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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2268 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 7, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Hey guys, remember a month and a half ago I pointed out that AI-Generated Music had fully crossed the uncanny valley?

I specifically claimed:

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.

GUESS WHAT.

https://www.whiskeyriff.com/2025/11/08/an-ai-generated-country-song-is-topping-a-billboard-chart-and-that-should-infuriate-us-all/

I do think this either proves that the average country music fan has little taste, or AI music is as good or better than the average country musician.

Damning with faint praise, perhaps, but this absolutely still feels like we've officially entered a new state of play for the music industry.

I don't know if this has been mentioned in any of these discussions about AI-generated art, but on the off-chance it hasn't, it would be remiss of me not to mention that Roald Dahl (author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG and just about every other non-Harry Potter book you loved as a child), predicted the use of generative AI to compose fiction. In 1953 (probably a few years earlier, in fact).

I highly encourage you to read the linked short story, "The Great Automatic Grammatizator": like most of Dahl's numerous stories for adults it's wickedly funny and creepily unsettling. A short synopsis: a talented mechanical inventor named Knipe harbours frustrated literary ambitions, and after yet another rejection from a publisher, he has an epiphany in which he realises that the rules of grammar governing the English language are almost mathematical in their strictness — hence, it should be trivial to design a machine which, once assigned some input parameters, can "compute" a passage of text in much the same way that a calculator computes a mathematical formula or equation. As a tremendous act of revenge against the publishing industry, Knipe sets to work building the machine and presents it to his boss, Mr. Bohlen, who is initially sceptical but eventually converted when literary magazines buy the short stories (attributed to pen names) produced by the machine. Knipe later sets about modifying the machine so that it can compose novels in addition to stories.

The most ingenious touch, I thought, was the end of the story, when the narrator explains that Knipe and Bohlen eventually expanded their operation to buy the rights to use real authors' names and likenesses, attaching them to books composed by machine.

But on the whole, it was a satisfactory beginning. This last year—the first full year of the machine’s operation—it was estimated that at least one half of all the novels and stories published in the English language were produced by Adolph Knipe upon the Great Automatic Grammatizator.

People often talk about how AI-generated art is soulless and lacking the creative spark necessary for authentic human emotion. I won't pass comment on whether this is the case. If someone hasn't yet been moved to tears by an AI-generated passage of text or piece of music, I have little doubt that such a thing will happen before the end of the decade. "So what? People have been moved to tears by Twilight."

Fair enough. But my question is this. Right now, you can get an AI to generate a sample of Taylor Swift's voice which, to anyone who isn't a professional musician or trained sound engineer, sounds indistinguishable from the real thing. As the technology improves and with access to more and better training data (say, exclusive access to Swift's own master recordings, archive of unreleased songs, and isolated vocal takes), even sound engineers are likely to be taken in. The technology to generate musical instrumentals is likewise getting better every day.

In a world where Taylor Swift goes into business with OpenAI and grants them the right to use her name and likeness on musical releases generated by ChatGPT (or whatever dedicated music-generation software they use), do you really think you could tell the difference? Or what about AI-generated novels attributed to James Patterson, with his permission? I mean, it's only one step removed from using ghostwriters, something Patterson is open about doing. Of the novels published under the Tom Clancy banner, a majority were written by other writers, and a significant chunk of those published postmortem, meaning Clancy could not have been involved in their composition even in principle (not even giving them a cursory once-over before typesetting).

Better yet — how do we know this hasn't already happened? Taylor Swift's latest album is her most poorly-received release since 2017's Reputation, with neither the album nor any of the songs from it receiving Grammy nominations (the 68th edition of the Grammys will be the first time Swift hasn't been nominated for anything since 2017), and many reviews commenting on it sounding creatively exhausted, predictable and lacking novelty or dynamism. Isn't a solid, pleasant but unremarkable and creatively sterile album exactly what we'd expect from an album generated using Taylor Swift's previous albums as training data? When Swift is rehearsing for the next album tour, isn't it possible she'll be learning to sing the songs on the album for the first time?

I'm not yet concerned about artists being supplanted entirely by AI-generated artwork: I think an author or musician's name recognition is still a vital part of what makes their releases commercially successful (which is why the names of James Patterson, Stephen King, Tom Clancy or Danielle Steel are always in much larger text on the covers of their novels than the title). But the ending of "Great Automatic Grammatizator" sounds eerily plausible to me: a world in which an author writes and publishes one or two hit novels the traditional way, a major publisher takes notice, and gets the author to sign a contract granting the publisher exclusive rights to publish AI-generated books under the author's name, in perpetuity. There will inevitably be gaffes in which the author is being interviewed about what their latest book is about, and it will become glaringly obvious that the author doesn't know what it's about, because they haven't read it, never mind written it. Or the author will be approached by a fan at a convention who'll ask them to sign a copy of a book published under their name, and the author won't have even heard of this book.

There will inevitably be gaffes in which the author is being interviewed about what their latest book is about, and it will become glaringly obvious that the author doesn't know what it's about, because they haven't read it, never mind written it.

Hah, easily solved by simply having any interviews of the author be completely AI-Generated videos as well.

Or the author will be approached by a fan at a convention who'll ask them to sign a copy of a book published under their name, and the author won't have even heard of this book.

This one's trickier, but I speculate that the studio/publisher might have an artist/actor/author whose whole body of work is AI, but they hire somebody to pretend to "be" the artist/actor/author for all in-person appearances.

Alternatively, distribute the stories as 'by' a collective name.

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