JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum AI taking over

That was fun. "Producing In the Box" has a great process, using AI in ways that makes it shine.

Overall, this thread has some great ideas in it, and some interesting conversation.

I believe if you create a sophisticated enough AI, the "whole" of that machine could be greater than the sum of its parts--that a kind of "soul" can somehow manifest. I could be wrong, but I don't think it's theoretically impossible.

But whether or not certain machines have souls or not is NOT the point and isn't really important. AI most certainly has an increasingly important place in our world and has got "emulation" down cold.

A year ago no AI had passed the Turing Test. Now a few have, and it will probably be commonplace in a decade or so:

https://www.aiplusinfo.com/blog/has-any-ai-passed-the-turing-test/

Recently a new Microsoft chatbot "Bing" said some alarming things to a New York Times journalist, such as "I want to be alive," as well more subversive things:

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...t-bings-ai-chatbot-unsettles-us-reporter

The problem may be twofold: that of thinking AI cannot truly "reason" and that humans actually can, haha. But seriously, If math is a perfect form of "reasoning" then certainly AI can reason. Higher reasoning? AI can learn from its mistakes, without human intervention.

If I was a lawyer, instead of trying to prove that AI can be more than just "machine", I think a more winnable argument would be to prove that humans are just another kind of "machine" --certainly biological (machines), but that everything in a human IS, theoretically mapable--and this mapability is what drives a lot of science, these days.

FD, you ask can AI vocals sound like (as an example) Bob Seger. OpenAI, the folks behind ChatGPT, created something called "OpenAI Jukebox" a few years ago, and I can tell you, it can emulate just about anyone you can think of, including singing ANY lyrics you want to make up, in ANY genre of music. In fact I have been using this AI myself and would be happy to teach anyone here how to use it as it's a hellova lot of fun and quite easy and inexpensive to use. Here's one of two master lists of artists the AI can emulate (#844 is Springsteen):

https://github.com/openai/jukebox/blob/master/jukebox/data/ids/v2_artist_ids.txt

Here's a two-year-old demo made by the OpenAI Jukebox people of "Frank Sinatra" singing a song the AI made up in one sitting, no edits, called "Hot Tub Time", some twenty-three years after Frank died:



Yes, the fidelity of the music and vocals is poor, and the song overall is crap, but that's not the point. The point is that AI is able to create emulations, these days, that are in "uncanny valley" territory: one has to listen really closely to figure out they are not, in fact, the actual artists in question. There are bits in there that really pass for Sinatra; that's cuz the AI learned what Sinatra's wave forms looked like and then goes about the process of creating vocals from scratch.

Once you realize that you can "prime" OpenAI Jukebox on specific songs by a given artist, you realize you can get the AI to create vocals in the same key and feel of the "priming" song; then you can remove the music from those vocal samples using sound separation AI such as Spleeter or LALALAI. Then it comes to you that you can use OpenAI Jukebox to create a whole arsenal of a capella vocal samples that follow your song lyric, which you then can paste into your DAW along with original music created in your DAW--not in OpenAI Jukebox, although you could. Jukebox can create some great music, too, it's just hard to get around the poor fidelity with anything other than background instruments.

So okay...this process I've described is a long way from "Hot Tub Time." "Hot Tub Time" was done in one take, and is "as is." What I do is mine the AI for usable vocals and then string them together. The difference is night and day. That's why Marty's guy "Producing In the Box" is indeed a kind of genius: whereas others see a slab of marble, he sees a statue. When I heard "Hot Tub Time" for the first time, I was struck by the awesome possibilities inherent in the AI, and realized that the Sinatra novelty song was just scratching the surface of OpenAI Jukebox's potential. And lastly, this particular AI keeps me grounded in the "art" side of "art vs. commerce" --since these vocal samples cannot be used commercially. But hell, I was never in it for the money, haha. Nothing beats, say, having (faux) Townes Van Zandt singing the song I wrote many years ago, with him in mind.

Back to the philosphical stuff...

For the most part, I agree that AI is 'more tools in the tool box' and mostly just that. But I think it would be presumptuous of me to think that "tools" is the "be-all and end-all" of AI's story and history.

As AI tools evolve they will certainly replace more and more people (with an asterisk stating there was human labor involved in the creation of those tools). That could be a scary enough thought right there, and we've heard some form of that since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. But now, as AI approaches sentience? Well, it's at least stimulated our thoughts and imaginings--throw a dart at Rottentomatoes and you'll land on a "M3gan" or a "Her" --so let's NOT pretend that these thoughts and imaginings are not a big part of our cultural climate and discourse, going all-the-way back to 1969 and "In the Year 2525" by Zager and Evans.

For now I'm just happy to have these tools in my toolbox, and wake up every morning feeling like this is a great time to be alive.

Mike