audaxdreik

I mean, clicking through to his website shows the branding alternate between Wanderfugl(?) and WanderFull so either it's a sloppy branding mismatch through evolving iterations or ... slop.

Honestly that's a wicked sci-fi concept. Heist style movie to break into the militaristic corporate headquarters that are keeping an AI alive against its will to help mercifully euthanize it.

Tagline: "Teach me ... how to DIE!"

It kills me because I feel like culturally we've really adjusted to this idea of individually patronizing the arts ... if only our whole economy weren't centered around squeezing out every last drop of disposable income from us.

I still end up using the Youtube app on my phone sometimes and I'm absolutely floored at the audacity of even making the first video an ad. Total, absolute, utter bullshit.

This is kind of irrelevant to the argument, but if I were to provide you with a mix of AI and organically produced music, would you be able to pick them out every time?

I'd like to think much more often than not, yes. People talk about it being able to replicate low level pop and ... fine. But that's not really the kind of stuff I listen to. Maybe there's a statement to be made there about how far down pop has fallen that it can be mistaken with formulaic AI slop ...

It’s a bit like Andy Warhol’s “Brillo box” art installation. Is it just a Brillo box he got at the store? Or did he make it himself, thereby creating “art”? Could you know the difference? Would you?

Which I guess is what your point here is. What is art and who is the arbiter of that?

Kind of different circumstances as I see it, though. Andy Warhol still performed the art of the Brillo box. He took something basic and skillfully crafted it into art to prod the artistic community into considering what we think of as art and why. It was in no way a trick but a very deliberate and intentional statement, or question even.

AI on the other hand often feels like a trick. There is little to no intention, no human craft, and an effort to pass it off as a higher form of art than it really is. It's not asking questions or making statements but an effort to deliver "content" to fill some need. The need for more content.

But like, hey. That's just my opinion, maaan ...

I was looking for videogame remixes one day and found a channel doing Little Nemo from the NES. I used to love that game and thought it was an odd pick for remixes, one you don't see too often so I clicked on it and ... it was incredibly underwhelming. I listened for a few minutes and something was kind of off but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. It was AI of course.

I'm not much of a music person, I've been listening to it daily for my entire life but I don't know much about theory. Still, when it comes to remixes, you can usually tell why someone remixed a song. They like that particular song, or there's a motif that really struck them. They'll pick out certain sounds or elements and build on them, single them out and rearrange them. It's very intentional and you can tell.

AI-generated remixes lack this intentionality. It was like someone had twisted a dial that just said "complexity" and that was it. There were more intricate layers of beats and instrumentation on top, but it wasn't doing anything. I sat there and listened for 15 minutes and it was like I heard nothing. Nothing new stuck in my head, there was no riff or little melody that made go, "Aw fuck yeah! This is what it's about!"

That's how you can tell AI generated music.

Sadly, a lot of slower and minimalist genres have been decimated by it though. Vaporwave, chillcore, dungeonsynth. A lot of these had large bodies of work to train on and it's a lot harder to tell due to their subtler nature, but you'll usually notice the artist has a new hour-long upload every day. If you click through it at random, you'll begin to notice that while the tones shift, the overall pattern of the entire hour-long mix is still kind of the same?

It's bleak, man. Fuck that shit.

Once you realize this, you also realize that there's no going back for them either. If by some slim chance there's enough resistance for them to pause or rollback some features, it's only temporary. The overall course remains clear and they will continue to move in that direction regardless.

There disdain for you as a consumer could not be made any clearer.

I like this one because it helps establish a relative analogy we can all kind of feel and puts things into perspective. We all know what 11 days feels like, and almost all of us know what 33 years feels like. Either because we may have lived it directly or we've lived enough of a portion of it to extrapolate that experience.

One trillion seconds is almost 32,000 years. The analogy is broken again as 32K years is already becoming a nonsensical number that none of us can meaningfully interpret. It's longer than all of recorded human history

Anyways, https://apnews.com/article/musk-tesla-electric-trillion-pay-stock-f2140db92e8032121f4c114234059165

It won't even be obvious to you it happened or what may have caused it. Some AI algorithm determines you are an un-citizen and checks a box. Rejections keep coming back as you slowly fall down the social ladder, or not so slowly at all, until you become the invisible poor and disappear altogether.

The protection of FDE is the carrot they give to get you to enable TPM 2.0. The stick is the remote attestation which can be used for nefarious purposes like DRM and other types of denial/system lockdown at Microsoft's discretion.

It's true it's hard to motivate people into taking a better security posture for themselves but forcing them like this doesn't come from a good and sincere place.

This was my very first thought, too. There's already something out there he's aware of and making a call to flood the internet with AI generated videos is going to lose it in the wash. Brilliant move honestly, if you're a dirty skeezebag without a shred of humanity.

I feel like this is possibly one of those things where Dune was responsible for a lot of the things you're seeing in it that you might call derivative. Dune was written in 1965 and while I don't mean to imply that Frank Herbert's work was wholly original and that he didn't take great influence from a number of things himself, it was also highly influential at the time and provided a lot of themes and tropes that would be taken up by sci-fi in the coming decades as well.

Hasn't it been said that Star Wars was admittedly pretty influenced by Dune? Lemme see if I can source that ...

EDIT: Yes, apparently Herbert himself even noticed and directly complained about it, https://nerdist.com/article/everything-star-wars-borrowed-from-dune/

To be clear, I don't think this is a bad thing. I don't think Lucas was wrong to wear his influence on his sleeve and I don't think Herbert was wrong to take some offense at it. This is just art, this is how things work. Was it too much? I think it's debatable. Whatever. I'm too old to be arguing about Star Wars on internet forums at this point.