I have always been a musical person. I was supposed to study music when i was young but my stars did not allign so i have been only a listener for many years now. My passion for music has never faded.
Why am i telling you all these? Well, today is the day i have witnessed (with my own ears) suno ai. It is basically the same thing for music what "Sora" is for video. You type the lyrics and you select a musical style, and it generates a song in the style you asked for, with actual lyrics that you typed, sang in "perfect pronunciation" (regardless of language) and within musical structure, and the result is just amazing. You hear instruments, but of course, because it is generated by an algorithm, it actually has no instruments in its makeup. There isn't a human singing also. And it is not even "music" in its general sense. It is an emulation of what we humans call "music". It is not perfect of course, but i still think it is amazing. Even in its infancy, it is nothing short of amazing.
I have been a curious person all my life. I remember the times when they created a computer with the claim that it plays chess better than the grandmasters. I remember it beating Kasparov (within close margin). Then came the "boston dynamics" robots, with ever evolving precision over the years. We have witnessed the "autonomus driving" of Tesla. The cars themselves started to drive better than the best drivers out there. And over the last few years, "AI" and language models started to "do art" better than most of us can ever do. Well i am not going to say better than Van Gogh, Mozart or Michelangelo, but if you consider that AI is still crawling on all fours, there is no predicting how amazing it will get, in the very near future.
If you are a humanist, you will tell me that all these are just imitations made by machines created by men. "God creating man in its own image". And you would be right. But who can deny the "human bias" in this perspective. When you think about it in a logical sense, the AI or the algorithm can also be considered as an "acceleration" or expansion of the whole growing up process of a human being, who is limited within the confines of his/her own culture. The AI (or the algorithm) on the other hand, can actually cover "the whole human experience", without the limitation of any one culture/nation/belief etc. Who can say that "our culture" is not a very limited "data set" that takes many years for us to absorb, as we are limited by our biology. The machine on the other hand has access to the whole world's data set and it could absorb so much more in a much shorter amount of time (as we have witnessed). And it is still doing so, in an ever increasing speed. Yes, we can still identify the extra fingers, but I am pretty sure the best painters started with very poor drawings of stick figures in prep-school. Give it a couple years and who knows what these algorithms will be able to achieve...
So i ask, did we just create a better version of ourselves? That is a humbling idea isn't it? Are we actually just imitating replicators? Seriously. What else do we do? All the "amazing" things that we attribute to ourselves, looking at the advances in computer science in recent years, I am starting to feel humbled. Maybe all we claim to be is not all that "great".
Why am i telling you all these? Well, today is the day i have witnessed (with my own ears) suno ai. It is basically the same thing for music what "Sora" is for video. You type the lyrics and you select a musical style, and it generates a song in the style you asked for, with actual lyrics that you typed, sang in "perfect pronunciation" (regardless of language) and within musical structure, and the result is just amazing. You hear instruments, but of course, because it is generated by an algorithm, it actually has no instruments in its makeup. There isn't a human singing also. And it is not even "music" in its general sense. It is an emulation of what we humans call "music". It is not perfect of course, but i still think it is amazing. Even in its infancy, it is nothing short of amazing.
I have been a curious person all my life. I remember the times when they created a computer with the claim that it plays chess better than the grandmasters. I remember it beating Kasparov (within close margin). Then came the "boston dynamics" robots, with ever evolving precision over the years. We have witnessed the "autonomus driving" of Tesla. The cars themselves started to drive better than the best drivers out there. And over the last few years, "AI" and language models started to "do art" better than most of us can ever do. Well i am not going to say better than Van Gogh, Mozart or Michelangelo, but if you consider that AI is still crawling on all fours, there is no predicting how amazing it will get, in the very near future.
If you are a humanist, you will tell me that all these are just imitations made by machines created by men. "God creating man in its own image". And you would be right. But who can deny the "human bias" in this perspective. When you think about it in a logical sense, the AI or the algorithm can also be considered as an "acceleration" or expansion of the whole growing up process of a human being, who is limited within the confines of his/her own culture. The AI (or the algorithm) on the other hand, can actually cover "the whole human experience", without the limitation of any one culture/nation/belief etc. Who can say that "our culture" is not a very limited "data set" that takes many years for us to absorb, as we are limited by our biology. The machine on the other hand has access to the whole world's data set and it could absorb so much more in a much shorter amount of time (as we have witnessed). And it is still doing so, in an ever increasing speed. Yes, we can still identify the extra fingers, but I am pretty sure the best painters started with very poor drawings of stick figures in prep-school. Give it a couple years and who knows what these algorithms will be able to achieve...
So i ask, did we just create a better version of ourselves? That is a humbling idea isn't it? Are we actually just imitating replicators? Seriously. What else do we do? All the "amazing" things that we attribute to ourselves, looking at the advances in computer science in recent years, I am starting to feel humbled. Maybe all we claim to be is not all that "great".
Statistics: Posted by jason_kidd — Tue Apr 23, 2024 7:09 pm