Shhh, I don't want my boss to find out - I've asked if it's okay if I can have the next 245,000 years to finish this job while the rest of the team deal with the rollout
I'm so glad you commented that, because after I posted I realised I'd forgotten to ask if anyone knew why that particular number of hours was displayed because I thought it mustn't just be random. Every day's a school day 😁
We're doing an IT refresh at work and have some old mid-2011 iMacs in a classroom. I thought I'd just try wiping one using internet recovery to see what happened (it failed), but thought the estimated download time was pretty hilarious. It did jump down from 53 minutes to 31 before it decided to give up 🤣
And apparently Diogenes said back to Alexander "if I were not Diogenes, I would also want to be Diogenes".
Legend.
I feel like this fits nicely here :
Personally, I'm looking at AI in music as the modern equivalent of the introduction of sampling in the 80s. Loads of people lost their minds back then - "Nobody has to be able to be able to play instruments anymore", "It's cheating", "Sampling isn't real music", etc etc, and look at how ubiquitous sampling is now, and how literally nobody with half a brain thinks that sampling is "cheating" and anyone using a sampler isn't capable of making "real" music. Sure, it'll take a while for the whole AI thing to settle down and find its place in composition and production as artists learn how to best integrate it into their creative flow, and inevitably there will be people who use it to make up for a lack of talent and who might even get lucky and have a hit with fully AI generated compositions, but most artists are going to learn how to use it as a tool to expand their repertoire or to generate ideas from their own ideas, rather than as a replacement for their own creative input. I can easily imagine bands like Radiohead already having spent weeks training models to their own specifications to work within their specific requirements, rather than replace them or using publicly available models that won't give them the results they want.
I think a few specific markets are going got be more impacted than others - music for low budget films and YouTube content creators are the main areas which I think will benefit mostly from purely AI generated music (and current people working in these fields may have more to worry about than most). Rather than worrying about paying royalties for music playing in the background of an Italian cafe scene in your 1940s-set drama, you can generate a unique piece which fits with the scene perfectly with nobody needing to research copyrights or anything like that. Same for YouTube videos where you just want a catchy hook looping in the background over you talking about whatever - no need to worry about getting your video taken down for copyright issues when the music was created by a text prompt ten minutes before you uploaded it.
Pop music, whatever your personal interpratation of that may be - from The Greatest Showman soundtrack, to Warp records output, to vaporwave, to K-pop, to whatever's on the current Radio Six playlist, I don't believe will suffer from the introduction of AI, as the people creating music that people love to listen to will not allow their own creative input to be overshadowed by AI generated content, but probably will be happy to see what using this new tool can add to their creative output. Some artists will embrace it more than others, and others will completely shun it, but to go full circle to my opening sentence, I believe those people are the equivalent to the people saying that samplers will be the death of "proper" music back in the day. And like how the sampler is virually ubiquitous across all genres of music now, I believe that even those genres that shun AI currently will eventually see the value once the pioneers have figured out exactly how to use it effectively.
(Edited a bit for clarity and adding a couple of other thoughts - oh, and I've got to be honest, I haven't read the article!)
Left front: ooen-control controller (in a 3D printed case) (https://kblivesolutions.github.io/open.control/)
Right front: Phanstasmal Force (https://www.tindie.com/products/distropolis/phantasmal-force-micro-midi-controller/), spray-painted orange.
Behind: MIDI Fighter Twister (more just for scale than to suggest it's a boutique thing) on a 3D printed stand I found here, and spray-painted orange:. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4782849
I love these little controllers. They can do stuff I've not found on any other controller and are totally customisable so they end up being unique to your own style (although I've never owned a Push and reckon they probably have a lot of the same functions). I use Control Surface Studio to create scripts for them in Live - and that's another thing that has totally changed how I use Ableton for mixing, but mainly performance. They're also tiny so are easy to carry round in a laptop bag.
I've just realised in coming across like a salesman or something, haha! Anyway, along with a Launchpad MK2 this is basically a photo of my live "rig".
I discovered this classic-sounding upbeat ska track by the Steadytones over the weekend thanks to Craig Charles' Radio 6 show, and can't get enough of it. I couldn't believe it when I found out it only came out last year. It's blatantly going to be my song of the summer - it's got such a great laid back summer vibe!
DASEIN餓鬼 @waveform.social I make jungle/IDM/old school rave tracks using Ableton, released through openwheel.bandcamp.com
In my other life, I work in IT.