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Newsletter cribnotes | Newsletter cribnotes | ||
===Robot Nirvana=== | ===Robot Nirvana=== | ||
Why the emergence of [[artificial intelligence]] that can write its own Nirvana tunes tells us | Why the emergence of [[artificial intelligence]] that can write its own Nirvana tunes tells us quite the opposite of what some people think it does. | ||
{{Quote|''Over The Bridge, a mental health awareness organisation, has created The Lost Tapes Of The 27 Club, a compilation of songs generated by [[AI]]. The four songs mimic the tonal qualities of Amy Winehouse, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison, imagining what music by the artists were like '''had they not passed away'''.''}} | |||
Emphasis added. No, creatives, you are not out of a job. | |||
In 1993 there had not been a Pink Floyd album of any kind for six years, and there hadn’t been a ''good'' one for fourteen. The Machine, judging the mood of the record-buying public, which tends to buy Pink Floyd records regardless of what they are like, considered it was time for a new one. But key band members were not talking to each other — other than through the medium of commercial litigation — and others were drifting away. | |||
Now a new Pink Floyd album in 1994 could have taken one of the following forms: | |||
*An actual, new Pink Floyd Album, where Roger Waters returned to join the, wrote most of the material and bossed, grumped and control-freaked the remaining members of the band as, allegedly, he did in the 1970s; | *An actual, new Pink Floyd Album, where Roger Waters returned to join the, wrote most of the material and bossed, grumped and control-freaked the remaining members of the band as, allegedly, he did in the 1970s; | ||
*The Pink Floyd album that was released, ''The Division Bell'', with Waters replaced by a session musician, and David Gilmour’s partner writing all the lyrics; | *The Pink Floyd album that was eventually released, ''The Division Bell'', with Waters replaced by a session musician, and David Gilmour’s partner writing all the lyrics; or | ||
*An album created by | *An album created by musically gifted Pink Floyd fans who are passionate about the band, deeply understand it, and have views on its thematic and musical direction, and who can create what they would expect a Pink Floyd Album to sound like. | ||
In 1994 we were still deep in [[A.I.]] winter, so a Pink Floyd Album made by [[A.I.]], deploying machine learning, [[Neural network|neural networks]] and natural language processing to emulate the band’s recorded output wasn’t really a viable output. But realistically, after the novelty had worn off, you would expect to to be somewhere low in that pecking order of options. | |||
As it turned out the remaining members, minus curmudgeonly creative force Roger Waters, pulled off a fair approximation of what machine learning can do now. Beautifully recorded and redolent of the band’s signature crystalline guitar solos, swampy organs and moody synth pads, ''The Division Bell'' went straight to number 1 in the UK and the US, eventually selling something like 10,000,000 worldwide. But the critical reaction was “mixed”; one wittily dubbing it “''Wish You Were An Animal On The Dark Side Of The Wall''”. Despite phenomenal sales, posterity has favoured Roger Waters’s judgment that ''The Division Bell'' was “just rubbish ... nonsense from beginning to end.” | |||
Now keep in mind that this was a a real album, created by actual members of Pink Floyd. A | |||
* | |||
The importance of authenticity. Why is it not the same when it isn't David gilmour playing that guitar solo? | The importance of [[authenticity]]. Why is it not the same when it isn't David gilmour playing that guitar solo? | ||
The importance of effort. We should not underestimate how we we value the effort required to produce intellectual property. Many years ago go robotics engineers designed a contraction that could play the flight of the bumblebee on classical guitar. Undoubtedly the machine was extremely complex, the programming highly ingenious and it executed the police flawlessly at tempo, undoubtedly more perfectly then the finest classical guitarist could. But would you pay money to sit in a concert hall and watch a robot playing classical guitar? Once the technical problem has been solved and can be inexpensively replicated the value of the performance tends to 0. Even though we can can program robots to flawlessly play, at no cost, we will still pay good money to watch a human virtuoso doing the same thing less well than the machine. | The importance of effort. We should not underestimate how we we value the effort required to produce intellectual property. Many years ago go robotics engineers designed a contraction that could play the flight of the bumblebee on classical guitar. Undoubtedly the machine was extremely complex, the programming highly ingenious and it executed the police flawlessly at tempo, undoubtedly more perfectly then the finest classical guitarist could. But would you pay money to sit in a concert hall and watch a robot playing classical guitar? Once the technical problem has been solved and can be inexpensively replicated the value of the performance tends to 0. Even though we can can program robots to flawlessly play, at no cost, we will still pay good money to watch a human virtuoso doing the same thing less well than the machine. | ||