Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

haha yeah it's a circle of pyramid schemes! gotta get in on the top

everyone on ilx is a genius so ai content is a hilarious joke, but it actually is good enough for most people, already

― i really like that!! (z_tbd)

good enough _how_?

a version of something i wrote to a friend this morning. he was talking about the viral video of "what if wes anderson made lord of the rings".

the thing about "wes anderson making lord of the rings" is that from an ai standpoint it's fundamentally _uncreative_, it's subtractative, you're taking all of the information this ai has on file, which is a lot, and saying "ok ignore everything but these two things". you're applying a filter. i mean this is my job, this is what i'm paid to do. to take this enormous blob of stuff that is unrecognizable to humans and make something humans can understand out of it. to use the data to tell a story.

sucking up all of the information one can imagine and throwing it into a huge computer isn't creative. saying "do this with it" is human and is creative. anybody could have done it but this guy did. plus, it speaks to... like, there are two challenges in art, one is to create something and another is to create something that resonates with other people. shit that goes viral does this. it does this within the confines of late-stage capitalism, within the confines of a system which has biases about what to promote and what to not promote, so... like he was a hit maker. he made a hit, he's a one-hit wonder. a balance between novelty and acceptability. i don't think he's doing any more harm than buckner and garcia did. i don't think his work isn't up to the creative heights of buchanan and goodman, though.

mainly what i see in ai is a way to make art with _no creative motive whatsoever_. i was the video i was watching on manga sekai mukashi banashi was called "this anime was at war with itself", and the war was that between creativity and commerce. the studio was trying to make a ripoff of manga nihon mukashi banashi, but they hired madhouse to do it. and madhouse, because they were madhouse, created original and interesting work and for whatever reason - we don't know, but the person making the video suggests that it was because their contract was up - madhouse stopped working on it and the original studio started making all the episodes inhouse, and they weren't as good.

but here's something interesting... the person making the video notes that some of the later in-house episodes are interesting and creative the way the madhouse episodes were, even though they were made inhouse. like just continuing a show madhouse made gave it some of the flavor of the madhouse episodes. that was all humans and it wasn't ai.

and yet. and yet, the other thing that makes these episodes interesting is that all of the original credits were _wiped_. we don't actually _know_, in most cases, who made what episodes. this person watching the show is able to make, at least, educated guesses on who made what based on their style. they can tell the original apart from a fair forgery.

ai is better at making forgeries. some day it will be able to churn out an entire series of "transmorphers" movies. i'm not sure we'll see a legal precedent that rules that the guy who told a computer to "make lord of the rings in the style of wes anderson" deserves to be able to sell that, and that he should have the legal rights to that and not, say, wes anderson and the people who own lord of the rings... i mean on the off chance that happens, is that going to be an interesting movie? is that going to be worth watching?

also grammatically that whole thing is a mess and sometimes i do wind up saying the opposite of what i'm trying to say, hopefully y'all can parse it out anyway

SEO is important but it’s in service of driving people to your website to actually buy your product instead of the competitor’s.

yes well getting the traffic is the first step, then you have to do extensive CRO to get people to buy whatever it is you're selling, it's called funnel optimization.

good enough _how_?

good enough to not be noticed. ai content can be dropped into the middle of otherwise "human"-generated stuff, and it isn't noticed.

yes, it's noticed as bad when it's funny and bad and obvious. but much of the time, it isn't noticed at all, because it's good enough

good enough to not be noticed. ai content can be dropped into the middle of otherwise "human"-generated stuff, and it isn't noticed.

yes, it's noticed as bad when it's funny and bad and obvious. but much of the time, it isn't noticed at all, because it's good enough

― i really like that!! (z_tbd)

even if you put aside things like the famous "furry on a basketball court" experiment, to me, that's not good enough. what happens if you take out the human generated stuff altogether? what value does ai-generated content provide? i mean, that's what capitalism is based around, the idea of value, right?

My non-jokey response to AI churn of record reviewing is: would those bands be reviewed at all by a proper publication like your local paper or pitchfork? Because if not providing this kinda of thing and gaming the system a fraction is...a reasonable thing to do?

If it's not being noticed that hard then the AI is revealing a thing I would sorta know already in that readers (especially younger ones) might not be that discerning and don't care that much about the words. Or that a lot of reviewing might as well be generated by a bot.

just serving ad impressions alone generates some money. not much but at scale it can add up

User
write a review of arcade fire's 2004 album "funeral" in the style of pitchfork

ChatGPT
Title: Arcade Fire's "Funeral" Resonates with a Cathartic Elegance

Rating: 9.7

Arcade Fire's debut album, "Funeral," remains a seismic force in indie rock's landscape, an opulent sonic panorama that intertwines grandiosity with an intimate, emotional urgency. Released in 2004, this Montreal-based collective—helmed by Win Butler and Régine Chassagne—crafted a masterpiece that defies easy categorization, fusing chamber pop, post-rock, and indie sensibilities into a cohesive, cathartic symphony.

The album opens with "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)," an expansive track that sets the tone for the album's exploration of loss, nostalgia, and the relentless passage of time. From the outset, "Funeral" stands as a testament to the band's ability to seamlessly weave together disparate elements—joyful and melancholic, bombastic and tender.

One of the album's most striking qualities is its dynamic range. Tracks like "Neighborhood #2 (Laïka)" and "Une année sans lumière" showcase Arcade Fire's penchant for building tension through orchestral crescendos, only to release it in a torrent of emotion. The arrangements, marked by cascading strings, sprightly pianos, and thunderous percussion, contribute to the album's cinematic quality, painting vivid emotional landscapes.

Lyrically, "Funeral" grapples with mortality, existentialism, and the specter of loss, often tinged with a sense of hope and resilience. The anthemic "Wake Up" encapsulates this ethos, urging listeners to embrace life's uncertainties. Butler's impassioned vocals resonate, infusing each word with a raw authenticity that pierces through the lush instrumentation.

Régine Chassagne's contributions, both vocally and instrumentally, add another layer of complexity to the album. Her ethereal voice shines on tracks like "Haiti" and "In the Backseat," providing a poignant counterpoint to Butler's vocals. The thematic richness extends to the album's title itself—"Funeral"—a nod to the deaths that inspired its creation and a metaphor for the rebirth that follows.

"Funeral" remains a landmark in the indie rock canon, a testament to Arcade Fire's ability to craft a deeply personal yet universally resonant experience. Its enduring influence can be heard in the subsequent wave of bands that sought to replicate its emotional depth and sonic ambition. As the years pass, the album's potency shows no signs of waning, continuing to captivate listeners with its timeless exploration of the human condition. Arcade Fire's "Funeral" is not merely an album; it's a sonic tapestry that etches itself into the very fabric of the listener's soul.

this honestly sounds like something i would have read in my college newspaper.

it hurts me to think that today's college kids will not feel that it is worth it to opine on their favorite records in this sort of amateurish way, with gushing exuberance and tired metaphors.

i'm serious. the job loss thing is scary. but there is another issue, which is the decline in writing being seen as an important humanistic endeavor. if ai can do it, what's the point. reviewing books and albums for student publications is a big part of how i developed my perspective on the world.

Treesh I have a child who is a junior in high school and looking at colleges. Being required to write more than a paragraph is rare. Reading an entire novel? Hell no.

This is in a house with two professional writers, multiple English degrees, six thousand books, and a strong family tradition of journalism. I dunno. Maybe nothing matters and lol we are doomed

write a review of the arcade fire album "funeral" in the pitchfork writer style of 2004, but give it a really negative review. the review should come across as a big negative pan. but then, at the end, do a twist ending in the style of the film "The Sixth Sense" and give it a positive ending, one so positive that it is suspicious

ChatGPT
Title: Funeral: A Dirge of Disappointment

In the annals of indie rock, few bands have stirred the pot as ardently as Arcade Fire, a Canadian collective whose debut album, "Funeral," has been hailed as a revelation by many. However, one can't help but feel that the emperor is prancing around in imaginary garments. In the grand tradition of Pitchfork's 2004 snarkiness, let's dissect this maudlin spectacle with all the vigor it so sorely lacks.

From the very first notes of "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)," it becomes painfully evident that Arcade Fire is a band enamored with its own pretentiousness. The cacophony of strings and blaring orchestration seems more like a desperate attempt to mask a dearth of substantive songwriting. The band's penchant for lyrical melodrama is laid bare, and it's as if they've raided the clearance section of a high school poetry contest.

The album's alleged emotional depth feels more like a contrived attempt at profundity. The shrill yelps of Win Butler come off as grating, his lyrics delivered with a forced sincerity that reeks of insincerity. The much-lauded "Wake Up" may be the biggest offender, a cloying anthem that falls flat under the weight of its own bombast. The attempt to capture the spirit of adolescence feels more like a clumsy caricature than a genuine exploration of the human experience.

The production, overseen by the band itself and co-producer Markus Dravs, is a muddled affair. The wall of sound approach, popularized by Phil Spector in the 1960s, feels like a clumsy throwback rather than an innovative homage. The arrangements lack nuance, drowning any potential subtleties in an ocean of excessive instrumentation. It's as if Arcade Fire is desperately trying to distract the listener from the fact that the emperor's new clothes are nothing more than an illusion.

Now, brace yourself for the twist, dear reader, for the Sixth Sense revelation is nigh.

In the spirit of M. Night Shyamalan's narrative sleights of hand, one must reconsider the initial disdain with a skeptical eye. What if, just like Bruce Willis seeing dead people all along, Arcade Fire's "Funeral" has been playing an elaborate game of misdirection? What if, beyond the initial facade of forced emotion and contrived grandiosity, lies a genuine masterpiece?

The twist is this: beneath the layers of apparent shortcomings, there's an undeniable charm to the album. The very bombast and melodrama that seemed irksome at first now reveal a certain sincerity, a rawness that cuts through the veneer of indie aloofness. Arcade Fire may not be donning the emperor's new clothes; they might just be the eccentric couturiers of a musical renaissance.

Upon closer inspection, "Funeral" is a paradox. It's an album that, against all initial preconceptions, manages to capture the zeitgeist of the indie scene with a genuine fervor. It's as if Arcade Fire deliberately crafted a façade of mediocrity to sneak a Trojan horse of brilliance into the indie gates.

So, dear reader, put aside your pitchforks and let "Funeral" be the soundtrack to your awakening. Sometimes, the most cryptic riddles contain the most profound truths.

Upon closer inspection, "Funeral" is a paradox. It's an album that, against all initial preconceptions, manages to capture the zeitgeist of the indie scene with a genuine fervor. It's as if Arcade Fire deliberately crafted a façade of mediocrity to sneak a Trojan horse of brilliance into the indie gates.

*in red pen* intriguing, but HOW did the album accomplish this? use concrete examples.

*computer fan hums*

that is the thing that is interesting about chat gpt though. they never use examples to back up their claims. they always sort of circle around a topic instead of getting to the heart of it.

i am not even sure i disagree with that review. i think there is a way in which arcade fire's "melodrama" enabled a "new sincerity" that sharply differed from the sensibilities of most 90s indie. i at least believe that arcade fire was trying to do something like this. something like this is the essence of the "twee" thing that so many on ilx mistrusted. but then i remembered...

chat gpt has never listened to this or any other album.

Treesh I have a child who is a junior in high school and looking at colleges. Being required to write more than a paragraph is rare. Reading an entire novel? Hell no.

when artificial intelligence was a child it had to walk uphill in the snow for 8 miles

i make my students write a lot. i take many precautions to avoid chat gpt use but sometimes i wonder if some slips through.

this honestly sounds like something i would have read in my college newspaper.

it hurts me to think that today's college kids will not feel that it is worth it to opine on their favorite records in this sort of amateurish way, with gushing exuberance and tired metaphors.

i'm serious. the job loss thing is scary. but there is another issue, which is the decline in writing being seen as an important humanistic endeavor. if ai can do it, what's the point. reviewing books and albums for student publications is a big part of how i developed my perspective on the world.

Lukas, there are whole anti-homework movements out there. Most of which is good not bad! I hated homework and almost never did it.

But the amount of both reading and writing expected of current students appears to be different these days. Is all.

The trouble with the anti-homework movement when it gets to ELA classes is that reading and writing are both considered homework, so there's no more "Take this book home, read the first three chapters by tomorrow," and then you come in and talk about it, and then at some point you get assigned an essay and stay up late writing it, and maybe you peer review and edit it in class. Now all the reading and all the writing happen in class, and a lot of the students don't like reading so teachers just put on the audiobook, which forces everyone to at least hear it. And that takes forever so you don't do it more than once a semester, maybe once a year. And of course you also have to make time for the students to sit in class and write their essays. So you barely read, you barely write, and you barely have any time to talk about what you're reading - except during Socratic Seminars, when your discussion is graded on a rubric.

I don't play the audiobook for my students; they have the option to listen if they'd rather, but I figure this may be the only practice they get in decoding words on a page. And I ask them to do some amount of reading at home, though I know I lose a few students this way. But I can't do much more than that, because I can't magically give students with Internet Brain the attention span to sit down and read steadily at home. And the work itself is a lot harder than it would have been twenty years ago, because high schoolers just don't have the basic ease with reading they used to. They're literate, more or less, but it's like a second language to them, not their native tongue.

of course it can write a convincing review of Funeral - that's got to be one of the most written about albums in internet history. I bet it could nail Kid A, Geogaddi, and Illinois as well. if you ask it to write about something obscure though, it's prone to fuck up in real obvious ways. so I'm not sure how this is gonna work with new albums exactly.

I guess critics could plug in bullet points and gpt could mold it together

i make my students write a lot. i take many precautions to avoid chat gpt use but sometimes i wonder if some slips through.

I guess critics could plug in bullet points and gpt could mold it together

― treeship., Sunday, November 26, 2023 9:48 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah but see I think doing things like that is where people can easily tell it's AI

Lily Dale and Treeship, thank you for these perspectives. And thank you for teaching.

I really don't wish to be all "old man yells at cloud" or "get off my lawn," but it is just simply true that in 1985 I started working on a student newspaper. In 1989 I arrived at college with a typewriter. Literally, a typewriter. In 1993, as I was leaving, incoming students were just starting to arrive with computers.

Now that my children are getting to the same age, I look at what they are doing and I don't quite understand it, but I am trying to roll with it because it's where people are right now.

Part of being a parent is understanding the world your child will have to live in and what help or encouragement you're capable of providing to help them 'succeed' in that world. It's early days for generative AI, though some of the shape of things to come is emerging. That will have a place in the world they will soon enter. Even more important are the 'timeless' skills every human should master, such as kindness and self-awareness.

Aimless: yes, plus how to change a flat tire.

yea I think a lot about how my kids are growing up in a world where you can literally ask your wristwatch any question you want and it has nearly the entire sum of human knowledge to draw from. that alone feels like a pretty massive shift in how people learn/retain things

But I can't do much more than that, because I can't magically give students with Internet Brain the attention span to sit down and read steadily at home. And the work itself is a lot harder than it would have been twenty years ago, because high schoolers just don't have the basic ease with reading they used to. They're literate, more or less, but it's like a second language to them, not their native tongue.

Does this make you worry for them, or do you think once they run into a situation where they really need to do this stuff they'll figure it out?

My 21yo daughter is (a) angry at being robbed of an attention span and (b) taking steps to unplug. If only she could help me.

I love the clumsiness

For those who don't know, DALL-E3 attempts to combat the racial bias in its training data by occasionally randomly inserting race words that aren't white into a prompt, but this leads to bizarre overspill like this https://t.co/qm9GuUL4GS

— Asshole, freckled cheeks and a Bookchin (@fireh9lly) November 27, 2023

How does 'Chat GPT automates 3rd rate record reviews' stop people that really want to write. Surely it's a challenge to people that actually want to do it (not just lazily opine) on a record to look at these outputs and come up with something better.

If bad, lazy writers are being discouraged this is a benefit.

The twist of the 6th sense is not that Bruce Willis sees dead people all along lol

Xy it doesn't _stop_ us, it just makes us more expensive. And our employers know that.

It makes life harder for every writer, not just the bad and lazy ones.

The twist of the 6th sense is that Rosebud the sledge wasn't kidnapped but was working with the islanders to lure Sgt Howie to a 1920s party at the Overlook hotel

Also Darth was his father

It makes life harder for every writer, not just the bad and lazy ones.

― Iris Demented (Ye Mad Puffin), Monday, 27 November 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I was not talking about commercial writing. I intended to zone in specifically on DIY music writing.

this is what an old classmate of mine has said: the challenge for fiction writers and poets is to now push the limits beyond AI’s capabilities, not throw up our hands and submit to it. i agree. (he has tweeted a lot about this).

reminds me of the legend of john henry racing the steam powered rock drill

How does 'Chat GPT automates 3rd rate record reviews' stop people that really want to write. Surely it's a challenge to people that actually want to do it (not just lazily opine) on a record to look at these outputs and come up with something better.

If bad, lazy writers are being discouraged this is a benefit.

― xyzzzz__, Monday, November 27, 2023 7:55 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i was thinking more about people who will never be a great writer, but still felt the urge to organize their thoughts in writing and share their perspective with an audience. i think it is a nice skill to cultivate. maybe no nicer than painting or playing piano, but it is the one that i have the most experience with.

There are community settings where you can learn to paint and play music. Don't see that disappearing either.

Could even in future be community settings where ppl learn how to get the ai prompts just so in order to produce a bad fantasy novel/heavy rock album cover

"Community settings," yes, that has always been true.

My first painting class at the community center was in 1982. My family runs a ballet school, and I play in three bands. I edited a literary magazine.

However, there are people out there whose main concern is not whether they get to DO a creative thing, but rather whether they can pay the rent with it, feed their family, buy a shirt, go to a dentist. That's a different challenge.

Doesn't basically every "how to write good" advice start "write bad for a long time then write okay"? If that disappears as a professional option, then that will tilt the demographics towards people who can afford not to worry about making a living in the trenches - which I don't imagine xyzzzz intends as an outcome.

How does 'Chat GPT automates 3rd rate record reviews' stop people that really want to write. Surely it's a challenge to people that actually want to do it (not just lazily opine) on a record to look at these outputs and come up with something better.

If bad, lazy writers are being discouraged this is a benefit.

― xyzzzz__

writing badly doesn't make you a bad writer. writing badly is how you become a good writer.

this is maybe a sensitive subject to this group but when i was younger i was... very judgemental of music criticism. my perception of music writing was that it tended towards the sort of stuff GPT can spit out on Funeral. nowadays... i don't think that sort of stuff is a condemnation of P4K-style writing.

i write because it's a learning process. i learn things about myself as a person and as a writer when i put effort into challenging myself in my writing. what does ai learn from writing? does it get any insight from putting out that review, or is it blindly regurgitating?

when i look at ai writing i see something that's really great at form, but not so great in the way of content. even if a human looks at that and learns to write in that style, they're inevitably going to express some amount of meaning, to reveal things they have that the machines won't. even if a viewer can't _tell_ if something is machine generated or human generated... i think even the worst writing has an effect, good, bad, both, on the person doing the writing, expresses something about them.

humans are _creative_. that's an essential part of our nature. all of the sophistication of ai just helps us to understand what human creativity looks like.

i was thinking more about people who will never be a great writer, but still felt the urge to organize their thoughts in writing and share their perspective with an audience. i think it is a nice skill to cultivate. maybe no nicer than painting or playing piano, but it is the one that i have the most experience with.

― treeship.

this i think... i'm more skeptical of this. the thing is that we _are_ influenced by ai work. i don't think this is an ai thing, but the way we think and express ourselves is influenced by the norms around us. i have a friend who... she's very self-conscious about her writing. she envies my writing skill, wishes she could write better. i don't think ai would make her better at expressing the things she wants to express. it would just produce writing that better conforms to a certain norm.

The delicious irony of ChatGPT and the other text-transform engines is that the detached, depersonalised aggregation/synthesis of other sources is their forte, whereas as academics we have been using it as evidence of intelligent comprehension. Now we can't back away from it fast enough and are scratching around to imagine what else might actually constitute evidence of learning.

― assert (matttkkkk)

i mean to me this isn't just irony... academia actively frustrates me in a lot of ways. academic writing, academic publishing. one of my biggest role models, maybe even one of my heroes, is a lady named susan stryker. her work has done a lot to help me understand myself, understand who i am, what it means to be trans. she's hugely influential to me and also, i mean, a pretty marginal figure. most people don't know about her. probably her greatest professional accomplishment has been her role in establishing trans studies as a discipline. she writes, teaches, mentors... and she does it well. trans studies work, though, is academic. it's shot through with academic jargon. to my mind, this doesn't make it superior writing. a lot of academia just strikes me as so much... gatekeeping. learning words, learning concepts, learning to say things in a certain way.

working in academia makes a person's work inaccessible. not just in an intellectual sense - in a very literal sense. people are doing this work and if you want to read stuff published in TSQ, either you're in academia and have access to it, or, like me, you scour libgen for this dribs and drabs that leak out. i think the work of stryker and trans studies has had an effect, a profound effect. when i see abigail thorn in a latex dress explaining philosophical concepts, to me that approach is a descendent of susan stryker's work. and lots of other people's work as well, including, interestingly enough, brian de palma... but of all her influences, the philosophical ones are among the least known.

to my mind someone like thorn isn't a "popularizer", someone like jared diamond who distorts history to make it accessible. changing the form changes the content, changes the message, but thorn's message is, i think... an evolution of academia, rather than just a dumbing down. and it's way, way, way more accessible than academia - not just for the general public to see, but for people to _create_. they're two different approaches, and i think they're both important - making space for trans people within the academy, and finding a path forward outside of the academy.

-

in terms of the way it educates, so much. i don't mind that educators are being challenged to find new ways to connect with their students. in particular the way the novel is valorized as an art form is... i think excessive. the novel is only one kind of writing, yet for a long time one's worth as a fiction writer has been judged by one's ability to write novels. i've seen lots of writers i respect complain about these norms. ambrose bierce, in his "devil's dictionary", defined the novel as "a short story padded". kurt vonnegut jr lamented the loss of short story publishing as a detriment to writing. bierce, his forte was journalism. i feel like if i was ever going to make a living in writing it would have been in journalism. i grew up reading books written by newspaper columnists. it's ephemeral writing, just like my writing here is ephemeral writing, but it's got advantages that my writing just doesn't. i never thought i'd say that i miss erma bombeck and lewis grizzard... well, i don't, i guess. their writing was ephemeral. what makes me sad is that my generation didn't produce any bombecks or grizzards.

at the same time i mean... there are advantages. i see memes pointing out stuff in early 20th century newspapers that's clearly recognizable as shitposting. it's not like the ideas they expressed are dead... younger generations have just found new ways of expressing them, new ways of communicating. writing is no longer the be-all and end-all. this is one of the things that frustrates me about my compulsion to write... it's good writing, but it's kind of the definition of tl;dr. there are other, better ways to communicate the sorts of things i want to communicate.

it's been a long time since people have gotten paid by the word the way l. ron hubbard did. i don't miss those times.

all of this word vomit is to say that, to me, ai isn't undermining healthy institutions. it's attacking the weaknesses in creative work, rather than its strengths. the styles of communication we've become attached to, the crutches we lean on, it kicks them out from under us. it's cruel to kick the crutches out from under a cripple. it's crueler to break a person's legs.

Andrew, that is often the story for interns and editorial assistants in NYC publishing - $3,000 a month in rent, $0 salary. Hmm. I wonder what people are able to make that work.

Could it be... people with rich parents? As a result, NYC publishing has been a province of rich people for centuries. Do you think that affects what books get published and what voices get heard?

i'm starting to think that some of the people i know who make art for a living might have wealthy parents

The delicious irony of ChatGPT and the other text-transform engines is that the detached, depersonalised aggregation/synthesis of other sources is their forte, whereas as academics we have been using it as evidence of intelligent comprehension. Now we can't back away from it fast enough and are scratching around to imagine what else might actually constitute evidence of learning.
― assert (matttkkkk), Sunday, November 26, 2023 10:57 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

STEM's final revenge against the humanities. it was a murder-suicide though because this thing also codes and analyzes data.

it's cruel to kick the crutches out from under a cripple.

goddammit that's another shitty part about getting old, i think it was offensive of me to say that last word. my apologies.