I'm being a prick by saying a song that took thirty seconds to prompt isn't impressive?

That seems to be the argument here - we're all doomed because AI is good. But what evidence of good AI is there? This song?

Theoretically I've been beta-testing software for a large company that will build up bass, guitar, drums, whatever around any audio file you feed it. I haven't felt the need, however, because in a closed, NDA beta populated by audio professionals there's been a lot of "mmmmyep" in response to everything it does. The better version of this, run by people who do this shit for a living, is thunderously underwhelming and it kicks the living tar out of this.

The Korg Karma would auto-accompany; it was released in 2001. And yeah - if you were a lone lounge singer at a Holiday Inn out on the turnpike, it was cheaper than hiring bandmates. You can even look at its list of notable users and see that it got a real try-out - but that algorithm was available for about 18 months and then the Karma got remaindered. Korg never bothered trying to do that again.

My argument is and has been that algorithmically-generated music (and poetry, and art, and and and) is un-fucking-impressive and I say that as someone who started messing around with algorithmic music on Kyma in 2002. See - I'm not disputing you on wastewater even though I've got more background in it than any other normie you know. I'm not disputing mk in genetics. I'm not disputing TNG in sales.

But this? This is something I actually know more about than anybody else and since y'all have picked up a guitar once or twice y'all feel more than comfortable going "no no it's great and you're a prick for raining on the parade."

One of the things you have to learn as a screenwriter is distinguishing between "things that you like" and "things that are good." I always had hella more luck churning out dreck on command than I did carefully refining my own ideas - my own ideas appeal largely to me and leave the general audience confused. You can solve by inspection which are more fun for me to work on. If you ever wanted to know what happened to Bill Drummond and Jimmy Caudy, it's the fact that they spent ten years going "you're all listening to shit, stop it" and the audience went "moooooooooorPOOOOOOOOOOOOOP" so they took a million pounds and burned it in a pile.

Everyone here is going "thing that I like" and equating it to "thing that is good" - "while this is a genre of music I would never listen to, it’s pretty darn good compared to other music in that genre." That's like saying "while I would never listen to rap music, this is good rap music." The truly baffling thing is I'm sitting here getting ad-hominem attacks for arguing that low-effort AI slop is low-effort AI slop! If my kid spent 30 seconds scribbling something on a page and showing it to me, I would be remiss as a parent if I didn't say "that looks like you spent 30 seconds on it, kid." What's the counter-argument? "what does the fox say" peaked at number six. Fuckin' "We Built This City" made it to number fourteen FOR THE YEAR and it's widely acknowledged as one of the worst songs of all time.

But you know what? It's in your goddamn head right now. It just bumped out "what does the fox say" which was also in your head. Fuckin' Gangnam Style was a goddamn cultural movement and the whole bloody country was doing the Macarena.

Pop quiz - can you recall anything at all about "Hubski Ghosts?"

Back when I was editing and scoring Youtube videos I had access to three different stock music libraries. They were full of forgettable nonsense garbage that nobody ever listened to again, but they were cheap. Those, of course, were the high-water mark of unproduced music and they sounded hella better than Suno ever has. Nowadays of course you just type "royalty free" into Youtube and get whatever you want. Most people use the same music, though, because almost all of it is ass.

NOBODY uses AI-generated music.

And maybe that's the difference - I've spent a career listening to mediocre music across dozens of genres, and i've spent a career getting little gems like mixing Reba McIntyre in secret, forgotten little impromptu three-part harmonies. My crap-to-gold meter is practiced and polished in this very domain.

If that makes me a prick? I suggest y'all get used to people being pricks about your AI-generated music.

You take it as an article of faith that AI will end up in the Top 40.

- What's your music experience?

- What's your broadcast experience?

- What's your radio experience?

- What's your songwriting experience?

- What's your A&R experience?

Because I paid for college mixing bands in clubs.

And I worked for Paramount and Fox for fifteen years.

And I put together a radio show every week that reports to Billboard - my shit actually gets tabulated by the guys who build the Top 40.

And I've scored two or three web series and a few short films.

And I get about 15 emails a day from various A&R reps trying to get me to play their music.

I'm not even going to be polite about this anymore - you know fuckall about music but since you can type prompts into an AI you presume my expertise is moot. "Their competition is just gonna keep getting better and better" - It's not though. Juno this month is Juno 18 months ago and nobody fucking cares. Look - someone hacked Spotify's algorithm and managed to get into the charts. Here watch.

Go search "velvet sundown" and you'll hear far more discussion about the fact that they somehow got 370,000 spins than the fact that this is mediocre shit that nobody would listen to on purpose. Basically, Spotify's algorithm is so easily gamed that you can stuff it with AI slop as easily as you can Youtube or TikTok. Spotify responded by going "oops."

Here i got another one for you

You know who doesn't hate AI music? The alt-right. Because they can force Suno to make them alt-folk covers of music that they aren't allowed to like without it being run through their hatefilter.

That's objectively TERRIBLE. Here's the really dumb thing: an alt-folk cover of Pantera's walk has existed for 12 years:

But clearly that chick has opinions about Gaza so we aren't allowed to listen to it, let's get AI to burn a few million tokens doing a worse version that's just for us.

I listened to the goddamn song, dude. the difference is, I listen to about nine hours of new music a week.

I am an expert.

You are not.

And your arguments reflect that fact.

And it sounds like it!

- What about this is impressive to you?

- What about this is any better than Suno was eighteen months ago when all the musicians spent two minutes freaking out about Suno before dismissing it out of hand?

- What about this sounds anything more than GPT4 poetry, Taxi.com stock music and any rando's text-to-speech AI engine?

- Are you ever going to listen to this again?

- So why would you expect anyone else to?

I had a bad day in a private forum on Reddit a dozen years ago and within an hour someone had posted this:

Now - I don't listen to that either. It's every bit a low-effort throw-away song. Nobody will ever bother with it and the fact that it's been racking up 20 views a year is actually kind of impressive.

Everything else to say was said here, applies 100% and it grinds my fucking gears how everyone tech-adjacent stares into the Mirror of Erised and goes "clearly artists are doomed."

The lack of meaning, you mean?

My daughter went bra shopping with her mom yesterday. She also got a makeover at the counter - first time she's had eye shadow and mascara on. She also gave me the GenZ Stare for the first time I noticed - now normally I'd link to that but I want you to go through the exercise of seeing the moral panic writ large in every result you get.

Now see - up until like a year ago we just called that a "withering stare." I don't know how far back that goes; I could guess "Shakespeare" and most people would nod and stroke their chins. But then some twitchfuck millennial decided "ZOMFG they're staring at me deadpan AND I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT MEANNNNNNNSSSSSSSS" because they were raised on a steady diet of Instagram and Friends reruns and they have crippling aphasia if no one is making duckface. So rather than go "I am now an Old" they went principalskinner.jpg and presumed it was the children who were a problem.

I can see some people having a problem the first time their kid gave them an "AYFKM" look. For me? It was rather a proud moment. My wife was discussing a self-defense course for young women that was being taught by a friend of a friend -

"sort of like what they taught us to do in camp."

"What did they teach you to do in camp?"

"you sharpen a stick that just barely fits in your hand and leave one end blunt so you can conceal it and stab your attacker if you need to."

"So that camp taught you to make prison shanks?"

"I...guess?"

"Well I guess it's a good thing Bobby wasn't in that camp," my wife opined.

"Oh Bobby took that camp," my daughter said.

"Well at least he's not violent," I said.

- GEN Z STARE -

"LOL Bobby is violent?"

- GEN Z STARE INTENSIFIES -

"What violence does Bobby practice?"

"He likes to throw rocks at girls' boobs"

"Awright I earned that look"

So... gooning is not my cup of tea? But I'm really uncomfortable with Harper's declaring that nobody should drink it.

Aside from the self-righteous moral scolding ("I could’ve spent my years of peak brain development romping around a toxic-waste site, slurping sludge and indiscriminately licking circuit boards"), the article describes an archetypal sex-positive group fetish. The Circle Jerks formed in 1979 and everyone knew what they were referring to. Bukakke has been a thing since the mid '80s. The "goonstate" is nothing more than tantric sex, an accepted and celebrated aspect of Hindu spirituality with a 2500-year history.

I mean yeah - older dudes are getting laid more often, who knew. The guys who are really into it are concerned about the health of the guys who are diving too deep. Young men will absolutely celebrate things young women really wish they wouldn't and while I've never felt particularly compelled to build a porn cave, let alone share pictures of one, I'm heartened to see that the controls and cautions around it are about maintaining a non-exploitive community. Pretty much every "nope I'm out" example used by the author is about stuff that breaks the law or crosses a self-harm threshold so what, exactly, are we supposed to be upset about?

As a card-carrying woke millennial, I felt antique as a hippie washed ashore in Reagan’s eighties. There I was, archaically respecting pronouns while everyone else bought Bitcoin and rediscovered the joys of calling things retarded.

Oh.

Fu-huuuuuuuuuucking LOL

Using electronic health record data from the multistate, primary care–based American Academy of Pediatrics Comparative Effectiveness Research through Collaborative Electronic Reporting (CER2) network, we defined preguidelines, postguidelines, and postaddendum guidelines cohorts (cohort entry during September 1, 2012, to August 31, 2014; September 1, 2015, to August 31, 2017; and February 1, 2017, to January 31, 2019, respectively). We determined the cumulative incidence of IgE-FA and/or atopic dermatitis (AD) in children aged 0–3 years, observed for either at least 1 or 2 years. Diagnosis rates during pre- vs postguidelines periods were compared using logistic regression, Cox proportional hazards modeling, and interrupted time series analysis.

Let's put that in English, shall we?

- Using the EHR database outside the one all the allergy studies use (my daughter is not in it)

- That only contains data voluntarily added ("do you have a food allergy? click this box")

- That is explicitly not covered to test for food allergy by Blue Cross, Kaiser or any other major insurer

- They successfully demonstrated that there's a hole where they're expecting 60,000 kids to be

Contrary to this bullshit, the conventional wisdom GOING BACK DECADES was "get your kids exposed to allergens so they aren't as bad for you" - the phrase "hygiene hypothesis" was first coined in 1989 but the idea goes back to Rachel Fucking Carson. It's why my kid was given peanut butter at - you guessed it - four months! And promptly went into anaphylaxis at her babysitter's.

What they won't tell you, of course, is if you want a legit allergy diagnosis? You have to wait until your kid is 24 months old. But don't wait too long because insurance won't cover it after 30 months! And since the tests are done at an allergy clinic the results aren't given to your PHP. You can do that, of course. You can ask for the results to be transferred. But EPIC doesn't have a slot for all your allergy shit because your insurance company doesn't have any way to code for it other than "life-threatening allergy."

What you're seeing here? Is the archetypal attempt to blame parents - same as it ever was - while also attempting to cast a nothing bullshit study as a "landmark."

I see your Bloomberg monochrome and raise you a Bluesky blue'n'gold

source

One of my deepest regrets is not digging in deeper at Reddit.

Back when Jedberg was running things I was pushing hard to make Reddit more human, incorporate the profiles and photos and general friendliness of Redditgifts into Reddit Enhancement Suite as a double opt-in - if you have your info on Redditgifts and they have their info on Redditgifts, you would see that Redditgifts info on someone's Reddit profile. Nothing major, just an attempt to bridge the gap. Reddit shot it down.

I also harped on them all the time that they needed to inform people when they had been "favorited." I kept pointing out that it made things less lonely. They didn't have the wherewithal to do it, but they didn't want to say it that way.

For me, the inflection point was /r/ForeverAlone. There were no efforts to help anyone, it was just gamifying self-pity. That it relied entirely on f7u12 cartoons made it a gateway drug for all the /b/tards who wanted a high score with their nihilism. But nobody at Reddit saw the point.

They kept hinting around at me being the community manager while also making it clear it had no pay and no power. They also made it clear that they acted based on technical violations of terms-of-service and a firm belief that behavior-shaping through UI for any reasons other than engagement was anathema to them.

I wonder what would have happened if I'd tried harder, rather than let the inhumanity chase me away. Ultimately? There weren't nearly enough people in positions of influence, let alone authority, who were interested in putting a human face on it. But I still wonder.

this book is worth your time. It draws a credible, well-referenced roadmap from GamerGate to 2016. I knew and interacted with nearly everyone mentioned in it. Some of them popped up here. They are, to a man, basement dwellers who didn't get hugged enough.

What was the dumb Yahoo headline this morning? Ahh, yes. "OpenAI and Broadcom sign deal to build up to 10 gigawatts of custom chips, Broadcom stock surges"

So -

- a week after they did the same fucking thing with AMD for 6GW of chips

- two weeks after they did the same fucking thing with NVidia for 10GW of chips

- For a total of thirteen fucking Hoover Dams of electricity

- But not until 2028

Look. Here's countries by electrical consumption. AI of course doesn't measure power consumption by anything normal like kW/h. So you have to take their fucked up number, multiply it by 24, then take that fucked up number and multiply it by 365 and then take that truly fucked up number and compare. So:

- The broadcom deal is 52 TW/h or the electrical consumption of Greece

- The AMD deal is 87TW/h or the electrical consumption of Chile

- The NVidia deal is also 87TW/h or the electrical consumption of Romania

- The three of them together is the electrical consumption of Thailand

We would need to increase global wind power by ten percent just to cover the last two weeks of OpenAI chip deals. Meanwhile, Microsoft has converted 1.8% of Office365 users into paying Copilot users. Which is probably good, because they lose $20/mo on each and every one of them.

It is bugshit bonkers bananapants. And I say that being able to go

Okay, you want me to explain the 2008 housing crisis? The banks created poker chips that paid off the riskier they were, and they made more money by telling people they weren't risky, and they financed them by offering loans to risky people, and everyone went surprised pikachu when the risks proved to be too great.

That's just stupid. But you can look at it and go "yeah, I can see how that could happen" without having to go "OpenAI somehow agreed to thirteen Hoover Dams worth of electrical capacity in the past two weeks, bullish"

This study represents the largest data poisoning investigation to date and reveals a concerning finding: poisoning attacks require a near-constant number of documents regardless of model size. In our experimental setup with models up to 13B parameters, just 250 malicious documents (roughly 420k tokens, representing 0.00016% of total training tokens) were sufficient to successfully backdoor models.

So never mind "poisoning" - what this study says (and the bulk of the researchers don't work for Anthropic) is that the data integrity of (420,000 / 0.0000016 = 40 billion words) = eight Wikipedias can be compromised by (420,000 x 4/5ths = 336,000 words) = any one of the extant Game of Thrones novels or any two Harry Potter books.

How much of the available training data out there treats fan death credibly, for example?

They are stats and policy wonks with deep and heartfelt opinions about Warhammer who are attempting to meme "small caged mammal" into existence. Your cringe is their cool.

I agree with your take, however. I determined with no outside assistance that very few people here would be all that interested in the VAT structure of ready-made sandwiches.

Dude pickups have evolved well past their usefulness. A basic bitch F150 is $50k. That's two Honda Civics if you want to haul shit to the dump. Not only that but most of the time they have four doors now which doesn't mean a ridiculously long wheelbase it means a bed about the size of a jacuzzi tub. I went to the hardware store with my father-in-law's 2002 "TRD" crew cab Toyota and it barely fit a horse trough! What are we doing here?

What we're doing is we're buying vehicles with the steering wheel on the wrong side because the stuff we can buy new from the local dealer is completely and utterly irrelevant to our lives.

haha of course an El Camino would persist as an evolutionary dead end in the land of kangaroos and platypuses

Here on the Pacific Rim the general approach is "fukkit I'll just import a kei truck"

It can be all of those things and it can be smartphones.

Let's get a couple things out of the way:

1) "literacy" has had a pretty floppy definition over the years. As Kamil Galeev pointed out, "Literacy" in the 18th century was "can you write your name?" while Marriott uses this piece of shit to argue that "Literacy" in the 21st century is "can you have erudite conversations with a peer after a cold read of the first page of Bleak House?"

2) Every weepy pissy screed from the intelligentsia about "kids" and "school" from now until 2037 is going to have to deal with COVID and its impacts and you'll notice none of them ever do.

It is fair to point a finger at phones and all they provide because they are designed to suck up your attention like a needy toddler. Tik Tok is the worst - it only has firehose mode. But it's absolutely not fair to say the kids aren't reading Keats, therefore kick-me-in-the-balls channel.

For starters, this MFer throws goddamn Neil Postman into the mix not once, not twice, but EIGHT FUCKING TIMES without even once making note of the fact that he was discussing broadcast television... before the dawn of cable... three years before the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine. Fucking Neil Postman would have been horrified of WIKIPEDIA because the very idea of hypertext was anathema to him:

From Erasmus in the sixteenth century to Elizabeth Eisenstein in the twentieth, almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one's habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality; that the sequential, propositional character of the printed word fosters what Walter Ong calls the "analytic management of knowledge." To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making, and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.

^^^^^^^^^^^some dipshit who never heard of yellow journalism

Like how Walter Ong comes along for good measure? Yeah, Marriott never quotes Ong directly, he quotes Ong as quoted by Postman and pretends it's a primary citation. Kinda like how he says (Bleak House) is "a book that was once regularly read by children" because George Orwell mentioned that David Copperfield was in libraries in 1940.

But the real bullshit in this article is how he fuckin' makes up history, like how "capitalism" started with the printing press (rather than the Medicis and their ilk) and how books-would-save-us-if-only without noting that we have Jordan Peterson because of his books, for example. ZOMFG! David Bowie read Faulkner! Paul McCartney reads Ibsen! We'd all be saved if only Taylor Swift picked up some Hawthorne... Oh wait, she did and does?

Well shit.

Every five or ten years, some dumb fuck reads Postman, loses his shit, decries the modern world and points at Cranky Grandpa from 1984 (not "the late 80s", not even vaguely) as a prophet and visionary of our ongoing literary collapse. This is primarily because their other choice is to look at McLuhan, who was four years dead by the time Postman was losing his shit, and who argued that it isn't about books it's about communication and if they do that then they have to shut the fuck up about the Zoomers that didn't make their latte correctly.

But why aren't the kids reading?

It's been pointed out that Millennials didn't read, they read Harry Potter. Dipshits like Marriott love to point at "the classics" as if they're something kids used to pick up on their own, rather than something ten generations of English teachers have beaten them over the head with and I don't care whose "best books" list you look at, the least dead author on there is usually Toni Morrison and are you seriously bitching that more kids aren't picking up a 300-page screed about slavery and child abuse? Or is it the Kafka they should be picking up voluntarily? Ulysses? The fuckin' classic of my age was Flowers in the Attic which was creepy and terrible and utterly without literary value and the only reason all these 'boomers are championing Stephen King these days is to get back at their parents for calling it dreck when it was new.

Which circles back to your first point(s) - why the fuck would they engage with any of this shit? Everyone under 30 is terrified of global warming, everyone over 50 doesn't believe in it. The economic structure that put their grandparents in their home is utterly unavailable to them. We traded quaaludes for cocaine for meth for heroin for fentanyl, we traded free love for AIDs for incels. I didn't link to this yesterday but maybe I should have; the fundamental argument is that the political ideology most common among young people is nihilism.

It's pretty fuckin' funny that Marriott wrote that whole Postman-linked-seven-times screed and didn't bring up brainrot even once. Which pretty much gives lie to this entire category of essay - it's all GenXers whining about how Facebook isn't fun anymore and Millennials pissed off that there's nothing on Instagram or else they'd actually take a quick look at these kids they're mourning. Brainrot is real - my daughter's school puts you on time-out if you use it and the two Johns in her class are distinguished by their fellow pupils as "John" and "Brainrot John."

So what is it? If you ask a concern troll, it's "mental decline from consuming too much low quality content." If you ask a kid, it's pointless memes. What does 67 mean? Nothing, that's the joke. What's a Skibidi? It isn't, that's the point. Why is something Ohio? Why isn't something Ohio. Going with McLuhan here - the medium is the message, and the message is "we're here and all this shit is pointless." Errbody losing their shit about Skydance buying Paramount without noticing that it's basically the Taylor Sheridan Channel. Errbody losing their shit over ABC censoring Kimmel without noticing that Disney is three theme parks, a cruise line, Marvel and Star Wars. Andor? Andor is your countercultural must watch? Fanfic set in a universe based on Feudal Japan? 67.

Before it was 67 it was this shit. Before it was that shit it was this shit. Before it was that shit it was this shit. Before it was that shit it was this shit. Before it was that shit it was this shit. Each and every generation marking "present" for their friends while being castigated by their parents for not reading the Iliad in the original Greek. There's a period right before the next generation takes power where the current generation in power goes "OHHHHHHHH SHIT THEY'RE GOING TO FUCK IT UP ROYALLY" and frankly, that's only been true once.

These essays always freak out about the decline of standard testing by ignoring the recovery. They freak out about the impact of social media while ignoring that nobody uses it anymore, especially kids. They freak out about phones without acknowledging the groundswell against phones in schools is happening ten times faster than the death of tobacco. Scratch each and every one of these essays and you will find a boomer, a GenXer or a millennial reframing his (always his) discomfort with his impending cultural irrelevance. Millennials used to be super-proud of the fact that they were "digital natives" until GenZ went "fuck social media." GenX used to be super-proud of being at the dawn of social media until they discovered they'll be there for its sunset. Boomers dominated television in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s but that also means they dominated it through the '00s, '10s and '20s which is why Cathy Bates is playing Matlock, Carrie Preston is playing Columbo, and every.possible.entertainment.venue is serving up nostalgia for an era kids never lived through.

I think millennials are particularly sensitive to this shit because they fucking lapped up the branding and advertising their parents the 'boomers served up to them and GenZ and Gen Alpha are absolutely positively not doing that. I think GenX mostly just pisses and moans about the decline of Western civilization because their comfy place is Reality Bites and Breakfast Club. The thing about nihilism is it's the clean slate before the ideology. "fuck everything" is where every socially-awake teenager lives and then they go through Marx and Rand and Marquez and come up with a worldview. These essays exist because the kids are rejecting the current worldview.

They should.

It's terrible.

Does that mean the END OF THE MUTHERFUCKING WORLD?

GTFO.

https://futurism.com/openai-scheming-cover-tracks