Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
In other news, Kevin McLeod just received some major backlash for generating AI slop, with the track Kosmose Vaikus (which is described as made using Suno) getting the most outrage.
Here are his own words on the matter. From what I can find, it doesnāt seem he acknowledges/understands the issue of the training data being stolen from non-consenting musicians.
Some related personal thoughts (and feel free to disregard them, theyāre probably ignorant): As someone without much of an ear for music, this stuff sounds like the same generic instrumental songs that computers were generating even before the current hype bubble.
I remember watching the CGP Grey video Humans Need Not Apply back in the day, and it was using AI background music even then (2015), albeit only to prove a point. The only real differences between then and now is that 1) modern models can generate songs in more genres and also generate (bad) vocals, and only because itās been fed the entirety of humanityās musical history rather than being trained only on licensed data, and 2) the hype bubble is releasing countless music generators and getting tons of non-musical people posting their generated stuff online, often with the intention of making a quick buck.
Would I have been able to tell that these songs were made my a machine? Probably not. But as I said, I donāt have an ear for music and wouldāve just figured they were made by a mediocre composer. Iād say thatās the biggest difference for all creative things nowadays. Back before LLMs, I wouldāve assumed it was a sloppy writer, artist, musician, etc. rather than a slop machine.
Itās also funny how, given enough generations, slop machines can sometimes churn out something passable or even half-decent. Gives major infinite monkey typewriter energy. It wouldāve been an interesting phenomenon to study if it wasnāt so energy-wasteful, trained on stolen data, and used by executives to oppress workers. Alas, in a better timeline.
Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering, the CGP Grey video aināt great, though it is interesting to look back at and see how AI hype looked in the mid-2010s compared to now.
Being outraged that a notable composer of anodyne placeholder music has made use of the anodyne placeholder music generator is frankly a bit bizarre to me.
Looking at the comments, most of the outrage is on principle - theyāre here to hear Kevin McLeodās own output, not a slop-botās.
I get what youāre saying, but to me at least, the issue is the theft that Suno has committed against millions of musicians. If he had trained a model only on his own/licensed/public domain work, then I wouldnāt be upset about it. In fact, I remember from back before the current hype bubble creatives using small generative models trained on their own work as fun little art projects.
Itās actually a bit sad how now that the reputation of generative AI has been tarnished because of its use by talentless idiots for the exploitation of workers, we probably will not see creatives making use of ethical machine learning in their art anymore.