Trump and his acute destabilizing actions are the symptoms of the chronic, broad, deep destabilization of our society in the form of differing perceived realities, caused by....the internet and its exploitation by sick, greedy social media founders, investors/owners, and, yes, employees.
Thank god we are taking care of the “researchers working on things like music classification and generation” ! As long as we can convince ourselves we have a sound analysis of it, no need to support and defend people making actual art right. So much already made, who needs more?
This is not to defend Spotify (death to it), but to state that opening all of this data for even MORE garbage generation is a step in the wrong direction. The right direction would be to heavily legislate around / regulate companies like Spotify to more fairly compensate the musicians who create the works they train their slop generators with.
Expressing frustration at the pervasive tendency of technologists to look at everything, including art which is a reflection of peoples' subjective realities, with an "at-scale" lens, e.g., "let's collect ALL of it, and categorize it, and develop technologies to mash it all together and vomit out derivative averages with no compelling humanist point of view"
Well, that seems like a pretty reasonable thing to be pissed off about, thanks for taking the time to elaborate.
I think the overlap between the bureaucratic technologies developed by people who, by all accounts, are genuine lovers of the subjectivity and messiness of music qua human artistic production (e.g. the algorithmic music recommendation engines of the '00s and early '10s; public databases like discogs and musicbrainz; perhaps even the expansive libraries and curated collections in piracy networks like what.cd), and the people who mainly seem interested in extracting as much profit as possible from the vast portfolios of artistic output they have access to (e.g. all of Spotify's current business practices, pretty much), should probably prompt some serious introspection among any technologists who see themselves in that first category.
I read an essay a number of years back, which raised the point that, if you're an academic or researcher working on computer vision, no matter how pure your motives or tall your ivory tower, what do you expect that research to be used for, if not surveillance systems run by the most evil people imaginable. And, thus, shouldn't you share some of that moral culpability? I think about that essay a lot these days, especially in relation to topics like this.
We're very much trained to solve the most general case of any problem, for sensible reasons.
I first learned about this formulation of the rule from a case study in Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, where breaking the rule resulted in a much better user experience.
How does Spotify defend people who actually make art? There's virtually no difference between pirating and steaming through Spotify for the vast majority of artists.
Personally as an artist I'd rather give it to people directly for free but I'll meet the audience where they are. The "compensation" does not factor into it at all.
Interestingly, I'm seeing more and more small bands stepping off of Spotify, mainly because of AI clones and botted stream scams. Apparently they've decided losing that reach is acceptable. (anecdotal ofc. but even on local scale it's an interesting choice)
Yuck. Just to make it easier to train slop machines. The point of art is not to have completionist archives of EVERYthing that’s ever been made! Let it die. Death is the most natural part of life. Art is about the human experience, not “for researchers”.
The point is human connection. Art is a living reflection and record of human experience.
Art will persevere- the kinds of folks who prioritize what they like based on popularity were never the supporters artists (contrast with craftspeople trying to make a buck) counted on in the first place. Enjoy your derivative slop - we’ll continue on our imperfect, messy, individual, human artistic lives.
I am having a lot of trouble following you. Something has upset you: what would make you feel better?
do you mean that researchers should be disallowed from accessing art?
I do not see how research interferes with all the benefits you prioritise. Can't you continue to enjoy those benefits?
Many people think 'real' music has electric guitars. I think they're wrong, but why argue with them? I think it's fine if you do not like music made from music, but that ship sailed last century. One detail you may be missing is that there are imperfect messy individual artistic humans who make music from music too. Computers are no more an obstacle to human connection through music than electric guitars are.
> I am having a lot of trouble following you. Something has upset you: what would make you feel better?
Don't talk to people like here, please. It's passive aggressive and unproductive. GP's comment was fine, if not a bit impassioned, regardless if you agree with it.
That’s a fair question—we’re not in the business of enabling SMS spam, and we have a strict anti-spam policy that we enforce. Some of the use cases that we want to help with delivery are SMS 2FA, alert messaging, account notifications, customer care, etc. Everyone who sends SMS, including large, trusted brands, struggles with deliverability at a certain scale.
> I'm honestly not sure if I'm capable of working in tech anymore at this point and that's doing quite a number of any selfesteem I had.
You know, as Mr. Rogers said, "Not your toys, they're just beside you, but it's you I like" Your value isn't dependent on being able to work in tech or what you have. Go out, grab a coffee, wonder at the autumn leaves, do something nice for someone, see where that leads.
I disagree wholeheartedly with the sentiment that "traveling the stars" is a worthy goal, even more worthy than stewardship of the paradise we already have. We are living in heaven. We have a wonderful planet that nurtures us yet we continue to sabotage our favorable situation for the sake of growing worthless numbers like GDP, all while some people starve or are forced into lives of misery. And yes, I have read Parable of the {Sower|Talents}, who's primary lesson I take to be, we should prevent that terrible situation in the first place.
The earth is at best a temporary paradise, doomed to be burned up by a rogue asteroid or if it's exceedingly lucky its very own sun. Also incomprehensibly limited in the population and diversity of life it can support when compared with the universe.
How incredibly selfish of us to decide we shall be the select few that get to live on a single planet when the universe has the potential to support so many more lives.
Every second we delay, countless earth-like planets are being consumed by black holes, never to be seen again.
Given that humanity has only existed for ~200,000 years, and the threats you've mentioned are unknown but likely millions or billions of years in the future, is it fair to say it's a "temporary paradise?"
If we could live another ten, one hundred, or a thousand of humanity's lifetimes, that's not temporary in any meaningful sense.
To put it differently: making plans today for the earth's demise due to the sun's expansion is a rather extreme case of premature optimization.
It’s the next frontier and an area for expanding our technological prowess, even if we disregard the doomer psychology aspect of it. We have so much shit to do to even mine the asteroid belt that the next 100 years will look as different from now as we do from the Middle Ages. Not to mention when even further in the future we decide that interstellar travel must be attempted.
I think what's selfish is romanticizing "so many more [hypothetical] lives" while real lives now are smothered for the sake of malignant capitalism. Perhaps the fact the the former takes no self sacrifice makes it an appealing viewpoint.
People can track GDP without optimizing for it at the expense of the environment. Although, metrics do seem to hack the human brain in such a way that we can't help but try to optimize them, no matter how useless they are.
Unspoken and underlying the author's entire worldview seems to be, "the more new things, the better," a not uncommon tunnel view in the engineering world. The purpose of regulation, ideally, is to ensure that whatever activity/process is being regulated is worth the cost(s) for the majority of people. Defining those terms and making that decision is precisely the job of regulators, who are ideally accountable to a democratic base. In the worldview where all that matters is "growth," people suffer. Running water is a huge quality of life win for EVERYONE. If you ask most people what would really help make their lives better, it's not gonna be colonizing mars, building tunnels under LA, whatever, it's gonna be access to resources we already have. Healthcare, clean water, clean air...perhaps we should think more about engineering as it can be applied to expanding access, and not so much to "making new things," which most people don't need or care at all about.
Not to mention that giving healthcare, clean water and clean air to people who don’t have it will increase “growth” in long term, probably more than anything new.
Is access to these resources really an engineering problem, rather than a matter of political fact? The people with the power to expand access, politicians, don't have any real incentive to.
It's definitely a political problem more than any other, yes. What would give politicians more incentive to operate this way would be real campaign finance reform. Check out represent.us
I would argue that its an engineering/technology problem at heart. If access to those things was easy and cheap politicians would have no/less incentive to hold it back. It's probably not the same if it's a limited and restricted resource.
If we had more people trying to optimize food production, water distribution, Healthcare scaling and management etc, those things would become materially better, fast.
But we are more concerned with optimizing ads so we can buy shit we don't need so..
Underlying the political will to do something would be the implementation of that thing. To continue the running water example, you can imagine many technical challenges to distributing fresh water to the parts of the world that don’t already have it.
This undoubtedly needs talented engineers across the disciplines, definitely not just software.
>>> it's not gonna be colonizing mars, building tunnels under LA, whatever, it's gonna be access to resources we already have. Healthcare, clean water, clean air...
This exactly ... incremental improvements on existing infrastructure, increasing access etc would benefit more people than big bang, sexy stuff like hyperloop.
Let's be clear about one thing: The hyperloop was intended to cast suspicion on infrastructure investments, primary rail. Who knows what will happen in the future? Maybe low pressure tubing will rule and no one will use rail? Then your investment will be for naught!
It's an age old method, the same as used in telecom to justify not spending on fiber infrastructure. Who knows what will happen in the future? Maybe wireless? Look at this idea what a future wireless service might bring!
(Completely ignoring the fact that fiber is what drives economy and innovation. Wireless is just a question of capex, if the fiber is already in place. Quite similar to how low pressure tubes have physical limitations that makes it unrealistic to replace rail.)
This is not only an obvious observation by now, as Musk has been pretty clear about what risks he saw with rail investments, particularly in California but also across the country.
> It's an age old method, the same as used in telecom to justify not spending on fiber infrastructure. Who knows what will happen in the future? Maybe wireless? Look at this idea what a future wireless service might bring!
With SpaceX's immediate success in becoming a global ISP, this turned out to be true.
New was good because humans needed many things (that were new at this point). Now that we got almost everything we need, "New" is no longer good on its own.
Humans did not “need” things they lacked, and live to tell about it. Every age could see itself as complete. We’re fortunate that it took until the mid 20th century to freeze everything in amber. Unfortunately, the mid 20th century left us some really problematic stuff that wouldn't pass regulatory scrutiny today - like car dependence - and now we can't get rid of it.
Except in practice regulation increases cost and reduces access, particularly of anything new. Regulation has made building so difficult in the UK that oligopolies have formed and 90% of the young will never be able to buy a house unless they inherit.
Personally I blame Right to Buy for the collapse in building new homes, as this graph [1] neatly illustrates; Local authority building collapses, Housing association building is a trickle by comparison. Private housebuilding has remained relatively stable since 1955 by comparison.
The financial crisis also has a notable effect, but it's small by comparison.
The cost of housing is fuelled mainly by lack of social rented supply, and the high cost of land with planning permission. It's also to some extent a consequence of political service to the baby boomer generation, who got high house building when they needed it, had the heyday of BTL and have constrained house building since to preserve the value of their investments. The size of houses is decreasing [2] and I can't find a source for it, but certainly anecdotally plot size is decreasing too. The young are paying more for less.
House size decreasing makes sense as people become more urban.
Everything else you said is exactly spot on though.
It was regulations intentionally written to make the rich richer and keep the poor poor that caused the issue. It wasn't a mistake, or an unintended effect of the nanny state going too far, quite the opposite.
The reason I mentioned it as such is that it's not really regulation, as much as the effects of the right to buy policy causing the public sector to stop building houses; reversing this wouldn't really be 'deregulating' but would actually be involving government to address a market failure.
The original idea of right to buy, as discussed by Labour, in the late 70s was to reinvest the money from sales in building new council houses.
The Tory policy implementation sold them off cheap and slowly ratcheted down the amount of the sales price going to that purpose and the building dramatically slowed. Again, not an accident or unintended effect.
Basically bribing the better off council house owners into voting conservative (and for policies that cause the housing crisis) at the expense of the poor.
It sounds callous, but even if those 72 deaths could be attributed to regulation on houses (they can't, that's apartment blocks), it would still be an acceptable price to pay. It costs less than a million to save a marginal life, housing regulations have cost north of a trillion (comparing total cost of housing stock then to now adjusted for inflation), so unless those regulations have saved a million lives? They aren't worth it.
Humans are really bad at thinking at scale, but this is essential for good pubkic policy.
So you are splitting hairs by, after the fact, by distinguishing between "houses" and "housing"; making up numbers of what regulations cost (not the same as the total cost of housing, right?) and insisting that fireproof cladding just isn't worth it in purely monetary terms.
> is to ensure that whatever activity/process is being regulated is worth the cost(s) for the majority of people
Ideally yes but in reality it ends up being a way for trolls to hang out under bridges and take their cut or to block new things to protect existing interests.
Is more housing in the best interest of the majority of people? Public transit? High speed rail? Better energy systems?
Totally agree. I think the issue here though is not with regulation itself, but with corrupting influence that we as constituents allow to infiltrate our regulatory bodies. I'd hope campaign finance would help solve this issue too – harder to pull a " Greg and Co. gave me $x so I'll appoint Greg jr. to this sweet regulatory position where he will inevitably act in his self-interest" kind of thing if the public has full view of Greg and Co.'s campaign contributions in the first place...
Did you miss the part where exactly these things suffer the most from regulation? How long until we mostly cannot afford healthcare for the middle class? Aren't we already somewhat there?
We can always go back to letting insurers deny health care based on “pre-existing conditions.” I’d rather regulators deciding people shouldn’t be priced out of the healthcare market for having asthma or diabetes.
Or go back before the (unfunded) EMTALA bill where uninsured people were told to just die in the hospital parking lot.
Whatever mechanism the government uses to “ensure affordable access” would be a regulation. We’ve seen what fully unregulated healthcare looks like and it’s people dying in the streets.
Agree that it would be a regulation. I'm suggesting that this be the goal of regulation, though. Instead, many regulations seem to be focused on improving quality without regard as to how that affects access.
That is the goal on the Dem side though. Universal healthcare isn’t picky on the how but on the outcome. That was a core theme of the failed “Hillary Care” bill in the 90s.
The Republican EMTALA bill solved access. Every ER is required to treat everyone regardless of their ability to pay. The republicans didn’t fund this particular bit of regulation so the costs flow into the outsized bills hospitals charge.
As you talk about the affordability of healthcare, I assume that you're talking about the US system. Consider this: is US healthcare more or less regulated than that of the rest of the developed world?
A more suitable comparison would be whether the US's (or Germany's) healthcare system is more or less regulated compared to 50 years ago. Now also look at the pricing.
Every one of the MidJourney images featured in this article is obviously derived from averaging. The model is trained to correlate the average look of this or that with whatever keywords. For example, the "artist at work" – okay from afar with no real examination/consideration, it looks like something, kind of. As soon as you actually begin to look at it, it becomes glaringly uninspired. Hmm, what's he working on there...is that a hand? what even is going on in front of the artist? How about the front and center desk – nothing is actually definitive, I can't recognize a single thing on that desk! Etc etc, and similar observations can be made about all of the other images.
Not that art should necessarily be a clear depiction of real things, far from that. Good art (read: art I feel a connection with and inspired by) is the presentation of a SUBJECTIVE POINT OF VIEW. In these images, all I see is the averaging of many points of view (the actual artworks the model was trained on, I presume), resulting in no point of view at all.
This technology will take jobs like designing 3-star hotel lobby wallpaper, not the places of human artists. Without a human point of view, "art" like this is flavorless jello.
Well, the author says they keep up on "the latest papers" and whatnot, which leaves me as yet unconvinced of the artistic quality of the future output from these models. We will see.
While I'm still rambling on about this – the author states: “In a strictly mechanical sense, yes, an artist can still create, knowing that the art could be done faster and better by AI.” The art cannot necessarily be done better by an AI, and the speed with which art is created does not matter, artistically.
> In short, it's a mistake to judge AI art by its current capability. It's about to go on an exponential tour.
It's been going on one for the last five years. Two years ago it would have been difficult to generate a picture that's recognizably anything at all, using any non-specific engine.
Now we're down to complaints that mostly don't matter that much. Two years from now..?
What you're describing is a known limitation of Midjourney and it's default impressionist style. Current solution to that problem: any particular item on the desk can be erased and re-generated with DALL-E, with prompt control, which will add a much clearer item.
That's an interesting idea dogcomplex, I'd be very curious to see the output of that process. Still ... who or what will choose what is too "average-y," what should be replaced with something more clear? Will some larger-scope model be responsible for that? Is there then any way to stop that recursion in an artistic way or does ultimately a human artist need to get involved?
