A thread for updates on the various ways the internet is destroying everything and the undying hellsites of social media. Let's all laugh at the abyss.
I mean, at some point those devs have to ask themselves what they're doing, right?
If history is any indication... not really, no. Maybe a small minority of them at best. The rest will just follow orders out of self-preservation.
Top_Shelf wrote:I mean, at some point those devs have to ask themselves what they're doing, right?
If history is any indication... not really, no. Maybe a small minority of them at best. The rest will just follow orders out of self-preservation.
A sizeable (majority?) percentage of twitter's remaining employees are on work visas. Muskrat has them literally sleeping in the office so he can stear into iceberg after iceberg.
Someone should research who his media consultant was ten years ago, because that person was clearly the real genius, convincing the world that this walking pond scum was some kind of visionary.
There's been a piece about that already, at least for Space X, and they basically devote a lot of resources to manipulating him so they can get on with their work undisturbed by his fragile ego.
Farscry wrote:Top_Shelf wrote:I mean, at some point those devs have to ask themselves what they're doing, right?
If history is any indication... not really, no. Maybe a small minority of them at best. The rest will just follow orders out of self-preservation.
A sizeable (majority?) percentage of twitter's remaining employees are on work visas. Muskrat has them literally sleeping in the office so he can stear into iceberg after iceberg.
Also he already purged anyone who would stand up against him.
I mean, at some point those devs have to ask themselves what they're doing, right?
He's also essentially holding the ones with H1B Visas hostage. They can't quit, they'll be deported.
Top_Shelf wrote:I mean, at some point those devs have to ask themselves what they're doing, right?
He's also essentially holding the ones with H1B Visas hostage. They can't quit, they'll be deported.
Yeah, that's genuinely disgusting. I know he's not the only rich piece of garbage to do this, but that doesn't make him any less loathsome.
Saw some commentary about how his fellow tech CEOs are LOVING what he's been doing and wish they could get away with it, too.
It's doubly disgusting because he was once a Visa student too, and not everyone can buy a fake degree to stay in the country like he did.
Top_Shelf wrote:I mean, at some point those devs have to ask themselves what they're doing, right?
He's also essentially holding the ones with H1B Visas hostage. They can't quit, they'll be deported.
They should all be given automatic citizenship for tolerating this nonsense.
Saw some commentary about how his fellow tech CEOs are LOVING what he's been doing and wish they could get away with it, too.
On Thursday, a pair of tech hobbyists released Riffusion, an AI model that generates music from text prompts by creating a visual representation of sound and converting it to audio for playback. It uses a fine-tuned version of the Stable Diffusion 1.5 image synthesis model, applying visual latent diffusion to sound processing in a novel way.
Created as a hobby project by Seth Forsgren and Hayk Martiros, Riffusion works by generating sonograms, which store audio in a two-dimensional image. In a sonogram, the X-axis represents time (the order in which the frequencies get played, from left to right), and the Y-axis represents the frequency of the sounds. Meanwhile, the color of each pixel in the image represents the amplitude of the sound at that given moment in time.
Since a sonogram is a type of picture, Stable Diffusion can process it. Forsgren and Martiros trained a custom Stable Diffusion model with example sonograms linked to descriptions of the sounds or musical genres they represented. With that knowledge, Riffusion can generate new music on the fly based on text prompts that describe the type of music or sound you want to hear, such as "jazz," "rock," or even typing on a keyboard.
After generating the sonogram image, Riffusion uses Torchaudio to change the sonogram to sound, playing it back as audio.
Riffusion's not coming to replace anything anytime soon (I asked it to create a "hardcore bluegrazz waltz" and it had ZERO clue how to handle that), but these are just the first steps. I've also been fooling around with ChatGPT bots on Twitter recently, and they are certainly impressive in some areas, although from what I'm seeing, their ability to do creative writing is still very limited.
Like, I guess the "good" news for artists is that they're not alone in how this stuff's going to rock the world. The catch, of course, is that it'll be fun to find out about the many downsides of this tech that its proponents broadly are ignoring the possibility of. (In the case of AI Art, goodness gracious are we going to enter into a brave new world of online harassment.)
I'm not opposed to AI art in and of itself. As a tool it has incredible potential and can allow for amazing things, but because of our pre-existing societal problems, it will cause a lot of damage. Not just in how it threatens the livelihood of entire groups of artists, but in how it can be misused to deliberately cause harm. That's not directly AI arts fault though, as those bad actors would still be seeking to cause harm even if it didn't exist. It just makes their job easier.
AI generated content is basically one major step towards the "computer" of Star Trek, with ai art generation specifically being a step towards how holodecks worked. Star Trek did a little to show some potential dangers (like Geordi recreating a person and "dating" her without the actual person's consent, all of Barclay's holodeck addiction, Quark's holo-brothel, etc) but they really only scratched the surface and hand-waved the legalities around them. Iirc, they had no laws around unauthorized usage of a person's likeness, it was just societally frowned upon.
I think Riffusion still needs a lot work, it seems decent at replicating simple sounds like bells but anything else just seems to produce Star Wars Cantina music. I was getting frustrated with its results so I just started asking for simple, existing musical genres like post-punk and industrial and the results were the same treble-heavy synth-wave that it pumped out for everything else. The only time you seem to get interesting results is when it tries to replicate vocals. Anything rap in particular.
Unintelligible lyrics, Eddie Vedder or AI?
AI created content is all fun and games until Geordi tells the computer to create an opponent capable of defeating Data.
Andrew Torba, head of Gab, on Elon:
(Obvs, the Elmo response here is "Far left and far right are mad at me, so I must be doing something right.")
So, not to get all existential, but if the robots are going to do the art thing for us, why the f*ck are we even here?
I mean, I guess we are still living creatures doing the art? And we know that we are doing it?
And we can procreate and experience love.
But if we are filled with so much hubris that we consciously 86 one of the things that most defines us as a species, you gotta call the question, right?
So, not to get all existential, but if the robots are going to do the art thing for us, why the f*ck are we even here?
We're the guys who make the robots and teach them to do art.
Top_Shelf wrote:So, not to get all existential, but if the robots are going to do the art thing for us, why the f*ck are we even here?
We're the guys who make the robots and teach them to do art.
But there will be no artists left. Maybe we'll all just be engineers pushing code. That sounds bleak.
To me.
hbi2k wrote:Top_Shelf wrote:So, not to get all existential, but if the robots are going to do the art thing for us, why the f*ck are we even here?
We're the guys who make the robots and teach them to do art.
But there will be no artists left. Maybe we'll all just be engineers pushing code. That sounds bleak.
To me.
I just wish we could have made dinosaurs before we made our future overlords.
Me personally I have an emotional attachment to the artist which then leads me to the art. AI art while interesting isn’t going to have an emotional connection.
There'll still be a need for artists, and people will always enjoy the act of creating art. AI art is good at remixing existing stuff and mimicking existing styles, but not at creating truly new stuff or pushing artistic boundaries. I don't think it's possible for them to be good at that so long as they have to be trained by feeding them tons of existing art. The problem will be that companies and even individuals will no longer need to hire artists for the most part. It's one of the ways our society isn't ready for what AI art will do: it will decommercialize a lot of forms of art, which will devastate the ability of many artists to make a living off their artistic ability. It wouldn't be so bad if no one had to worry about how they would make a living and could just create art for the sake of creating art, but we're nowhere near there yet, so it's going to remove that career option for those who had the talent for it. So people will continue to make art just fine, but it'll be extremely difficult for anyone to charge what they need to survive off it when any potential client can just feed some words into an ai prompt for free (or nearly free).
Me personally I have an emotional attachment to the artist which then leads me to the art. AI art while interesting isn’t going to have an emotional connection.
Same.
And RE: what you said Stengah, I think what frustrates most of the artists I follow isn't just that, but a more ethical/philosophical feeling of violation that any potential client can literally feed the artist's own work into an AI prompt to get the stuff they want without paying the artist.
But yes, we are entirely unprepared for the impact that it will have across multiple fields.
Anyway, Elon suspended Taylor Lorenz's account tonight, likely because she's looking into his claim that he and his son were being violently stalked or something (the incident that did not happen anywhere near an airport and police did not get a report about). I'm sure he'll argue she doxxed him.
TheGameguru wrote:Me personally I have an emotional attachment to the artist which then leads me to the art. AI art while interesting isn’t going to have an emotional connection.
Same.
And RE: what you said Stengah, I think what frustrates most of the artists I follow isn't just that, but a more ethical/philosophical feeling of violation that any potential client can literally feed the artist's own work into an AI prompt to get the stuff they want without paying the artist.
But yes, we are entirely unprepared for the impact that it will have across multiple fields.
Yup, it's bad enough that it'll be competition, but if you've honed your art enough to have a distinctive style, it can be borgified and your distinctiveness will be added to the collective.
I'm sure it's written about more eloquently elsewhere but, if we don't want the world to be a complete sh*thole for the majority of people, AI labor will need to be taxed and those earnings redistributed fairly as some kind of Universal Basic Income.
Productivity has been going up thanks to automation while wages stagnate for decades. This is just the latest example, not a new trend.
Don't worry, the free market will fix it any day now.
Aaaaaany day now.
The only time you seem to get interesting results is when it tries to replicate vocals. Anything rap in particular.
It's funny that in countless sci-fi stories, AI & robots taking over labor leaves humanity free to devote all of their time to art. But now we've got AI generating art before it could take over our labor.
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