Artificial intelligence officially gets scary

[wg-]

Instagram is just a MMORPG

 

[shakahislop]

watching my girlfriend use tiktok makes me feel like it's 1992 and i'm 50 years old and i've just heard hardcore for the first time. or 60 years old in 1950 hearing rock and roll. or the way my dad feels about rap. it is so offensive to my sensibilities. so obviously shit according to my aesthetic values. it has that game-changing level of disruption. and it is massively popular with the kids.

 

[wg-]

That says more about your own sensibilities than the changing world though really

Its just an app

 

[wg-]

Surely going out drinking in Newcastle with Faustino Asprilla was much more traumatising

 

[Clinamenic]

That says more about your own sensibilities than the changing world though really

Its just an app

I mean the world-changing aspect of it I think becomes more concrete when we think about how it habituates us and our attention spans. Bit of a feedback loop, in that the app finds product-market fit because the target audiences already have a suitably short attention span, which the app then conceivably reinforces.

 

[Clinamenic]

In a way it makes a sense in terms of proportion: we have a larger world to keep track of, in terms of news and trends, and because we can't just expand the hours in the day we need to reduce the time spent per-item if we want to maintain a balanced overview of the landscape.

 

[luka]

I mean the world-changing aspect of it I think becomes more concrete when we think about how it habituates us and our attention spans. Bit of a feedback loop, in that the app finds product-market fit because the target audiences already have a suitably short attention span, which the app then conceivably reinforces.

Not everyone is a fan of these changes. Mark Ronson didn’t sound particularly enamoured in 2019 when he said: "All your songs have to be under 3:15 because if people don’t listen to them all the way to the end they go into this ratio of ‘non-complete heard’, which sends your Spotify rating down." Tove Styrke complained to the BBC in 2022 that she’s “sick of everything being the exact same formula” because “everything is 2:30”. Others have claimed “TikTok’s impact could literally halve the length of a pop record in the next 10 years.”


For songwriting teams, whose job is to maximise their playlisting and streaming, that means erasing the “boring” bits from their songs with “topliners” (AKA the people who create the vocal melodies, harmonies and lyrics over a beat) being drafted in to write killer hooks. Gone are fade outs and intros; now hooks come right in at the start of the song (“Poland” is basically all hook) and choruses arrive earlier and earlier.


the traditional verse, pre-chorus and chorus of songwriting is usurped. “It’s increasingly common for songs to begin in medias res,” they write, “with a hook, followed by a hook and ending with another hook.” Bad Bunny is a great example of this, particularly “Si Veo a Tu Mamá”. The release and tension of classic pop is essentially being rejected; everything is condensed.

 

[version]

I'm assuming platforms like Reddit will end up moderated by AI rather than individual users at some point.

 

[Clinamenic]

I'm assuming platforms like Reddit will end up moderated by AI rather than individual users at some point.

Totally possible, and really I think that would be the best (ie low stakes) scenario to start testing AI executives and c-suite agents.

 

[luka]

as ive been saying for years pop music has been entirely produced by alogrithim for a long time now. thats the uncanny valley aspect of pastiche pop. by the time they tell you about a new technology its already been in operation ages.

 

[luka]

this is a pretty decent AI song

 

[shakahislop]

That says more about your own sensibilities than the changing world though really

Its just an app

it says something about both i think. it's easy enough to be aware of your own sensibiliites and preferences and seperate them from a more analytical perspective about how these forms of mass media / mass consumption have broader consequences.

i do think that entertainment / media products have consequences for parts of life that are much more important than aesthetic preferences. tiktok etc is a major conduit for ideas and probably more importantly for constructing subjectivities experienced by quite large numbers of people.

i don't think this stuff is the driving force of history. but it is relevant on a (kind of) music forum which is also a bit concerned with politics, has a cultural studies influence etc i think

 

[version]

 

[shakahislop]

as ive been saying for years pop music has been entirely produced by alogrithim for a long time now. thats the uncanny valley aspect of pastiche pop. by the time they tell you about a new technology its already been in operation ages.

not produced by algorithm in the same way as like OpenAI produces images. although of course, that is presumably coming. but its doubtless been produced in response to metrics over the last decade. the data provided to labels etc through streaming platforms, especially when they can combine it with multiple regression (etc) tells them a lot, in a lot of quantitative detail, what people like, which kind of people like it and so on.

 

[shakahislop]

a bit of a bugbear of mine - not that it particularly matters - is how much music writing and discussion remains wedded to a conception of the world that was formulated in the 1980s and 1990s and has as its basic coordinates a kind of permenent 90s, namely that music was always a central driver of culture and will always be a central driver of culture. rather than seeing it as a contingent and passing thing that emerged in a 50 year flurry of (highly lucrative) activity as a consequence of a major new technology (recorded music) and the ability to centralize and control production of the product

 

[luka]

its one thing to say music is dead etc (it is, thats indisputable) and that apps etc are the new thing shaping culture but its harder to say what actually that entails. your homework has to be giving an account of what it means.

 

[luka]

certainly lots of people use them. but what does it do to them and the wider culture? thats the question.

 

[version]

Virilio's “emotional synchronisation” is one effect that's been cranked up with each successive technology. It's possible to drive millions of people into a state of distress within the space of minutes.

 

[luka]

Virilio's “emotional synchronisation” is one effect that's been cranked up with each successive technology. It's possible to drive millions of people into a state of distress within the space of minutes.

has it? most people say the reverse.

 

[luka]

definitely true with hitler and the radio, or who shot JR on dallas. but the media landscape is a lot more fractured now.