to try to go from good to excellent and it can be freeing to start fresh instead. In particular, ‘excellent’ does require creative ideas, which are easier for humans to generate with a fresh start.
But AI may allow us to start over fresh more readily, if it can just give us a full song when needed. Maybe it will even be possible to give it some of those creative snippets and ask it to flesh it all out. We’ll have to see…
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.
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?
Kidz Bop and Max Martin’s drunk voicemails
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.
For a second or two I was like: " why the f*** is Obama talking about Weird Al making elevator music?"
That actually might make elevator and phone hold music survivable - continual compositions that never repeat
Cheaper to generate 30s and loop it
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It’s reassuring that this opinion is based on many years of experience reading scientific papers, implementing these models and following the trends closely!
I was really hoping the comments would be some sort of “what the fuck does he know?”
I scrolled a bit and there are many like these, yep
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If I can get some more legit-sounding 60s rock, I’m in.
Could you even imagine the necessary programming to create a thing like Bobby Zimmerman, a brilliant songwriter that can’t even sing, but made of go of it anyways and is regarded as one of the best singers of the last half of the previous century regardless?
Lol, no one thinks he’s “one of the best singers of the last half of the previous century,” WTF are you smoking?
That’s Captain Beefheart you are talking to…
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AI is new and already performing in office to a second year law student level.
That’s what I got from this.
Also the Secret Invasion intro looked really cool and I hate it but it did. When it comes to depth and meaning it may be a while yet before AI can simulate or bullshit it’s way through that but for now it can definitely create interesting and noteworthy pieces.
Can’t imagine good art coming from something that’s incapable of giving a shit about things.
Young tech can’t tell real from simulacrum
Is muzak your idea of good art?
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What is good art? Stuff like this can be produced with zero effort in a couple of seconds.
Lol, not that.
🤣
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For art to be good it needs to leave an impression on people. Can’t imagine anyone taking anything away from Generic Pretty Girl #372
Most stuff looks pretty generic, you’re right. But there’s actually been a couple times when I’ve been baffled by the output. For this one, for example, I just gave it my username
I think magicians love when audiences are willing to both believe in magic and maintain a respect for the secrecy of their trade.
I’ll tell you what I know for sure: people from my generation are working like their lives depend on it to separate the new generations from their money using our triumphant new invention; so of course this looks like impressive art to younger people and no one else; you’ll love the AI music we sell you too! And wait till you meet all the AI characters we’ve trained for you! You can sit, jaw dropped stifling laughter to hear the next joke designed to make you cackle so hard you piss yourself, in a room full of tailored friends.
There are still tons of real things in this world: they still inspire more fruitful wonder than we do for ourselves and our contraptions.
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That takes a steaming hot dump on what the vast majority of people can do.
It’s why people are scared. They should be.
That takes a steaming hot dump on what the vast majority of people can do.
I’d argue that it is a steaming hot dump of random, deviant art quality junk, but to each their own.
I’d argue people like you are going to hold it under much more scrutiny knowing it’s made by AI instead of humans.
I’d also argue you will do this without admitting it.
Nah I barely looked at it, and wouldn’t care who made it because it looks like tarot card garbage.
This thread is the gift that keeps in giving 🤣
HAHA that’s crazy you think that that is so great.
I was like this in the 90s with MDs.
You probably think AI porn is “stunning” 🤣
‘So great’ would be inaccurate.
I said it “takes a steaming hot dump on what the vast majority of people can do.”
Tell me you feel called out without telling me you feel called out. Lol.
Why would I feel called out by a pattern I’ve seen a few times before and the generation before me saw even more than that?
You’re like the dude in the other 20s, “you fools! Look to the sky! The dirigible has conquered the realm once enjoyed freely only by the birds and angels! I’ll take a streaming hot DUMP on you from here! One golden ticket onto the glorious Hindenburg!”
Flies are just consequences of shit; I don’t feel much of anything about flies I figure 🤷♂️
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I don’t think you’re going to remember that particular image in a week.
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It’s an infinite crap generator, which I can see why people are so enamored with it. Because people seem to want a seeming variety of generic junk almost instinctually. Just take a look at the variety of garbage available on all streaming platforms right now, the variety of garbage on YouTube, or even worse a single aisle in any grocery store: shelves full of crap that’s often the same thing with different labels, substances that are utter shit on almost a molecular level but seem appealing or better than others based upon packaging.
Edit: Amazon is nearly a perfection of the instant, endless crap business model. Just imagine when someone hooks up one of these things to a 3d printer. You can then have infinite crap generated entirely based upon your search queries. Now if you’ll excuse me I have a patent application to file…
It’s not even infinite
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-world-is-running-out-of-data-to-feed-ai-experts-warn
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I think your generation’s the first to be totally pink for this sort of thing and I’m worried for ya
I’m gutted that you can’t tell the difference. Or that you don’t care to. It’s sad you think this toy is an idol.
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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.
It tends to be in upscale hotels, generally around the holidays, but isn’t incredibly common anymore.
If I think back on it, I’m not sure I have heard it since the 90s.
