Nvidia presents Fugatto: an AI sound generator to create “sounds never heard before”.
… @wyleu ?
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Humans are really good in making themselves obsolete.
Just wait until AI can create own power supply and produce own hardware by itself, software is already possible.
Humans will then be sort of interference and even a possible hazard to AI, wich has to be neutralized.
This will then happen to the entire planet, once AI can make and programm their own spacecraft and grow and distribute towards the galaxy. In our universe, ressources are limited. As soon as AI find out how to cross the border into the outside, universe itself will be obsolete. And so on.
Pandora’s box is already open.
Resistance is futile.
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On the bright side; Some of us might be kept as pets if we don’t cause trouble.
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One of my previous existences was writing tape library software, amongst other things for a commercials & film video post production company in Soho ( ok stop the chortling, we weren’t in any way un savoury, except on Friday nights, oh ok maybe Thurday as well ). This was back in the early eighties and barcodes on tape boxes and the printing of them and scanning with light pens was rocket science of the highest order. Now we handled a lot of material, tk rushes, audio dubs, off lines, transfers, sub masters and above all masters. All tracked very nicely from a 386 based server hooked together with a very early Ethernet backbone.
To assist this process were a form of reptilian life known as runners. Generally these were relatives of clients and other industry luminaries eager and more or less willing to get a foot up in the production industry and they had two major jobs.
1/ Providing food and drink for clients during the often intense editing sessions, The first thing I learnt when I joined the company was how to make plum and duck wraps from the local chinese shops and how to open a bottle of champagne without spraying it ( you twist the bottle not the cork…) and
2/ Delivering tapes from one post production house to another.
As post production we sat very much as the last chain in the production pipeline and this meant our payment department (Fiona Watson, a quite wonderful individual ) who had heard pretty much all excuses and seen it all. A Nigerian edit on a Saturday morning came in and to pay for the sessions simply opened a suitcase and handed us the correct number of bundles of twenty pound notes to cover the bill for over £20,000 . Interesting times, certainly.
But there was a down side to all this. If a client could walk out with the master, then they could fall stall payment, basically till the debt collectors were banging on the door because, if they had that, they had everything they needed and could move on to transmission and we were left holding a lot of preparation material but nothing that the client actually needed.
So we watched master very carefully with a key code protected library. But the clients knew this and frequently used to brow beat the runners to hand over the tapes, which given the offers of possible work and goodness knows what else, it was after all Soho, on occasion worked.
If this came to a head it was the runners word against the producer or director, and in such a situation it was very much in our interests if we didn’t want to lose a client or worse still an advertising agency, so the runner would lose out, often their jobs. The turn over was high and sometimes quite political.
The library system killed this bullying stone dead.
It was the first time I ever saw technology arbitrating human issues. Some of these runners nowadays crop up on hollywood credits, so we obviously got some thing right.
I’m quite a supporter of tech in this regard. So much of human interaction boils down to bloody mindedness, or power plays and the dispassionate approach of tech might make better human being of us all.
I know other views are available, but when you have had to deal with coked up video directors swearing blind or strongly opinionated pompous creatives with an over inflated opinion of their own competence, eager to pass of their failings in fits of outrage the simplicity of tech is fascinating. Once the dust and the emotions settle, the tech told us what actually got said and by whom, and often the best thing to do was simply leave them to consider the obvious evidence at some later date, and recognise their own very human failings…
Good days…
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@wyleu You are talking about tech as tools. It is possible to dig away a mountain by hand, as long as it takes, even generations, but a bulldozer and dynamite serve as good tools to reach the goal.
There are still humans governing the technology in this screnery.
But nowadays, with AI, humans are already and more and more governed by tech, and still feel comfortable living inside their sensory deprivation tank with pre-chewed AI generated input clogging up their mind and preventing them from asking questions.
I was impressed by how technology could arbitrate across what were basically class distinctions and as a wet and wooly, I like to see moves to equality.
AI ( or whatever particular acronym you choose to tag one’s concepts ) writes better neater code than I do, and saves me much tedious boiler plating. I’m certainly happy to relinquish that particular area of creativity, and I am of such an age that all I know is the sense of comprehension, those brought up within this world must feel. I understood dbases in the 80’s and could apply it to a specific set of problems. It sold itself on so many fronts, and addressed problems that wern’t even considered. And I enjoyed a sense of power, for want of a better word. An opportunity to steer something, assisted by technological certainty.
I presume the young turks of AI today feel exactly the same way.
Quite how one applies it to our present world is becoming down to the matter of trust. What sources do you believe? You do you seed your eternally hungry AI beast with ? That puts back the onus of creative endavour on the human, and that like many responsibilities, is something the majority of humans generally shy away from.
The concept of open-source is also something that exists very strongly within this world. Would I prefer to have arbitrated decisions made for me by a commercial machine with unpublished source and context, or something that declares all these for everyone to see? I recognise the existing forces. Indeed is this marketing from nVidia nothing more than a commercial to allow the sale of more high power cores or an active appeal to creativity?
By far the most creative in an artistic sense of the post production camps were the audio guys. They really did play with the craziest of client requests. … .“Can you turn a ringing trim phone into a country landscape at dawn. . . ?” – You turn to Pete Johnston at the Tape Gallery and he will use Capybara to morph the two together over different length voice takes in almost real time, because the abilities of the tech was understood implicitly…
These were sounds never heard before, and generally Pete did it first.
These were the tech under command of it’s day. I don’t really see too much of a difference. The questions are still asked by humans. All it provides is the Answers, Douglas Adams anyone…?
Certainly within post production it will speed up so much and it will be a great success, until it simply runs up against the next set of limitations, which will resolve to explicit concepts like moraility and equality. That’s the responsibility thrust back by the machinery onto the human input and perhaps we, as a species, have some fairly searching questions to answer, which may prove to be a good thing.
I can understand the demand to control thinking of my age will apply, and I don’t expect to see any reduction in attempts, but if the machinery is genuinely more perceptive of behaviour than we ourselves may be, or care to admit, I suspect that it might well be a rather more sustainable process than the frequently highly biased element most powerful humans like to bring to things…
They also write better poetry than me, so this is nothing more than a long waffly "
I welcome my machine overlords…"
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I agree with @fussl… machines will be able to do everything better than us, but not creativity, passion, emotion… I love the piano, sampled or modeled sounds are fantastic, but when you play a grand piano you feel the metal and wood vibrate… One day (or probably already now) a computer will play better than me… much better than me… but inside that music there will be algorithms and not my poor and simple soul moved by feelings and emotions… and this is something that is only human and animal…
A machine can produce, I wonder if it can entertain?
@wyleu I don’t believe so much in this power of machines… because they are designed and built by man and therefore polluted by human thought… Try asking ChatGPT who is one of the most famous journalists for having discovered and made known bad facts of various governments… He will answer you with various names, but he will not talk about Julian Assange… and if you ask him about Julian, the answer is: “it’s true… Julian also did important investigations”… but only if you specifically ask about him…
… this lack is due to man and not to the machine…
That’s presumably context supplied? It’s why open source is important.
There is also motivation. I fully understand the drive within the post production world and how it will be applied. Artistic statements are something rather different.
Once more the responsibility transfers to the consumer to critique content.
Would an human audience enthusiastically go to a machine composition?, or are we to end up composing almost entirely for an AI audience suitably tuned to provide much needed adoration in our workshops…?
Julian’s example was to say that behind artificial intelligence there is always and in any case the man, with his limits and his beliefs.
Music has been drifting for a long time now… now we look more at the physical aspect than how a piece of music was harmoniously constructed. Is this okay for 99% of people? Very well, but this does not prove that it is right and beautiful. Yes, it sells and makes money, but art is another thing… I apologize but I can’t explain myself better with Google translator… With my Italian friends we talk a lot about these things and I struggle a lot less
Increasingly less and less. The only way to make money outside of the very pinnacle is to perform on tours.
The very fact we are communicating, assisted by translator tech, is an obvious benefit derived from this sort of stuff.
We are out performing and hopefully entertaining tonight.
It will probably be hilarious at some point in a way that a sentient jukebox is unlikely to be …
My daughter sent me this, this week…
I’m not sure how real it is, thats for me to check, but I’d like it to be…
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It’s good to be human, sometimes isn’t it?
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I am happy to be human, but not only because I know that 450 is 90% of 500… but because I could not live without emotions, good or bad that change you completely. As for Google Translator, of what you write @wyleu, I can understand 60%, and I realize that you must be a very nice person with a lot of humor…
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Why, thank you. One of our’s from 1996.
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I tried to get help from chatGPT for an Arduino sketch… Almost always wrong… Then I showed chatGPT a sketch written by me and quite complicated… he told me. “Well written but with some errors”. He corrected it and it didn’t work anymore…
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I tend to use it in the early stages of knock together early prototypes where it can get stuff like MIDI cc values onto a screen pretty quickly. It’s the version controlling from there that gets to be the problem, as if you do hand crank edits into the code the process of explaining quite where the next conceptual leap will go.
Id like to try a “convert this python code to rust”, but it hasn’t been too successful as yet. . .
Mostly cos the python does’nt get finished to my satisfaction…
but you’re talking about pretty complicated stuff… I built an Expression pedal with Arduino Micro pro… the only help I got from chatGPT was the part of the sketch where a led had to flash while the control was being changed… stop… I did the bulk of the work…
It’s a tool. The Never, Once, many rule applies.
I certainly trumpet it’s benefits but it’s made me recognise a certain lack of definition in what I’m trying to actually do…
Mostly I stare into space and think about the possibilities…
IT’s probably what I enjoy most.
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