As noted elsewhere in this thread, one of their large supporters was VMware[0], which was aquired by Broadcom at the end of last year. Although I'm skeptical that the loss of a single 'community partner' would cause the whole organization to fold. There are teirs above community which presumably donate more to enjoy title[1]
VMware donated A LOT of money to causes like this and they not only made it really easy to match employee contributions, but they also had "pledge drive" style events to raise as much money as possible.
This is a part of our culture that I'm really sad to see going away.
Not sure why I'm being downvoted. I'm aware that VMware used to donate to a lot of causes and now Broadcom doesn't (source: I also work there :)).
My point is that I'm surprised that the loss of a single sponsor would make-or-break an organization like this.
I say this as someone that supports their mission, formerly helped run an affiliated club (shoutout EMich WiCS!) and donates annually, or used to anyway.
> sounds cool, now what can we do with that to make it into music?
So a human using the tools of sound production is what transforms the function output into music. (Please let me know if I’m misunderstanding you).
I think I see what you’re saying, but that’s already happened here hasn’t it?
I mean, it's not as though an AI made the decision to generate this all by itself, a human had an idea to create this piece and wrote a prompt which created this output.
The order is of events is reversed from your Ableton example, but I would contend that this kind of production is no less musical than what someone could create using a DAW, simply that the tools are more accessible
(and I presume there is less direct control over what the end result is going to sound like, but the same could be said of conducting an orchestra versus playing a piano.)
Eta: For example, some people in this thread have complained that the AI generated voice falls into the uncanny valley. I agree, and I think that’s part of the art here.
> but the same could be said of conducting an orchestra versus playing a piano.
Conducting an orchestra is an important role but the music is mostly a result of first of all the composer, and then the conductor / arranger's interpretation as well as the skill of the musicians. I really don't see the similarity to a human input of "GNU license, sad, jazzy." The resolution is just way too rough.
In fact, imagine comparing the experience of reading Snow Crash, to reading the sentence, "Cyberpunk story with sci fi elements, VR universe, pizza delivery guy with samurai sword."
I’m not meaning to equate the level of effort or skill involved. And I’ll grant that I know very little about music composition beyond my experience in Middle School band in which the musicians’ personality and skill presents a significant constraint for the conductor/arranger :)
I would readily compare the experience of reading Snow Crash (one of the first SciFi books I read of my own volition) to the output that a LLM may produce from such a prompt. My iPhone informs me that I’ve spent nearly 10 hours playing with Characters.ai in which SF storytelling characters are my favorite to interact with. When I first read Snow Crash I felt like “finally, an author that understands that part of the story that _I’m_ interested in!” and my experiences of AI driven creative writing has felt similar. Certainly it feels less “magical” since I’m aware that I’m customizing the author to my personal taste - is that “magic” of feeling connected to the artist *the* art?
I'm not here to yuck your yum, if you're having fun with it, by all means. If you're getting output from characters.ai that are on par with a neal stephenson novel, I would really enjoy seeing that and learning how I could do the same, that sounds very fun.
When I go up to the self-service booth in McDonalds, go through the menu and select a portion of McNuggets the result food has been made, the food was only made because of my actions, no nuggets would have been made if I specifically didn't want them, but to say I am the one who cooked them would be absurd.
Like, if Trent Reznor had produced Hurt not by putting his doubts, self loathing and pain into words and music, rather by typing "sad, trending on artstation" into a console then heading for lunch, I don't think it would be any way as meaningful even if it was note for note beat for beat the same output.
The meaning the listener imparts to the song is constructed in the listener's head, a combination of the song and the listener's own knowledge, experiences, personality and emotions.
I knew nothing about Trent Reznor the first time I heard "Hurt". Often when a song is heard on the radio - perhaps a sentence that dates me, but even so - there is no explanation of where it came from or even what it's called to accompany it; or perhaps there may have been, but the listener wasn't paying attention until after they realised they liked what they were hearing; indeed, there used to be an entire industry for solving the problem of "I heard a song I like and want to know more about it, or at the very least find out what it's called so I can hear it again".
When I first heard "Hurt", it resonated because of how those sounds interacted with my own experience. Everything else came after. Had those exact same sounds any other origin, that first experience would not have been affected - I would have had no way to know.
> The meaning the listener imparts to the song is constructed in the listener's head, a combination of the song and the listener's own knowledge, experiences, personality and emotions.
This is reductionist IMO. The equivalent seems to me to be, "the meaning the reader of words imparts to the meaning is constructed in the reader's head..." but clearly the vast majority of the meaning of the words is derived from the writer's intention. Of course that can be misinterpreted, reinterpreted, co-opted, etc, but regardless, it doesn't mean the author can be simply ignored, or that a psuedo-random generation can be treated the same as human-generated.
> clearly the vast majority of the meaning of the words is derived from the writer's intention
This is not clear at all.
Written words are just marks on a surface. Whoever made them may have intended to convey something, but they made them and walked away; they are now absent, taking their intents with them; only the marks remain, and those are not sentient or even alive - they contain no intent. There is nothing about the patterns left behind in themselves that makes them different from any other patterns the universe contains as far as the universe is concerned. If handed a set of marks on paper with no other information, you have no way of knowing for sure how they came to be. You could guess, you could be super confident, but you couldn't be /certain/.
If a reader later comes along who happens to have studied the same pattern-codes as the creator of the marks, however, seeing them will make that reader recall the associations and build up meanings in their head. These may or may not be the same meanings the writer intended to convey.
Children learning to read understand this very well - reading is /hard/, associating meaning with code is /hard/, decoding similar meanings to everyone else is /hard/, aligning the associations spoken words trigger in your head with others around you takes /study/ and /effort/, even realising that you end up with different meaning in your head when presented with some symbol to what others get, though frequent, takes deliberate effort. Reading comprehension questions in elementary school tests are there for a reason.
To a well-practiced reader, the process is natural and seamless, and feels like telepathy; it /feels like/ meaning has been transferred directly from the writer to the reader. But it is not that, and many problems arise when people forget this.
Once you have learned to seamlessly decode symbols into meaning in your head and the process is fully automatic, symbols you encounter in the world will seamlessly trigger meanings in your head regardless of their origin.
This is the human condition: we are all locked inside our own heads, and you can't take a piece of yourself and place it inside another directly. The best we can do is shout into the void and hope something similar inside the person across from you resonates; but it turns out that human shouts are not the only thing that can make those strings vibrate.
When we encounter combinations of symbols in the world that trigger complex meaning inside us, we /expect/ them to have an author who intended to convey something like that meaning, because in the entire history of human experience to date, the only other way for such things to appear in the world has been incredibly unlikely coincidence, invariably accompanied by context that makes it clear it is coincidence. (A certain proportion of social media content is, in fact, people sharing instances of these coincidences!)
However, this is an assumption that we make, and the world is rapidly changing in ways that mean it may, going forward, no longer be a valid one.
More and more, we will encounter combinations of symbols in the world that trigger complex meanings in our heads but originate from no human intent beyond "I need a combination of symbols that will trigger these meanings in the heads of those who encounter them", if even that much is explicit. We are rapidly improving the processes that produce them, and one of the ways we are improving them is removing tells. You will see the symbols, they will decode into stories in your head, and you won't know for sure if a human author was involved or not.
It is vital, going forward, that we all remember that symbols triggering satisfying meaning in our head does not automatically imply deliberate human intent for that meaning in their origin, lest we be entirely unprepared for the brave new oncoming world, just the way a chunk of the populace was unprepared for nigerian prince emails in their heyday, or are still unprepared for telephone calls from "internet tech support" right now.
this is not just an ad hominem, it is also senseless. "you can safely assume this person knows nothing of our history, because he finds our tourists annoying" is not a valid argument.
Quite a lot! There are articles ad infinitum about how specifically tailored the TikTok algorithm is for many users.
I certainly think that knowing very specifically what a substantial portion of a county/market’s population is interested in qualifies as intelligence.
How effectively you make that information actionable is up to the creativity of your intelligence/advertising apparatus.
I suppose that depends on what you mean by “propaganda”. Personally I think it can be convincingly argued that any message transmitted to you from a State is propaganda
(Note: that means that I don’t believe that all propaganda is inherently evil, sometimes your interests align with a State. For example governments paying for advertising to discourage smoking is a great thing, IMO!)
I’ve never lived in China, but I’ve spoken with many people that have and my understanding is that allegiance to the State (eg, the State’s sole stewards the CCP) is a big part of life there. I’ve even been told that staying in the good graces of the State’s only official political party is important if you want to do things like buy property or start a business.
TikTok is administrated by humans, many of whom live in China.
Those humans are, I assume, ambitious and want to do well for themselves and therefore likely want to appease the State.
Therefore, when I read articles about how the administrators of TikTok can effectively decide what goes viral it makes me fear what I’ve begun calling ‘incidental’ propaganda.
Probably those China-based administrations at TikTok don’t want to actively harm American society, but it’s certainly true that America and China have different interests in the world. I assume that any administrators in China will never choose to make something go viral if it is critical of the Chinese State or its interests.
You can see how that might skew things for those that only get their news from TikTok, right?
(This is my understanding and thinking on things right now given the information I have. I gladly welcome any new information if someone reads this and disagrees. But please be kind :))
I am a Chinese that has been living in the West for a few years.
> I’ve never lived in China, but I’ve spoken with many people that have
IMO, these opinions are a bit biased.
1) those are probably the people who chose to stay in the West;
2) Chinese people (incl. me) sometimes talk extravagantly about life in a "communist country", since to some degree it pleases the Western audience and adds some fun to the talk.
Maybe a CCP member has to show their allegiance from time to time, but I am not and I can not recall I was asked to do so in any form. Probably asked to sing the national anthem every morning when I was in the school? And despite the censorship, people, especially young netizens, invent all kinds of altered words mocking domestic politics, often to my surprise how much they are aware of, given that I already live in the West out of the bubble, that people usually think Chinese internet is.
Taking a particular different mindset as unconscious propaganda and thinking it's harmful seems to support the Chinese internet firewall project and the opinion that people are not able to make "correct" opinions on their own.
Having lived there for several years I didn't find the state some ever-present aspect of life - but it doesn't seem particularly relevant
Your line of reasoning seems fine, but it basically applies to any "other". If some European decides what goes viral, he is going to subject poor stupid american viewers to their nefarious European biases - and those biases may harm our society!
Furthermore the biases of US based company executives may harm our society as well. I'll grant you that they may be less inclined, but gosh, rage bait and selling sweets to children does make them a whole lot of money.
So the logic isn't wrong, but it seems to be applied selectively in cases that just happen to benefit large American tech companies - who are incapable of providing US consumers a product that's nearly as good as Tiktok
Maybe biases in algorithms need to addressed.. But that should be done in a thoughtful unbiased holistic that applied equally to everyone - instead of this embarrassing kneejerk "the commies are taking over" kind of way
I’ll certainly agree that the ‘red scare’ vibe to this bill makes me uncomfortable — even if I agree with the action overall.
I certainly am biased towards companies that operate in a way that I’m familiar with. In the companies I’ve worked in delivering value to shareholders trumps all else at the end of the day. (I don’t love it but it’s predictable)
As you allude to that causes some quite nefarious behavior, but it’s predictable to me for the most part.
To me, this is in contrast with what I see happening in the Chinese market. Again, this is colored by my experience. From the outside looking in it appears that companies based in China bend much further to appease their government than in the markets I’ve worked in (US, UK and Japan) and that makes me less inclined to trust them.
I think this is simply a confusion over the meaning of words.
You can indeed buy Full Self Driving™ (FSD), but even then your Tesla is not capable of self driving, fully (eg, there are many scenarios where a human is still required)
People take "Full" as meaning L5, but Tesla uses "full" as in ODD (Operational Design Domain). It can go anywhere, city streets, highways, parking lots, unmarked roads. In that sense it is indeed "full". This is clear when you look at the history of Tesla autonomy products, first there was Autopilot, which is only for highways. Then they release Full Self Driving Beta, which includes every type of driving.
Not just the dev team but even the "product owner" gets blind sided in "small" and "agile" companies.
The CEO or someone high up the food chain sees a defect and now zomg the sky is falling.
It has to be fixed nao, prioritization be damned.
That's what I meant by nobody from the above list can be a product owner.
The whole point of having sprints is so things can't be added to a sprint mid-sprint.
Maybe there are extenuating circumstances but they should a. really be extenuating circumstances and b. should come through the (clearly nominal) product owner.
