I was driving home from a delivery today, listening to some AI generated covers of songs (currently wandering a rabbit hole here) when I had some intermingling of thoughts. I should start by introducing the song that triggered all this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2VbC42rkrM
The debate will probably never be settled, every industry has it, and only by the world becoming one homogeneous culture (never gonna happen?) will it ever go away. What’s a better experience, 1 high quality raw ingredient or a completed dish of several high quality ingredients that work together in harmony? It’s case by case… The exception that comes to mind for me is fruit. A good peach can always be better than a peach tart, but I guess I’d always prefer pain au chocolat to just straight chocolate or cacao liquor.
We live in a world where some very interesting things are going to start happening to allow the very untalented people like me a chance to create/produce music without the help of anyone else. By taking some recordings of someones voice from a movie, running it through AI, mapping a digital version of their voice, and autotuning it to cover a song that I sing. You’ll never have to suffer my original, and I can get the finished effect I want. We can already do this, it’s crazy. I’m just lazy to start.
Surely it wont be perfect, that uncanny valley effect where you know you’re not sure if it’s AI or not but sounds inhuman, or a mimic of humans. There will come a day that connessirurs of music will decide as a blanket statement that AI music is inferior to real vocals, as blended coffee is inferior to single origin, blended whiskey is inferior to single malt, and blended tea or wine is inferior to mono-varietal.
Well… the last 2 things about whiskey and wine are already sort of false. Blended whiskey is not inferior to single malt, I’d say the opposite is true. The best matchas are surely blends, because mono varietals all have strengths and weaknesses. I know this because I’ve tested this. It’s not something I naively believe, I know it in my heart of hearts. Asia by and large agrees that blended whiskey is the way to go. North America is seemingly the opposite. Is it marketing, is it culture? I don’t know, both?
I was looking at a thread a guy made about his cyberpunk futuristic women using AI. He was getting bashed for ‘not really creating these images’ as AI did the work — but the pieces would not exist without him, his time, his tinkering, his base models, his manipulation. AI imamge creation is just another tool, it can do nothing alone. If we had paints that could adjust their colours according to where a light source is supposed to come from, would that be cheating? If we add sugar to under ripe strawberries in order to make them palatable, is that cheating?
But you cannot taste the strawberry for what it is, if you add sugar.
> No one wants to eat a shitty underripe strawberry.
This music is fake, the singer is AI
> This is music I wrote, I am singing the base, AI is covering my voice because it’s much better for the listener in the end.
This tea smells like pomelo flowers!
> The base of this tea is modern tie guan yin, spring harvest duck shit oolong, and jasmine pearls — all in specific proportions. Only someone who knows what each tea does, how they react when blended, and what pomelo flowers smell like (and that thinks they are appealing) could make this tea. The blend is surely better than its pieces, but it could not exist without high quality ingredients.
First and foremost, I think the fundamental understanding of single malt whiskeys, mono varietal wines, coffees and teas as ingredients needs to be common knowledge for the growth of human culture. After they are rigorously understood, they are to be used as means to an end result (blend) to achieve the pinnacle of flavor, that is the correct path.
I don’t know the point of this article. I’m just getting some ideas out of my head. Thanks!
Leave a Reply
I would love to hear from you