What If... Gorilla Monsoon Had His Own Podcast And Invited Hogan On As A Guest

[King Mal the Glorious]

9 minutes ago, Loki said:

I was at a developer conference over a decade ago, and a guy from Ubisoft was proposing voice generation for large MMOs, based on a payment for usage of voice algorithm.  He was also proposing a similar system but for music composition - something that went down VERY badly with the professional composers in the audience!

I work for Ubisoft and it's still a thing they're heavily looking into, though the specifics of it are all very hush-hush.

[BomberPat]

15 minutes ago, Gay as FOOK said:

I totally feel the existential sting of it, not going to lie. I know it's just a more sci fi bent on the kind of labour revolutions that have always happened every century or so - killing off some jobs and creating others - and I don't nearly understand enough about it, but it gives me the willies. 

Also people who are earnestly like "Well do you even need the artist when the AI can do the song just like them, when you really think about it?" are fucking dangers. 

Even as a bit of a Luddite when it comes to new tech, I'm usually not that responsive to claims that tech innovation will cost us jobs - employers just change the goalposts; the old example was always that if it takes a worker an hour to make a MacGuffin, and then you get a machine that means they can make a MacGuffin in half an hour, the solution of the factory owner isn't to cut his workforce in half, or to give his workers shorter days and keep productivity as it was, it's to make twice as many MacGuffins and reap the profits. I see most new tech the same - they might change how we work, or move jobs around, but without a fundamental reassessment of how we organise society around work and capital, I'm never that concerned about massive jobs losses from new tech.

Where AI is different, aside from the short-term utopianism of it all where businesses will make rash decisions because of how much AI evangelists are over-promising, is that this sort of thing is tied to identity. There's already been at least one story of a kidnapping hoax because someone was able to artificially replicate a woman's voice, then while she was away on a skiing holiday, phone her mother and use that "cloned" voice to claim that she had been kidnapped and to extort money - now, I think there's a lot more going on there than the headline scare story; how did they obtain her voice, and her mother's phone number, and get the timing right, which all makes me think that it was someone known to her, rather than random faceless internet scammers, but the technology is there.

It should be obvious that the ability to make it sound like somebody's voice is saying something that is isn't will have profound impacts. Combine that with increasingly convincing deepfake technology, and before long we'll be inundated with convincing fake videos of politicians admitting to eating babies. 

 

People aiming to use AI for art, music and whatnot, I just find the most tiresome, unimaginative people in the world. The idea that you can write a book, or create a piece of art, with just a few prompts, is completely missing the point. The idea that the point of creating art is to have some art at the end of it, not the process, or that any original idea is just a combination of existing principles, with no scope for genuine inspiration or happy accidents. It's all shit. And mental that people have decided that the goal of technology isn't to take our place in the workplace, but to take our place as creative beings, doing what we'd rather be doing when we're not working. It's like designing a robot to sit on the sofa in its pants while you go to the office.

[air_raid]

Well, I saw "What if Gorilla Monsoon" as the start of a thread title and assumed we were about to dive down the Wrestling Of Future Past rabbit hole.

My personal favourite always being - if Virgil had been booked to win the 1992 Royal Rumble, would WCW have won the war?

[Chest Rockwell]

1 hour ago, BomberPat said:

And mental that people have decided that the goal of technology isn't to take our place in the workplace, but to take our place as creative beings, doing what we'd rather be doing when we're not working. It's like designing a robot to sit on the sofa in its pants while you go to the office.

People who delight in the creative process don't want this. People who want praise with as little effort as possible love it though.

People enjoying art as consumers fall into one of four buckets. They have maybe thought about the implication or not, and either do or don't expect the quality to be as good and do form their opinion based on those factors. People who are creators fall firmly into the 'have thought about it and expect the quality to be worse' bucket naturally. 

[LaGoosh]

1 hour ago, BomberPat said:

People aiming to use AI for art, music and whatnot, I just find the most tiresome, unimaginative people in the world.

And they are almost always tech/crypto bros with no understanding of art in the first place other than stuff being "cool" or "badass".

We're seeing a big push for using AI in film, music and television at the moment because all the major players are owned and run by glorified hedgefunds who see art as another line in a spreadsheet. Things that bring people joy are "content" or "IP". But this will inevitably fail because no art genuinely good will ever be created by an AI ever. These soulless fucks will see the success of stuff like Barbie and Oppenheimer and try and replicate it by creating more films about toys and forcibly pairing them up with serious "dark" films and they will all be shit because you can't replicate the genuine, naturally occurring humanity behind these things no matter how smart an AI is.

To bring it back to the original post - it's a cute trick but behind the clever technology it's still just a trick. An empty, shallow and meaningless diversion.

Edited September 13, 2023 by LaGoosh

[The Gaffer]

Yeah the company I work for is laying people off in droves - squeaky bum time on the last working day of each month - because they're moving to AI and the Bond villain that runs the place uploads near daily "Hey did you see they can now utilise AI to create new Hendrix albums even though he's dead? Isn't that so cool!" on our internal channels. It's blood curdling. 

I do think there's a massive audience to be monetised by a lot of it invariably, though. Look how well near-identical annual iterations of games like Assassins Creed and Call of Duty tend to do. Okay so they're not that soulless but the market's clearly there. 

[Merzbow]

It looks like SAG-AFTRA have sent strike authorization to video game actors for just this reason so it looks like they'll likely be joining the other actors and writers.

[air_raid]

Well, not one to hate something on principle, I listened to it. And to be fair, I was pleasantly surprised how funny it was.

Spoiler

 

"I can assure our listeners that that match did not happen."

 

[Loki]

That's the thing, putting aside the AI the thing works because @BigD747 has put some effort into it, writing a funny script and then working on the generation for ages until it sounded natural, lots of editing there I suspect!  I particularly liked the young Hogan / old Hogan voice change.

So these things still hinge on someone being talented enough to make it interesting.

[Keith Houchen]

My partner has Aphantasia, this means she can’t see or create images in her minds eye. So as an artist, that’s quite a stumbling block! She uses photographs she or I take to use as a guide for her illustrations but she likes the idea of being able to feed instructions into a generator to create a frame of reference that she can then use to draw. 
 

Of course, she sees people who do this, then add a filter or whatnot, and then try  pass their art off as their own with some AI assistance. As @Loki said, you still need the initial talent. 

[Chili]

Fair play, I figured this thread would end up being loads of Ian Beale and random 90's football stickers but these responses and information have been genuinely proper interesting.

[air_raid]

9 minutes ago, Chili said:

Fair play, I figured this thread would end up being loads of Ian Beale and random 90's football stickers but these responses and information have been genuinely proper interesting.

Can an AI make Ian Beale into a 90s style football sticker? That's the real quiz.

[Carbomb]

46 minutes ago, air_raid said:

Can an AI make Ian Beale into a 90s style football sticker? That's the real quiz.

Ian Beale-Williams

[Mr_Danger]

You think the arts industry will suffer from AI but imagine the relative AI Out of Context thread on here! Rick saw it coming and got out in front.