Thread

1. keiferski · 1790255905 · focus · HN ↗

   In the world of arts/media, I think AI basically only has a future as a hidden thing. Openly admitting that you used AI to make something will be used against you, in order to dismiss your work. For a lot of people/things, it already is - see Hank Green, or the daily comments about "I don't want to read what you didn't write."

   Expect a massive marketing reversal in 6-12 months, when every "AI-powered" company removes the keyword from their home page.

   1. tengbretson · 1790256722 · focus · HN ↗

      That used to be true of autotune too. It was either tastefully hidden, or obvious and trashy. Then projects like 808s and Heartbreak and Tha Carter III put it front and center and it's been a legitimate tool ever since.

      I didn't know if generative ai has a strong enough signature to go through the same evolution, but I wouldn't be shocked if it did.

      1. ofjcihen · 1790262431 · focus · HN ↗

         “Death of autotune, moment of silence”.

         Nah, they were still keen to let people know it made you a clown.

      2. sublinear · 1790263431 · focus · HN ↗

         Autotune, and quantization in general, is a legitimate artistic choice though. It's like using a ruler. It's not strictly required either.

         AI is literally the exact opposite of that. We had been building software with ruler-like precision even when it was unnecessary and got in the way. That's the only reason we ever wanted AI to begin with.

         One mistake people keep making is the assumption that arbitrary and probabilistic imprecision ("wisdom of the crowd") is automatically equivalent to artistic or experienced/curated choice. It's absolutely not. Another mistake is that approximations are always enough to satisfy all problems, or at least "real world" problems. That's obviously not true either. That's flat out ignorance.

         1. mingus88 · 1790269904 · focus · HN ↗

            Check out some off Connor O’Malley’s YouTube videos lately. He’s a collaborator with Tim Robinson and has an absurdist take with heavy AI used

            What I’m saying is he made an explicit artistic choice to use AI and it’s an integral part of the work. You can’t tell a creative person they aren’t allowed to do something.

            AI is going to be used, and already is used, by creative people for legitimate uses that only enhance the statements they are making.

            The fact that lazy people are using it as a shortcut for a lazy audience is not an indictment of AI

            1. sublinear · 1790271506 · focus · HN ↗

               Yeah, I'm not saying there's no artistic value in using AI.

               I'm saying that less intentional use has less artistic merit. AI hasn't made an impact on the toil involved in the creative process. It's instead another brush.

               It all boils down to the fact that humans are not outsourcing anything to AI. If anything, it just raises the bar and makes humans have to work harder. Decision fatigue was already a problem long before this era of AI, and AI can make it worse.

               That's exactly what happened to music with beat quantization and autotune. People just zoomed in, nerded out, got snobbier, stopped seeing the forest for the trees, and ultimately produced very boring music from exhaustion. Not only that, but a ton of nuance was lost. We took so much agency away from the performance and made it all march in line and in time. It's up to the audience where the breaking point is.

               1. qsera · 1790323355 · focus · HN ↗

                  > It's instead another brush.

                  Exactly. AI generates imitations of the past. So does a paint brush at its fundamental.

            2. lubujackson · 1790303663 · focus · HN ↗

               > You can’t tell a creative person they aren’t allowed to do something.

               That sums it up for me. This "new thing appears, become hot, gets overplayed, people hate it" cycle happens over and over, but that is trendy norms. Meanwhile, creative use will continue to go up and to the right as people learn how to better wield AI to express themselves.

               The future won't be "AI in art is bad" but "AI as a tool of artists is powerful, AI as an artist is nonsensical".

      3. vconnor · 1790265998 · focus · HN ↗

         Autotune is legitimate as a surgical tool, used as little as necessary so you can't ever hear it, not when it's front and center as they have tried to do in the 2010 era of awful.

         AI is still in the 2010 autotune phase, where more is better.

         1. tengbretson · 1790272319 · focus · HN ↗

            AI is in its 1999 JLO If You Had My Love phase.

            Though if 2010, the year that Lost in the World was released, is your marker of an awful era, then I suspect that when generative ai does get used to create real art you will likely not be a fan of that either.

            1. mitxela · 1790302021 · focus · HN ↗

               there's an artistic effect I keep seeing that only works with generative AI. It seems to be alternating traditional transforms (translate, rotate, scale, perspective, color shift, take your pick of anything you want) with diffusion steps to bring the resulting image back to the same semantic prompt every frame. Looks trippy, like the image is moving, yet also staying the same (like a Shepard tone), and also constantly drifting in details because AI's not that good.

               1. 10000truths · 1790311662 · focus · HN ↗

                  Do you have a link to an example? I'm curious to see the effect you're describing.

                  1. mitxela · 1790337728 · focus · HN ↗

                     no sorry, it's not really googleable and it's not what the other person linked to
               2. sethaurus · 1790317569 · focus · HN ↗

                  Sidebar: if you're also mitxela on youtube, I just had the strange experience of reading this comment while listening to your voice from a different window!

                  1. centizen · 1790318465 · focus · HN ↗

                     You aren’t the only one, and I had the added effect of not even realizing it until your comment
               3. amatecha · 1790319248 · focus · HN ↗

                  I re-read your message a bunch of times to make sense of it and finally realized what you might be describing -- is it like this? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8PQuXE6gRUA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8PQuXE6gRUA (Lorn - ENTROPYYY)
         2. landdate · 1790304061 · focus · HN ↗

            you must not listen to anh popular music
         3. pvab3 · 1790341192 · focus · HN ↗

            I don&#x27;t have a problem with the T-pain style of autotune. The worst form of it when it&#x27;s used on every single note without the ridiculous note-snapping effect that makes it so obvious

            I could come up with a thousand examples, but I remember when I was in college and listening to a lot of 90s music. Blink 182 had this album come out, and I couldn&#x27;t even listen to 3 seconds of vocals because of the insane amount of pitch correction grinding the life out of everything:

            <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lic0oCDMfwk&amp;t=15s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lic0oCDMfwk&amp;t=15s

      4. sathish316 · 1790267549 · focus · HN ↗

         It’s autoslop can become an adjective for Generative AI content whether it’s hidden or not. It’s so AI - can mean different things to different generations - derogatory for Gen Alpha and like a good thing for older generations
      5. [deleted] · 1790285693 · focus · HN ↗

         [deleted]

      6. badc0ffee · 1790303693 · focus · HN ↗

         &gt; projects like 808s and Heartbreak and Tha Carter III

         Or 22, A Million by Bon Iver.

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