I was at a dinner last Saturday night and my friend put on the track from Velvet Sundown and asked me what I thought. I thought, super clean sounding production, super clean sounding raspy voice, kind of meaningless lyrics.. what’s new?! I have to say I was pretty shocked to find out it was Ai as I’m about to go into the studio soon to record a new bunch of songs I’ve written and it left me feeling pretty defeated. But when I thought about it afterwards I realised that Ai is really just mimicking what is already there. Slop. Not everything is slop of course, we put on Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain afterwards and I felt a lot better.
This technology is not evil in and of itself but it is being used in an evil way. It’s stealing our humanity and we are aiding that process by listening to it and choosing it over something organic. As Tolkien said, and I loosely repeat, “evil cannot create anything itself, it has to steal and mimick everything from the ones who create.”
And yet evil keeps winning, so the stealing and mimicry must be effective.
Creation of something truely new is rather rare i think. We all engage in mimicry and stealing(we often call this inspiration and influence), and often we arent even conscious of it. I dont think that process is to be deprecated.
Which leaves us with intention. And lets be real, we're talking about humans here. Humans are the very creators of evil intentions..
Thank you for this post! This gives me some hope for the future.💕✨️ I feel ai can have a good impact (in my personal hopes helping chronic illness warriors to find much needed diagnosis etc) but the fact its been being used to create income for creativity is a bit greedy... glad to see YouTube is changing this soon.
Maybe.. but itd be silly to assume this iteration of ai is the end of it. Theyve invested alot of money, this is just the first salvo. I would expect any concessions they make rn to be of a tactical nature.
Its like, great news everybody, our new vests stopped their 9mm bullets, were winning! Meanwhile theyre cooking up icbms in the back.
Why the pissy view? Well i cant remember the last time good news wasnt followed by bad, and then worse. Just the amount of money theyre investing in FUTURE ai capabilities portends something far greater than the ai threat we're facing right now.
But ofc i dont keep my finger on the pulse of these things. Im basing my view on my own reading of the room, albeit from a distance.
This shits not going anywhere, and attempts to control them WILL be sidestepped or neutralized. We should be very suspicious of anything that comes from them that looks like a victory. And i think it behooves us to remember that in this world things are never what they seem.
Referring to Tolkien again, as has already been done, he thought of his legendarium as chronicling what he called the Long Defeat - until ultimate victory, not of our making. Worth bearing in mind, perhaps.
AI is the asbestos of the digital age. They put it in *everything* (and I literally mean everything, from floor tiles to boiler jacketing, paints, ceiling tiles, cars, high chairs, you name it, they wanted to try to find a way to use asbestos in it) ...until they realized that it kills people. And then we spent / are-spending another century (and trillions of dollars) on asbestos abatement, sort of like what we have coming in AI abatement. But hey!, they spent tens of trillions of dollars on that slop ...and they're gonna want it back, ...and they're looking at you and I to pay the tab.
I think Apple's failure to deliver an AI assistant was a turning point. Apple has a lot of flaws, but it can usually take a new technology and extract a useful nugget of it and make it easy for their users to use. There are numerous examples: touch pads, NFC, code signing, text layout, disk backup and archiving, textual search, facial recognition and I'm sure I'm missing a ton more. If there was some useful nugget that AI could deliver with some level of reliability, odds are Apple, if anyone, could have delivered it. Apple failed. Idiots are screaming for blood. Tim Cook the CEO, is a moron. The truth is that AI is less than meets the eye. It gives a great demo. I worked on an AI product in the 1960s, and it gave a great demo. Apple found out the hard way. Others are going to learn the same lesson.
Among those learning the same lesson are Spotify and Youtube. LLMs seem perfectly suited for the arts since they generate the same kinds of artistic output as humans: words, music, images. The problem is that there is a lot less there than meets the eye or ear. If you want to generate Muzak, something invented in the 1930s, ambient music-like sound to fill in an auditory vacuum, then AI can be useful. If you want actual music, you'll need actual musicians.
Yet those of us who treasure human creativity seem to be a huge minority. My Spotify usage is all consciously chosen. I want to hear what I want to hear. Word of mouth for anything "new," new being post 1994 for my main Playlist.
A lot of people want Spotify, especially, to fill in an auditory vacuum. It produces music-like sounds that fit within an expected envelope. I know I hear Spotify in lots of places like medical offices and non-chain stores where it serves to hide the hum of the HVAC system. I'm sure there are lots of people who love Spotify because it lets them curate a huge collection of music that they actually want to listen to. If nothing else, it offers a chance to try out new music without springing for a whole CD up front.
All my previous music collections, whether vinyl, CD, cassette (or even my old 8 tracks) have been lost or "stolen," so Spotify is my affordable option. But they don't choose anything for me. I'm not interested in their opinion. I know what I want to hear. This whose opinions I respect introduce me to enough modern talent.
This is a good sign. I've been predicting the biggest new product in the next 5-10 years will be an authenticity verifier or an AI detector—something like a virus detector—to alert the public to which creative products have been doctored and which haven't. A product like that, along with the public's apparent distaste for fakery, might go far to stanch the flood of junk that's coming our way.
Once we cut through all the mythology, it’s a lot easier to see this stuff for what it is. For every little impressive thing it can do, there are a hundred places where it’s wasteful and wrong.
With AI we are in early adoption still, the age of the Model T not the Ferrari. The way they are pushing AI on us runs the risk of ruining the brand for a generation as everybody walks away from shitty products. There is a place for AI but much like the personal computer, the quality expectations of what you produce will change. If you are in a creative field you need to be checking it out. I don't need it but my 26yr old niece does.
I use a writing assistant and sound and video capture everyday. What comes out is extremely useful but flawed. It needs human supervision and cleanup. I can't use it in its raw form. Under controlled conditions, with some care by someone who understands how it works, it's extremely powerful, capable of summarizing large amounts of information into condensed form. Out on the public internet, with no human mediation and supervision, it's a disaster, especially in the realm of deliberately faked generation, as Ted likes to point to. It's just junk.
The company I work for has been slowly building a machine learning and genAI strategy for well over a decade, and the slowness has worked. No mania, no crash. Lots of mistakes were avoided. Failures were identified and killed off before they could do much damage. Agentic AI has been highlighted yet also clearly called out for requiring intensive training, with intensive testing and scrutiny of results. (We run agent marathons and kill off the losers, which are the majority. A smaller fraction of successes survive and live on to the next stage, maybe 20%) The all-important cybersecurity issue, and the status of IP and copyright, were put into the strategy early. We deal in sensitive data, so no other way was possible. A decade littered with carefully curated failures was needed to identify the successful methods and ideas. Failure had to be honestly identified and ruthlessly flushed out.
Interesting, My late wife was a graphic designer, she started in the mid seventies, with an exacto and a paste pot. The personal computer completely changed her world, she had to retrain herself but she had the artistic talent so that once she learn her way around a PC ...
After she passed away, I was going through her things and ran across her portfolio. It had things from the 1980's to the 2020's. What I noticed was the change in acceptable quality. Yes the computer let you do more but you had to step up your game because the rest of the world was too.
The world moves on automation doesn't scare me I've been watching it happen all my life
In the 1920's my father as a teenager worked the farm with horses, in the 80's I worked the farm with equipment that could do as much work in a day as he and several hired hands did in a week. By the 2040's there won't be anyone but a automated piece of equipment.
I should just get around to recording myself singing and playing folk songs on my violin and mandolin. It will probably have mistakes, but it will be real.
YES!!!!! AI bubble pop cannot happen soon enough! People want heart and soul in the creations they spend their time on, not zeroes and ones. Next bubble pop (please God): Digital currency. No intrinsic value to Bitcoin and its ilk. Just more zeroes and one that go away when the electricity goes out. If the U.S. goes through and invests public money in digital currency, it will be not only be bankrupt, but so far in the hole we may never dig ourselves out. But that's exactly what the Trump administration plans to do. Probably because Trump benefits from it.
“Real” physical currency as in dollars or euros are no more real than cryptocurrency. The value of any “real” currency is given by the supply and demand for the currency. The supply is controlled by the central banks and the demand is based upon the trust of the national and/or international investors (common people who buy dollars as a “reserve” and institutional investors as well). Right now the us dollar is on a multi-year low because of the uncertainty provided by the trump administration and other systemic factors such as the ever-rising debt ceiling. All of this to say that cryptocurrency is the same than any other form of currency. The difference is that you’re giving the keys to the supply side to someone else and not the central bank. If the central bank got a hold of a crypto then it’d be the same. The true value that people often miss is in the trade-ability and traceability provided by the blockchain. Its transparency. You can see all the transactions happening (whereas you can’t do that with the banks). The value here is transparency and accountability. Crypto tech is here to stay. Crypto infrastructure is only getting better.
We'll agree to disagree on that. Blockchain technology has value for privacy and security purposes. But the whole point of cryptocurrency is its untraceability. That's why ransomware fraudsters want payment in cryptocurrency. The only reason cryptocurrency has Trump's support is because he and his family launched a cryptocurrency and it's a bang-up way to siphon off tax dollars (masquerading as investments of public money). It's a scam from start to finish. A digital house of cards.
I'm sure others have seen the following sort of thing in their Google feeds of which I will give the most stunning of idiotic examples:
It was a beautiful, formal color portrait photo of an extraordinarily handsome, young, and wealthy couple, from circa 1958. What I call for lack of a better term, "AI slopover," which appeared in small letters under the photo, said something like "Woman wearing pearls and man wearing suit pose for photo."
It was a photo of John and Jacqueline Kennedy, probably taken in their Georgetown home.
Have others seen things like this, for example, a photo of The Beatles circa 1964 with a slopover caption which is something like, "Young men with long hair and guitars performing?"
The thing about AI narration is that it's always detectable. First of all, our souls sense it, but second, if you listen long enough to a piece which your instincts tell you is almost certainly AI, you're bound to hear a moment's telltale stretching out or jumbling of syllables. If it's a YouTube video, I usually leave the following comment, or a close variation:
"Don't you know that there are probably a hundred thousand semi professional, community, or college theater actors in this country who would be happy to narrate for free, just to be able to list the credit?"
They never seem to catch on.
Oh, yeah, here's something I've seen on YouTube in the last year: having been unwontedly ( of course Spellcheck squigglylined it in red, but Spellcheck squigglylines its own name in red ) and uncomfortably close to a half dozen psychopaths, several of whom did their best to kill me, in my lifetime, I have an interest in learning as much about "Cluster B personality disorders" as I can. The YouTube Algorithm knows this about me. It's just amazing how many addresses people such as Jordan Peterson and C.S. Lewis ( ! ) made about Cluster B personality disorder! I imagine Peterson, at least, has lawyers trying to run all of these counterfeits to ground, but inasmuch as there are several hundred million YouTube channels, it will take them a while.
"Abandon Ship!"
"Ai, Ai, Cap'n!"
I'd take my hat off to you if I were wearing a hat.
Hat management is an extinct craft.
I was at a dinner last Saturday night and my friend put on the track from Velvet Sundown and asked me what I thought. I thought, super clean sounding production, super clean sounding raspy voice, kind of meaningless lyrics.. what’s new?! I have to say I was pretty shocked to find out it was Ai as I’m about to go into the studio soon to record a new bunch of songs I’ve written and it left me feeling pretty defeated. But when I thought about it afterwards I realised that Ai is really just mimicking what is already there. Slop. Not everything is slop of course, we put on Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain afterwards and I felt a lot better.
This technology is not evil in and of itself but it is being used in an evil way. It’s stealing our humanity and we are aiding that process by listening to it and choosing it over something organic. As Tolkien said, and I loosely repeat, “evil cannot create anything itself, it has to steal and mimick everything from the ones who create.”
And yet evil keeps winning, so the stealing and mimicry must be effective.
Creation of something truely new is rather rare i think. We all engage in mimicry and stealing(we often call this inspiration and influence), and often we arent even conscious of it. I dont think that process is to be deprecated.
Which leaves us with intention. And lets be real, we're talking about humans here. Humans are the very creators of evil intentions..
I thought the tune was sheer crap. But so is much non-AI music. Musically bad, lyrically trite.
I found AI renditions of Bro Country to be no more annoying than the genuine article.
It may be, because Bro Country is so generic formulaic and non-threatening, that it's easy for AI to pull musical patterns out of it.
Excellent assessment. Exactly right.
Thank you for this post! This gives me some hope for the future.💕✨️ I feel ai can have a good impact (in my personal hopes helping chronic illness warriors to find much needed diagnosis etc) but the fact its been being used to create income for creativity is a bit greedy... glad to see YouTube is changing this soon.
Maybe.. but itd be silly to assume this iteration of ai is the end of it. Theyve invested alot of money, this is just the first salvo. I would expect any concessions they make rn to be of a tactical nature.
Its like, great news everybody, our new vests stopped their 9mm bullets, were winning! Meanwhile theyre cooking up icbms in the back.
Why the pissy view? Well i cant remember the last time good news wasnt followed by bad, and then worse. Just the amount of money theyre investing in FUTURE ai capabilities portends something far greater than the ai threat we're facing right now.
But ofc i dont keep my finger on the pulse of these things. Im basing my view on my own reading of the room, albeit from a distance.
This shits not going anywhere, and attempts to control them WILL be sidestepped or neutralized. We should be very suspicious of anything that comes from them that looks like a victory. And i think it behooves us to remember that in this world things are never what they seem.
Your last sentence is one we all need to commit to memory, and deploy daily.
Good points.
Referring to Tolkien again, as has already been done, he thought of his legendarium as chronicling what he called the Long Defeat - until ultimate victory, not of our making. Worth bearing in mind, perhaps.
AI is the asbestos of the digital age. They put it in *everything* (and I literally mean everything, from floor tiles to boiler jacketing, paints, ceiling tiles, cars, high chairs, you name it, they wanted to try to find a way to use asbestos in it) ...until they realized that it kills people. And then we spent / are-spending another century (and trillions of dollars) on asbestos abatement, sort of like what we have coming in AI abatement. But hey!, they spent tens of trillions of dollars on that slop ...and they're gonna want it back, ...and they're looking at you and I to pay the tab.
Great analogy
IIRC, at one time, they made asbestos cigarette filters.
What could possibly go wrong?
I think Apple's failure to deliver an AI assistant was a turning point. Apple has a lot of flaws, but it can usually take a new technology and extract a useful nugget of it and make it easy for their users to use. There are numerous examples: touch pads, NFC, code signing, text layout, disk backup and archiving, textual search, facial recognition and I'm sure I'm missing a ton more. If there was some useful nugget that AI could deliver with some level of reliability, odds are Apple, if anyone, could have delivered it. Apple failed. Idiots are screaming for blood. Tim Cook the CEO, is a moron. The truth is that AI is less than meets the eye. It gives a great demo. I worked on an AI product in the 1960s, and it gave a great demo. Apple found out the hard way. Others are going to learn the same lesson.
Among those learning the same lesson are Spotify and Youtube. LLMs seem perfectly suited for the arts since they generate the same kinds of artistic output as humans: words, music, images. The problem is that there is a lot less there than meets the eye or ear. If you want to generate Muzak, something invented in the 1930s, ambient music-like sound to fill in an auditory vacuum, then AI can be useful. If you want actual music, you'll need actual musicians.
Yet those of us who treasure human creativity seem to be a huge minority. My Spotify usage is all consciously chosen. I want to hear what I want to hear. Word of mouth for anything "new," new being post 1994 for my main Playlist.
A lot of people want Spotify, especially, to fill in an auditory vacuum. It produces music-like sounds that fit within an expected envelope. I know I hear Spotify in lots of places like medical offices and non-chain stores where it serves to hide the hum of the HVAC system. I'm sure there are lots of people who love Spotify because it lets them curate a huge collection of music that they actually want to listen to. If nothing else, it offers a chance to try out new music without springing for a whole CD up front.
All my previous music collections, whether vinyl, CD, cassette (or even my old 8 tracks) have been lost or "stolen," so Spotify is my affordable option. But they don't choose anything for me. I'm not interested in their opinion. I know what I want to hear. This whose opinions I respect introduce me to enough modern talent.
Nice! They're trying to force AI upon us. But the resistance to it is real.
This is a good sign. I've been predicting the biggest new product in the next 5-10 years will be an authenticity verifier or an AI detector—something like a virus detector—to alert the public to which creative products have been doctored and which haven't. A product like that, along with the public's apparent distaste for fakery, might go far to stanch the flood of junk that's coming our way.
Once we cut through all the mythology, it’s a lot easier to see this stuff for what it is. For every little impressive thing it can do, there are a hundred places where it’s wasteful and wrong.
With AI we are in early adoption still, the age of the Model T not the Ferrari. The way they are pushing AI on us runs the risk of ruining the brand for a generation as everybody walks away from shitty products. There is a place for AI but much like the personal computer, the quality expectations of what you produce will change. If you are in a creative field you need to be checking it out. I don't need it but my 26yr old niece does.
I use a writing assistant and sound and video capture everyday. What comes out is extremely useful but flawed. It needs human supervision and cleanup. I can't use it in its raw form. Under controlled conditions, with some care by someone who understands how it works, it's extremely powerful, capable of summarizing large amounts of information into condensed form. Out on the public internet, with no human mediation and supervision, it's a disaster, especially in the realm of deliberately faked generation, as Ted likes to point to. It's just junk.
The company I work for has been slowly building a machine learning and genAI strategy for well over a decade, and the slowness has worked. No mania, no crash. Lots of mistakes were avoided. Failures were identified and killed off before they could do much damage. Agentic AI has been highlighted yet also clearly called out for requiring intensive training, with intensive testing and scrutiny of results. (We run agent marathons and kill off the losers, which are the majority. A smaller fraction of successes survive and live on to the next stage, maybe 20%) The all-important cybersecurity issue, and the status of IP and copyright, were put into the strategy early. We deal in sensitive data, so no other way was possible. A decade littered with carefully curated failures was needed to identify the successful methods and ideas. Failure had to be honestly identified and ruthlessly flushed out.
Interesting, My late wife was a graphic designer, she started in the mid seventies, with an exacto and a paste pot. The personal computer completely changed her world, she had to retrain herself but she had the artistic talent so that once she learn her way around a PC ...
After she passed away, I was going through her things and ran across her portfolio. It had things from the 1980's to the 2020's. What I noticed was the change in acceptable quality. Yes the computer let you do more but you had to step up your game because the rest of the world was too.
The world moves on automation doesn't scare me I've been watching it happen all my life
In the 1920's my father as a teenager worked the farm with horses, in the 80's I worked the farm with equipment that could do as much work in a day as he and several hired hands did in a week. By the 2040's there won't be anyone but a automated piece of equipment.
Maybe I'll still be around to see it.
I should just get around to recording myself singing and playing folk songs on my violin and mandolin. It will probably have mistakes, but it will be real.
YES!!!!! AI bubble pop cannot happen soon enough! People want heart and soul in the creations they spend their time on, not zeroes and ones. Next bubble pop (please God): Digital currency. No intrinsic value to Bitcoin and its ilk. Just more zeroes and one that go away when the electricity goes out. If the U.S. goes through and invests public money in digital currency, it will be not only be bankrupt, but so far in the hole we may never dig ourselves out. But that's exactly what the Trump administration plans to do. Probably because Trump benefits from it.
“Real” physical currency as in dollars or euros are no more real than cryptocurrency. The value of any “real” currency is given by the supply and demand for the currency. The supply is controlled by the central banks and the demand is based upon the trust of the national and/or international investors (common people who buy dollars as a “reserve” and institutional investors as well). Right now the us dollar is on a multi-year low because of the uncertainty provided by the trump administration and other systemic factors such as the ever-rising debt ceiling. All of this to say that cryptocurrency is the same than any other form of currency. The difference is that you’re giving the keys to the supply side to someone else and not the central bank. If the central bank got a hold of a crypto then it’d be the same. The true value that people often miss is in the trade-ability and traceability provided by the blockchain. Its transparency. You can see all the transactions happening (whereas you can’t do that with the banks). The value here is transparency and accountability. Crypto tech is here to stay. Crypto infrastructure is only getting better.
We'll agree to disagree on that. Blockchain technology has value for privacy and security purposes. But the whole point of cryptocurrency is its untraceability. That's why ransomware fraudsters want payment in cryptocurrency. The only reason cryptocurrency has Trump's support is because he and his family launched a cryptocurrency and it's a bang-up way to siphon off tax dollars (masquerading as investments of public money). It's a scam from start to finish. A digital house of cards.
Y’all should check out Coffeezilla on youtube to see what I’m talking about.
Ed Zitron's newsletter has long detailed his predictions of an AI bursting bubble due to a lack of "there" there.
AI Slop that no one likes or watches also uses up valuable server space. Money losers.
I'm sure others have seen the following sort of thing in their Google feeds of which I will give the most stunning of idiotic examples:
It was a beautiful, formal color portrait photo of an extraordinarily handsome, young, and wealthy couple, from circa 1958. What I call for lack of a better term, "AI slopover," which appeared in small letters under the photo, said something like "Woman wearing pearls and man wearing suit pose for photo."
It was a photo of John and Jacqueline Kennedy, probably taken in their Georgetown home.
Have others seen things like this, for example, a photo of The Beatles circa 1964 with a slopover caption which is something like, "Young men with long hair and guitars performing?"
The thing about AI narration is that it's always detectable. First of all, our souls sense it, but second, if you listen long enough to a piece which your instincts tell you is almost certainly AI, you're bound to hear a moment's telltale stretching out or jumbling of syllables. If it's a YouTube video, I usually leave the following comment, or a close variation:
"Don't you know that there are probably a hundred thousand semi professional, community, or college theater actors in this country who would be happy to narrate for free, just to be able to list the credit?"
They never seem to catch on.
Oh, yeah, here's something I've seen on YouTube in the last year: having been unwontedly ( of course Spellcheck squigglylined it in red, but Spellcheck squigglylines its own name in red ) and uncomfortably close to a half dozen psychopaths, several of whom did their best to kill me, in my lifetime, I have an interest in learning as much about "Cluster B personality disorders" as I can. The YouTube Algorithm knows this about me. It's just amazing how many addresses people such as Jordan Peterson and C.S. Lewis ( ! ) made about Cluster B personality disorder! I imagine Peterson, at least, has lawyers trying to run all of these counterfeits to ground, but inasmuch as there are several hundred million YouTube channels, it will take them a while.
I think it is possible Trump may have had something to do with it. At least his announced lawsuit against Washington Post for fake news.