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Advertising generates economic production, rather than economic production generating advertising.
Advertising generates economic production, rather than economic production generating advertising.
===Robot Nirvana===
===Robot Nirvana===
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.   
Why the emergence of [[artificial intelligence]] that can write its own Nirvana tunes tells less about our future than thought leaders 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'''.''}}
{{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.
Have a listen [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzn21tX2ykY to the video].<ref>Oddly, the official tracks have been pulled from Spotify and YouTube. </ref> It’s a clever forgery — it’s got the inexpert syncopations, and an amusingly authentic out-of-tune guitar, and Nirvana’s trademark intensity shifts. But play it back-to-back with In Bloom and it’s just not the same. For all the power of AI they seem to have co-opted at least a singer and possibly a whole band to record the song, so we’re a significant step away from this really being artificial intelligent.


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.
That’s not to say music AI isn’t impressive: it is ''stunning''. The AI drummer on Apple’s ''Logic Pro''. Amplitube’s amplifier emulation. Izotope’s mastering plugins. These are genuinely amazing, and really are putting folks out of work/bringing professional studio technology in the hands of [[Dangerboy|talentless amateurs]] (delete as applicable).


Now a new Pink Floyd album in 1994 could have taken one of the following forms:
But the implied promise here isn’t technical emulation but replacement of humans altogether in the creative process. The futurologists are over their skis here. Can [[artificial intelligence]] give us the music Kurt Cobain was going to give the world had he not died? It cannot. ''Of course'' not. Even logically, this is barking mad: the guy shot himself. There is a path-dependency problem here: Cobain could not make any more music, so whatever a machine can come up with, however brilliant, ''it could not be that''. It would be something different. It would be ''some other process'' trying to emulate Nirvana.
*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 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 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.”
We don’t need AI to do that: AI just makes it cheaper and easier. However good these processes may be, it is never the same. Just ask the surviving members of Pink Floyd.


Roger Waters still tours ''The Wall''. No-one tours ''The Division Bell''. In a way it is the direct equivalent of Nirvana by AI: a luscious, flawlessly executed recombination of a bunch of ''old'' Pink Floyd records, put together without the “watchmaker” of Pink Floyd himself.
===== The Dark Side of the Wall =====
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 — you know, the one Pink Floyd welcomed us to in 1975 — judged the mood of the record-buying public, which tends to buy Pink Floyd records regardless of what they are like, and concluded it was time for a new one.  


But, problem: other than through their [[legal eagle]]<nowiki/>s, band members were not talking to each other. Lyricist Roger Waters had walked out over a decade earlier, and there was no chance of him coming back. What to do?  In 1994, using AI to emulate the band’s recorded output wasn’t really on the cards. The remaining members did it the hard way. They pulled off a fair approximation. Without Waters, guitarist David Gilmour had his wife, an author, contribute lyrics. 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.
''The Division Bell'' ''sounded'' like Pink Floyd. It was recognisably the same product. But it emulated old ideas, recycled old tropes, tried to recapture the glorious seventies. There was nothing new in it. It went nowhere. It did not develop. It could not anticipate where Roger Waters might have taken the vision, because Waters wasn’t there to give that impetus. One critic posted a one-line review which captured the problem exactly:
“''Wish You Were An Animal On The Dark Side Of The Wall''”.
Waters still tours ''The Wall''. No-one tours ''The Division Bell''. Psychologically, no-one wants a facsimile, a reimagining or a rehash, however much effort one goes to to achieve it.
In a way ''The Division Bell'' was a good analogue to Nirvana by AI: it is not a development of the artist: it is a recombination of ''old'' records, put together in a way ''that Kurt Cobain didn’t''. We know the artistic choices Cobain made, and they weren’t these ones. They’re the ones that ended up on ''Nevermind''. If the object is to emulate someone that we no longer have, and we are reassembling existing parts that Kurt Cobain left behind, then unless we submit them exactly as Cobain would have — as he ''did'' — then our recombination must be inferior.
So, as a recombination its an inferior. As an extrapolation of where Nirvana might go next, it is nowhere. [[Artificial Intelligence]] is not magic. It cannot see into the future or reconstruct dependent paths which did not happen. Given that Cobain’s path stopped abruptly in 1994, we do not have the necessary inputs to deduce what he might have been writing about in 1995. We cannot reconstruct that: it is no more effective than any kind of [[backtesting]].
Who knows what Cobain would be singing about had he not died? Perhaps he would have discovered a tantric yoga and spent a month in a commune in Bangor. Perhaps In Utero would have been composed entirely on Sitar. Maybe it would have been rubbish. We ''don’t'', and, ''cannot'' know.
And pop stars ''do'' decamp to spiritual retreats. The Beatles did. And no amount of technology pointed at ''Please Please Me'', ''With The Beatles'' and ''A Hard Day’s Night'' will yield anything resembling ''Rubber Soul'', let alone ''Sergeant Pepper'' or ''The White Album''.
Creatives: you’re not out of a job yet.
=== It’s not about the ===
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?  


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