Skullgrid

Skullgrid, 7 hours ago

This week, I spent a few hours listening to Dadabot’s Pho Queue stream.

I read the little prose they left in the stream description. And I found myself wanting to go back to it several times. Something about the screams of “FA KYUU” sounds morphing into saxophones, being garbled, sometimes screamed, sometimes sung, the transitions that were talked about in the prose felt nice to listen to. sometimes it felt like it was coming up with genuine new ideas, for itself at least, that it didn’t generate before.

Then I started thinking of the level of art discourse we have in the modern world, especially visual arts, and ideas from Cage. And the nature of the music industry.

Jackson Pollock and his CIA funded splashes of paint are only worthwhile to people who actually like them. The AI generated saxophone warblings, the screeches that come out of it, the choppy, syncopated drum beats give me feelings. It is art to me.

There is a person behind the scenes, that curated the algorithm to bring out music in a certain way. Pho Queue doesn’t sound the same as a “bach faucet” , because of the human creativity and curation that went into the way the music is generated.

Brian Eno and John Cage made music with procedural generation features before the current wave of generative AIs. It’s an established perspective to have on music. Some performances use radios being tuned to frequencies just to add a new source of sound.

How is this stuff any different?

On the other side of the coin, does music made by humans inherently mean anything? The crap churned out by pop musicians that are flying around with private jets, composed by commitee with the end goal of generating another product for someone else to buy, is there any expression or emotion in there? What does the zillionth love song made by a billionaire have to offer that hasn’t been expressed a zillion times before?

There’s some more to be written , like if I make music myself that relies heavily on timbre, or effects that I bought, who’s really doing the expression, and how? If the musical theory of what I’m playing is simple, and contributes less to the aesthetic feelings of the music I’m making than my guitar’s timbre, the way I set up my effects pedals; is the expression I’m doing actually more in how I turned the knobs on my pedals to get an aesthetic than the actual notes I play? So then am I expressing something, or are the people who designed and manufactured my equipment?

But then we get into this :

I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.

The talk about AI is stupid. It’s a tool.

The talk about the IMPLICATIONS of AI, and who uses it to automate what, at the cost of who, is the actual argument to be had.

If some metal band that can barely scrape together enough money to tour uses AI to generate an album cover, it shouldn’t be taken as a horrifying act of taking money out of an artist’s mouth. If BMG fires everyone they have on the art dept to only use AI art, that’s something to be concerned about.

Skullgrid, 22 hours ago

Neat

Skullgrid, 2 days ago

Yeah, who else would want free big boobs bimbo surgery, a busty intellectual?

Skullgrid, 2 days ago

I thought having at least Hu and Watt as their names would make the sketch make a little more sense

Skullgrid, 1 day ago

and they should.

the entire menu, and company history is cultural appropriation. They literally ripped off a mexican family restaurant

Skullgrid, 2 days ago

Ok, but all you did was make more people pay attention to the trending panel which made people look at the slur.

Skullgrid, 2 days ago

which skin are you using? post a screenshot , alongside your current playlist so we can be entertained

Skullgrid, 3 days ago

this news is so foreign to me I have no idea who’s in the right or wrong.

this means it’s a high quality post, and not just more news from the US, Canada , Australia and Europe.

Skullgrid, 3 days ago

here’s the actual link :

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Day

Skullgrid, 4 days ago

Why? You should teach the same things to your son at the least for empathy , the most for prevension.

Skullgrid, 4 days ago

What? Why shouldn’t his daughter and son be taught that sometimes, men act inappropriately and that women feel threatened and all the rest?

Skullgrid, 4 days ago

this film is gold, and one of the most underrated Cohen brothers film.

Skullgrid, 3 days ago

Agile sprints are 2-6weeks.

I have never, in over 10 years of working in agile seen a single company go one day over 2weeks.

Skullgrid, 4 days ago

Oh look, actual antisemitism

Skullgrid, 4 days ago

Why not share a source that doesn’t fund fascism?

Skullgrid, 5 days ago

This is bait to then switch the genders then cause outrage.

Skullgrid, 5 days ago

Otoh, not everyone has the frankly marginal technical skills it requires to download and use KoboldCPP,

if it’s anything like Stable diffusion, there’s probably a webui that lets you run it if you can follow basic instructions

Skullgrid, 5 days ago

At this point, if they’re asking for the scientifically specified strain of virus to be served to them, I’m not sure it sounds like “anti science” , more like “braggadocious risk taking”

Skullgrid, 4 days ago

Covid has a mortality rate of about 3%

hah great, makes the 1 in 50k risk of a certain vaccine’s side effects even more ridiculous to think about

Skullgrid, 5 days ago

There’s a couple on there, zenith passage, unit 731,aethere,origin

Skullgrid, 6 days ago

I hear he’s more into the head of the pig

Skullgrid, 6 days ago

So… “go outside and touch grass” is bullshit? :P

Skullgrid, 6 days ago

thanks so much.

still doesn’t explain why the BDSM lady is pegging the guy inside through the computer though.

I guess that kind of thing would populuarise Informatics in yugoslavia. Didn’t know they had that big of a femdom scene that it would lead to other things being made popular just by putting it next to something.

Skullgrid, 5 days ago

Great, now fix it without having over half the country go into poverty, you privileged piece of shit boludo.

Skullgrid, 6 days ago

even then you’re fucked. I’ve been on “the bench” at my contracting company since christmas, which led to my wages getting halved. every fucking day I read about layoffs in software development flooding the market with better programmers than me.