Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

umwelt just means lifeworld, like how the world presents itself to the senses of a specific organism, "what it's like to be a bat" or whatever.

my contention is that, even if a.i. makes stuff that can't pass a turing test, they are still just imitating forms and conventions developed by people. the real a.i. art would be made for and by a.i.

also, the a.i. generated op-eds i've read have seemed bizarre and meandering. do you have a good one?

canadian newspaper op-eds are also terrible so it’s a low bar

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3

even if a.i. makes stuff that can't pass a turing test, they are still just imitating forms and conventions developed by people. the real a.i. art would be made for and by a.i.

im saying the art by and for AIs could be cool

most art by and for humans is awful, but a small minority hits the umwelt’s g-spot; maybe some art by ai for humans will be also be like that, maybe not. imo a close collaboration between human and ai will be more the thing. like you say “hey ai, play 10 different guitar licks over this bassline that sound kinda like a mix between Ron Asheton and Jimmy Paige” and then among the 10 you pick one you like and change it a bit

cool now she stole Holly Herdon's thing

But Holly Herndon is actually building it. Grimes is merely "talking" about it. She is very much the Steve Jobs to Holly Herndon's Wozniak in this regard. Unless she's getting her hands dirty and coding with the Endel team or a very hands on product management type role, but I'm guessing she's playing more of a consultant role and contributing a public face to help market it.

Also, Herndon's incorporation of AI and the ritual around training it into her recent live sets goes far beyond anything Grimes has ever done from a performance or even conceptual standpoint.

Lol @ grimes haters like “she doesn’t even have a phd in computer music!”

i don’t think holly herndon has dibs on this; it prob won’t prove to be just a gimmick. (also her AI album left me cold). more than one musician will collaborate with AI; as they get better it’ll start to become more common

Lmao sure as if this isn’t the rich person version of blowing weed smoke in your pet’s face and insisting “they love it” https://t.co/rqE5kHOVXP

— Alex®️ (@sexymollusk) October 28, 2020

Herndon has not, AFAIK, gone around advocating for machines to actually replace human endeavor, let's keep her out of this imho

yeah sorry she doesn't deserve that

what’s “human endeavour”?

doin things

You don’t have to be “rich” to show your kid Apocalypse Now; you just need a VCR.

I’m sure AI created music will reach a point where at least one out of 10 of the biggest hits of the year is generated by computer algorithms but it doesn’t work for every genre and there’s many factors to consider besides “it sounds good”, most chart hits are personality-driven. I don’t think if THXF-2543 released some crap like “Toosie Slide” it would receive the amount of attention than if someone like Drake released it.

Mostly I think it will end up helping human musicians get out of a writers block, inspiring them to try some arrangement or progression to a song they hadn’t considered.

Even when I’m playing extremely procedural games like Galaga I still feel like I’m having an artistic experience created by a programmer

I think the future she’s suggesting would be the same as owning an iPhone— different songs (different apps) but still essentially a conversation with the device, the programming, the designer

I would very much like to see a Data-style cellist face off against the greatest we humans have to offer

I can bet my house - and I swear it’s a beautiful house - that I’ll die before any AI creates an album like say this year’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters by Fiona Apple or idk Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or even an album like Art Angels or Visions to stay in topic.

thinking about those bumper stickers that said "drum machines have no soul" here

i guess this makes me pretty much a to-be-forgotten hayseed but shucks, what if making music and art wasn't so impossible bc noone has the time. maybe automate the other stuff and let us make the art? lol that's the kind of thinking that gets me sent to a crappy off world colony i know

more seriously can art be optimized in this way? i'd say its conceivable but not likely

there’s many factors to consider besides “it sounds good”, most chart hits are personality-driven. I don’t think if THXF-2543 released some crap like “Toosie Slide” it would receive the amount of attention than if someone like Drake released it.

I have to partially disagree in that Drake may or may not have much personality, but “Tootsie Slide” is a good song. And I don’t think AI can replace (good) songwriting – much as some ppl (including on here) may snark that “a computer could have written this.”

I actually like Drake but he has several songs that sound like autopilot and imho Tootsie Slide is one of them.

Anyways... sorry for sniping on Tootsie Slide... it's not that bad of a song, I just think it's one of those songs that wouldn't have half the impact it had if it weren't for the Drake trademark.

It might not seem like it based on my last comments, but I hate gatekeeping "rockist" attitudes. I actually agree with Grimes on this one and I understand exactly what she's going for in here. A.I. will be a very helpful tool to develop musical ideas and it will one day reach the ability to create 'perfect' songs from scratch, but humans are very much not fans of perfect things.

Grimes is pretty much otm, but I don't see an AI serving as a singular cultural figure like Bowie. To me, it seems way more likely it'll get used by the future Spotifys to create new, interesting music for you steered by your likes/dislikes

I mean you can still get a charismatic human to be the face of the operation and AI to do the songwriting.

Yes definitely. But it just seems a much easier task for an AI to create music an individual will like based on their tastes vs. correctly guessing what the next big thing will be. The latter involves knowledge outside what a strictly music-making AI would know, like music trends or even societal trends

Plus, when the technology is there, it'll be in the hands of too many people to really stick out the way Bowie did. That's why I thought the Bowie comparison was not quite right

the tech grimes is imagining where AI can make music on its own as well as humans can is a long way away still and she even says that in the article ("in a century" etc.)

it wouldn't surprise me if sometime this decade there are good machine learning-powered compositional tools etc. that can be used effectively to provide accompaniment to human-created works or suggest musical ideas etc. but the end result from that is still going to be about human curation and using whatever AI tools there are as a creative partner and i think that would be quite exciting and interesting. rather than being a replacement for humans i'd expect initially you'd get a different sort of creativity that can lead to novel and interesting results if applied well, if current text-generation tech is any guide to how things will develop. obviously there are people already trying to do this at the moment but it's still very experimental, limited & inaccessible etc. since the tech just isn't there yet.

even the best text-generation tools at the moment like gpt-3 still rely a lot on human curation of both input and output. probably the best application that uses gpt-3 at the moment is AI dungeon which is really really incredible and one of the funniest and most entertaining games i've ever played, but the experience you get from it is very much a collaboration between the human players and the AI feeding off each other. to really get the best out of it you have to be willing to reject the AI's responses when they don't work for you and ask it to try again and even at its best it doesn't really feel like the AI's responses are 'human' - instead it has its own bizarre creativity that is distinctly inhuman and all the better for it.

ufo otm

Yeah, I feel like I'm echoing a lot of the responses already in this thread, but it feels like there's a step missing here. "When will AIs make art / music / whatever?" -> how do we know they aren't already?

Humans are so bad at understanding or even recognising other forms of life / intelligence / play / (potentially art would go here) that are already existing on our planet. How would we know what kind of "art" an intelligence so unlike our own would even look or sound like?

The question of "when will AIs make music that is recognisable and enjoyable to humans?" is quite a different one. I find it kind of uncomfortable when people speak in ways of, "well, we have to train it to create scenarios that appeal more to humans" - the autist in me wants to protest "why can't we train ourselves to better understand what is interesting / entertaining / artistic to other intelligent entities?" That dominator impulse, that "our" values are the correct ones, and we should train others to fulfill our wants - that always flags up caution when I see it.

(I always prefer the suggestions that sound more collaborative, more Kraftwerkian - "we play the machines, and the machines play us" etc.)

AIs: "yeah, we just make music for ourselves and if any humans like it that's a bonus"

Haha, yeah, that's really funny!

But thinking "well, what kind of music would AIs listen to" - you know, that reminds me of the processes of listening to other kinds of music that are intensely *alien* to me, i.e. I am quite LOLold now, and often when I listen to music that the teenagers around me love, I am totally lost, and the music sounds incomprehensible to me. (Or indeed, listening to music from entirely other cultures or subcultures, where I don't really understand the rules of how the music is made, or what it's about or who it's for!) The best way to access or get into that kind of music is to ask the teenagers - well, what do *you* like about this stuff? And they'll respond that it turns out the point is something that I hadn't even considered.

Do you want AI music to be just a kind of generative Spotify Hipster Boyfriend that gives you more of what you already like? Or do you want to treat AI music more like a Russian teenager who listens to music you find utterly incomprehensible, and try to learn to comprehend what the AI gets out of it?

Also, AIs wouldn't need to listen to music linearly in time the way we do. They could presumably, say, take in a whole MP3 at once as a data file.

toosie slide is a terrible song and drake on autopilot at his worst

this is dumb. even if possible, that level of production would be overwhelming and human listeners wouldn't get anything out of it. if shakespeare wrote 10,000 plays just as good as hamlet no one would bother trying to wrap their head around his oeuvre. same if bowie made 10,000 Lows

by this logic, shouldn’t we try to minimize the number of great works of art and music, in order to free us up from the bother of trying to wrap our heads around too many of them?

― flopson, Wednesday, October 28, 2020 2:20 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

one must wrestle with the Super Deluxe Sign O' The Times and answer this for oneself

Or do you want to treat AI music more like a Russian teenager who listens to music you find utterly incomprehensible, and try to learn to comprehend what the AI gets out of it?

I already have Autechre to scratch that itch for me

ai doesn't exist and will never exist and this shit is stupid beyond all measure.

fuck grimes and her opinions, she married one of the most contemptible men alive ffs

One could argue that the situation that Grimes is describing already exists-- I remember the early 00s when there were arguments like "are DJs musicians?" (not turntablists, but song selectors). I don't, on a base level, see much difference between present-day algorithmically-devised playlists and "an AI-manufactured Bowie" aside from where we are on the development curve

ai doesn't exist and will never exist and this shit is stupid beyond all measure.

― Give me a Chad Smith-type feel (map), Thursday, October 29, 2020 3:15 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

“strong AI” or whatever exists but for writing something close to what she’s talking about already exists

*strong AI or whatever may never exist

the OpenAI soundcloud dump is my most listened to album this year, the GANs are already capable of making mistakes that humans are incapable of making themselves. even the most generic jukedeck / aiva / amper stuff trying to make traditionally pleasing / consonant / ignorable background music for commercial music occasionally throws a 'nice' chord change that obeys all the rules, and yet is so totally alien & wrong that at times I have to, y'know, yell

/commercial use

ya ive dipped into those a bit. on some level ai is like a really insane vers of an arpeggiator. i wonder if there was a luddite rxn against like arpeggiators and sequencers when they first came out too

it’s funny how this thread is 50% people idly speculating about ai and music and 50% online rage-dads whose opinion on it is perfectly correlated with their opinion on elon musk, just because this is the grimes thread

🖼

quote was meant to be: "on some level ai is like a really insane vers of an arpeggiator"

i wonder if there was a luddite rxn against like arpeggiators

Well, God did intend us to pick all the notes for ourselves

I need to go listen to the songs you two are talking about, I haven't heard much recent AI-generated music. I thought Microsoft Songsmith produced some interesting "mistakes" along the lines Milton describes and that was ten years ago

some of y’all never been to a YONA show curated by Ash Koosha


The vast majority of Yona’s lyrics, chords, voice, and melodies are created by software, with Koosha mixing and producing the final song.

https://youtu.be/gT2D5_CTzb4

the open ai soundcloud is interesting thanks milton

I wish I could be tricked into listening to this stuff with some fake bio of a weirdo electronic artist, it's hard to listen without the baggage of knowing what it is

The way I’d break it down is that there are a number of artists and toolmakers who are in the generated music space now, who sit in a different space than musicians that are in the mainstream or fringes of the mainstream, who are busy creating/programming and writing about the theoretical space of how AI and generative music could become mainstream. There are artist spaces and festivals, the kind with panels and nerds talking in dark corners about *how* the music was made, that have been going on for some time. I think to a lot of the adventurous music-listening public, the creative process and technique is a very opaque thing and the end product has a limited audience because you have to have an idea of how and why the music is created.

As far as I know, Grimes sits on the other side of this. She’s a musician but a consumer of music-making technology, and she works outside the space you could, perhaps with a grimace, call the “academy.” She’s on the Coachella, holograms dancing on stage, side of it. I know a number of people (including Holly Herndon iirc) were engaging with her on twitter about some of the things she’s previously said and she might be synthesizing some of those thoughts when making comments about AI in music now, but it’s not her wheelhouse.

The thing about the creating-tools side of things is some bits seem rudimentary or even cobbled together until it’s formalized into a piece of software or something that befits a creative workflow and then it’s *everywhere*. The precursors to things like ProTools and Ableton were used by a handful of people for very meticulous projects, and now they’re everywhere. We’re getting close to presets and a lot more point-and-click for things like Max/MSP and integrating OpenAI-style noodling into creative workflows to the point where they’re something you just jump into, but not quite yet. And I think that’s when Grimes comes in.

I had an interesting conversation at a bar last year with a guy who set up the A/V rigs for large touring shows — he was doing a simple gig just doing work for a conference in town — and he was enthusiastically explaining some realtime effects a couple acts he’d worked for had used and how it was an amazing show. I was thinking back to a coordinated electronic music/laser show I’d seen closer to 2010 and once I tried finding video clips on my phone to show, I realized that it looked completely unimpressive now. Because the show I’d seen was doing something new that was pretty rudimentary — but not previously done — and now it was completely archaic. The tools for linking those things together in the way I had witnessed is now completely run of the mill.

lulz

Tbf her Canadian company applied, not her.