"Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense."
- from the novel Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
I take this quote to mean that most people's idea of "apologetics" (arguing to convince people that the facts of Christianity or some other religion are true) is kind of pointless. You'll never convince someone logically of something that has to be experienced viscerally. LLMs don't help with that at all.
>You'll never convince someone logically of something that has to be experienced viscerally.
While you might be right, Christianity in particular is based on truth claims, including specially the resurrection, so the Christian tradition places special emphasis on rational defense. Apologetics is not just a means to persuade others; it is also a means to persuade oneself.
Edit: Responses say that all religions involve truth claims. True, perhaps I was imprecise. I only mean that the Christian case is especially stark. St. Paul: "If Christ be not raised, your faith is in vain." I'm not aware of another faith tradition that considers itself to hang upon a single boolean.
Actually, as a Christian (Catholic), I 100% agree with your assertion.
While all regions claim truth, Christianity really centers itself on this idea.
In fact, this is repeated over and over again, so much so that I've lost count of the number of times I've heard the following during Homily: "In Christianity is not true, and Christ was proven to not have been risen, we should stop practicing it".
You quoted Saint Paul which is great and one can find plenty of other examples such as Lewis's trilemma: "Lord, Liar, Lunatic". [0]
All religions are based on "truth claims", Christianity is nothing special in that regard. Ask a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew... They all have their professions of faith, and fervently believe their teachings are the truth.
They claim to know the truth but the reasoning behind it is different between religions. I'm no religious expert but I'm very familiar with Mormonism and they push really hard on the idea that faith is intentionally separate from truth and you learn about the truth of the church by meditating on your feelings and experiencing frisson, not via logic. Yes everyone has their mythology and Mormonism has its share of things the prophet says God says but it is very different than the Christian apologists that try to reconcile the Bible with things like astrophysics and other observed phenomena.
Do you have a citation for this? I am reasonably familiar with Mormonism (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) and I don't think I have ever heard this before?
I'm no religious scholar but I've had a LOT of conversations with Mormons with various levels of training (regular folks, bishops, missionaries) about why parts of the story don't make logical sense or aren't internally consistent. The common answers are in the expected range from the standard "god works in mysterious ways" to "if you could prove God was real it wouldn't take faith and the point of the human existence is to find faith".
The Mormon church, of course, has its wings of scholars trying to find evidence to support their origin stories (like looking for their god's original home planet or buying ancient South American temples to hopefully find something supporting the story of white peoples in the early Americas) but they also fully lean in to the idea that humans are inherently fallable and human reason isn't as powerful as faith and feeling. I think this is well demonstrated by the ritual of "bearing one's testimony" in church which is always ways you FELT the holy spirit or by the modern forgiveness (and embracing of) the clear corruption and deception of the original prophet Joseph Smith (like the demonstrably false book of Abraham, for example).
This isn't even supposed to be judgement of one way over the other - I'm just describing the very strong difference between Christian apologists like the author (who want the true truth the right way) and other kinds of proselytizing (that are more supportive of "any road to the right answer").
It still seems like a meaningless distinction, Buddhism also rests on claims of real world events: the Buddha is a historical figure, the story of his enlightenment being a factual happening is key to the belief system.
There are ways of interpreting and practicing Buddhism in which this is less important (eg modernist, psychological, western), but that's also true of Christianity (eg the Jefferson Bible, Unitarians, etc).
>You'll never convince someone logically of something that has to be experienced viscerally
"poofy guy in the sky doesnt care about war or rape or torture because someone ate an apple. sent his kid in the form of a human. kid was killed/human sacrificed. that saved all humanity. this doesn't stop rape, war, torture but it saved humanity"
the brain has to do some gymnastics to deal with dissonance
as militant as that sub is; I can't feel but understand them
that subreddit makes a looooot more sense when you treat it like you'd treat exislam or exmormon, people who were intentionally hurt by the church, both Catholic one and local Protestant
In my experience frequenting those boards as a former atheist, the vast majority of the militant atheist types were harmed more by their inability to compete in the standard hierarchies of society than they were by any particular Church or faith.
Most of them are angry at "The Man"—God just happens to be "The Man" at the very top.
I get your perspective and I will admit there are surely cases like that - I still wouldn't say it's a vast majority.
Though that raises a question. For example if you were a LGBT person in Deep South and abused over that, who is to blame? Every individual who did that (unfortunately, in the name of religion), or the Church culture who allowed for that to be norm?
And anger over church. I'm Polish, and I'm bi. The most well-known bishops were politically hand-in-hand with the previous ruling party. I would hear in public state media how I'm a part of "rainbow disease" that's infecting the country. Church would often buy land for 1 (!)% of the price.
At which point can I say that it wasn't just a few bad apples, but the whole structure who allowed for things to be that way?
Jesus is God. Don't ask me how to explain it from a theological standpoint but from my understanding: God decided he wanted to better understand the NPCs in his HumanSim(TM) game so he straps on a VR headset, enters the game via a virgin birth hack, gets killed, then rage quit. Hasn't been seen since so likely started a new game on some other planet.
> Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.
This is a self-defeating statement. The statement itself is a claim about God. If it is true, then it contradicts itself because it asserts a truth about God (namely, that no truths can be defended about Him). This undermines its own premise.
If it's not subject to itself, then it's claiming an exception to its own rule, which makes it self-defeating. A universal claim about truth can't exempt itself without contradiction.
The distinction between "statements about X" and "statements about statements about X" doesn't resolve the contradiction here, because the original claim makes a universal assertion about all possible true statements about God. By its own terms, it must encompass both:
1. First-order statements about God
2. Second-order statements about statements about God
3. All higher-order statements as well
Put differently: The claim "Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense" is asserting that there exists no level at which defensive truth claims about God are valid. But this assertion itself constitutes a defensive truth claim about God—whether at first, second, or any other order.
The attempt to escape via orders of statements fails because the original statement's scope explicitly covers all truth claims regarding God, regardless of their logical level. If it didn't cover all levels, then it would no longer be claiming that "nothing true can be said"—it would instead be claiming "some things true can be said, just not first-order things," which is a fundamentally different claim than the original.
So by attempting to exempt itself based on being "meta-level," the statement has already conceded that some true things can be said about God from a posture of defense (namely, meta-level things)—which directly contradicts its own absolute claim that nothing true can be said.
This is why universal claims about the impossibility of certain types of statements are often self-defeating—they cannot consistently exempt themselves from their own scope without undermining their universality.
> But this assertion itself constitutes a defensive truth claim about God
You seem to be asserting this without any proof, or at least none that I can follow. The assertion itself is a "defensive truth" about "truths about God," not about "God." I'm not sure how you are justifying considering "truth about [truth about [truth about [... X]]]" as the same thing as "statement about X".
Is it possible that you're considering the properties of the truths about X to be properties of X as well? I don't think this is justified. Properties of truths about X come from properties of X. For example, statements about the color of X are not statements about X itself, despite coming from properties of X. E.g. color(X) = color(Y) -/> X = Y.
Recursion doesn't complicate the case here. The original statement made assertions about "statements about God", not about God. For example, the statement "All statements about God are false" is not paradoxical, it is simply false (if we accept the law of the excluded middle). A statement like "Everything I've said about God is false" could very well be true, it's not paradoxical, despite also being part of the set "Everything I've said;" it's just not "about God."
Thinking about your argument a little more, it seems like our disagreement comes from your belief that "about X" is 'infectious' to all higher order statements, whereas I don't believe this is the case. The best way I can think to argue my point right now is from examples.
Suppose we had many books about movies on one hand, each book containing movie reviews or something, and then we have one book about [books about movies] on the other hand, call it B. The book B, which is about [books about movies], simply contains the number of words that each book about movies has written in it. Is B "about movies"? I would argue that it is not, it contains nothing about movies in it at all, just numbers describing other books. I can say "all books about movies are wrong" without meaning to refer to B, as B is not wrong (as long as the word-counting is correct).
Your examples attempt to break the chain of "aboutness" between meta-levels of statements. But there's a crucial distinction your argument misses:
"Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense" isn't merely describing properties of statements like your examples do (word counts, colors). Instead, it's making a universal claim about POSSIBILITY itself, specifically, the impossibility of defensive true statements about God.
This raises a key question: What makes defensive truth claims about God impossible? This impossibility must stem from something about God's nature itself. Otherwise, what grounds the impossibility?
Your examples all involve contingent properties:
1) Book word counts are contingent features of books
2) color(X) = color(Y) involves contingent properties of objects
But the original statement makes a necessary claim about what kinds of truth claims about God are possible at all. This is fundamentally different because:
1) It rules out ALL possible defensive true statements about God
2) The basis for this universal impossibility must lie in God's nature
3) Therefore it necessarily makes a claim about God, not just about statements
This is why property inheritance examples don't apply here. The statement isn't claiming properties transfer between levels, it's making a universal claim about possibility itself that necessarily involves both statements about God AND God's nature.
While you've shown that descriptive properties don't transfer between meta-levels, this doesn't address the key issue: a claim about what statements about God are possible must ultimately be grounded in God's nature itself.
> a claim about what statements about God are possible must ultimately be grounded in God's nature itself
Ah, so you're saying that the original statement "Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense" (call this statement "O") is self-defeating not because it applies to itself, but because it applies to one of its (lower-order) premises (call it "P"), which is itself about God? This is different than your original argument "The statement itself is a claim about God" but we can go with this as well.
I think your new argument relies on that premise P being made "from a posture of defense," otherwise O doesn't apply. I don't see any evidence of this being the case, so I don't think your argument is correct.
In other words, two conditions need to be satisifed for P to apply to a given assertion:
1) The statement must be about God.
2) The statement must be made from a posture of defense.
P doesn't satisfy (1) and O doesn't (have to) satisfy (2). Am I wrong, or what am I missing here?
The church has a long history of defending and clarifying the principles and practices of faith in a relatively academic way, in a way that would surprise people who believe religion is an anti-intellectual endeavor.
I remember reading something along the lines of, Jesuits will have a perfectly ironclad logical argument to any theological point... Assuming you have already swallowed the 1-2 big rocks at the foundation.
I would say there are both intellectual and felt needs. Apologetics is kind of its own genre of rhetoric and doesn’t satisfy everyone. It can be better to offer to research an objection together, rather than try to win it (more fun, too.)
Religious debates in a friendly setting can also lead to personal sharing that opens someone to emotional or spiritual experiences.
Minimizing intellectual concerns by overriding with an emotional experience does not “work”, not long-term and certainly not over generations.
But there are also people who have few or no intellectual concerns! Caveats all the way down.
From an outside perspective, that quote takes on a whole other meaning. Namely, that very few statements about "God" don't have similar but contradicting statements - making it (almost?) impossible to say anything definitive about them at all (from a SAT solver/proving kind of perspective).
To many the idea of bringing the intellect fully into action in religion seems almost repellent. The intellect seems so cold and measured and measuring, and the will so warm and glowing. Indeed the joy of the will is always figured in terms of warmth – such words as ardor, fervor and the like come from Latin words for a fire burning: there is a fear that intellect can only damp down the fire. Many again who do not find the use of the intellect in religion actually repellent, regard it as at least unnecessary – at any rate for the layman – and possibly dangerous. One can, they say, love God without any very great study of doctrine. Indeed, they say, warming to their theme, some of the holiest people they know are quite ignorant. Plenty of theologians are not as holy as an old Irishman they have seen saying his Rosary. All this is so crammed with fallacy as to be hardly worth refuting. A man may be learned in dogma, and at the same time proud or greedy or cruel: knowledge does not supply for love if love is absent. Similarly, a virtuous man may be ignorant, but ignorance is not a virtue. It would be a strange God Who could be loved better by being known less. Love of God is not the same thing as knowledge of God; love of God is immeasurably more important than knowledge of God; but if a man loves God knowing a little about Him, he should love God more from knowing more about Him: for every new thing known about God is a new reason for loving Him. It is true that some get vast love from lesser knowledge; it is true even that some get vast light from lesser knowledge: for love helps sight. But sight helps love too.
After all, the man who uses his intellect in religion is using it to see what is there. But the alternative to seeing what is there is either not seeing what is there, and this is darkness; or seeing what is not there, and this is error, derangement, a kind of double darkness. And it is unthinkable that darkness whether single or double should be preferred to light.
Indeed light is the joy of the mind as warmth is the joy of the will. But warmth and light are both effects of fire, warmth fire as felt, light fire as seen (and seen by). It seems strange to value the one effect and not the other of that fire by which the Holy Ghost is figured to us. It is an odd delusion that one is warmer in the dark, that one can love God better in the dark.
There are a lot of good theologians who are uncomfortable engaging in apologetics. It's easy to get immersed in the debate, and turn towards heresy or dishonesty without noticing. This precedes AI.
From where are you deriving your sense of "pointlessness"? If there is no absolute standard (such as God), then all truths, including moral truths, are determined by individuals or societies, making them relative.
I've been drawing cartoons about tech-related topics for years, and recently collected them all into one place. [0]
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We shared some details about Gmail's migration to Spanner in this year's developer keynote at Google Cloud Next [0] - to my knowledge, the first time that story has been publicly talked about.
I tried to find it in this video, but failed. Could you please share a time stamp on where to look?
It’s a pretty big deal if Gmail migrated to GCP-provided Spanner(not to an internal Spanner instance) and sounds like he kind of vote of confidence GCP and Cloud Spanner could benefit from: might I suggest to write about it? It’s easier to digest and harder to miss than an hour-long keynote video with no time stamps.
And so just to confirm: Gmail is on Cloud Spanner for the backend?
It's almost certainly not the case that Gmail uses Cloud Spanner rather than Internal Spanner. I don't think Cloud Spanner (or most of Google's cloud products) have the featureset required to support loads like Gmail (both in terms of technical capability, and security/privacy features).
When I worked at Google I tried to get more services to migrate to the cloud but the internal environment that was built up over 25 years is much better at supporting billion+ users with private data.
And yet, if they do, that's probably one of the best sales pitches they could have - dogfooding. After all, isn't that also how AWS started, just reselling the services and servers they already use themselves?
It doesn't make much sense to have a 'better' version of a product you sell but keep it internal.
Yet Amazon Retail still don't use DynamoDb for the critical workloads. They still rely on an internal version of DynamoDb (Sable) which is optimized for Retail workload.
looks like it starts at 50:45. youtube recently made it so you can click "show transcript" in the description then ctrl-f takes you to all the mentions. very helpful for long videos like this.
In the timestamped video link shared downthread, the speaker does seem to strongly imply that gWorkspace doesn’t manage the infra, when he finishes explaining the migration he declares (around 55:18)“[…]we can focus on the business of gmail and spanner can choose to improve and deliver performance gains automagically[sic]” which would imply, to me at least, that it’s on GCP.
That's not what it implied to me. To me, it meant that they adopted an internal managed Spanner with its own SRE team, instead of running their own Spanner. In the past, Gmail ran their own [[redacted]]s and [[redacted]] even though there were company-wide managed services for those things.
Agree, but with the caveat that [[redacted]] and [[redacted]] were old and originally designed to be run that way. All newer storage systems I can recall were designed to be run by a central team after many years of experience doing it the other way. And many tears shed over migrating to those centralized versions.
Source: I was on the last team running our own [[redacted]].
Wow, almost content-free presentation! How obnoxious!
This wasn't the first time Gmail has replaced the storage backend in-flight. The last time, around 2011, they didn't hype it up, they called it "a storage software update" in public comms. And that other migration is the origin of the term "spannacle", because during that migration the accounts that resisted moving from [[redacted]] to [[redacted]] we called barnacles.
I think you've done well laying out what a lot of people want "AI Engineer" to mean at this moment in time. My concern (coming fresh out of the absolute semantic nightmare that was the "serverless" community) is that the term AI is so hopelessly overloaded, and has been such a moving target over the years, that it's unlikely that a plurality of people will ever share your mental model of what an "AI Engineer" is/ does / knows / is paid.
Personally I've been using Generative Engineering / GenEng [0] to describe the professional practice of building stuff with AI as your pair programmer. I recognize some are pulling away from the term "generative", but to me it feels like a better anchor into the specific flavor of AI we're talking about.
Hmm, I think "the professional practice of building stuff with AI as your pair programmer" is just "software engineering". That is, it's just one more tool to use to do the existing work. We never had "Search Engineering" or "StackOverflow Engineering" to describe the practice of building stuff using web search and stack overflow as tools...
Maybe Text Processing Engineer or Text Engineer for short could express well that this person handles both text analysis and synthesis. It is analogous to the term Data Engineer, which describes someone that handles data processing and pipelines in general.
Generative isn't perfect for similar reasons perhaps, I consider procedural generarion adjacent to machine learning based generation so it would need to encompass both to make sense to me.
agree with the semantic overload risk, but i think at this point Worse is Better is applying here. like I said in the piece I'm not starting the trend, just calling out that it's already under way.
I believe a big reason this song blew up on social media was that it was misleadingly hyped as an "AI-generated song". I expect many people thought that AI composed and recorded the (reasonably idiomatic) music and lyrics.
For the record, here's my understanding of how this "AI-generated song" was made:
1. A human wrote the lyrics
2. A human recorded the beat
3. A human recorded themselves rapping
4. An "AI voice filter" made the recorded voice sound like Drake / the Weeknd.
IMO, the real tragedy here is not some threat to Drake (he’ll be fine) but that some dude who wrote an original song had to pretend it was written by AI to get it heard.
>IMO, the real tragedy here is ... that some dude who wrote an original song had to pretend it was written by AI to get it heard.
Genuinely curious to hear why this is a tragedy. Does everyone who puts out anything original deserve to have it heard by a wider audience?
Edit: Asking as someone who has always been heavily involved in various aspects of music and has watched a massive increase in the volume of music being put out now that it's significantly easier to produce on your own. This is a very complicated topic.
To me it's pretty easy to grasp that it's disappointing the artist had to mask as two of the most successful artists of all time to get heard, while also understanding that it's the easier route to do that. It's easier to be a ghost writer than it is to push your own brand, that sort of situation.
Well...of course? If I pretend my blog post is written by Bill Gates, more people will read it. This is basic human nature.
We can try to prevent plagiarism and improve our detection of it, but there's nothing wrong or disappointing with the fact that people prefer to listen to Bill Gates than a random blogger.
> Well...of course? If I pretend my blog post is written by Bill Gates, more people will read it. This is basic human nature.
I think the tragedy is that the attention doesn't follow quality or value, it follows fame and gimmicks. In your example, Bill Gates's stupidest brain farts will get 1000x more positive attention that an objectively-better tour-de-force that almost anyone else posts.
> I think the tragedy is that the attention doesn't follow quality or value, it follows fame and gimmicks.
It is, but also... welcome to life. This is how it works. What determines success is very often more about things other than the quality of the product.
For evidence, just look at the most popular products at the store. Very rarely are they at the top of the quality scale.
My guess is some ppl get tired of the moaning about things you can’t change. So short circuiting the topic is avoiding the annoyance and maybe an antivirus to prevent one’s own thoughts from spiraling negatively.
Exactly that. I already went down that spiral many times and the result is nothing but sadness about the many injustices of the world. But ultimately it's out of my hand. It's out of your hand. The ball is in no one's court.
Focus on the better aspects of life. Take care of your loved ones. Do your best to improve your local community. Contribute to a better state of the world, no matter how small the contribution may be. Pray to a higher being if you believe in one. That's ultimately all you can do.
It's really hard to evaluate everything by yourself. If you wanted to listen to some good music, you'd find something you like much faster by scrolling through the top 1000 most listened songs than a random shuffle of the maybe billions of songs that have ever existed. "A lot of other people like this" is a pretty good filter for things you'll probably like given how similar we all are (especially when we're stewing in the same culture).
Attention cannot follow quality because you have to pay attention to determine quality. So what attention follows is a heuristic of quality: has this person exhibited quality in the past. That's not a tragedy or sad or anything. In fact, that's normal in a marketplace where you have to pay before you benefit. Rarely, something novel will arise and another heuristic of quality will be present: virality.
I think this is actually perfect and there is no tragedy.
These heuristics for quality being discussed and alluded to, especially over time, suck far worse than just sticking to personal recommendations and keeping your tastes disconnected the internet. It is not perfect; culture on the internet is just bad these day across many dimensions and getting worse. Next I expect to see some try to equate profitable with quality.
No. It has nothing to do with the Internet. It is simply a property that you cannot describe a thing accurately without observing the thing. You can only use heuristics. One such heuristic is personal recommendations (which I would place in the viral transmission mode). Another is creator.
I'm not disputing that claim of yours, but you're missing the point. I'm saying the heuristics for quality you presented, when taken in the context of our internet, tend to press culture towards shit quality, or as some parent comment mentioned "fame and gimmicks."
For the record, the type of personal recommendation I'm talking about cannot be viral, in any useful context for the word. I'm talking about recommendations delivered one on one and as an ongoing conversation over many moons; Not recommendations that I see in my Facebook Feed as a Facebook Post from my Facebook Friends to their Facebook Followers. These mediums are insufficient and grow worse, IMO.
> We can try to prevent plagiarism and improve our detection of it, but there's nothing wrong or disappointing with the fact that people prefer to listen to Bill Gates than a random blogger.
Except when Mr. Gates and the random blogger are both out of their areas of expertise, people still believe Mr. Gates because he was successful elsewhere instead of applying proper skepticism.
Except they have good reason to apply less skepticism because they know Mr. Gates has a lot more to lose if he's caught making things up or lying or messing with folks on the record.
Whereas random bloggers are fly-by-night operations in comparison.
The venue it's published on also matters... If music is published (for profit) on official services like iTunes or Spotify and it isn't exactly clear that it's AI generated content, then there is a certain level of misrepresentation involved in it all...
If the music was posted to somewhere that it's normal to expect non-serious content (like Reddit or social media) but still properly credited as Ai generated on a non-profit basis (standard practice of course), then that would have been far less offensive.
I don't really understand the objection here. Must we couch everything with "of course in the grand scheme of the world and poverty and famine it isn't a big deal, but..."
Be grateful - at least you weren't born in an AI-controlled human farm created to inflict as much suffering onto humans as possible. Poverty and famine are only a reflection of your privilege as a free human.
That was a distracting side comment on my part. My real objection is that it's silly to characterize the artist as a victim. They had the opportunity to leverage other people's work, both technical and musical, to get eyeballs they likely never would have otherwise gotten.
To me, saying it's "disappointing that they had to" feels wrong almost to the point of being offensive.
I'm someone that regularly releases original music and the small following that AI have genuinely likes the music, but it's an increasing hurdle to get new people just to listen, even when it's free, because of the absolute flood of phony music online. I don't resort to spending a lot of money on promo (which is the normally competitive move) because there is no guarantee that that money won't simply disappear without results, because these days platforms scam musicians as much as record labels do.
Not much online is more perilous and rife with scams than trying to make a name for yourself in the music industry. I think people should be given multiple opportunities to be heard by platforms, but now platforms don't do it unless artists pay them to be heard because of the shear volume of fraud accounts uploading fake and low effort music to streaming services.
TikTok shows everything from videos of people cooking eggs to people trimming cow hoofs.. Despite the company being built around music, very little choice is offered in terms of browsing music, and the platform regularly punishes unknown musicians by limiting their views and by imposing complex copyright control on original music to prevent it from being discovered. The majority of the music streamed on the platform funnels royalties for most of the videos on the platforms to already wealthy individuals, scammers, and to companies associated with music streaming.
I think that Independent musicians and labels are putting out music better than major industry now in most cases, yet because of that competition, major label and industry forces work to suppress indie music through lobbying platforms and government for control, and they also throw money around to make competition against them extra hard for musicians that aren't profitable. Tons of independent musicians are operating at a financial loss, and simply having a chance to be heard would make it worthwhile.
So yes, I think that everyone authentic should get as many chances to be heard, because it's an honor for platforms to get new authentic indie music from people that could upload it elsewhere instead, and platforms should be ritually meticulous in promoting all of the authentic independent artists on these platforms in support of music growth, because that's a far better prospect for long term success than just lining pockets of ancient and withering music label executives.
> Does everyone who puts out anything original deserve to have it heard by a wider audience?
Yes! This is a failure of capitalism coalescing and centralizing under fewer and fewer big profit centers.
There are many, many creators putting out work as good (if not better) that deserve discovery. (NB: not everything is worthy of "discovery", like some early experimental learning work, but there's definitely undiscovered well-polished work out there.) Culture can be made by the masses, not by the few, but profit sharks don't let that happen.
> There are many, many creators putting out work as good (if not better) that deserve discovery.
With music, specifically, this has been one of the best impacts of the internet. As long as you avoid services that curate (streaming services, etc.), as a music lover there is a vast world of excellent music at your fingertips that you wouldn't ever have had the chance to hear otherwise.
As an artist, you can develop an audience from the pool of the whole world. You can make a decent living with a pool of a few thousand fans -- and finding a few thousand fans from the set of the Earth's population is a much more feasible thing than before because of the internet.
They "deserve" discovery? Ever since playback devices for recorded audio have become widely available there have been far more talented musicians than listeners could make any use of. An almost infinite oversupply, that's the price musicians pay, if they want or not, for the technical/physical ability to be heard by more people than they can fit in a room, and even at times when they don't actually play. The world does not owe attention to a musician, no matter how talented. If a musician is getting heard, good for them, if not, that's life.
Just to clarify, I agree with the general sentiment of your comment.
My concern, or confusion, or lack of understanding, or ignorance, or whatever you wanna call it, is less about the mechanisms of capitalism controlling distribution and moreso the sheer volume of music available. I posit that there is more well-polished music being released on a daily basis than people are capable of listening to, or that we even mathematically have the available time, as a whole, to fit into our lives. Even if we shifted the controls of distribution and such, there seems to be far more content than there are ears to hear the content, and I just don't get how we can ever expect everything worth it's weight in notes to be heard.
I understand the desire, as an artist myself, to be heard, but I also know that I'm one of millions of other people feeling the same way. If everyone's creating (and there are definitely far more creators than ever before), who's listening?
No, you're not. You're dealing with principles of communism here. They're inherently nonsensical.
Note the standard of justice being used. It's not, "impersonating someone to use them as a stepping stone is wrong, no matter who does it, or who is the victim".
The standard is, the rich and powerful don't "deserve" equal protection from the law, the real victim is the artist who isn't being recognized because the industry isn't playing "fair". So it's ok if the underdog breaks the law, because the world is stacked against him.
Yeah, and basket ball isn't fair because I'm fat and uncoordinated, and math isn't fair because I'm stupid and don't want to study.
Ironically, these were the same people that said, "Nobody deserves a platform to spread the 'wrong' ideas." when it came to censorship on Twitter, and had the gall to call it "accountability" when people were banned for wrong think about vaccines.
If you're scratching your head and saying, "Wait, what am I missing? That makes no sense! Ten seconds ago it was the rich and powerful censoring the poor underdog, and that was bad. But now big pharma backed censorship is a good thing?" -- it's because you're the sane and logical person, and they're the ones without a consistent worldview.
> You're dealing with principles of communism here.
I don't know, the reasoning seems simpler than any school of thought can offer. Humans are bound to 14-16 waking hours per day. A large portion of those hours are taken up by obligations like work or chores. That leaves a set amount of time to consume media created by other humans. Even if more free time could be had, there will always be a hard biological limit of about 14 waking hours to consume things.
But more and more humans are being born and learning the arts, so combined with instant global communication they will inevitably produce and distribute way more than can be crammed into those hours. Look at a random streamer's Let's Play history for an example. If they play a longer JRPG then they can leave a trail of many hours-long videos per week depending on how long their sessions last. Sometimes that's to the exclusion of every other game in existence. It's a bit sobering if you think about it.
I read a book called The Plenitude by Rich Gold who discusses some of these topics. He doesn't go as far to give a fully workable solution to the problem but one of his suggestions is to challenge creators to limit themselves to 5 "big creations" over their entire life, and focus on honing those creations to the greatest extent. It's an interesting book and I'd recommend it.
>I read a book called The Plenitude by Rich Gold who discusses some of these topics. He doesn't go as far to give a fully workable solution to the problem but one of his suggestions is to challenge creators to limit themselves to 5 "big creations" over their entire life, and focus on honing those creations to the greatest extent. It's an interesting book and I'd recommend it.
Ooh, this sounds interesting. Thanks for the suggestion!
While I like the spirit behind Rich Gold’s suggestion here, I think he may be overlooking the fact that for a large number of artists the practice of quickly iterating and “shipping” songs is a fruitful one. Not every creation is going to be solid gold, but overall this mindset is a valid one for generating work with artistic value.
This is totally backwards. Anyone can upload music and have it heard around the world. As another commenter stated, the problem for artists is oversupply. How do you propose capitalism or any economic system will make the situation better? What do "profit sharks" have to do with this?
That's just how the music industry has become. As an indie musician myself, it's incredible hard to get heard. So while I don't agree with what was done in this case, I can understand why.
Is it though? This never been easier just to upload something and get some amount of listeners. If you lived a bit rural and was a poor teenager in the 60s you could forget ever getting anyone to listen to your music, if you even had the instruments to play it. Nobody is owed a big audience.
It's never been easier to publish a blog available to billions of people that no one ever reads.
In the 60s you would travel to a music centre. A place where others performing music went. You leveraged a community. If someone in your community made it, it shone a light for everyone and created a scene. People helped each other make it.
That small community with those opportunities have been replaced by centralization without the community or scene multipliers.
And now you can create, distribute, and market you song for free to a world wide audience. The weirdest stuff can get a thousand plays on soundcloud. Much more than you'll get from being played at any random bar or club. Also you would have to make a vinyl print of you song to provide it to a dj.
Thousands of soundcloud plays means one person one listen and this is over years. Many of those are short listens / skips. In a bar you could have a few hundred people all listening at once passively the entire song while associating with good times drinking.
Sharing a song with a group will create memories and stronger associations
Recording your music to any level of quality they would play on the radio back then was expensive. It was really time consuming to lay down tracks and edit them. Like manually cutting tape, etc. Today anyone can make a professional sounding recording at home.
Still possible with many small local radio stations. Mail in a CD with your shit and a genre label and odds are someone will listen to a track or two to decide if it has a place on their show.
This is what a pure meritocracy looks like. There's no more tricks, there's no more hacks, it's just a tight few metrics that you're either really really good at, or you aren't. It's the same with the rest of the country. Turns out a pure meritocracy leaves a lot of losers because there can only be so many winners.
> IMO, the real tragedy here is not some threat to Drake (he’ll be fine) but that some dude who wrote an original song had to pretend it was written by AI to get it heard.
The lyrics are semi-auto-biographical about The Weeknd and Drake. The guy who wrote this didn't date Selena Gomez. It's pretty uninteresting as a song if it's not from The Weeknd and Drake.
> I believe a big reason this song blew up on social media was that it was misleadingly hyped as an "AI-generated song". I expect many people thought that AI composed and recorded the (reasonably idiomatic) music and lyrics.
IIRC, I read that in the 70s many people thought Popcorn by Hot Butter was also written by a computer, but it was just played on (analog) synthesizers.
Not quite - the voices afiak are pure AI with the tuning, pitch, etc done in post. Essentially treating the vocal signature of someone as if it was an instrument. And pretty much everyone knew the beat and lyrics weren't AI generated, at least from what I've seen. This is going viral after there was a viral trend of people replacing songs with Kanye West AI, so people knew what was happening.
The impressive part is that the voices could be very convincing. That's what made it shareable.
> IMO, the real tragedy here is not some threat to Drake (he’ll be fine)
Man, what a skewed version of justice this is. "He'll be fine." The REAL victim is this unnoticed artist? Give me a break. What he did impersonating another artist was wrong.
There's this perverse notion that has infused our society where it's ok to rob from a Target or Walmart because it doesn't really "hurt" them. "They have insurance. They'll be fine!"
That standard of justice will lead society to a very VERY bad place if you follow it.
I agree that it's not okay to rob the wealthy simply because they are wealthy.
But this case is more nuanced. A compelling argument can be made against the very idea of robbery of IP. I think the vast majority of "intellectual property" should not, in fact, be anyone's property, and therefore no one can be robbed of it.
Who is harmed and who benefits in the situation where Drake has a lock and key on his IP?
Consumers are harmed --- they clearly enjoy new Drake music regardless of whether or not it was written and sung by Drake, but this is not allowed.
The "AI artist" is harmed --- they could have created something valuable in the world, but this is not allowed.
Drake artificially benefits from a regulatory monopoly. Everyone is strictly worse off because of arbitrary, draconian rules.
A much better example is drug patents. Literally millions of lives could be saved --- and at a lower cost --- if patents didn't exist. Patents and intellectual property are just state-sanctioned monopolies where everyone is harmed and coerced to pay rent to some random asshole.
I think actually if there's an argument for restricting Drake-alikes, it needs to be said.
From my POV as long as you make it clear it isn't actually him, you should be able to do it. What's next, I can't do a parody of Drake either? Should we ban the Nixon-moonlanding-crash video?
Nobody has a unique voice anyway, I'm sure one of those 8B people sounds a lot like Drake. Does that other guy get to decide what songs Drake sings? Of course not, having a specific set of traits should not give you rights over it.
Does Arnel Pineda, who sounds a heck of a lot like Steve Perry, owe Steve a cut of whatever he makes with the band? (Aside from the fact that obviously there's contracts in place.) He's singing his ass off every time he's on stage, just like Steve did when he was the front man for Journey.
In the end this is an argument for the already powerful to stop the newcomer. There's no reason some dude shouldn't be able to do the same work as some other dude, as long as he doesn't pretend to actually be that other guy.
But is that true? If I were a gifted mimic, I couldn't go out and make a song called "Sad in Toronto", even if I was very clear about not actually being Drake?
The op is extremely certain that they have interpreted this law correctly, but the fact of the matter is that a case like the one you describe has never gone through US courts, so we do not know. We are likely to have a court case sometime in the next few years it seems, who knows how long it'll take to get an answer though.
There was a very important and similar case though where Bette Midler sued Ford over inappropriate use of "her" voice performed by an impersonator.
The context seems important in that case though. Ford had the impersonator sing a song that she herself released! (They had acquired copyright release for that part) So there's no reasonable claim that Bette Midler was not the one they were impersonating.
If you sang a song you wrote in a voice extremely similar to Drake's without mentioning Drake in any way, then that seems very different to me.
A gifted mimic is not a mechanical reproduction. The right of publicity doesn’t protect you from people with similar appearances or voices, it does protect (to a certain extent) against uses of mechanical reproduction of your appearance or voice.
Because it is separate from copyright, US federal statutory fair use considerations don’t apply to this right (I’m not sure to what extent Constitutional fair use might apply to it; statutory fair use in copyright largely recapitulates what were found to be Constitutional limits on the copyright power stemming from the First Amendment, I don’t know if it has ever been considered the extent to which the First Amendment, applied ot the states through the 14th, applies similar restriction on the right of publicity, which is in the US, to the extent it exists, a state-law intellectual property right.)
If it's clearly qualified that this is a fabrication of his voice, then what right does he have to control that? He's not being harmed. He's not being misrepresented.
I think he is being misrepresented in the song itself. People hearing it will think it's him. Whether or not that's called out in the marketing doesn't seem relevant.
As to harm, I don't know if he's being harmed or not -- but to my mind, that's not an important point. If, as I believe, it's wrong to produce works that show you doing and saying things you didn't do (without your permission), then it's wrong whether or not you were actually harmed by it. And what is harm, anyway? Being embarrassed is a kind of harm.
There are cases where using someone's voice can harm them, sure. That doesn't mean we should give everyone carte blanche jurisdiction over what can be done with their ideas or their voice.
I think the onus is on the speaker/singer to prove they are being materially harmed by a fabrication of their voice. In many cases, this could be simple: "That fabrication is being used to misrepresent my beliefs AND it's causing me harm." Fair enough. But is someone making a Drake song causing Drake harm? No. He could argue loss of income, but that would be shaky. He didn't come up with the lyrics. He didn't come up with the beat. He didn't even actually sing it. If it's so easy to rip off his voice to create a hit song, then is he actually still losing income? Why doesn't he come up with the hit song?
Yeah but identity theft can be dealt with without giving people rent-seeking monopolies. Everyone is worse off except Drake and the argument that he was materially harmed is very shaky at best.
Allowing massive conglomerates to exist has already led society to a VERY bad place already.
Anyways, besides that, impersonation for personal gain or to cause disadvantage is already criminal. If Drake wants to do something about that, he can.
Do you have any reason to believe people thought that? Everyone I talked to thought it was a human generated song with an autotune like drake ai filter on the lyrics.
Yes, many people assumed this. Here's the first example I found (scroll through the thread for many more): https://twitter.com/Russ_Wilcox/status/1647602468623114240 (Note that this guy was smart enough to ask the question - imagine how many people saw "AI-generated song" and just uncritically assumed a computer spat out the whole thing, chatGPT-style)
The story is that there was a program, Racter, which allegedly created a book titled "The Policeman's Beard Is Half-Constructed" back in the 1980s. The book was released and was a hit primarily because of that AI connection, and a version of Racter was also sold. However, the Racter that got released could never have composed the book, leading me to this post:
> The least hypothesis is that the "good" version of Racter that supposedly composed the novel never existed, and that it was all a hoax made up by someone who wanted to bask in some publicity and sell the Racter that actually got released. As you say, the output is suspiciously good for something they insisted was accomplished on a home computer of the era and, oh no, they can't release the software that did it for Reasons... yeah, pull the other one, it's got bells on.
The tune should have never been uploaded to begin with... I remix artists, but use their actual vocals, and never release remixes that aren't properly cleared...
Putting out unauthorized work by others (for profit), especially when it emulates that they actually created the product, can harm their reputation. Putting out unauthorized work from musicians (for profit) often represents that the work was cleared... It's a move to either generate attention for the tool that they used, or for the emulation services they provide as "musicians", or even worse it could be a scam to make money off of putting out counterfeit music... I guess whoever was behind it (and now there will likely be even more of this) figures the legal issues that arise are worth the risk in seeking whatever profit may come from breaking common rules of music production such as this.
It's troubling to see this happen as an Indie musician amid the already overly complex scam environment within the music industry.
The legality of doing this depends on either the AI related lawsuits that have already been filed or legislative bodies answering the legal questions through new laws.
Copying a voice isn't banned, per se. You can do a perfect impersonation of someone without fear of violating any copyright.
Distributing recorded samples, however, is a clear copyright violation.
So, does AI merely make an impersonation or is it combining files that you have no right to distribute to form the voice? Are images in the Stable Diffusion dataset partially embedded in the outputs or not? Are the stories ChatGPT writes just weapons grade copyright infringement?
It all depends on how many rights we all attribute to the things we stuff into AI datasets. If AI models are ruled to be some kind of special case where the output doesn't violate the copyright if the training dataset, I think AI voice cloning should be completely legal.
I believe the music and movie industries will do what they can to get the law on their side, perhaps demanding royalties for every work of theirs in AI datasets. Maybe they'll demand payment per generated work. I believe Universal is already demanding their partners to stop blocking scrapers for use in AI.
I have no idea how a judge will rule on this. Based on the little work from professionals I've seen, it could go either way with current copyright laws.
a few days EARLIER this was released in Israel by KAN (television chanel)..
I know you probably can't speak hebrew but here is a song made (vocals/lyrics/music) by AI, of two dead singers who are very famous in Israel (Zohar Argov and Ofra Haza).. It is convincing
> IMO, the real tragedy here is not some threat to Drake (he’ll be fine) but that some dude who wrote an original song had to pretend it was written by AI to get it heard.
I haven't listened to the song in it's entirety or very closely but an actual Drake or Weeknd song usually has much better production and songwriting. Not saying it's not good or that Drake songs are good but from my amateur ear there's a difference in quality.
I produce music but can’t sing to save my life. If I had access to an on-demand pitch perfect AI singer, I would likely release way more of my music to the public.
The thing with musicians are that there are so many talented musicians out there who can straight up show up and sight read a complex piece they never played before and put it on a record. Many who will work for free or close to it as a result of this saturation of talent. You could probably go on instagram and book a singer for your work by the afternoon.
That depends on if its faster to come up with the prompts to sing the song you are imagining in your head as a producer versus just hiring a cheap singer. Sometimes yes sometimes no I’d expect is the answer to this question, and given uncertainty some people do pay extra for certainty. Musicians pay extra for marginal quality gains too. If it was all just a race to the bottom all fender and gibsons would be made in China because no one cares, but thats not the case. American models that are sonically almost the same sometimes as a cheaper made in japan or thailand model command premiums due to the perceived quality.
just wait until the music industry elites start to recognize this...
This was predicted (as so many other things have) in anime...
Recall JEM? the soft-core-USA-version of anime?
but so many things have been predicted/projected through anime (art)... the cyberpunk future of holographic AI media pieces has been a long trope in anime...
at some point, youth will not care if its AI (EDM? YO!) and will just accept deepfake AI generated content along with AI generated sexually apealing rockstars...
What was not predicted in anime, but will become a reality is the personalization of the 'messenger' where we listen to the same song, but mine is personalized to me, and you, yours. so if, say, female, the song may be talored to being delivered to you differently than to male... however, that doesnt mean the delivery is based on gender... there will be subtle differences in timbre tone and rythm based on you....
> but will become a reality is the personalization of the 'messenger' where we listen to the same song, but mine is personalized to me, and you, yours.
Which would totally destroy one of the things that makes music powerful -- it provides a shared, deep experience. Not to mention that it all but eliminates another purpose for music: to communicate to people.
The more use cases I hear about AI, the more I think that economic devastation isn't the only thing we're flirting with. We're also flirting with destruction of society as we erase people and meaningful societal bonding.
Please note that, obviously I know what you mean (and what I mean).. and if it wasnt clear - I am NOT a fan of the dystopian-cyberpunk-future..
For fucks' sake, I am guilty of helping the world get to the current dystopian shitshow we have going on today (as is 99% of HN, but especially us from the 1980s)
> the personalization of the 'messenger' where we listen to the same song, but mine is personalized to me, and you
Dynamically generated, personalized content already exists in the form of video games. Yet it is not notable when an NPC remarks on my unique gear, achievements, etc.
Technology may eventually enable easier remixing of art to personal tastes. However, this has also existed as long as art itself.
What people look for in the artist is their uniquely curated tastes, human connection to the person themselves, and a sense of community with fellow fans.
A machine that creates everything for everyone can provide none of these. Its output will be products, not art. It will have customers, not fans.
> What people look for in the artist is their uniquely curated tastes, human connection to the person themselves, and a sense of community with fellow fans.
Some people do, some people don't. There's nothing obligating an anime/SNS art hoarder to think this way, and if all they ever do is consume the end product without giving a thought to how the artist laid down the individual strokes that made the picture or how the artist's circle of friends and life story influenced their style, there's no consequences. The artist and other people with a similar mindset are unable to criticize these consumers because their behavior is invisible. When AI artists started appearing with art featuring blatantly copied styles, they did finally become open to such criticism.
I have a feeling the nature of endless feeds with a practically infinite amount of art to consume has conditioned a lot of consumers to never have think about the human artist. They can just look at the stash in their Pictures folder and think "that's a cute X" divorced from the artistic context that's been integral in earlier art history. The consequences of this are only starting to become apparent right now. But I think if there were nothing like Stable Diffusion then one would be unable to tell apart the people who would be open to copying artists' styles with a hypothetical AI program to-be-invented in the future from people who wouldn't. They'd all just appear to be the same breed of fans. It was the invention of the technology and its spread that revealed those preferences.
If he did everything he could to make it sound like Drake or The Weeknd musically and lyrically then it wasn't original and didn't deserve to get noticed much.
One less clone if a world of clones isn't a tragedy.
My Cloud Resume Challenge project [0] and book [1] uses a set of small, stackable mini-projects to introduce beginners to many of the pragmatic skills used in cloud software engineering.
I won a Pwnie Award last year (for "Best Song"). I did not accept the award in person, so they mailed it to me because my coworker who accepted it in my place couldn't get it through airport security due to the huge hypodermic needles sticking out of its neck and butt.
It's the most horrifying award I've ever received. I love it. I should probably keep it in a Faraday cage, just to be on the safe side.
A few years ago, at Goodwill, I found a lovely 1930s copy of Eve Curie's biography of her mother Marie Curie. The book had been well-preserved in a homemade mylar jacket. In the flyleaf were two inscriptions: one a woman's name with "Dr", dated in the 1970s; the other dated in the early 2000s with another woman's name, also a doctor. When I flipped through the pages, a "Congrats grad" card fell out. Dr. A was Dr B's mother and had given her this book from her own library upon Dr B's graduation from med school.
- from the novel Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson
I take this quote to mean that most people's idea of "apologetics" (arguing to convince people that the facts of Christianity or some other religion are true) is kind of pointless. You'll never convince someone logically of something that has to be experienced viscerally. LLMs don't help with that at all.