PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Frank Sinatra with a nirvana cover

Really? One cherry picked video negates what I said? Why not post Jaco himself? Or Vic Wooten? Or Larry Graham? Or go back to Stanley Clark, Charles Mingus, James Jamerson... That one kid who knows how to play doesn't undo how many horrible bass players I have seen in my decades of doing this, most of whom got into bands to drink on a band tab and get girls. (I mean, that's why I got into it....)

About 8 or 9 years ago I was at a wedding. The band played their dinner set and then took a break before the dance music started. The bass player ate a big chunk of a 6 foot sub that had mortadella in it. He apparently didn't know mortadella has pistachios in it. He DID know he was deathly allergic to nuts, and 2 songs into their show he started to swell up like a mutant from the planet Glorp and had to be rushed to a hospital. These guys were FRANTIC because the keyboard player couldn't play left hand bass while also playing the other side of the page too. I went up and told them "I can play the bass parts. Let's go on like nothing happened." When we finished about 3 songs the singer leaned over and told me "Wow. Not only CAN you play the bass parts but you are actually better than ________." Whatever his name was. I just smiled and said "I've been at this a little while."

I will double down on what I said. Most bass players that are not featured players like Jaco and Victor (to name just 2) are subliminal and it's the easiest instrument there is to play. It's only 4 strings (I am aware you can 5 or 6.) and the parts are not complicated. You CAN play complicated, but a bass player is supposed to play with the drummer and stay out of the way, so basics will do. Toss in a 3rd and a 5th every now and then (and just for Thump, maybe a 7th) as part of the measure before the chord progression changes and then get back to root notes. Those 2 sets I played had about 12-15 songs I did not know, but I told them to give me a key and count it in and I will feel where the changes are. You could do that too, Mario. Herb, David, EtcJoe... Any guitar player worth his weight in salt could do that. Now, with some experience in Motown and funky bands, I also tossed in some thumbing and in the songs that needed it some string snapping. Played a really nice Guild Starfire bass through a Hartke rig. With an MXR flanger and a Big Muff distortion box (that was set up WAY wrong).

And as a bonus for "whatever his name was", I didn't accept their offer to pay me. I told them to pay the guy his full share and consider it a sick day. The best laugh of the night was when we were talking during a break between the 2 sets I played and I told them some of the bands I had played in one of the young men said "Oh yeah! My father mentioned that band a few times." And in my mind I thought "Thanks a lot ya little [*****]!" He called his father and told him who was playing bass and he said "I remember him being the keyboard player in that band." and then of course I had to talk to dad for a minute and when the kid showed me a picture I did remember the guy despite that being 20 years prior.

Better and better condescending flexes every time you tell us how great you and that we all suck!

Happier and happier you didn't come to Herbstock.

You said that, not me.

Oh well, I'm having a very happy life. I hope you are, too.

Easy my friend, I was just pulling your leg on your previous bass is easy comments. Sorry if I ruffled your feathers.

I hear you about bass players. My wedding band had three long time members, two different drummers, but we went through about 10 or more so called bass players. We fired most because of your last sentence in the above message, i.e. they couldn't stay in the pocket with the drummer and they all tried to be a lead instrument!

How did we get from a computer mimic of Frank Sinatra to trashing bass players and people who use backing tracks is beyond me. Eddie wins for grumpiest poster again, though. The technology of deep fakes is going to be troubling if not already. Too many people believe everything they see and hear on their phones and elsewhere. The movie studios would gladly use AI to write their scripts and computer faked actors to play the parts if they were good enough and they will be someday.

I'm afraid on how deep fakes will be used during political campaigns. Its bad enough that they take snippets from a speech to make a candidate look bad but with deep fake they can post things that was never said. This is true for all political parties.

Now back to the main thread.

Repeat winner! So many people to thank....

My concern as well.

That's a lot worse than making Sinatra sing a Nirvana song.

There should be severe penalties for politicians who do that. Any falsification of your opponent(s) should result in immediate disqualification. But as we know, that will never happen.

Back on topic.

And yes, writers, actors, songwriters, musicians, and others will be replaced by AI, along with accountants, investors, news pundits, and so many others.

My question is this: “When AI and robots put half the work force out of work, who is going to have enough money to buy the products?”

Insights and incites by Notes ♫

You are right . . . as well as a profession that cuts close to home . . . engineers!!
For less money than the salary of a single engineer, you'll buy an AI bot that will do the work of an entire engineering department.

"The times they are a changin"

One of the many problems with AI is that it doesn't actually create - it merely recycles.

For example, it may begin an image as white noise, and then progressively refine it so that the error measure of the image falls below some given level.

The valuation of the error value is based on labeled training data that was supplied by people, using artwork created by people.

Often, that artwork was flat out stolen, with no profits being returned to the creators of the original artwork.

This holds true for AIs like code assistants, which have trawled through huge amounts of code, regardless of the license associated with that code. And it's the same for programs that correct grammar, or write term papers. The data comes from somewhere, but there's no attribution on the final product.

Expertise in a field comes not just from knowledge of what has happened, but what direction that points. I've got plenty of books on orchestration. While they have some value, the problem is that styles change, and they no longer reflect current practice.

By embracing AI of this sort, we devalue the works of artists who have innovated, and hand profits over to corporations who only seek to reap profit off the works of those artists while returning none of those profits to them.

Today, this may or may not be universally true; I'm thinking it's not true but of course it comes down to how one defines "create". And with advances in AI coming ever faster and faster, even if this is true today, it will unlikely be true "tomorrow".

There are AI systems in existence today that are designed to create/discover scientific hypotheses that humans alone haven't been able to create. Today's scientists and engineers collect far more data than is possible for humans (alone) to analyze and interpret. Properly trained and programmed computers can crawl thru terabytes of data and discover relationships amoung the variables at ever increasing speeds and usefulness. In fact, AI systems capable of generating hypotheses go back to the 1980s.

It has also been suggested that a category of Nobel (or other) Prize be set up specifically to award AI bots or AI/human collaborations when meaningful discoveries are made . . . stay tuned.

"In science, experimentation and hypothesis generation often form an iterative cycle: a researcher asks a question, collects data and adjusts the question or asks a fresh one. Ross King, a computer scientist at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, aims to complete this loop by building robotic systems that can perform experiments using mechanized arms. One system, called Adam, automated experiments on microbe growth. Another, called Eve, tackled drug discovery. In one experiment, Eve helped to reveal the mechanism by which a toothpaste ingredient called triclosan can be used to fight malaria."
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03596-0?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_campaign=61e730f65f-briefing-dy-20231121&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b27a691814-61e730f65f-49938064

I predict we will see many more applications similar to this in the near future; this is the good side of AI.

PS> You never know what might be lurking in your toothpaste

I define create as something different than minimizing an error function.

We've had these for sometime now.

These systems aren't "creating" anything. They're evaluating. The solution is a result of running an algorithm. It's not like these systems have any abilities beyond running these algorithms.

That's hugely useful, but it's not the same are creating.

It seems to me that people making those sorts of suggestions don't have a good grasp of what they are talking about.

And what does it mean to award a computer program a Nobel prize? How do you give a computer program money?

These are only tools used by people to perform functions. They're not self-aware entities that have any understanding of what they are doing, and it's not a good idea to encourage people to think of them in those terms

These are programs that are designed by people to look for patterns in data. While they are called AI, the are not "artificially intelligent".

Executing an algorithm requires no intelligence.

They are capable of learning and classifying, but they are certainly not intelligent.

You can say that about quite a few songwriters and bands. Through my years of performing in cover bands, I've noticed a lot of bands and single artists doing 3 versions of the same song. 3 seems to be the magic number.

When I was working with Motown, Berry Gordy gave us the same talk he reportedly gave to others, I'll paraphrase. Don't try something new, write what is already out there and already a hit.

It has to be similar enough to be recognized and immediately be liked by the audience. While it has to be predictable, it must be different just enough so it isn't predictable 100% of the time. That little twist makes all the difference in the world.

What A! might not have yet, and might someday, is that little human spark of creativity that recycles what went before, but add just a bit of something new.

But when we write pop music, are we really doing something new, or a mash-up of more than one old thing?

It's doubtless that AI is coming after a lot of jobs. I just hope it doesn't take mine soon. I'm not a songwriter, I'm a performer. DJs have already taken too much of my market, I don't need A! taking the rest.

Notes ♫

“Something different than minimizing an error function”? This could mean almost anything. An apple is different than minimizing an error function.

How about this for a working definition of “create” in this context?

Create: To produce, reveal or give rise to something unique or sufficiently dissimilar from that which came before. To bring into being or awareness a novel thing, idea or relationship which did not exist prior.

“Create” and “discover” can be very close cousins.

Generative AI creates new content like images, text and relationships based on information it has learned from a training dataset and a set of rules. And it is a tool and has already surpassed the capabilities of a human. Tools that surpass human capability is nothing new in our history.

There are tools that surpass our crushing power; think sledgehammer.
There are tools that surpass our cutting power; think scissors.
There are tools that surpass our killing power; think rifle.
There are tools that surpass our lifting power; think hydraulic systems
There are tools that surpass our ability to move on the surface of water; think speed boat.
There are tools that surpass our ability to fly; think airplane.
There are tools that surpass our vision; think micro/telescope.

It is easy to connect the dots. Why couldn’t our brains be surpassed?

There are tools that surpass our ability to store and retrieve info; think database.
There are tools that surpass our ability to compute; think hand calculator.
There are tools that surpass our ability to strategize; think Deep Blue vs Gary Kasparov

And there is a tool that has already proven it can discover and create new and relevant relationships between variables that humans haven’t seen, we call this tool artificial intelligence and we ain’t even seen the tip of the iceberg yet. Drug discovery and protein folding are just two areas where this has and will shine.

And for the first time in our history we have a tool that can create a tool. ChatGPT4 can write software (in more than one language).

No doubt, this kid has me beat.
I wonder if anybody here can play a 5-string fretless as well as her.

PS> I like the new name Doctor, too bad "Steely" is already taken

All in fun! I wish we had a trophy to give out!

Joe, the laughs I get from these forums are trophy enough. I enjoy everybody here but one person. (The Flexor as I call him.)

Yes, this is indeed good news. Dan has graduated from a Student to a Doctor in a single day. Fast work, Dan! Congrat's.

Yep, I won't disagree about this.

Very little of what we do is original. Even things that are new - like inventions and discoveries - are found to develop in parallel in separate places.

But something that people can do - that AI can't - is understand which of their decisions are derivative, and which are not. For example, you can write a song in the style of another song, and know which elements can be safely retained as non-infringing (because they may be common across the genre) vs. things that need to be modified, because they hew too closely to the original.

AI can't currently do that, because the underlying technologies don't have a way to evaluate what they are "creating". There's no self awareness of either the process, or understanding of how to evaluate the results.

Training neural networks is based on minimizing error values. Iteratively generating images is based on minimizing error values. The core of neural networks is generating results with the lowest error value.

What I mean by "creates" is that there's an awareness of what's been created. Neural networks don't know about the algorithm they're running, or the data they are processing. It doesn't "know" if it's generating an image, or writing code. It's just applying learned weights to data.

"Rules" are typically inferred from the training data. Or they're hard-coded into the design of the neural network.

The training data is created by people, the valuation of the training data is created by people, and design and evaluation of the neural network is also supplied by people.

I also suggested that these systems are only just tools.

Because these machine allow us to exceed what we could do without them doesn't mean that these machines exceed us. A hammer without a person can't pick itself up and drive nails. Nor would it right to say that a sailing boat has "pluck and courage".

Then why attribute neural networks with the ability to create?

Yes, but that's not a difficult ability to surpass, wouldn't you agree?

I'm not saying that our brains can't be surpassed. I'm saying that neural networks aren't intelligent.

ChatGPT can just as easily "hallucinate" a complete false answer as generate a correct one. It has no ability to discriminate between the two, or even comprehend the meaning of its output.

We called lots of things "artificial intelligence", but that doesn't make the manifestations of "intelligence".

You mean, like a machine that can build a hammer? Because that already existed.

ChatGPT doesn't decide for itself that it wants to write a program, any more than a hammer-building machine decides that it wants to build a hammer.