There Are No Shortcuts to Being Human
The Velvet Sundown band fooled a lot of people, including Spotify fans and Rolling Stone.
It had suddenly shown up on Spotify several months ago, with full albums of Americana-styled rock, and more than one million folks streamed the band’s songs – except there was no band. The songs, the album art, the band’s photos – it was all generated by AI.
When you know this and relisten to the songs, you swear you would’ve never been fooled. Those now in the know say the music is formulaic, derivative and uninspired. Yet many of us were taken in by this AI hoax, or what the real “band” now refers to itself as – “a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction and composed, voiced and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence.”
Formulaic. Derivative. Synthetic. We mean these as criticisms. But they are accurate descriptions of exactly how AI works. It is synthesis by formulas (or algorithms) that parse billions or trillions of data points, identify patterns and derive the finished product from it. That is AI’s greatest strength…and its biggest downfall.
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