PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Rick Beato on AI and deep fakes

Interesting points. And probably not too far off the target.

Whatever happens, the people actually creating stuff are still gonna keep getting screwed. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I have no idea, but think it will be a very interesting ride. 'Watch this space' kind of thing.

I think AI will continue its rapid advancement. The implications for the music industry will be the least of our problems. I agree with Rick's statements, and many legal battles will ensue.

The internet is currently being inundated with fake information. This fake information takes many forms and is put in place by foreign governments and other persons supporting their own agendas.

"Deep Fakes" generally means a video of a person whose face or body has been digitally altered to appear to be someone else, typically used maliciously or to spread false information.

I think it is currently impossible for most of us to know whether what we see or read on the internet is authentic or fake.

The continued advancement of AI will make this issue even more problematic.

The relationship between AI and music will continue to evolve for better or worse, depending on one's subjective opinion.

Billy

I agree with Rick in that musicians and record labels will be impacted. But when he says Spotify, Apple Music and others will do well that will only be in the short term. Someone will write an AI program for your personal computer that will build "original" songs in seconds and then play them for you thereby cutting out even the streaming services.

And then when AI has learned how to effectively program, the programmers will be cut out of the loop.

Last year on this forum I wrote “Alexa, write me a song with a melody and some lyrics and then copyright it.“

What is also coming to a restaurant near you is 3D-printed fish fillets.

I pity the generations coming behind us. They may live to 140 but will it be worth it?

Interesting! I do agree that the record labels are going to go wild… I don’t understand how the A.I. artists can use the name “Drake A.I.” and get away with it?

That will be just one of many legal battles.

All I can say is that a lot of lawyers are going to get rich!

What really worries me about fake AI is when it gets into politics. Was what I saw and heard really my candidate? I can real problems coming down the pipe! And that would be world wide.

PS - I know how to make a human brain. The downside is that it takes nine months.

This topic takes me back to a day in 1981 when I went to a studio here to see the Fairlight in action. The guy who owned it showed me how he could take any vocal and sample, not the words, but the vocalist's voice characteristics. And in fact he did it with Elvis and created a new Elvis-like song that HE wrote. The vocals had a bit of the "slurring" kind of sound that a vocoder produces, but it was really close and very good considering the time. Elvis fans would know it was not Elvis, but to someone who lived on Mars it would have sounded real. This is doing much the same thing with far better tools than what was available back then. I mean, the the Fairlight came out in 1979!! The stuff in this video, as one who doesn't listen to Drake, Kanye, Weeknd or any of that genre, you could tell me it was really Drake and I wouldn't have any idea.

The label could call it Draque!! Or Kanyea! Or Weakend!

Hardly waiting to see the legal battles. Honestly hardly waiting!

Here is a fresh interview with one of the pioneers of AI, Mr. Hinton.

If he is concerned, we all should be . . . this is far bigger than music.

https://youtu.be/yAgQWnD31nE

On the other hand for some internet active folks like us it is, at least at this stage, easy to carve out your own little safe bubble. I typically read but four balanced and well vetted news sources. My facebook activity is curated to focus solely on historical architecture, mountain biking, nature and music (listening and production). My information searches are confined to Wiki and Britannica. Our shopping is almost exclusively with Amazon. We book read via Kindle. Gmail kills every spam attempt. ATT's security app ID's spam texts immediately. And we live happily in a cloistered Apple world with an ipad, two Macs, two iPhones, HomePod, Apple TV and more. At the risk of being presumptuous I don't think I'm being faked. FWIW and a boat load of salt!

Bud

Hi, Bud,

Perhaps I should restate what I said, "... I think it is currently impossible for most of us to know whether what we see or read on the internet is authentic or fake or (simply inaccurate)."

"historical architecture, mountain biking, nature and music (listening and production)" encompasses a large body of knowledge. Not all "nonauthentic" information is put in place to deceive the reader purposely but is often inaccurate.

According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), reports of Amazon scams increased by 500% between June 2020 and 2021, with victims losing more than $27 million to scammers

If you read or listen to the national news through any medium, you will get outright deception from the federal government.

Do you really think the CDC thought masks were unnecessary at the beginning of the pandemic?

Do you have any way of knowing if a journalist or an AI wrote an article? How would know if the photo you are looking at is real or AI-generated?

A quoit from Scientific America

"In March the Sony World Photography Awards announced the winning entry in their creative photo category: a black-and-white image of an older woman embracing a younger one, entitled PSEUDOMNESIA: The Electrician. The press release announcing the win describes the photograph as “haunting” and “reminiscent of the visual language of 1940s family portraits.”

But the artist, Berlin-based Boris Eldagsen, turned down the award. His photograph was not a photograph at all, he announced: he had crafted it through creative prompting of DALL-E 2, an artificial intelligence image generator.

It is not that fake/inaccurate/nonauthentic information is definitely causing you or me any great concern at the moment. Both of us know where to look for what we assume are reliable sources.
I certainly do not have the software to analyze images, for example.

You and I most likely have little interest if Drake's voice was emulated by AI and some people liked the AI version better. That is an issue for Drakes's legal team.

Nothing is that significant until these issues happen to one of us.

Deep fakes are only one potential AI-generated problem. The implications for the music industry are significant.

There is no way to prevent the technology from being advanced.

Billy

That sounds gloomy indeed … perhaps a bit dystopian. Glad I’m naive. At 77 I’ll just continue on my oblivious journey.

Bud

Exactly! Sometimes I just try to remember those four magic words that can change my perspective. “It does not matter”. If I like the Drake A.I. song better than actual Drake legit then does it really matter? If that photo that won an award was produced by A.I. does it really matter?

At least we know with some degree of certainty that things are uncertain.

But are you certain about that?

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

Donald Rumsfeld

Of course this never addresses unknown knowns. That is to say the things we don't know that we do know.

-Chad

And no matter where you go there you are.

Bud

Here is a known known. AI or not, there will always be a sub population of cognitively challenged and minimally educated adults that will believe in falsehoods. Here are just a few:

Santa Clause is real
The COVID pandemic is a hoax
Bill Gates has placed micro chips in COVID vaccines
Hydroxychloroquine, injesting bleach and beams of light are safe and effective treatments for COVID
Donald Trump is sent by God to save the Christians
The world is flat
Paul McCartney has been dead for decades (the album cover proves it)
Elvis Presley is still alive
The Holocaust never happened
The Sandy Hook school shooting is a hoax
The people who stormed the US Capitol on Jan 6 were innocent tourists on vacation
Fluoride in public water supplies is a communist plot to weaken America
Ukraine started the war with Russia
Global warming and man-made climate change is a hoax

And the list goes on.

Someone should write a song on this subject, that would be a hoot!

And Bud, you are not naive but well informed.