The Random thought thread

[willedoo]

The graphics are all AI. Not sure how much of the audio is. There's a heap of them on their youtube channel, all AI visuals. It's amazing how fast the AI technology is moving in the field of graphics.

[Marty_d]

I went to visit my mum on Saturday and she had a YouTube video paused on her computer - something about a sniper taking a 600m shot.

When I asked her about it she was telling me how interesting it was, this female sniper doing a 600m shot against the Taliban in Afghanistan recently.

However, the woman on the screen and her male spotter looked like models, their olive drab clothes were WW2, their pistols looked like Glock butts with weird circular end on the slide, and the rifle had iron sights!

Pure AI slop. God knows what it was telling her.

[facthunter]

Better get used to it as it's only going to get worse.  I keep saying that you can get anything o YouTube. Stop posting it unless it's particularly good  and vetted and expect People to spend time watching it.. We can go through this stuff at home. IF we want to. Nev

[rgmwa]

Good song but definitely AI. Look at how the guitar and harmonica being played (or not). There's a lot of these videos out there. Great songs but all AI generated, including the lyrics and music I think. What's the world coming to?

Edited 16 hours ago by rgmwa

[nomadpete]

Yes, the video looks A.I. 

But the lyrics resonated.

I was hoping the sound track might be real.

[rgmwa]

You can only hope so. 

[willedoo]

1 hour ago, Marty_d said:

I went to visit my mum on Saturday and she had a YouTube video paused on her computer - something about a sniper taking a 600m shot.

When I asked her about it she was telling me how interesting it was, this female sniper doing a 600m shot against the Taliban in Afghanistan recently.

However, the woman on the screen and her male spotter looked like models, their olive drab clothes were WW2, their pistols looked like Glock butts with weird circular end on the slide, and the rifle had iron sights!

Pure AI slop. God knows what it was telling her.

There's heaps of them getting around these days, all BS. A lot of them are about military women amazing everyone. All a similar theme- everybody takes them for granted, pokes fun at them etc. and at the end of the video they find out she is actually a high ranking general or a highly decorated special forces hero or similar drivel. All clickbait for views to their channel.

[onetrack]

Shouldn't the blues song go .... "everybodys scrolling....."?

[nomadpete]

7 hours ago, onetrack said:

Shouldn't the blues song go .... "everybodys scrolling....."?

Aaaah, if the lyrics are really A.I. it surely would have.

 

Does this mean I have to disregard a 'song' that is nice, just because it might be presented by A.I. ?

 

I disregard almost all video that accompanies music anyway.

 

Do I have to go back to playing my old CD's that predate A.I. ?

 

Octave, what is the destiny for musicians?

[octave]

2 hours ago, nomadpete said:

Octave, what is the destiny for musicians?

Interesting question. I could just wimp out and say, “I’m retired now.”

 

Music has always evolved alongside technology. The instruments available to composers today are vastly different from those available centuries ago, whether in orchestras, jazz, rock, or electronic music.

 

Of course, AI is a rather different innovation.

 

I think AI in music is inevitable, and like most technological change, it will bring both benefits and drawbacks.

On the positive side, AI is a democratiser. It allows almost anyone to experiment with composition, arranging, and production. That could open the door for talented people who may never have had formal training or industry connections.

 

On the downside, it may also lead to an overwhelming amount of average material. Music has often evolved because composers and performers broke the rules of their time. AI, at least in its current form, largely works by analysing existing music and reproducing variations of it. Whether it can truly innovate in the human sense remains an open question.

 

For me, music is deeply human. I would rather hear a second-rate live orchestra or band than a flawless recording of a world-class performer. The imperfections, the spontaneity, and the sense of shared experience matter. In some ways, this tension has existed for decades, as recordings became increasingly engineered and perfected.

Technology has always reshaped the music industry. In the 1940s, venues employed large big bands with 20 or 30 musicians. The arrival of the electric guitar and amplified music made it economically attractive to hire four or five performers instead. That was a loss in one sense — the big band era was awesome, but it also helped create rock and pop music as we know it today.

 

I suspect AI will become very useful in commercial areas of music. For example, we may not always need a human composer to create an advertising jingle or background track. My concern is whether this eventually leads to a kind of musical “fast food”, content that is efficient and disposable, but lacks depth, individuality, and genuine human expression.

 

In the end, I don’t think AI will destroy music. But I do think it may change what we value in music, and perhaps make the human element even more important.

[old man emu]

6 minutes ago, octave said:

Whether it can truly innovate in the human sense remains an open question.

I think that the question has been well and truely answered. By its very nature, AI can only utilise what already exists. As you can say, it can rearrange what exists, in the same way that composers have created variations on the works of others. However, it takes a human imagination to innovate. Here's an example. Pete Townsend of The Who played around with reverberation using an electric guitar. No AI program would have thought to do that. When he achieved a useable result, other rock guitarists began to use the technique.

[octave]

1 minute ago, old man emu said:

By its very nature, AI can only utilise what already exists. As you can say, it can rearrange what exists, in the same way that composers have created variations on the works of others.

I would say, though, that that is also what many composers do. You can take any modern song and find bits of older music in it. This is not necessarily bad; in fact, I think it is good. This is why music evolves rather than just making random jumps in all sorts of directions.  The question is, will AI in the future be able to do this?

[old man emu]

20 minutes ago, octave said:

I would rather hear a second-rate live orchestra or band than a flawless recording of a world-class performer.

I listen to ABC Classical all day. (I can't get other radio stations and I don't stream. I just want background noise.) The presenters often go on about how wonderful some virtuoso plays a known piece. To my unsophisticated ear I can't detect any diffrence between players. To my way of thinking, a composer writes down what might be compared to a software program that will produce a sequence of sounds that is pleasing to the listener. Once that sequence is written, anyone with instrumental skills can reproduce those sounds, whether it be a virtuoso or a student. I suppose the difference would be in the number of flaws made in each performance.

[nomadpete]

51 minutes ago, octave said:

On the positive side, AI is a democratiser. It allows almost anyone to experiment with composition, arranging, and production.

Therein lies my biggest worry. It doesn't (in my opinion). It does allow almost anyone.... to access one or two A.I. systems to do all that for them. Standardising, not creating. So far, I see that A.I. does not have the ability to innovate with original artistic input.

 

No doubt it can research existing information and draw conclusions from that. Even when A.I. grows up more, will it ever be capable of mimicking human tangental creativity? (ie: creativity)

Edited 2 hours ago by nomadpete

[nomadpete]

54 minutes ago, octave said:

I suspect AI will become very useful in commercial areas of music.

But we already have elevator music.

[octave]

5 minutes ago, nomadpete said:

Even when A.I. grows up more, will it ever be capable of mimicking human tangental creativity? (ie: creativity)

I mostly agree but are you confident you can identify AI music from human music?

[octave]

40 minutes ago, old man emu said:

listen to ABC Classical all day. (I can't get other radio stations and I don't stream. I just want background noise.) The presenters

OME if you did stream there is now Classic FM 2 which has no talking, just wall to wall music. I often listen to this overnight.

[nomadpete]

45 minutes ago, old man emu said:

To my way of thinking, a composer writes down what might be compared to a software program that will produce a sequence of sounds

I often listen the same way as you. Thank you ABC.

But in spite of a score that was scribed by a famous composer, I dispute

 

45 minutes ago, old man emu said:

anyone with instrumental skills can reproduce those sounds, whether it be a virtuoso or a student.

Maybe when I lapse into 'background noise' type of listening. But I might have three different CD's of a given piece of music that all have the same notes in the same order, but they all sound (feel) totally differen musically to me. Some people might have:-

 

"Seeing colors for sounds is known as chromesthesia, a type of synesthesia where auditory stimuli trigger visual experiences, such as perceiving colors when hearing music or other sounds. "

(from wiki)

Edited 2 hours ago by nomadpete

[octave]

28 minutes ago, nomadpete said:

But I might have three different CD's of a given piece of music that all have the same notes in the same order, but they all sound (feel) totally differen musically to me.

The thing is that written music only gives you so much information.  It is a l like a script for a play. Shakespeare wrote the words but different actors deliver those lines differently.  For any classical piece of music you can find recordings by many different performers. If they were identical there would be no point in there being any more than one definitive recording.  Composers also often leave a lot to the performer. Mozart for example did not generally use articulation marks (slurs, staccato etc) as most composers did preferring to let the performer use their own interpretation.  There is also  issues such as tone quality. My primary instrument is clarinet. It is capable of producing an edgy bright tone or a richer darker tone or a jazz tone 

[octave]

Here are a couple of pieces of music trivia.  

 

During war 2, the BBC would play the opening of Beethoven's 5th Symphony (which I think everyone would recognise) before news programs.   The rhythm is short, short, short, long, which is the same as the Morse code for V. This became part of the V for victory campaign.  Famously, Churchill used to hold up his fingers as a V but initially got it the wrong way round, which meant something quite different.

 

The well-known theme tune to Mission Impossible, composed by Lalo Schifrin started out with that famous  long, long, short, short, which is Morse code for MI