I wish I could add an image to my comment here. I've added a "No AI" brand logo to my music videos and my CDs that I just had made (and finally received today). You know, the typical red circle with a slash through it over a black AI symbol. Of course, I have just 20 subscribers on my YouTube channel, but you gotta start somewhere and th…
I wish I could add an image to my comment here. I've added a "No AI" brand logo to my music videos and my CDs that I just had made (and finally received today). You know, the typical red circle with a slash through it over a black AI symbol. Of course, I have just 20 subscribers on my YouTube channel, but you gotta start somewhere and that's what I'm doing. I agree about using some AI tools (I use an internet cloud service for my mastering, and my mixing software has new AI-based mastering and stem separation plugins) but not making and recording music using AI. That's moronic. There are no shortcuts.
Some sites like Deviant Art have quasi-banned AI-generated material, requiring it to be metadata-tagged. It's available in its own area. There was so much pushback against allowing it to be freely mixed with non-AI material that they were forced to do something. Admittedly, there are some gray zones, like AI-touchup of natural photographs, a digital version of old-fashioned retouching. But the images as a whole are not AI-generated.
Personally, I think there's a whole range of legitimate uses of generative AI. But the copyright and liability issues must be worked out first. No more "disruptive" man-children like our tech titans ramming this stuff down our throats with deceptive and kleptomaniac business models.
I subscribe to Adobe Stock, and they are starting to overwhelm the categories I typically buy with AI-generated crap. I think it's time for me to actually push back on this to their customer support. At least they clearly label anything that IS AI-created, but it's super easy to pick them out anyway. All of it is garbage, it's not acceptable, and it cheapens the service. I won't have it and won't buy it, ever
Tell them about Deviant Art. There are ways to cope, but an early, firm stand is needed. Make the categories clear: pure AI, digitally auto-retouched, digitally/manually retouched, straight originals. Ideally, the AI material should be digitally watermarked with date, originating human, and the software that human used. Humans in the loop!
And always keep in mind, whatever the worthy private, voluntary initiatives, political and legal action are needed to sort out the issues of copyright, liability, and deceptive business practices. We need a Supreme Court that understands enough to not perpetrate and perpetuate travesties like the recent decision to allow continued government-backed online censorship (which is illegal in the normal universe that we've always lived in). The idea that online is a "hole in reality" where normal laws and democratic culture magically don't apply has to end.
I'm glad Ted recognized the necessity for point (3) among artists. Chat-GPT may be a lousy encyclopedia, but it's a much better spellchecker. That goes double for when you need to write code, which is something I suspect most artists hate. It's not just programmers wanting art without paying artists, it's artists wanting multimedia who can't afford programmers. Ideally, we could all afford each other - but that's a much broader income inequality issue. Best of all would be fostering a culture of collaboration where creative people of all kinds preferred working together instead of with bots, but then we'd be replacing social media narcissism with actual community and trust in shared ventures, which big tech doesn't want.
The real question is - would you be ashamed to admit to the way you used AI? If you're an artist and you post an AI generated image as part of your "brand," that's sad. If you re-traced an AI image, ditto. But using AI as a glorified Pinterest-style mood-board? I really can't see myself raising the ire against reference images and inspiration whether they come from photography, illustration, sculpture, movies, wallpaper, bubblegum wrappers, or, yes, AI hallucinations. What we need is a culture of transparency where the processes of human involvement take priority.
Great question. I got concerned when I realized I wasn’t going to be able to afford a mastering engineer ~ a year ago, when most of my mixes were completed, it was at least $100 per track with only a single turnaround. What if you discover problems after you receive the master file? (Sure, that NEVER happens if you’re a pro 🤣).
I discovered there were some cloud-based subscription services that solved both the cost and the editing issues. Mastering a song mix inevitably uncovers things that you may not notice during composition and initial recording and mixing. That’s why it’s so critical to the process.
Yeah, I wouldn’t have an issue with admitting I use a cloud AI mastering service. I liken it to playing all my own instruments and programming a drum machine. I can’t pay someone to master for me if I keep finding issues, and I can’t hire a drummer, much less set up a complete recording session in my tiny office for a drum kit. (Shudder.)
As for collaboration, I would really appreciate a partner in crime, but many musicians are either flakes or just high-maintenance people whom I do not have the spare energy or time to sustain. (I may in fact have found someone who could be a real partner; but establishing a partnership is akin to meeting a person in the flush of first love - one must exercise care not to frighten the game off before you consummate the relationship!) I sincerely hope to find a real collaborative partnership, so we’ll just have to see.
I'm sure you've never referenced a photo, or an art-book. I'm sure that you learned to draw by constructing the figure in a vacuum and never gained inspiration from another artist, and that you emerged fully formed, and were never placed in a collaborative environment where you were asked to do things "like this." That is a very unique position to be in.
I recently graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts where, of course, all of the students spat on AI without knowing the least thing about it. Of course, any time they attempted verisimilitude, they'd be recopying photos they found online. But an AI image that at least has the decency to mash together millions of points of "inspiration" into a generalized facsimile gleaned from common elements amongst them - that is forbidden.
And if using the best available spell-checker is lazy - it is because I have better things to do with my time than thumb through a paper-dictionary double-checking words - or should we ban dictionaries as cheating, too?
If you're from Ottawa, there's a very good chance we graduated from the same school. But, with all due respect to our common community - you are being an ignorant crank. A sensible person does not accuse strangers on the internet of being criminals based on flimsy ideology.
First of all, plagiarism is many things, but it is not a crime, it is a civil matter. That's why, unlike with theft, conversion, or other actual property crimes, you have to sue the other person and prove damages. There are no police involved. I further note that there exist no cases in any relevant jurisdiction characterizing anything I have done with the assistance of AI tools as plagiarism - namely because such a claim would be patently absurd, and you'd understand that if you knew the least thing about the law, how AI works, and how it figures into the modern artistic process.
I would hazard a guess that you have no proof at all that you've been so much as scraped by big tech. Go on - show me where you are in the LAION dataset. It's all publicly available, and that case is actually being litigated. But I get the sense you're likely another embittered luddite - the type of person who saw some blurry, grainy, black and white art photography and assumed that because it bore a passing resemblance to your blurry, grainy, black and white art photography, it must have been stolen from you personally. I mean, it could always be that you're just not very original, but some people are indeed comforted by the idea that there work must have been "stolen" by a jealous rival, or a big corporation, or the evil robots. Moreover, I suspect that if you did graduate from the likes of Ottawa U in the 70's (this is just a guess here) I would have absolutely no interest whatsoever in your work, let alone stealing it.
Besides, and as low tech as I suspect you to be, this is something you ought to understand: the tool for plagiarizing other artist's work is nothing from AI - it's Google Image Search, where you can find the copyrighted work of anyone who's anyone, without a license, free of charge, in it's exact original.
If you want to know how AI works (I suspect not based on your palpable, calcified lack of curiosity) I've described a little of it in some posts below, but in summary, even to say that AI is a skilled mimic of various artistic styles is a vast over-estimation of its capacities that does a disservice to real artists. If the thing can't generate a proper phony of a master like Vermeer, I can't imagine why you should feel so threatened about whatever it is you do.
If you're referring to Claudine Gay - she wasn't fired, she resigned. And in her case, it wasn't even a civil matter (no one was sued) it was pure academic incompetence if not outright dishonesty. None of it, to my knowledge involved AI - one of the central focuses of that investigation was her dissertation from 1998, well before this was even an issue. Lifting other people's academic prose is, of course, incredibly unethical and unprofessional - but if you were to let a large language model write an academic essay for you, you'd have much more fundamental problems than plagiarism - like a lack of footnotes to source documents that actually exist.
If my tone seems overly hostile, it is because I don't take kindly to strangers accusing me of criminality out of sheer ignorance. I get enough of people saying stupid things about my demographics to put up with that when it comes to my art, which is the inmost representation of my individual identity in an otherwise rutheless and hostile world. I don't need to see your resume, but when you accuse me of stealing your work, I certainly demand proof of that claim.
I've been experimenting with AI for 10 years as a part of my practice - well before most people bothered to take notice. To me it is every bit as natural as the way so many impressionists took an interest in early photography, which did more to disrupt the art market than AI ever will. Every day I face the existential dread of seeing this new technology threaten the relevance of the skills and identity I've spent the last 30 years and more cultivating - to hear people debase the entire issue with hysterics over intellectual property and artistic credit is maddening to me when the real issue of putting the vision of real humans at the center of media has yet to be grappled with. Without appreciating what we bring to the art we make that no machine can, we deserve to be as obsolete as the mechanical typesetter.
"Yes go ahead help yourself to my work to aid the lazy AI shortcuts you wish to employ."
"What I address is plagiarism, a crime of another order. Is profit is your goal? Have at it then, but keep your hands off my work, done the hard way. "
Well, you know Grammarly is a machine learning tool going on what, 20 years now? You’re not compromising yourself by using it. There are folks in existence who think using a DAW is a moral compromise and that your recording isn’t “real” unless you’re using only vintage analog equipment with 2-inch tape and have a recording contract. And that you’re obligated to pay specialists every stage of the way to shepherd your music across the finish line, whatever that is. Which is, you know, nonsense. I don’t miss the old barriers to entry.
The essential element is that there is a creative human actually formulating, writing/designing/building, and producing in whatever chosen format or medium is required for the art to become a real thing.
When people go asking ChatGPT to do that same proof-reading work - folks still get antsy. I mean, there's also the fact that you can get AI to write a paragraph for you, and then you proof-read it so it doesn't sound like it was written by a committee of public relations analysts. Even by that point, people get nervous. Most people can't tell 15-year old technology from the emerging stuff and are quick to attack anything that's new to them.
I also can’t help thinking that the big AI push is not going to amount to as much as Big Tech thinks for the following reasons: 1) major issues with excess resources usage; 2) diminishing returns in quality the longer you use natural-language prompts; 3) companies throwing money at AI to remake their businesses may be starting to perceive those diminishing returns; 4) persistent violations of intellectual property combined with increasingly loud rejection of the validity of copyrights. None of these things are making them any friends. Techies could care less about creatives; to them we’re just people who don’t matter. But eventually the Big Scam becomes too obvious to ignore. Just like Web 2.0. I’ve done pretty well in stocks this year but I am definitely keeping an eye on things.
Large language models are in a hype cycle like the dot-com bubble, crypto, NFT's, metaverses, and those stupid VR goggles. There's nothing in the architecture that suggest a transformer network will ever be capable of general artificial intelligence. The companies adding chatbots to their products aren't being helped by them - they're just waving something shiny in front of feckless investors.
I think the resource consumption issues will come down with innovations like Samba, or some other iteration - but that just means that every open-source gearhead is going to want to run it on their cell-phones, which will leave nothing for big tech which mostly brings scale to the table. As for intellectual property - I wish the average consumer cared, but they probably care more about the ways the current IP regime fails them than artists, and I suspect the tech giants will try to exploit that to forge a coalition against creative workers. The fact that everyone just gives so much work away for free on social media is a chilling sign of things to come.
That being said, I think there is a revolution in AI in the works. If you know the "Think Fast and Slow" theory of the mind, our current AI is pretty good at thinking fast. When it can "think slow," then they'll have something. They're working on it.
I think Apple's involvement is really going to prove if this stuff is viable. They are also heading in the very direction you note by having much computation take place on your local devices.
As a musician, sharing my work on social media freaks me out. I consider YouTube the best of a bad lot of options.
Saying you cant spell is like my Dad did for 50 years "Oh, I can't cook" - Ya ,because he had my Mom to cook for him & he didn't want to bother Learning to cook.
Oh, he did learn one Dish: Peanut Butter on toast.
Ones of my favourite questions. “Whose cooking dinner” Cuts right through the wanking every time. We had this phrase in my industry to describe a level of self flagellating hubris. “Stick milk.”
I wish I could add an image to my comment here. I've added a "No AI" brand logo to my music videos and my CDs that I just had made (and finally received today). You know, the typical red circle with a slash through it over a black AI symbol. Of course, I have just 20 subscribers on my YouTube channel, but you gotta start somewhere and that's what I'm doing. I agree about using some AI tools (I use an internet cloud service for my mastering, and my mixing software has new AI-based mastering and stem separation plugins) but not making and recording music using AI. That's moronic. There are no shortcuts.
I've done the same, but not on my music, rather on my articles.
Nice
Some sites like Deviant Art have quasi-banned AI-generated material, requiring it to be metadata-tagged. It's available in its own area. There was so much pushback against allowing it to be freely mixed with non-AI material that they were forced to do something. Admittedly, there are some gray zones, like AI-touchup of natural photographs, a digital version of old-fashioned retouching. But the images as a whole are not AI-generated.
Personally, I think there's a whole range of legitimate uses of generative AI. But the copyright and liability issues must be worked out first. No more "disruptive" man-children like our tech titans ramming this stuff down our throats with deceptive and kleptomaniac business models.
I subscribe to Adobe Stock, and they are starting to overwhelm the categories I typically buy with AI-generated crap. I think it's time for me to actually push back on this to their customer support. At least they clearly label anything that IS AI-created, but it's super easy to pick them out anyway. All of it is garbage, it's not acceptable, and it cheapens the service. I won't have it and won't buy it, ever
Tell them about Deviant Art. There are ways to cope, but an early, firm stand is needed. Make the categories clear: pure AI, digitally auto-retouched, digitally/manually retouched, straight originals. Ideally, the AI material should be digitally watermarked with date, originating human, and the software that human used. Humans in the loop!
And always keep in mind, whatever the worthy private, voluntary initiatives, political and legal action are needed to sort out the issues of copyright, liability, and deceptive business practices. We need a Supreme Court that understands enough to not perpetrate and perpetuate travesties like the recent decision to allow continued government-backed online censorship (which is illegal in the normal universe that we've always lived in). The idea that online is a "hole in reality" where normal laws and democratic culture magically don't apply has to end.
You could always label your music videos an CDs 'proudly an HI product'.
I like the simplicity of a logo - it has more punch and visibility given the context of what I do
Leonardo's Vitruvian Man
Exactly
Using a tool to check your grammar and spelling is the same as a carpenter using a level or a tape measure. No worries John!
I hear myself using this in upcoming conversations "is same as a carpenter using a level or a tape measure" so thank you!
I'm glad Ted recognized the necessity for point (3) among artists. Chat-GPT may be a lousy encyclopedia, but it's a much better spellchecker. That goes double for when you need to write code, which is something I suspect most artists hate. It's not just programmers wanting art without paying artists, it's artists wanting multimedia who can't afford programmers. Ideally, we could all afford each other - but that's a much broader income inequality issue. Best of all would be fostering a culture of collaboration where creative people of all kinds preferred working together instead of with bots, but then we'd be replacing social media narcissism with actual community and trust in shared ventures, which big tech doesn't want.
The real question is - would you be ashamed to admit to the way you used AI? If you're an artist and you post an AI generated image as part of your "brand," that's sad. If you re-traced an AI image, ditto. But using AI as a glorified Pinterest-style mood-board? I really can't see myself raising the ire against reference images and inspiration whether they come from photography, illustration, sculpture, movies, wallpaper, bubblegum wrappers, or, yes, AI hallucinations. What we need is a culture of transparency where the processes of human involvement take priority.
Great question. I got concerned when I realized I wasn’t going to be able to afford a mastering engineer ~ a year ago, when most of my mixes were completed, it was at least $100 per track with only a single turnaround. What if you discover problems after you receive the master file? (Sure, that NEVER happens if you’re a pro 🤣).
I discovered there were some cloud-based subscription services that solved both the cost and the editing issues. Mastering a song mix inevitably uncovers things that you may not notice during composition and initial recording and mixing. That’s why it’s so critical to the process.
Yeah, I wouldn’t have an issue with admitting I use a cloud AI mastering service. I liken it to playing all my own instruments and programming a drum machine. I can’t pay someone to master for me if I keep finding issues, and I can’t hire a drummer, much less set up a complete recording session in my tiny office for a drum kit. (Shudder.)
As for collaboration, I would really appreciate a partner in crime, but many musicians are either flakes or just high-maintenance people whom I do not have the spare energy or time to sustain. (I may in fact have found someone who could be a real partner; but establishing a partnership is akin to meeting a person in the flush of first love - one must exercise care not to frighten the game off before you consummate the relationship!) I sincerely hope to find a real collaborative partnership, so we’ll just have to see.
Sorry, I wander.
Some (most?)mastering engineers will send you mp3's of at least a couple tunes before you are charged anything, so you can check it out.
I'm sure you've never referenced a photo, or an art-book. I'm sure that you learned to draw by constructing the figure in a vacuum and never gained inspiration from another artist, and that you emerged fully formed, and were never placed in a collaborative environment where you were asked to do things "like this." That is a very unique position to be in.
I recently graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts where, of course, all of the students spat on AI without knowing the least thing about it. Of course, any time they attempted verisimilitude, they'd be recopying photos they found online. But an AI image that at least has the decency to mash together millions of points of "inspiration" into a generalized facsimile gleaned from common elements amongst them - that is forbidden.
And if using the best available spell-checker is lazy - it is because I have better things to do with my time than thumb through a paper-dictionary double-checking words - or should we ban dictionaries as cheating, too?
If you're from Ottawa, there's a very good chance we graduated from the same school. But, with all due respect to our common community - you are being an ignorant crank. A sensible person does not accuse strangers on the internet of being criminals based on flimsy ideology.
First of all, plagiarism is many things, but it is not a crime, it is a civil matter. That's why, unlike with theft, conversion, or other actual property crimes, you have to sue the other person and prove damages. There are no police involved. I further note that there exist no cases in any relevant jurisdiction characterizing anything I have done with the assistance of AI tools as plagiarism - namely because such a claim would be patently absurd, and you'd understand that if you knew the least thing about the law, how AI works, and how it figures into the modern artistic process.
I would hazard a guess that you have no proof at all that you've been so much as scraped by big tech. Go on - show me where you are in the LAION dataset. It's all publicly available, and that case is actually being litigated. But I get the sense you're likely another embittered luddite - the type of person who saw some blurry, grainy, black and white art photography and assumed that because it bore a passing resemblance to your blurry, grainy, black and white art photography, it must have been stolen from you personally. I mean, it could always be that you're just not very original, but some people are indeed comforted by the idea that there work must have been "stolen" by a jealous rival, or a big corporation, or the evil robots. Moreover, I suspect that if you did graduate from the likes of Ottawa U in the 70's (this is just a guess here) I would have absolutely no interest whatsoever in your work, let alone stealing it.
Besides, and as low tech as I suspect you to be, this is something you ought to understand: the tool for plagiarizing other artist's work is nothing from AI - it's Google Image Search, where you can find the copyrighted work of anyone who's anyone, without a license, free of charge, in it's exact original.
If you want to know how AI works (I suspect not based on your palpable, calcified lack of curiosity) I've described a little of it in some posts below, but in summary, even to say that AI is a skilled mimic of various artistic styles is a vast over-estimation of its capacities that does a disservice to real artists. If the thing can't generate a proper phony of a master like Vermeer, I can't imagine why you should feel so threatened about whatever it is you do.
If you're referring to Claudine Gay - she wasn't fired, she resigned. And in her case, it wasn't even a civil matter (no one was sued) it was pure academic incompetence if not outright dishonesty. None of it, to my knowledge involved AI - one of the central focuses of that investigation was her dissertation from 1998, well before this was even an issue. Lifting other people's academic prose is, of course, incredibly unethical and unprofessional - but if you were to let a large language model write an academic essay for you, you'd have much more fundamental problems than plagiarism - like a lack of footnotes to source documents that actually exist.
If my tone seems overly hostile, it is because I don't take kindly to strangers accusing me of criminality out of sheer ignorance. I get enough of people saying stupid things about my demographics to put up with that when it comes to my art, which is the inmost representation of my individual identity in an otherwise rutheless and hostile world. I don't need to see your resume, but when you accuse me of stealing your work, I certainly demand proof of that claim.
I've been experimenting with AI for 10 years as a part of my practice - well before most people bothered to take notice. To me it is every bit as natural as the way so many impressionists took an interest in early photography, which did more to disrupt the art market than AI ever will. Every day I face the existential dread of seeing this new technology threaten the relevance of the skills and identity I've spent the last 30 years and more cultivating - to hear people debase the entire issue with hysterics over intellectual property and artistic credit is maddening to me when the real issue of putting the vision of real humans at the center of media has yet to be grappled with. Without appreciating what we bring to the art we make that no machine can, we deserve to be as obsolete as the mechanical typesetter.
"Yes go ahead help yourself to my work to aid the lazy AI shortcuts you wish to employ."
"What I address is plagiarism, a crime of another order. Is profit is your goal? Have at it then, but keep your hands off my work, done the hard way. "
Those accusations are pretty stark.
Well, you know Grammarly is a machine learning tool going on what, 20 years now? You’re not compromising yourself by using it. There are folks in existence who think using a DAW is a moral compromise and that your recording isn’t “real” unless you’re using only vintage analog equipment with 2-inch tape and have a recording contract. And that you’re obligated to pay specialists every stage of the way to shepherd your music across the finish line, whatever that is. Which is, you know, nonsense. I don’t miss the old barriers to entry.
The essential element is that there is a creative human actually formulating, writing/designing/building, and producing in whatever chosen format or medium is required for the art to become a real thing.
When people go asking ChatGPT to do that same proof-reading work - folks still get antsy. I mean, there's also the fact that you can get AI to write a paragraph for you, and then you proof-read it so it doesn't sound like it was written by a committee of public relations analysts. Even by that point, people get nervous. Most people can't tell 15-year old technology from the emerging stuff and are quick to attack anything that's new to them.
I also can’t help thinking that the big AI push is not going to amount to as much as Big Tech thinks for the following reasons: 1) major issues with excess resources usage; 2) diminishing returns in quality the longer you use natural-language prompts; 3) companies throwing money at AI to remake their businesses may be starting to perceive those diminishing returns; 4) persistent violations of intellectual property combined with increasingly loud rejection of the validity of copyrights. None of these things are making them any friends. Techies could care less about creatives; to them we’re just people who don’t matter. But eventually the Big Scam becomes too obvious to ignore. Just like Web 2.0. I’ve done pretty well in stocks this year but I am definitely keeping an eye on things.
Large language models are in a hype cycle like the dot-com bubble, crypto, NFT's, metaverses, and those stupid VR goggles. There's nothing in the architecture that suggest a transformer network will ever be capable of general artificial intelligence. The companies adding chatbots to their products aren't being helped by them - they're just waving something shiny in front of feckless investors.
I think the resource consumption issues will come down with innovations like Samba, or some other iteration - but that just means that every open-source gearhead is going to want to run it on their cell-phones, which will leave nothing for big tech which mostly brings scale to the table. As for intellectual property - I wish the average consumer cared, but they probably care more about the ways the current IP regime fails them than artists, and I suspect the tech giants will try to exploit that to forge a coalition against creative workers. The fact that everyone just gives so much work away for free on social media is a chilling sign of things to come.
That being said, I think there is a revolution in AI in the works. If you know the "Think Fast and Slow" theory of the mind, our current AI is pretty good at thinking fast. When it can "think slow," then they'll have something. They're working on it.
♥️
I think Apple's involvement is really going to prove if this stuff is viable. They are also heading in the very direction you note by having much computation take place on your local devices.
As a musician, sharing my work on social media freaks me out. I consider YouTube the best of a bad lot of options.
Saying you cant spell is like my Dad did for 50 years "Oh, I can't cook" - Ya ,because he had my Mom to cook for him & he didn't want to bother Learning to cook.
Oh, he did learn one Dish: Peanut Butter on toast.
Ones of my favourite questions. “Whose cooking dinner” Cuts right through the wanking every time. We had this phrase in my industry to describe a level of self flagellating hubris. “Stick milk.”