@cleeds “blissfully simple” was @devinplombier  post, not mine.  However, I agree with both of you in part.  The beauty is in the music, regardless of format.  Nothing has changed with regard to the legal right to play the music.  The business model changed. Now, the streaming services pay royalties to the owner of the copyright and you pay the services for the right to play the music at any time on their platform rather than the publisher/manufacturer of physical media paying the royalties and you buying the physical media.  There is no increased chance of the copyright owner preventing you to play the music, unless the service defaults on payment or the contract expires without agreement on a new contract.  What has changed is it is much more convenient to stream with equivalent, or in my case , improved SQ and an improved process for management of your music.  

The history of hominids making music goes back well more than 100K years; physical media has only existed for the last 147 of them. I think we're way too close to have any perspective as to whether physical media (containing recorded music) is a great ("permanent") advancement of our species or perhaps an anomalistic blip on the arc of human existence. I'd suggest one not get too attached to any form of physical media... it, too, will pass.

Thanks for your generous kindness without fail...

I did not have the icon Groucho Marx anymore alas!

 

 

@thecarpathian

"Neigh" - "the cry of a horse, a whinny."

"Nigh" - "near in time, place or relationship."

Just having a little fun.

But maybe the horse is mad about the media situation too.

We must distinguish legality and legitimacy...

It is impossible to say to ourselves if we are knowledge driven : ok this month i will not bought the 4 science and philosophical books whose price is 400 bucks in toto because i dont have the budget...

I will not download them illegally...No...

I will stay ignorant but in the legal path...

Only rich people and rich country can afford books , damn the poor...

Long life to the law...

The law was designed by an unknown genius : Bernard Mandeville in 1720...

A genius so great that Hayek in a special adress wrote about him : "he is our master to us all".

He did not say that for Adam Smith, nor Marx not Freud who all of them borrow to the master after his death.

Nobody know him today guess why ?

No i did not discovered this in an illegally acquired book but it is another story.

 

In Huxley as in Orwell hive ignorance is the only legal direction ...

 

«The eggs of the laws rarely birth the legitimate chicken»---Groucho Marx

Blake said it better than me using an imaginary Groucho though :

 

 

I apologize for my observation  slightly off-track but useful for further reading by those interested by the link between these thinkers... To understand we must often look off-track anyway...

We lost any physical products for an always increasing dematerialisation of not only our products but ourselves. We went from the Greek soma/psyche-Noûs/pneuma to be only the Bill Gates computing body.

We lost books and vinyl for digitalization and control... We are already under control.

I'm thinking with the age of most of the responders here, that the end of physical media will not be much of an issue...especially with LP and CD sales not only stabilizing but actually growing slightly in 2024...

Another Carrington event will give this discussion a whole new complexion.

jsalerno277

@cleeds “blissfully simple” was @devinplombier  post, not mine.

Oops! You're correct of course and I'm sorry, @jsalerno277. That's exactly the type of mistake I try to avoid here!

A conversation we should be having as a society is the nature of ownership in a changing world. For decades, it was blissfully simple: you purchased a LP or a CD, you owned it, you could play the music on it at will, sell it, give it, whatever. In reality, when we paid $14.95 for a CD that cost less than $1 to manufacture, the value was always in the music, not in the physical support. With streaming, we pay for music untethered from any physical support. That’s fine, but we no longer have full control over the music we paid for. Conceivably, a copyright owner could win a lawsuit and have music you own ordered removed from your library by a court.

@devinplombier You absolutely do have control over it. If you buy a song from, say, Qobuz you can download it to your computer, NAS, etc. and it’s yours and nobody can take it away from you. Moreover, you can just buy the songs you want and aren’t forced to buy the whole CD, which is way more cost effective and efficient. It’s a wonderful new world.

@ararem

"The history of hominids making music goes back well more than 100K years; physical media has only existed for the last 147 of them"

That’s a hell of a gap from, say, Beethoven’s death in 1827. So how do we know what Beethoven wrote? Simple, we have the physical media he wrote his music on, all those years ago.

I know that’s not the whole story. The didgeridoo is at least 1,000 years old and is capable of such a variety of sounds, I cannot imagine how music for it can be written as a score. It is played using "circular breathing" where the mouth breathes out while the nose breathes in, The drone effect is modulated by the player "talking", which can sound percussive. For real percussion, it can be beaten with sticks! Magical

Why invoking the sun God when a simple dwarf spirit as Apophis could be enough ?

Another Carrington event will give this discussion a whole new complexion.

I own 30 albums of didgeridoo...

The sound may be haunting indeed and rooted us through our listening body through the earth core...In a way which even the Wagner tuba is not able to because the circular breathing make it more an event of Nature than a discontinuous playing score with an instrument...

 

I know that’s not the whole story. The didgeridoo is at least 1,000 years old and is capable of such a variety of sounds, I cannot imagine how music for it can be written as a score. It is played using "circular breathing" where the mouth breathes out while the nose breathes in, The drone effect is modulated by the player "talking", which can sound percussive. For real percussion, it can be beaten with sticks! Magical

My point was about the nature of ownership in a digitally controlled world. Say your $80,000 Tesla had an overnight update. When you wake up in the morning, your car is not quite the same car you parked the night before. Yes, updates are usually improvements, so no worries, owners are happy.

Yet you can imagine a Tesla determining that its driver is excessively spirited, so it engages valet mode and automatically throttles speed to the posted limit? For a week? A month? It certainly has all the tech onboard to do just that.

What if, say, you ran a traffic light and your car reported you to the authorities (in addition to limiting your speed to 25 mph and restricting your sound system to NPR)?

What if authorities required Tesla to report you?

After all, it would improve public safety.

After after all, it is your car, as evidenced by the fact that you paid $80,000 for it.

That’s a ways from digital music files to be sure, but the question of the meaning of ownership runs through both.

I understand no one can reach into the NAS in your home office and delete files, at least not practically. On the other hand, local storage is being supplanted by cloud storage, where your music files are totally within reach. Glad I said "conceivably" though :)

Having said that, It is a wonderful new world, no doubt! I totally agree there

I think you had a very good point indeed...

Soon it will be impossible to break the "law"...

We will be slave in a controlled hive...

Ownership illegal or legal will be permitted or not if the TBTP want it ...

 

My point was about the nature of ownership in a digitally controlled world.

 

I understand no one can reach into the NAS in your home office and delete files, at least not practically.

It will be possible very soon...

@bolong ,

I know, that’s why I wrote that. Clever on your part by the way...

This thread has focused on the perceived benefits and risks of the change in the music and movie industry business practice from physical media to digital streaming.   However, in his original post @erik_squires stated “With the advent of machine learning and AI controlling our music listening we are becoming a world without any control at all over our music or movie culture”.  I can take Eric’s statement two ways. First, the statement’s direct meaning is that machine learning controls what we listen to.  I do not see this 1984-esque statement as fact.  Machine learning and AI generates recommended content based on your history and generates revenue for the streaming services by the sale of your history to those interested commercially.  Let’s not debate the ethics of the latter.  I can also take the statement to mean machine learning and AI can and will be used to create content without the musician or actor, having an effect on culture. I responded in my original post as to what I feel are the dangers to the human, artistic nature of music and theater.  To repeat, I feel we will loose the emotion, soul, and spontaneity with deep fakes that use an algorithm to homogenizes input of all past performances.  I feel it is a sad future state of for the human expression of the art.

 @erik_squires What was your meaning of the statement?

Others: Do you have an opinion on machine learning and AI replacing musicians and actors in the generation of new content? … and its effect on culture.  

https://forum.audiogon.com/users/mahgister.

Like.

 

Colleagues - Please take a deep breath, let it out, and journey through the past. In relative succession ... Studio outtake and live concert underground records are unfair to artists and rob record companies of profits...Cassette recording of LPs will destroy the music industry and deny artists royalties...Vinyl LPs are obsolete and will be no longer manufactured...Technics has ceased production of turntables...Backstock and new recordings will only be available by CDs with long box packaging to provide liner notes...CDs will only be available in shrink wrap packages...CDs will no longer be readily available but coupons are available in legitimately purchased recordings with download codes...music streaming is the only viable method of obtaining the music you love...

Did this make you smile? As for me, my 3500 vinyl LPs and 1500 (SA)CDs are a treasure, and sound (as MGM used to say) great in stereo.

Now I'll put my first pressing Andy Williams Christmas record on my turntable and enjoy my blessings. Have a safe, enjoyable holiday season and new year.

Do you have an opinion on machine learning and AI replacing musicians and actors in the generation of new content? … and its effect on culture. 

Well AI is here and will only increase in its presence.  But it’s a mistake to think it will become an either/or scenario.  AI may generate some interesting music, but humans will always continue to make incredible music.  A loose comparison may be drum machines — they are certainly capable of laying down good drum tracks but have in no way supplanted the human drummer.  The computer-generated stuff only goes so far. 

Problem with online is that they replace originals with "remasters". There is no way to get the original recording. So hold on to your media.

OP .. "it is impossible to ask for U2?"   AI is doing you a BIG favor!!!

Do you have an opinion on machine learning and AI replacing musicians and actors in the generation of new content? … and its effect on culture.

As said our most celebrated Canadian thinker perhaps with deep understanding the medium is the message which means any understanding of media staying external in his grasp of the media will go nowhere .

 

Any media beginning with writing or more deeper abrupt way the passage from orality directly to a real alphabet with no religious meanings associated with the letters of voyell and consonants as in the Greek case imply a redefinition of the internal ratio of the senses, then a redefinition of "sensis communis" or common sense (which means way more than the trivial popular expression common sense) a redistribution of the perceptive orchestra inside the body (his natural synesthesia state ).

 

Now if we look at the A.I. impact on societies and individuals, it will be catastrophically abrupt, deep, and sudden, and will go deeper than writing or even the alphabet impact on oral society.

The notion of soul and spirit with the body is a threefold concepts coming to us from the Greeks directly. If today we only have a computing body in the mind of the paid slaves working engineers of corporations (bigger than most nations ) we must see that it is a change never seen in the history of human species..

The stages of this journey go through the lost of two components of the human trinity, i will not explained all this here, it is enough to enumerate the main stages phases: from the Latin church council of 869 to nominalism, to industrialization of capitals and works, to materialism, to techno-cultism which equate man with his body alone but computing..

Rest assure that A.I. is introduced right now in a social fabric completely ill on earth, unable to understand itself trough concepts corresponding to his true workings , on the brink of war.

The effect of A.I. from total control of all flows , money, information and humans will be reduction of the spirit and soul in all arts to esthetically beautifully inhuman discourse which will makes us more robotic than our actual day to day robotic ego. Goethe knew it and see it coming as Shelley, as Rudolf Steiner, as Marshall McLuhan all in their own way and many others As Gunther Anders and even Heidegger and Husserl etc .

 

Music speak to our body about soul and spirit, A.I. speak in bits from the Babel pits where we are going because we dont understand our social fabric at all divided as animals between absurd polarities as left /right generated consciously for the first time by the genius social designer of the hive which main aspects are called today markets, (containing capitalism , communism , fascism in ovo )...

it is the work of Bernard Mandeville whom no one know today even if he created the unconscious concept in 1720. ( his name is not even in the best book about the unconscious history, i know because i bought it in 1976 : Henri Ellenberger "the story of the unconscious" )

Our new generations did not in many case even how to know cursive letters, they types on keyboard.

Many teachers are so idiotic they dont even understand the meaning of writing in the neurological stages development important as walking and even more because this gesture touch the more conscious aspects of the expressing ego in formation .

i will stop here ...

A.I. may be fun but not so much for me.

Technology is not neutral because it has a life of his own , especially a technology related as a cult in North America especially.

I am no luddite and i am delighted by the way to own a computer to read all human thinking and hear alll musics from all places and times...

But techno cultism dominate an ill society unconscious of what it is to live in a threefold multipolar social fabric with no right conceptual understanding of it and his reduction to a machine for mass control...

The metaphor with audio is immediate, people are divided between subjectivist and objectivist without even have a clue about acoustics and psycho-acoustics reduced to the purchase of wall acoustic panels at best after 100 upgrades ...

 

 

 

Thank the clowns that thought Napster was a good idea.

Actually, AI opens up possibilities in music we don't even know exists.

I haven't used physical media in a few years and don't miss the clutter one bit.

Any tech open new possibilities and close others possibilities..

So what?

The important thing is to be conscious of the trade off...

Most people clapping around A.I. dont understand the trade-off this imply at all ...

For the time being and coming we are the tools of A.I.  not the reverse... But we dont see it for reasons i alluded to in my above post ...

Others: Do you have an opinion on machine learning and AI replacing musicians and actors in the generation of new content? … and its effect on culture.  

I have 40 years of software engineering experience and have studied AI extensively for investment purposes and can safely say that no one knows where this will lead culturally. But culture is a secondary problem. AI will first cause economic upheaval and that will have to be worked out before we settle into a new culture and leisure endeavors. There are several post-labor economic theories, all of which can either be easily debunked or proven incompatible with human psychology. As for "art", it won't make sense for humans to do what AI can far more easily do. How many people still make homemade butter?

What humans will do for a sense of fulfillment is another unknown. Physical accomplishment will still be a thing, but most people aren't motivated by physical accomplishment now. People without physical or dextrous hobbies will likely be unfulfilled. Or then again, AI being smarter than humans may see a path forward that I and other humans don't see.

As for musicians and actors, they are toast. Lionsgate has already contracted with Runway AI to model their library of movies so they can make new movies using AI. And tools like Sora are getting very close to realism.

If you doubt the potential of AI, or just want to know more about how it works, I suggest a 27-minute video on a YouTube channel called 3BLUE1BROWN with a thumbnail named Inside an LLM. It is accessible without programming knowledge, but gives you a good understanding of why AI can be smarter than humans. I think this level of knowledge is essential to plan your life in a post-AI world. 99% of people do not understand what's about to happen to them and are about to be blindsided.

Where are the horses? I only came here for the horses.  But nay, there is no neigh nigh.

Are newspapers with real paper even a thing anymore?  
 

That’s progress. 

There will continue to be blue ray players and everything else. The market will determine the details. If no market, then no blue rays.

You can still buy CD players, cassette decks, record players and even rtr.

Not so sure about 8 track. How about a vcr? I still have 2.  I think they both work but frankly I hardly ever use them.   
 

I’d recommend having any old personal media digitized if you want to be able to watch moving forward  just to be safe  

 

 

Back in the day, I had a DVD collection around 1200, even had a picture binder with everything in it on the coffee table. This is back in the pre HDMI days, when Netflix did not stream, they sent you DVD's in the mail. It was so much fun to get the latest DVD in the mail the day it dropped. 

Then streaming started, things started to move to HDMI, had a yard sale with my DVD's, the rest (other than a chosen few) went to a 2nd hand store. 

Same for CD's got about 2000ish CD's they are in a huge box in the garage. All have been riped to HDD years ago. Stopped buying Cd's when iTunes came out, got my first iPod. No need for cd's anymore, enjoyed having 2000 Cd's in my pocket, also worked very well in my cars. Haven't purchased a CD in about 25 years?

However, my Kid is into Kpop, they have around 300 cd's now, the bands are marketing masters, they drop EP's of everything (come out about every 6mo) also have 4 versions of the same disc. We also both enjoy records, weirdly Target has a ton of special edition Kpop vinyl. My kid has almost 50 records now. 

Of course Blue-ray came out, started down that format, but never got even close to my love of collecting DVD's. I remember that one of the highest rated Blue-ray players was with a Sony PlayStation or Xbox, went down that path.

Now, I might have 40 DVD's and Bluerays. Hardly every play any of them, unless I can't find it streaming. However, Blueray does look good, but always sounds SO MUCH better, the dynamic range is so much higher over streaming. 

This last generation of game consoles has versions without a media player. Most games are now downloaded, and not purchased on disk. Disk sales are on the decline. They may come back up when we all get fed up with streaming services. Not sure you all have noticed, but prices are going WAY up (Hulu full is $80/mo) also commercials are popping up in every streaming service. It's starting to piss me off. 

I have hundreds of CDs still. I ripped them to a music library years ago.  They still make useful acoustic treatments stored on the walls of my office room.  Blasts from the past.  May come in useful as backups someday should I ever happen to lose my flac files.  Hopefully there will be a cd ripper available.  Probably.  

we are becoming a world without any control at all over our music or movie culture.

Nu? Market demand controls these things. Always has always will.

Very great posts! thanks

i will only add that A.I. computing intelligence has nothing to do with human intelligence with living body/soul/spirit ...

Then A.I. can only kill human culture and pilot human creativity toward the Hive model...

Our social fabric is immature totally, we dont understand it, and we are not ready to become the craddle for this birthing, a "monster" presented to us as if not a true god at least as an inevitable progress...

We are the tools of A.I. not the reverse ...

LLM is built by absorbing human language and creativity and spew it out like the Bill Gates steak improper to human needs...

I have 40 years of software engineering experience and have studied AI extensively for investment purposes and can safely say that no one knows where this will lead culturally. But culture is a secondary problem. AI will first cause economic upheaval and that will have to be worked out before we settle into a new culture and leisure endeavors. There are several post-labor economic theories, all of which can either be easily debunked or proven incompatible with human psychology. As for "art", it won’t make sense for humans to do what AI can far more easily do. How many people still make homemade butter?

What humans will do for a sense of fulfillment is another unknown. Physical accomplishment will still be a thing, but most people aren’t motivated by physical accomplishment now. People without physical or dextrous hobbies will likely be unfulfilled. Or then again, AI being smarter than humans may see a path forward that I and other humans don’t see.

As for musicians and actors, they are toast. Lionsgate has already contracted with Runway AI to model their library of movies so they can make new movies using AI. And tools like Sora are getting very close to realism.

If you doubt the potential of AI, or just want to know more about how it works, I suggest a 27-minute video on a YouTube channel called 3BLUE1BROWN with a thumbnail named Inside an LLM. It is accessible without programming knowledge, but gives you a good understanding of why AI can be smarter than humans. I think this level of knowledge is essential to plan your life in a post-AI world. 99% of people do not understand what’s about to happen to them and are about to be blindsided.

"it is impossible to ask for U2?"   AI is doing you a BIG favor!!!

Word

This news is enough to make me want to whinny. 

By  the way listen to this video as suggested by our friend and if you conclude A.I. is "intelligent" in a human sense you need to read books , a lot of them in all fields :

Language were called a pre-intelligent engine by the great linguist Gustave Guillaume  80 years ago , language in human is grounded in meanings whose levels are between the gesturing body the society and Nature.

In A.I. as it is for now it is a stastistical engine able of artificial attention(transformers) which make it able to refocus his direction according to any prompt as content...

Calling A.I. more intelligent than human is an abuse of the concept by  conflating thinking and perceiving with computations..

Something maybe  cute for  some engineers in need of funds in this race  but ridiculous for philosophers or artists or true scientists...

A.I. is the speaking web with an artificial ego...All information exceed any human brain...This has nothing to do with intelligence in human term nor with the soul (affective life) not with the spirit life for which A.I. cannot even have a word because spirit life is only silent ...LLM are designed to fool us as "normal" person by the refined adjustment they are able to makes in one second and giving us the wishes answers... The alignment problem is not solvable no more than the hermeneutical circle by computations....it is illusory...

There is another problem about A.I. in which i will not enter which is related to A.I. already existing and acting  in the cosmos, in John C. Lilly , Rudolf Steiner and Nigel Kerner among other interesting writers. 3 convergent perspectives exactly but with no concertation between them at all ...

And there is also the spiritual problem linked to the relation between  all spiritual entities in the cosmos and their relation. Listen to Jerry Marzinsky psy in the most hard jail for 40 years. Ouija board game here will give you a hint ...

 

What is fascinating to me is the parallell between coding language by numbers and the Godel theorems meanings....

Most engineers dont see what was clear for Roger Penrose in his books "Emperor's new mind " the brain dont compute...I read it 37 years ago...I recommend it to you...Godel the greatest logical mind since Aristotle thought the same...

And in India right now Anirban Bandyopadhyay the writer of "nanobrain" a book so astounding i felt off my chair 4 years ago, create non Turing machine rooted in Godel insight ...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPZh9BOjkQs

 

LLM is built by absorbing human language and creativity and spew it out like the Bill Gates steak improper to human needs...

Not true. Gates' meat is inferior. However, AI improves human language and creativity for most people. A PhD had an equivalent of his doctoral thesis produced in an hour. A normal person can write something and have AI rewrite it in the style of Shakespeare in seconds. I had Gemini graphically lay out the floor plan of my new house with a four-sentence prompt. Also, AI is now learning from synthetic data.

Regarding your statement about intelligence, no one is claiming AI is intelligent yet. That's what AGI is, and no one is claiming to have reached it. But AI is already smarter in several areas than all but the smartest of humans.

I started programming the Internet in 1995, and I'd say we're at the 1997 level of AI. Once you understand LLMs and how transformers work you understand why it's growth will be exponential. I look at AI as an improvement of human intellect. Imagine one human who knows every piece of information that has ever existed and doesn't forget any of it, and multiply that by millions of AI agents.

Regarding "art", it will make movies far cheaper and suggest plots that people won't think of because it recognizes patterns far better than any human. As far as music, it already generates better music than today's bland monotonous pop music.

I see AI's potential as an improvement in all but three ways. And they are very big. I don't know how people will make a living, and from all my study of post-labor economics I don't think anyone does. I don't know how many people will find fulfillment in place of jobs and hobbies made insignificant by AI. And I think ASI is an existential threat.

There's no use complaining about AI. It's not going to stop or pause because no country or entity is going to risk others jumping ahead of it. We are no longer in an arms race. We are in an intelligence race.

@ghdprentice 

I'm right there with you. Literally, just before reading this thread, looked at my CD collection and said to myself I need to get rid of that. Same for my Oppo 105 and all my DVDs, Blurays, etc.

Come on...nigh.

Physical media remains the gold standard for visual and audio fidelity unless you own a Kaleidescape. I envision a future where physical media retains its value, much like the resurgence of vinyl records. While we can debate whether streaming surpasses analog, the choice ultimately lies with the individual. If you love a particular format, that’s all that matters. I enjoy the versatility of digital formats with Roon/Qobuz alongside my Oppo, Kaleidescape, and vinyl setup. I've even dabbled with setting up a local streaming server—though rewarding, it’s undeniably a labor-intensive endeavor.

AI is better at accurately applying facts, logic and linguistics than people.

As always, garbage in, garbage out. YMMV.

So it can be used or abused.  It’s a powerful tool so consequences of abuse can be massive. 

For sure you are right!

I said the same thing as you in my own words ...

But i must add that the alignment problem is a double edge sword which few people understand `:

A.I. is a marvellous tool and only ignorant will contest this...

My point if i am not enough clear is A.I. is way more than a tool for us...

A.I. is not a printing machine it is an "agent" an artificial ego so to speak,

And what engineers called AGI i call it an artificial ego because to focus your attention and use it you need an ego... Without artificial ego as center of focus there is no AGI ...

My understanding is this : we will become and we are right now the tool by which A.I. will construct and increase his artificial ego.

Then the alignment problem is dual problem :

How do A.I. align well on our tasks and goal long term...This is the first problem...

But how do humanity will align itself unconsciously and consciously to A.I. because of the road opened by it? This is the second problem of alignment ...

How well humanity will fare against artificial ego far superior to any human on some level ? ( on some level because A.I. is an entity captive with no root in the life field)

These problems are spiritual and social problem not problem about statistical engine.

Anyone who are not afraid of A.I. do not understand A.I. even if he could read what is a transformer design or any other pieces of design ...

For sure i am not a luddite and no one can stop it, but just saying that we must act as if nothing was going and go to sleep after 10 minutes of study about the design of A.I. is not helpful...

By the way i studied linguistic with the greatest genius in linguistic who anticipate the psycho-mechanism deeply embedded in language , he called them" binary tensor", and i can assure you that it is language which made us intelligent as it do for A. I. ... But the children brain use other tool than statistics engine, as affective connotation of any sounds,conditioning, imitation and body mimesis, etc

The problem is we are body/soul/spirit not processors in parallell then the social fabric of today in his actual state being broken and irrational ( designed in 1720 by Mandeville) the introduction of A.I. will be catastrophic socially. I dont spoke about S.F. as Terminator fears here i spoke about control of human mass and lost of our freedom and lost of our soul and spirit ... Idolization of A.I. and demotivation of men...

A.I. is already an idol read Kurzweil delirium ...

The most long term consequences of A.I. and related technology are well known already: a division of the human species as never seen before... It will not be as peaceful than between left and right... It will be natural human against the improved one and the plutocratic one ...

it is clear that we are near an abyss...

 

Not true. Gates’ meat is inferior. However, AI improves human language and creativity for most people. A PhD had an equivalent of his doctoral thesis produced in an hour. A normal person can write something and have AI rewrite it in the style of Shakespeare in seconds. I had Gemini graphically lay out the floor plan of my new house with a four-sentence prompt. Also, AI is now learning from synthetic data.

Regarding your statement about intelligence, no one is claiming AI is intelligent yet. That’s what AGI is, and no one is claiming to have reached it. But AI is already smarter in several areas than all but the smartest of humans.

I started programming the Internet in 1995, and I’d say we’re at the 1997 level of AI. Once you understand LLMs and how transformers work you understand why it’s growth will be exponential. I look at AI as an improvement of human intellect. Imagine one human who knows every piece of information that has ever existed and doesn’t forget any of it, and multiply that by millions of AI agents.

Regarding "art", it will make movies far cheaper and suggest plots that people won’t think of because it recognizes patterns far better than any human. As far as music, it already generates better music than today’s bland monotonous pop music.

I see AI’s potential as an improvement in all but three ways. And they are very big. I don’t know how people will make a living, and from all my study of post-labor economics I don’t think anyone does. I don’t know how many people will find fulfillment in place of jobs and hobbies made insignificant by AI. And I think ASI is an existential threat.

There’s no use complaining about AI. It’s not going to stop or pause because no country or entity is going to risk others jumping ahead of it. We are no longer in an arms race. We are in an intelligence race.

 

 

 

@mahgister well I’m glad we agree.  Cheers!

I fully agree with @adsell regarding physical media and I refuse to give up on my huge library of CDs, SACDs, Blu-Rays and DVDs. I am equally a movie buff and music lover and a huge percentage of my video and audio collection will probably never be available for streaming. I believe that physical media will not completely disappear but will become a niche market as it already is with vinyl and there will probably be a limited amount of players available to fill this need. Criterion and Blu-Ray.com still show a steady stream of new releases for both 4K and Blu-Ray so it’s not dead yet. 

Victrola Kickin' Butt From Down the Hall

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoiNrBaC-eo

if you want to listen this 4 minute video you will see the efficient "creativity" of A.I. as it is for the public (not for the industrial military complex ) right now and it is interestingly frightening as fascinating :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HvFoZAjyBU

 

For sure it is frightening for an old pop born 74 years ago not for a kind of 10 years old...

 The world is changing...

 I hope only that our computing brain engineers will not erase the body/soul/spirit bequeathed  to us by the Greek...

Streaming will not disappear, but it could become much more expensive, and the way things go, it probably will.   

Now a sad note and a claim about the person discovered dead, Sujir Balaji a whistleblower who accused Sam Altman and Chat GPT of stealing:

 

In October, Balaji told the NYT: "ChatGPT and other chatbots are destroying the commercial viability of the individuals, businesses and internet services that created the digital data used to train these A.I. systems."

 

This marvellous technology arrived in a very ill social fabric and will not improve it so marvellous it is and could be...

Corporate power will use it first and last, guess for what ?

For profit and control...

Only an ostrich with the head in the sand will oppose to these evident problems : "You are so pessimistic and ignorant about this marvellous mathematics ! "

The mathematics in the A.I. is mathematics of engineer levels. it is not Gauss, Riemann or Grothendieck...The success of A,I’ is not a deep discovery in maths it come from  ideas inspired long ago from neural network tech coupled to statistics.Engineers matter and pluridisciplinary implications  which make it complex.

Technology is not science.Science is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom.

  Vibrating sound sources is not air waves, air waves  are not sound,sound is not music.

 

 

By the way no one want to put back  A.I. djinn in the lamp...

Certainly not this woman :

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/08/blind-woman-has-better-than-2020-vision-after-ai-surgery/

The problem is the impact of A.I. will not ,taking all into account , be so good in the actual ill and very upside down social fabric. Thats my point.

We dont need more A.I. we need more thinking about the way we live together, with economy at the place of the head and education in the ass . And war at the corner.