faceh
17hr ago
Actually that right there is a use for AI.
Read the notifications pouring in, mute the unimportant, queue up the actionable but not urgent, and only let you see ones that read as actually important (not just "flagged" as important).
faceh
17hr ago
Okay, went ahead and put a selection of them in a playlist.
https://suno.com/playlist/d8348313-aa62-4474-b272-75d4dbabf641
Note these took me <20 minutes to generate, counting time setting up prompts (I used ChatGPT to fill out the prompt descriptions a bit).
And less than $2 worth of credits, I'd guess.
I don't have an ear for music but these pass as the sort of classical songs I listened to on CD growing up.
The playlist has an "inspire" button that would let one use these songs as the basis for future generations.
Lest I pretend it does it perfectly every time, it did ALSO produce THIS monstrosity on the same prompts:
faceh
17hr ago
Edit: I believe the “good stuff” is still being made, but its audience and distribution network is not part of the great algorithm fork. It’s elsewhere, it’s curated, and it’s often offline. Interested in the new avant garde. I suspect it’s here, it’s just not where 50-98% of people spend their time.
Yep. You have to be willing to dive beneath the surface, long enough to find the pockets of original and specifically high quality work that the indie scene is putting out.
faceh
17hr ago
Writing long-form fiction to even a high-human standard.
I like this one. The ability to create a fictional world that has 'infinite' branching plotlines and arcs to follow, or to produce the exact sort of one-shot novel you've been craving.
faceh
1d ago
Yeah, its a very solid point.
THAT SAID... I'm wondering if people would actually be willing to buy tickets to sit and have the AI's songs just played at them over the speakers, even if there was an video accompaniment.
Or they can commission an actual band to play the songs, but at that point... just become a fan of said band?
Well, guess we'll see if I'm right:
But mark my words now, the first large music festival showcasing ONLY AI-produced music will be happening inside of 5 years.
faceh
1d ago
it's the admiration and parasocial relationship with the artist.
I do think there's an issue where with AI you can't really make the AI itself the 'object' of your obsessions because there's nothing 'there.' And making the person prompting the AI the object seems extremely odd.
But I feel pretty similar about people who seem obsessed with certain DJs, when there is certainly an argument that all they're doing is pressing "Play" on the computer and then fiddling with some knobs. They still have 'fans.'
But, uh, we see that (some) people are readily accepting AI boyfriends and girlfriends.
And Hatsune Miku has a large following, even does concerts. Granted, the Japanese can anthropomorphize ANYTHING.
faceh
1d ago
I HAVE TO IMAGINE that there aren't many recordings of actual Medieval music around to train the AI on.
faceh
1d ago
I suspect that's just result in there being no more sales on such items, demand would probably smooth out substantially.
Flip side, AI monitoring how much of a given consumable I have left and then ordering it for me (keeping me in the loop, I'd hope) before it runs out entirely, and doing at least some due diligence to ensure its a decent price.
faceh
1d ago
I'm not sure how you can make one that actually prods you to do things unless you give it the ability to physically interact with you somehow.
My phone has a lot of notification and reminder systems, but I ignore those all the time.
faceh
1d ago
I would absolutely argue we're talking a matter of degree, but yeah, if your goal is "live as long as a carbon-based multi-cellular organism possibly can in ideal health" that's different than if the goal is "avoid literally every risk of actual brain death possible, with zero regard for preserving organic parts."
But we're already blurring lines by strapping sensors and stimulators and other mechanical parts in.
Now, to put a final spin on the question, what would you DO with your now-optimized health thanks to your AI patron keeping you in tip-top shape?
My preference for the AI generating personalized entertainment options somewhat answers that question. I could watch Firefly Season 50 and then go to the theaters and enjoy "Mission: Impossible 16: Mercury Poisoning" where AI Tom Cruise sprints across the surface of Mercury while holding his breath or something.
but I wouldn't want to listen to any of this again despite liking some of the genres it's aping.
The question of the hour: Is that really different than most songs produced by human artists?
I admit that I keep falling back to the same ~1000 songs that I enjoy listening to, very few of which are less than 5 years old, many of which are older than I am. And most 'new' songs I'll play like a dozen times and then they sit in an unused playlist for months or years.
I don't think I've heard a SINGLE pop song in the last year that I consider 'memorable' (not entirely true: Chappel Roan's "HOT TO GO!" sometimes pops into my brain unbidden).
I truly do enjoy Kendrick Lamar's music, but after listening to GNX on repeat for a couple weeks I've not felt any desire to add it to my main playlist. Humble is on there though.
And I lamented before that there's really no such thing as a new 'genre' anymore. So the AI does have the advantage of letting me play around with combining genres to see if anything neat falls out or is worth pursuing.
I am going to agree there's no actual replacement for having a talented live performer in front of you.
faceh
1d ago
I personally will never feel comfortable unless the entire system is airgapped, and maybe not even then. Think, for example, of how you have to keep a pacemaker away from electromagnets.
But life demands acceptance of certain risks, and there's a strong argument that health benefits from AI monitoring your body and suggesting adjustments would outweigh most risks from having that data exposed.
Of course, follow the logic and its just straight up transhumanism. Discard the weakness of the flesh entirely.
What is the use case here? I'm not being facetious, I think this is cool as hell but what is the use case? Composing and recording music is already dirt cheap.
You get 3000 credits a month for $10, and each song gen costs 10 credits. So you can get a couple hundred songs (assuming you're putting in a little bit of effort to tweak each one) each month for less than the cost of a CD back in the day. Whether that's a sustainable price point I don't know.
So we're talking below dirt cheap at this point.
MY use case has been making new high-energy songs to slip into the playlist at the gym, which is a fun process.
But this is also a step towards what I suggest is my preferred use-case: to make bespoke TV episodes, it'd need some ability to compose soundtracks and theme songs and such.
You don't notice the very clear artifacts in the sound?
I've been using Suno for about a year and a half, and its gone from "Constant artifacts that instantly betray its AI" to "If it played on the radio I wouldn't peg it unless I was paying close attention, and even then I wouldn't be sure." It even adds in respiratory sounds for Pete's sake!
Or more to the point, I think that if we did a double-blind test with randomly chosen people listening to AI songs vs. decently skilled indie artists, 80+% of them wouldn't reliably catch which were AI and which weren't, if we curated the AI stuff just a bit.
Given that a Spotify subscription costs as much why would anyone switch though?
Funny you should mention that.
Owing to the absolute dirt-cheapness mentioned above, its a 'viable' (if you cheat) business model to mass produce barely passable songs and upload them en masse to every streaming service under the sun.
And its actually debatable if this really makes the services worse given the fact that most users don't seem to notice or care much.
It certainly makes it harder for new, undiscovered artists to stand out. And that's the one thing AI has going against it. You can't yet attend a concert for an artist who only exists digitally.
But mark my words now, the first large music festival showcasing ONLY AI-produced music will be happening inside of 5 years.
Also, like two years back I talked about how I was still collecting music to my local devices through force of habit. It seems even more laughably futile now in the face of tech which can keep producing songs faster than I can even listen to them.
And more recently we discussed the art of cover songs.
This is also a machine that, if legal restrictions were not an object, lets you translate any given song to any given genre, instantly.
faceh
1d ago
It can emulate just about any time period, and REALLY traditional stuff too.
I'm not even trying to argue that its not AI slop at the end of the day, just like I think most pop music is human-made slop, but its a leap in capabilities.
I'd want absolutely perfect health tracking, the kind of thing where the AI can tell me exactly what to eat, what supplements to take, how much and what type of exercise to do etc. Might require a bunch of implants, but I'd love to always feel well-rested and optimised.
I agree... except I'd be pretty nervous on the nefarious uses that particular setup could create.
My piecemeal solution is that I can feed it the information about myself I want it to have rather than have it tracking me full time.
I do like the thought of being able to ask how to optimize for particular goals. "I'm training for a Marathon in 4 months, create a training and diet regimen tailored to my current work schedule."
This could genuinely be a Paramore B-side.
I know, right? I've gotten it to near-perfectly emulate Rammstein, Motley Crue, and Drowning Pool, and decent-quality ripoffs of Rage Against the Machine and Linkin Park.
System of a Down has proven trickier.
Suno, the AI song generator, just released version 5. And now I think we are 100% past the uncanny audio valley. Version 4/4.5 was at the level of "Convincing, occasionally incredible, but still flawed enough to notice." Version 5 is 'tricking' my ear 9 times out of 10. Studio quality. We have a fully functional infinite music machine available for the monthly cost of a cheeseburger.
A few examples:
https://suno.com/s/N86w28eQjBWbI6fA
https://suno.com/s/BsKe5OnQpUhPj2Zx
https://suno.com/s/voPPxtsXxRjFRF93
https://suno.com/s/Yqe3pzUQHIPAQ4g4
I think people get too focused on the apparent 'slowing' of progress in the LLM space and think its proof that Machine Learning itself is not living up to the hype.
Meanwhile stuff like Video generation, Music, and Protein Folding/Drug Discovery are still improving rapidly.
Arguably LLMs are just the interface by which we can access these other powerful Djinns to provide us with the particular services we want, as we await the "one true superintelligence" that can do anything to arise.
There's probably a small window right now to write a Sci-Fi novel that features humanity invoking individual AI patrons that specialize in particular aspects of the world, in the same vein as 'old gods' (Stockfish God of Chess, Suno God of Music, Midjourney God of Aesthetics).
Anyway, if there was ONE arena you would want AI to reach superhuman capability, one particular application that would improve your life even if AI progress stalled out otherwise, what would that be?
For our purposes, lets just grant "customized pornography" as the killer app.
Me, I think I want the ability to produce bespoke episodes of older TV shows that I enjoyed but were cancelled or went off the rails and/or had horrible conclusions. GoT and Firefly are obvious examples there. But I have several others in mind.
It'd be cool to live in a world where the "Canon" of a given series was not defined by any particular "official" source, but instead you had a whole library of 'forks' in the plot and character development that fans can choose from, or generate their own as they like, with maybe some curation done by the rights holder to identify the entries they deem 'high quality' and consistent with the original vision.
faceh
6d ago
The initial description reminds me of that episode of Metalocalypse where Murderface tries to find religion and attends a Church of Satan service.
The rest just sounds like its a church that is designed to be as politically influential as possible while still legally qualifying as a 'religious institution.' Really lays bare the "Wokeism is a secular liberal religion" factor.
As someone who grew up in a Southern Baptist Church, I genuinely cannot imagine attending a weekly service that WASN'T specifically about paying worship and adulation to an all-powerful deity you believe could intercede in the world. What is the real, actual point otherwise.
I would, no exaggeration, find it less cringey to worship C'thulhu without irony.
I think you end up with MASSIVE selection effects over the medium term.
I want you to think, REALLY think of any 'popular' political streamer who is known to have a healthy home life, wife/husband, kids, no social drama bubbling up.
Probably hard to come up with more than, say, 3, right?
I'll give you Joe Rogan right up front but he's not primarily political, really, and he's now so untouchable that he isn't subject to 'normal' pressures by any means. Also Jesus Christ Joe Rogan is almost 60.
ShoeOnHead is maybe the only one I know who managed to escape the pits and make a fulfilling life for herself relatively unscathed... and she had some close calls.
Charlie Kirk was arguably one of the few who had his life together from the start and maintained his popularity while still being a solid family man. And see where that got him.
The fact is that people who have the time and inclination to do this as a 'career' are less likely to have their life together in other ways, and won't really be able to devote efforts to keeping their domestic life on track if they are serious about staying relevant. And if they are not already in a stable relationship when they get popular, think about the types of people they're now likely to attract by having their face out there next to extreme, controversial opinions. You're arguably selecting AGAINST good partners, maybe even permanently killing your chances of having one.
In short, the ones who will actually stick around (before crashing and burning spectacularly) are already likely to be the most unhinged/unbalanced, and the general pressure is towards more extremism to maintain relevance. The ones who are stable and manage to get a family going will probably fade out naturally when other things just become more important to them.
And you see what that leaves us with.
Consider that one of the secrets to maintaining relevance in the attention economy is to constantly be embroiled in drama and controversy, and thus people who have stable home lives are not only at a disadvantage is how much effort they can commit to the bit, but also having less 'natural' controversy disadvantages them.
And the filters for who gets popular in the first place are arguably worse too. Rather than a celebrity working their way up to prominence doing movies, TV shows, and having to get through a lot of gatekeepers, it is essentially some 'random' ordinary person getting elevated to stardom, and they probably have a lot of personal issues already, which won't get better with fame. Give these people tons of attention, adoring fans, sexual access to women, and the feeling of having power, and expect their worst traits to eventually manifest in full, and there is NO real limiting factor on them, nobody who can tell them 'rein it in bud' and actually enforce that edict.
faceh
9d ago
There are streamers with huge audiences that can swing celebrity guests these days.
Adin Ross got Donald Trump himself.
Even before this event I had been thinking on whether 'late show' hosts were just a redundant dying breed now.
The original idea was that broadcast channels needed to fill airtime after their big, expensive shows finished airing, right? Kids are probably in bed, audience is getting sleepy and winding down. Need some 'light' entertainment that isn't costly to produce and flexible, mostly unscripted. Get a guy that's good at improv, interviews, and generally is charismatic, line up popular guests, give them a band, stuff a live audience in there.
Now, of course, people can watch whatever television programs they want, whenever, as late as they want. Livestreamers put on low-cost, light entertainment programs tailored to exactly whatever audience they target.
Okay, celebrity interviews are still kind of exclusive, but there's many other outlets for those too now.
At this point, a host would need to be particularly talented in some way to capture audiences attention from whatever else they could be watching. Or have an extremely loyal audience. I'm not saying they go away now, but maybe the format has to change a lot, and they're no longer the cultural force with the ability to demand high salaries anymore.
Only time I watch late shows these days is if I'm in a hotel and they charge money for internet service. Then I can flip on the TV and 'channel surf' (man, remember that?) to see if they're doing anything interesting.
On the other hand, shows that have LONG outlived their relevance (IMHO) like Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune are going pretty strong.
faceh
10d ago
I would say the Republican party has cohered around MAGA far more effectively than the Dems have managed to cohere around... anything.
This seems just patently incorrect to me.
In 2016-2020 there was zero penalty to defecting from Trump as a Republican, talking against him, voting against him (I still recall McCain casting the decisive vote to BLOCK the repeal of Obamacare. When he died he was still given full accolades by his fellow Republicans). They did work together long enough to not impeach and remove Trump, I guess.
In 2020-2024 you have the entire edifice of the federal Democratic party working together to ignore/cover up Biden's increasing cognitive decline. Although plenty of people noticed it, there were ZERO leaks until it was decided he needed to be replaced. And they've been working even harder since then to deflect and diffuse any responsibility now that they've had to admit what was going on. It is truly awe-inspiring.
Compared to how virtually every Trump appointee that quit or got booted immediately went and wrote a tell-all book about how inept and chaotic the administration was.
And now, post 2024, I still don't think the GOP has really conglomerated around MAGA. Its more like they've become content to just sit back and let him do things via the Executive order process and re-arrange deck chairs while he tries to steer the ship.
But you are somehow shocked that they later write a tweet endorsing Harris over Trump?
No, I'm "shocked" someone would spend such mental effort to try to create a persuasive essay in hopes of convincing others to take a particular course of action that... apparently, they themselves didn't find compelling.
Then literally say "whoops, I take it all back, ignore what I said earlier, I'm on the team again" without even a hint of mental distress.
Its like he didn't even believe his own words when he wrote them. So why should anyone else take him seriously on anything ever again?
HAVE THE COURAGE OF YOUR CONVICTIONS, MAN.
faceh
11d ago
So what do you do if they're (physically) much stronger than you?
Be far, far more vicious (gouge eyes out, rip at their genitals, crush small bones. Use hard parts of your body against small, soft parts of theirs.)
Or buy a gun. Train with it. Know what the self-defense laws of your state say about deadly force.
Being smaller, the stakes are inherently higher for you, which gives you both the REASON to be more vicious, and in many jurisdictions, the legal justification for employing deadly force.
Short of someone else larger stepping in,
Find and make friends with larger people. Doesn't have to be a full Master/Blaster relationship, but if you produce some sort of value for the mannerbund, expect them to come to your aid if physical violence is called for.
faceh
11d ago
In terms of ideological conformity, you can also take a look at organizations and institution that have become more left wing over time (almost all of them) and those that have become more right wing (good luck finding ANY).
What happens with Righties when they notice they've been pushed out of a space they like is... they go build a new one, start a new foundation on which to build a new institution. Note this is how Charlie Kirk got his start.
Look at how the Ratio of Conservatives to Liberals as College Faculty has dropped off a cliff since the 60's.
Note, this was precisely the sort of thing Charlie Kirk was trying to combat.
Of course, the left will simply say "Conservatives aren't as smart/don't believe in science/are anti-intellectual" as an excuse for this, as part of that whole "intellectual superiority and scientific backing" shtick. But amazingly the place where Conservative presence is the strongest tends to be the math, physics, and engineering departments, WHERE BEING CORRECT IN THE REAL WORLD continues to matter the most.
It was NOT because the share of conservatives in the population dropped off sharply that they took over colleges. It was attributable to the intentional attrition of activists over a long period of time actively favoring their ideological peers for hiring, and actively making life unpleasant for righties, to ultimately cement control over the valuable institutions. They are very open about the strategy and tactics they were employing. Conservatives/righties generally don't use these strategies to co-opt functional institutions.
And believe me, I can get almost as critical of red tribe politics and belief if I choose. But the central point, borne out by decades of living around both sides... is that Red Tribe will actually leave you alone/accept you as you are much, much more readily than blue tribe, provided you don't start conflicts. Grey tribe is easily the most accepting of all, but tends to lose out to blue tribe operatives due to having no/poor antibodies to their entryist tactics.
That last generation was the sort of thing that it used to produce more often circa V3.
Some weird distortion that spins off into eldritch horror territory as it compounds.
Which emphasizes my point that it has advanced a lot over just the last 6 months.
I really would like to try a double blind experiment on this forum to see who can still spot the AI songs.
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