An AI Singer-Songwriter Just Debuted Her Original Song—And The Responses Are Just Brutal
An AI Singer-Songwriter Just Debuted Her Original Song—And The Responses Are Just Brutal

An AI Singer-Songwriter Just Debuted Her Original Song—And The Responses Are Just Brutal

AI singer-songwriter 'Anna Indiana' debuted her first single 'Betrayed by this Town' on X, formerly Twitter—and listeners were not too impressed.
This needs to be hammered into techbro's heads until they shut the fuck up about the so-called "AI" revolution.
I've been doing a lot of using, testing, and evaluating LLMs and GPT-style models for generating code and text/prose. Some of it is just general use to see how it behaves, some has been explicit evaluation of creative writing, and a bunch of it is code generation to test out how we need to modify our CS curriculum in light of these new tools.
It's an impressive piece of technology, but it's not very creative. It's meh. The results are meh. Which is to be expected since it's a statistical model that's using a large body of prior work to produce a reasonable approximation of what it's seen before. It trends towards the mean, not the best.
This'd explain why inexperienced users of ai would inevitably get mediocre results. Still takes creativity to get stolen mediocrity.
I'm curious if you've gotten anything decent out of them. I've tried to use it for tech/code questions, and it's been nothing but disappointment after disappointment. I've tried to use it to get help with new concepts, but it hallucinates like crazy and always give me bad results, some of the time it's so bad that it gives me answers I've already told it we're wrong.
That's where some of the significant advances over the past 12 months of research have been, specifically around using the fine tuning phase to bias towards excellence. The biggest advance there has been that capabilities in larger models seem to be transmissible to smaller models by feeding in output from the larger more complex models.
Also, the process supervision work to enhance CoT from May is pretty nuts.
So while you are correct that the pretrained models come out with a regression towards the mean, there are very promising recent advances in taking that foundation and moving it towards excellence.
I'm excited for how these tools will be used by human creators to accomplish things they could never do alone, and in that aspect it is a revolutionary technology. I hate that their marketing calls it "AI" though, the only intelligence involved is the human user that creates prompts and curates results.
I get the sentiment, but don't really agree. Humans' inputs are also from what already exists, and music is generally inspired from other music which is why "genres" even exist. AI's not there yet, but the statement "real creativity comes solely from humans" Needs Citation. Humans are a bunch of chemical reactions and firing synapses, nothing out of the realm of the possible for a computer.
Yeah, I'd actually make a more limited statement. Real creativity requires the subjective experience and the ability to generate inputs solely from subjectivity i.e. experience the redness of the color red. AI could definitely do that, which is why LLMs are not AI imo
It's not the techbros leading this, it's the BBAs and MBAs that wouldn't know art if Michelangelo came to life and slapped them in the face with the sistine chapel.
I would never call an actual technician a techbro! Techbros are Rick&Morty ledditor "fuck yeah science!" dorks.
I see it an more an inability to analyze, evaluate, and edit. A lot of "creativity" in the world of musical composition is putting together existing elements and seeing what happens. Any composer from pop to the very avant-garde, is influenced and sometimes even borrow from their predecessors (it's why copyright law is so complex in music).
It's the ability to make judgements, does this sound good/interesting, does this have value, would anyone want to listen to this, and adjust accordingly that will lead to something original and great. Humans are so good at this, we might be making edits before the notes hit the page (Brainstorming). This AI clearly wasn't. And deciding on value, seems wildly complex for modern day computers. Humans can agree on it (if you like Rock, but hate country for example).
So in the end, they are "creative" but in a monkey-typewritter situation, but who is going to sort through the billions of songs like this to find the one masterpiece?
One of the overlooked aspects of generative AI is that effectively by definition generative models can also be classifiers.
So let's say you were Spotify and you fed into an AI all the songs as well as the individual user engagement metadata for all those songs.
You'd end up with a model that would be pretty good at effectively predicting the success of a given song on Spotify.
So now you can pair a purely generative model with the classifier, so you spit out song after song but only move on to promoting it if the classifier thinks there's a high likelihood of it being a hit.
Within five years systems like what I described above will be in place for a number of major creative platforms, and will be a major profit center for the services sitting on audience metadata for engagement with creative works.
Plenty of humans make those judgements about their own creations. And plenty of them get a shock when they release their creations to the masses and don't get the praise that they expected.
I believe that's vital to the creative process, but yeah, I basically agree.
"Generative" is such a misleading term. It's not generating anything, it is replicative.
The anger comes from the fact that companies are using AI instead of hiring artists.
There is a distinction between a human being inspired by an existing piece of art and an ai creating something from other art. The human has to experience it through the lens of the human experience and create using the human body. AI takes multiple pieces of art and essentially makes a collage.
For the thousandth fucking time, NO.
'AI' doesn't feel joy, sadness, pity, entertained, or inspired when learning from others. Not even inspired to steal.
For now.
And don't forget, humans are also trained on the inputs of others.
The difference is everyone has a different prospective, remembers some parts forgets others. Some journalists found a trick which revealed ChatGPT training data and it was literally just verbatim stolen data which literally contained a real person's information. You could hack into someone's brain and they wouldn't be able to directly recreate anything from memory alone, just watch any "from memory" youtube video.
While it's true there's nothing stopping AI from having human-like experiences, the content laundering is the thing corporations actually want.
Meat goes in. Sausage comes out.
The problem for a lot of the companies behind these things, is that they've run into problems now their investors want them to turn meat into a black forest gateau.
I'm sceptical if they can manage that feat. But what do I know.
Still, AI is able to "create" new things by a combination of existing concepts. It can generate a Roomba in the style of Van Gogh for example, which is probably not something that currently exists.
"Roomba in the style of Van Gogh" is a new combination of existing things, but it can never create something truly original. Derivative.
Are you saying the idea of a unicorn wasn't new and original because it was drawing on the pre-existing features of a horse and narwhal?
Right just as soon as all the people proclaiming that can point to the soul bit of my brain. There is absolutely no reason to say that AI cannot be creative there's nothing fundamentally magic about creativity that means only humans can do it.
You're equating creativity to the soul. They're not the same thing. But we can definitely look at the brain and see what parts light up when perform creative tasks.
The belief that only humans can be creative is interestingly parallel to intelligent design creationism. The latter is fundamentally a religious faith, but it strongly appeals to the intuition that anything that happens needs a humanoid creator.
I don't think, the human brain is special either, but we are still two big steps ahead IMHO:
Yes, it is literally impossible for any AI to ever exist that can be creative. At no point in the future will it ever create anything creative, that is something only human beings can do. Anybody that doesn't understand this is simply incapable of using logic and they have no right to contribute to the conversation at all. This has all already been decided by people who understand things really well and anyone who objects is obviously stupid.
Good job tearing down that strawman! 🙄
Oh shit, I thought you had forgotten a "/s" at the end, but reading your other comments this is actually what you believe and how you talk. So... yeah, I'm not going to take someone who cites "people who understand things really well" as a source at face value.
Except that it's wrong... AI is capable of creativity. It created the artist name. It's clearly not a very developed or robust sense of creativity because it clearly just hashed up the name Hanna Montana, and the song is probably likewise just a hashed up existing song, but I'm guessing it probably did a better job of creating an original work than vanilla ice...
Would you say that a random name generator is a creative algorithm?
I'm sorry, anyone who says these so-called "AI" are capable of creativity are being hoodwinked by marketing. This is an algorithmic probability engine, it doesn't think and it doesn't have an imagination. It just regurgitates probabilistic responses from its large data set.