Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

afaict they posted the blackout at 11pm (probably midnight or after their time) after posting dumb ephemera all day

some site out there has to be auto-posting and didn't turn off, but they seem in the clear

"delete forever": the song of the year, by the artist we deserve

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/style/self-care/grimes-AI-baby-sleep.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage

some interesting stuff here

"I think A.I. is great. I just feel like, creatively, I think A.I. can replace humans. ... She spoke with The New York Times on a Zoom call alongside the team behind Endel, an app that says it uses artificial intelligence to generate ever-changing soundscapes to fit different moods. It has received funding from companies including True Ventures, an investment firm that bankrolled the Grimes collaboration."

“If you feed an A.I. all the greatest artists ever, it will probably be able to auto generate really creative, really evocative art.” It may even be able to create superhumanly talented artists, “like, David Bowie times a million,” she said. “An artist who’s just super charismatic and amazing and fun, and just makes the best music, and can make 1,000 songs a day, and just do 1,000 interviews a day, simultaneously."

maybe the second half of david bowie's Low times a million

but not even that, really

*audio clip of HAL-9000 singing "Daisy"*

“If you feed an A.I. all the greatest artists ever, it will probably be able to auto generate really creative, really evocative art.” It may even be able to create superhumanly talented artists, “like, David Bowie times a million,” she said. “An artist who’s just super charismatic and amazing and fun, and just makes the best music, and can make 1,000 songs a day, and just do 1,000 interviews a day, simultaneously."

― Vapor waif (uptown churl), Wednesday, October 28, 2020 4:03 PM (thirty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

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

this shit will be used in spas and hair salons. at least grimes' tech-hype profits won't get anyone's head removed by a truck.

i know she is all jazzed up about robots replacing humans but i just think it's fundamentally dumb. if a.i. really replaces us, and isn't just a sped-up imitation, they would make their own forms of art that wouldn't be comprehensible to humans because it would emerge from and reflect the umwelt of a.i.

brad otm about the single to the album being good though, i guess.

I think experiencing art is about connecting with something essentially human. Listening to AI music would be like watching robots play football or something.

exactly. even grimes' attempt to transcend and escape her humanity, or embodiedness, you know, it's a human impulse. this is why she can make art about it that people can connect with.

xp there will be a new game, "Pop Star Manager"

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?

exactly. even grimes' attempt to transcend and escape her humanity, or embodiedness, you know, it's a human impulse. this is why she can make art about it that people can connect with.

― treeship., Wednesday, October 28, 2020 5:14 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is Turing testable, I’d be willing to put money on you failing it. tbh AI have probably already collaborated on songs you like

if a.i. really replaces us, and isn't just a sped-up imitation, they would make their own forms of art that wouldn't be comprehensible to humans because it would emerge from and reflect the umwelt of a.i.

without knowing what umlaut means... idk, this sounds potentially pretty fresh? humans make landfills worth of music that presumably results from their umwelt, and sucks

those op-eds written by gpt-3 are as good as like the 99th percentile in any canadian newspaper

the sponsored content i write for building material companies is irreplaceable though, right?

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