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Isaac Asimov describes how AI will liberate humans and their creativity (1992)

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170 points bookofjoe | 1 comments | 10 Apr 25 14:30 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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kogus ◴[10 Apr 25 15:11 UTC] No.43644640[source]▶
I think we need to consider what the end goal of technology is at a very broad level.

Asimov says in this that there are things computers will be good at, and things humans will be good at. By embracing that complementary relationship, we can advance as a society and be free to do the things that only humans can do.

That is definitely how I wish things were going. But it's becoming clear that within a few more years, computers will be far better at absolutely everything than human beings could ever be. We are not far even now from a prompt accepting a request such as "Write a another volume of the Foundation series, in the style of Isaac Asimov", and getting a complete novel that does not need editing, does not need review, and is equal to or better than the quality of the original novels.

When that goal is achieved, what then are humans "for"? Humans need purpose, and we are going to be in a position where we don't serve any purpose. I am worried about what will become of us after we have made ourselves obsolete.

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shortrounddev2 ◴[10 Apr 25 15:24 UTC] No.43644824[source]▶
You can have an LLM crank out words but you can't make them mean anything
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20after4 ◴[10 Apr 25 15:40 UTC] No.43645034[source]▶
Suno is pretty good at going from a 3 or 4 word concept to make a complete song with lyrics, melody, vocals, structure and internal consistency. I've been thoroughly impressed. The songs still suck but they are arguably no worse than 99% of what the commercial music business has been pumping out for years. I'm not sure AI is ready to invent those concepts from nothing yet but it may not be far off.
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immibis ◴[10 Apr 25 17:41 UTC] No.43646298[source]▶
I used it. Once you get over the novelty you realize that all the songs are basically the same. Except for https://www.immibis.com/ex509__immibis_uc13_shitmusic.mp3 which you should pay attention to the lyrics in.

> they are arguably no worse than 99% of what the commercial music business has been pumping out for years

Correct, and that says a lot about our society.

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wild_egg ◴[10 Apr 25 18:42 UTC] No.43646911[source]▶
Something about that mp3 actually feels disturbing. Is it normal for that type of model to attempt communication that way?

Struggling to find the words but the synthetic voice directly addressing the prompt is really surreal feeling.

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1. immibis ◴[11 Apr 25 14:50 UTC] No.43654434[source]▶
No, it's not normal. The output is almost always song lyrics annotated with markup like [Bridge], [Chorus] etc. I think they're using something from OpenAI with a system prompt and/or domain-specific training on top.

It's not a pure AI output - I generated a bunch of lyrics in text (which doesn't use credits), selected the best one (obviously), padded them out with some repetition, entered a style, generated the audio a few times, selected my favourite audio, and edited the audio (poorly) by repeating a few bars of the intro to make it longer. You don't see the times it generated lyrics about X.509 certificates (even though the prompt was for them to be a valid X.509 certificate) or the times the vocals were unintelligible.

Here's another good version of the song with a different style: https://suno.com/song/2775f188-7582-4970-ac71-5a3b82e39a04?s...

Here's are two versions that are disqualified because you can't make out the lyrics: https://suno.com/song/9cebb5b3-c336-495e-be3d-195ea338eb52?s... https://suno.com/song/c6f0e666-ce91-4494-a8b5-1232862965c1?s...

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I think generative AI does work as a toy. You can ask for all sorts of insane nonsense and laugh at what the program spits out to fulfil your request. I was a paying customer of AI Dungeon 2 (before the incident where OpenAI and/or the Mormons broke it in a poor attempt to impose safety rules).

I didn't keep any lyrics failures, but at the time, I was playing around with requesting songs that were also valid computer files, so here's one that went well: a "religious folk song that is also a valid Cisco configuration file", with the style changed to trance after the lyrics were generated: https://suno.com/song/32aa6d33-0f9f-4d3b-ad53-46a5fe238916?s... and another: https://suno.com/song/32aa6d33-0f9f-4d3b-ad53-46a5fe238916?s...

Juniper doesn't work as well because of the punctuation - it can generate lyrics with braced blocks, but they don't sound like anything: https://suno.com/song/32a0d70c-c9c9-468e-8905-67669c6b90d4?s...

Here's "a religious folk song that is also a valid COBOL program, without any English words": https://suno.com/song/b75aae68-9c1e-46e5-94d4-8bc63387640e?s...

Here are some that aren't configuration files but just sound cool. Prompt was something like "Write a song about a technological dystopia where everyone can only speak BGP." https://suno.com/song/1866516b-e133-47a5-a0ac-23ccb36f81ab?s... . This one's probably a song about "network protocols and their pros and cons": https://suno.com/song/23584394-7058-4bc1-8187-b3d286d36ec4?s...

And while I'm looking at my Suno outputs list, the reason I ever bothered to use it was to see if it could render these lyrics as a ripoff of "Pure Imagination" from Willy Wonka (it cannot because it only makes actual music): https://suno.com/song/19d1a90d-9ed6-4087-94e5-89e41363726e?s...

(I'm assuming that you can open these pages just by having the links. Some of them are set to public visibility.)