Farewell, dear Jared, we hardly knew you. Come to think of it, we didn't know you at all, and you wanted it this way. But now that you have seemingly shuffled off your (im)mortal (digital) coil and have gone into the great beyond of other cyberegions, we salute you for...uh...your infatiguable work ethic, your high work standards and your sophisticated artistry of sounding like a couple of different people all at once. Rest In Power, Jared, no matter where that power comes from. New server rooms, maybe.
Hey, you guys remember Jared Hutcherson, right? To some, he's the country-singer/songwriter that created dozens of albums as if it was nothing. To others he was the name of one of the most shameless A.I. slop generating programmer imaginable, pointing out modern country radio's hollowness by churning out hours and hours of inoffensive, bland country-pop pap that would go unnoticed among real artists on country radio. And now he's gone. I'm not saying my little article calling out 'Mr. Hutcherson' had something to do with that, though I'm not saying it didn't, either. Who knows how Youtube got wise to the systematic shenanigans behind our beloved Jared, or whether the people behind Jared took the money and ran, while they still could.
If you remember, 'Jared' was notoriously productive, as A.I. slop machines tend to be, churning out albums, and long albums at that, contrary to real artists, whoe albums get shorter and shorter, due to the Tik Tok-isation of the younger generations of music listeners. And now his thirty albums are seemingly gone from all music streaming services, having also quit Apple, Amazon and the rest of the bunch. Jared you are gone, but not forgotten.
Music recommendations straight from the slop shop are of course continuing. a couple of weeks ago, together with some albums from the early 70s that go well with my All Pearls, No Swine project, Youtube proposed me a band called The Rash Cooper. I liked two of their songs, though they didn't sound much alike, and wanted to find out more about the band. a Google research yielded absolutely nothing besides that album: no web presence, social media, even a mention on a website somewhere. If an abum with non-descriptive artwork is the absolute only thing a 'musical artist' has out there, there's a pretty much 100% probability it's A.I. So, I kept a tab on these guys, and guess what. Almost exactly a month after the first one, the second album of the 'band' dropped, again with nothing but the album and its obviously A.I.-generated cover to show for it. Goodbye, The Rash Cooper, you sloppy A.I. slop.
The stories of A.I.-generated slops and sloppy fakes are becoming legion and getting worse - music streming platforms now have to delete thousands if fake songs every day - and that is, when they're trying, which considering their business model they don't have a real incentive to. But they really should, as the scammers have upped their game, now skimming both sides of the aisle. As seen in the article I linked to, A.I. now steals or 'creates' fake tracks by fake artists, which then get streamed thousands of times by A.I. bots on a loop, allowing the scammer to goose the streaming numbers for a half-way decent payout. It's not much money per se, a low four digit figure, but it's like phishing mails. You repeat this often enough on a small scale involving small local bands to rip off, and you got yourself a salary. The loss, however, is on the scammed artists, not the streamers, so it'll probably take some turns for the worse, before the wave of A.I. slop & scam music really gets monitored and persecuted as it should.
No such stuff here on One Buck Records, pbviously, though nowadays I have to be careful as hell as well when sourcing the All Pearls, No Swine and Bluegrass Chartbusters series. So far, no A.I. has made it past ol' OGB's quality control, but the enemy is getting stronger and better. Still, all human-made music right here, of which there is more coming up very soon, same as it ever was.
Tell us about the last time you ran into something A.I.-related. Good? Bad? Ugly?
ReplyDeleteI discovered a good while back that A.I. stands for 'Artificial Imbecile' and most are only as 'smart' as their creators and equally limited by the number of information sources they are told to use to provide answers. Most rather than giving the right answer instead offer up the first answer they can find whether its accurate or not.
ReplyDeleteTake the AI that 'Duck Duck Go' have introduced. You can have all sorts of 'fun' with it. I asked it a football (soccer) question and in the response it referred to a particular manager being the current manager of a club when in fact he had been sacked 18 months previously and twice replaced in the intervening period. When I raised this berating it for the out of date information it apologised and acknowledged the error. When I asked it why it made the mistake it simply repeated the apology without seemingly having a clue why it gave out wrong information.
Another one to watch out for is 'Rufus' the Amazon AI which is limited to the data held on the sales pages on Amazon. So don't ask it anything too complicated because you'll just confuse it. Equally I suspect it's also designed to promote Amazon's interests so like their search engine it will be tailored to promote the company's business. In most cases you are better off trawling through the comments of an item on your own to find out what you need to know.
Unfortunately, 'AI' like search engines can be tailored to deliver results that advance particular outcomes and viewpoints over others so there not something to be taken seriously.
As you can gather I'm no fan of it. Its junk technology just waiting for the time when its junked. In the meantime it's something that will likely just add to the confusion in life because the last thing it will be is reliably accurate.
Thanks for your eternal vigilance, Monsieur OBG--we all appreciate it
ReplyDeleteI have spent hours this week dealing with A.I. thanks to a home repair situation and a bank loan. It is honestly mind-numbing...and when you can get to a person, they seem to have been mind-numbed by the A.I world they live in...and given what they are payed and their evident lack of training, who can blame them. One the other day asked me, sincerely with a bit of hesitation and soupçon of something--perhaps fear?, what A.I had said before I'd been transferred. When I explained I had just kept hitting zero until I got a live person, she asked, with concern, if I "did not like A.I." When I said I did not, she said, dutifully, they are very helpful. Uh-huh. Sure.
I had a similar experience when a song popped up in YouTube by someone I'd never heard of. I couldn't find a thing about this "person" anywhere. Generic album cover, no photos of the artist anyplace. I had to conclude that it was AI which is a shame because the pendulum has shifted from proving it's AI to proving it's not AI.
ReplyDeleteAI, like cars (or any other tech advance), has its good points and its bad. I may be the only person I know who doesn't/hasn't actively engaged with it (i.e., never went to it for something), but I don't know how upset I'm supposed to be about it's greasy little digital fingers getting everywhere. When I hear the new Stones record, do I know that M&K wrote those songs, or did they ask AI for a Stones-like song, as a prompt to work from? Ideally, for reasons I can't articulate, I'd like my music to be organically created, but if I like the result, how much would that affect me to have someone admit they started on AI for inspiration (They could even tell themselves the AI, after all, was using the artist's own past work to generate the song, so it was just them inspiring themself).
ReplyDeleteAll that aside, there have been AI songs -- that I knew were AI -- that I purposely listened to because I like humor (There's a whole market of AI "old" songs that are nasty, with 'Jenny Stardust' doing 'Ain't That A Kick In The Cunt' being a favorite) or admitted/blatant attempts to recapture something I already like ('Stooches' doing 'Chunky Bites', someone really REALLY running with the old story of Iggy rubbing peanut butter on himself in performance).
C in California
I haven’t needed to interact with AI, but a few months ago a friend sent me YouTube link, there was no message from him, just a link to YT, I clicked on link, it was a whole album by a band I’d never heard of, after the second track I thought it might be AI, while the third track was playing I researched the band, they didn’t exist of coarse. Too much pop music these days is written by a team of writers and sounding generic to my old ears, AI will only make it worse. I think the ‘wake up’ will be people will leave spotify in droves, if they are fed this crap. I’ve never felt the need for spotify anyway.
ReplyDeleteThis same friend has recently sent links to a nasty rightwing nutjob site. Maybe/probably his email has been hacked.
As C in California said, I too was suspicious of the new Rolling Stones album, I want to believe that no AI was used.