G: 'It's the screams of the damned!' The eerie AI world of deepfake music

[China]

'It's the screams of the damned!' The eerie AI world of deepfake music

 

"It’s Christmas time! It’s hot tub time!” sings Frank Sinatra. At least, it sounds like him. With an easy swing, cheery bonhomie, and understated brass and string flourishes, this could just about pass as some long lost Sinatra demo. Even the voice – that rich tone once described as “all legato and regrets” – is eerily familiar, even if it does lurch between keys and, at times, sounds as if it was recorded at the bottom of a swimming pool.

 

The song in question not a genuine track, but a convincing fake created by “research and deployment company” OpenAI, whose Jukebox project uses artificial intelligence to generate music, complete with lyrics, in a variety of genres and artist styles. Along with Sinatra, they’ve done what are known as “deepfakes” of Katy Perry, Elvis, Simon and Garfunkel, 2Pac, Céline Dion and more. Having trained the model using 1.2m songs scraped from the web, complete with the corresponding lyrics and metadata, it can output raw audio several minutes long based on whatever you feed it. Input, say, Queen or Dolly Parton or Mozart, and you’ll get an approximation out the other end.

 

“As a piece of engineering, it’s really impressive,” says Dr Matthew Yee-King, an electronic musician, researcher and academic at Goldsmiths. (OpenAI declined to be interviewed.) “They break down an audio signal into a set of lexemes of music – a dictionary if you like – at three different layers of time, giving you a set of core fragments that is sufficient to reconstruct the music that was fed in. The algorithm can then rearrange these fragments, based on the stimulus you input. So, give it some Ella Fitzgerald for example, and it will find and piece together the relevant bits of the ‘dictionary’ to create something in her musical space.”

 

Admirable as the technical achievement is, there’s something horrifying about some of the samples, particularly those of artists who have long since died – sad ghosts lost in the machine, mumbling banal cliches. “The screams of the damned” reads one comment below that Sinatra sample; “SOUNDS ****ING DEMONIC” reads another. We’re down in the Uncanny Valley.

 

Deepfake music is set to have wide-ranging ramifications for the music industry as more companies apply algorithms to music.

 

Legal departments in the music industry are following developments closely. Earlier this year, Roc Nation filed DMCA takedown requests against an anonymous YouTube user for using AI to mimic Jay-Z’s voice and cadence to rap Shakespeare and Billy Joel. (Both are incredibly realistic.) 

 

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[d0ublestr0ker0ll]

Personally it's mildly entertaining at first, the deepfake ish altogether.  Just weird that it's, well, fake.

 

The quote in the headline is something someone would say about groundbreaking rock in the 50s.  Chill out, deepfake fans, lol.  It screams of the bored.

[bearrock]

It's all fun and games until some deep fake video with audio of a prominent politician goes viral to feed a hoard of conspiratorial crazies.  Or every evidence of wrong doing gets swept off as fake.  I guess we'll just have to rely on the citizens being reasonable and level-headed.

....

Oh ****....

[Fan since a Fetus]

Technology will get better and better. A lot of music is fake anymore anyways. Music is too perfect anymore and it sounds boring. At least to me. Humans seem intent on removing human element from society. I think in a lot of circumstances this is good. But, when it comes to art, movies, books, albums, painting..etc..they need to be left alone. I feel that art is sacred. 
 

people spend tons of time and energy into perfecting their craft. Hopefully, people in general will stay creative. Plus art continues your education. A lot can be learned from doing and interacting with art.

 

im really not cool with seeing dead actors on the screen in something they didn’t partake in or hearing dead musicians that werent involved in the music and cannot back the project. It is unfair to them and it is unfair to the audience. 
 

I am not interested in fake anything. Whether it be a made up person in a movie or some fake boy band that actually doesn’t exist. But, that is the way we are going. Once this stuff is perfected, companies will move on from the human element so they can make more movies and albums at a cheaper cost and without wasting money because the artists performance was poor. 
 

and as said above, once this stuff starts hitting the political field, a lot of people will be screwed. In fact, it some ways it already is. 
 

 

Soul gets squeezed out

edges get blunt

demographic

gives what you want

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[China]

Robots Are Writing Poetry, and Many People Can’t Tell the Difference

 

HEN A BOOK of brazenly surrealistic poetry and prose was published in 1984, attributed to a mysterious figure named “Racter,” it was hard to know what to make of it. The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructed was a fever vision of weirdness. “I need electricity,” declared the poet in a signature moment. “I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber. / I need it for my dreams.” That same tone, at once charming and confounding, charged Racter’s aphorisms, limericks, fictional riffs, bits of dialogue, and odd attempts at nursery rhyme (“There once was a ghoulish sad snail”).

 

Reviews were mixed. Most conceded that nothing like The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructed had ever been seen before. But Racter’s patter didn’t always impress. While the strange skips in logic gave off an idiosyncratic energy, the verse also made readers feel like they were eavesdropping on the rantings of a somniloquist. One critic called the 120-page collection “metaphysical poetry as interpreted by William Burroughs and William Blake, with a dyspeptic dash of Rod McKuen and Kahlil Gibran thrown in.” Another critic insisted that Racter’s inscrutable ingenuity revealed not a literary maverick but a “coffeehouse philosopher who knew a great deal once, but whose mind is somewhere else now.” With its bright-red cover, the volume attracted a cult following. Copies soon became scarce, which only added to Racter’s mystique.

 

That mystique wasn’t at all harmed by the fact that Racter didn’t exist. Not as an independent scribe, anyway. The entity responsible for insights like “When my electrons and neutrons war, that is my thinking” or “A tree or shrub can grow and bloom. I am always the same. But I am clever” was actually a piece of code. Racter (short for raconteur) had been hatched on an early desktop computer programmed with the rules of English grammar. The algorithm could conjugate verbs, assign genders to pronouns, match adjectives with nouns, and discern singular from plural. With a vocabulary of several thousand words, Racter knew just enough to string together sentences randomly but coherently, at least from a grammatical standpoint. It had no awareness of the “syntax directives” steering those sentences and took no pleasure in their twists and turns.

 

Computer scientists had been trying to coax machines to write verse since at least the 1960s, and Racter was a singular example of how something mindless could create something meaningful. Indeed, it led avant-garde poet Christian Bök to wonder if humans were needed to produce literature at all. The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructed, he argued, was an “obit for classic poets.” Awaiting us was an era of “robopoetics.”

 

And, true enough, we are overrun with Racter’s kin. Dozens of websites, with names like Poetry Ninja or Bored Human, can now generate poems with a click of a key.One tool is able to free-associate images and ideas from any word “donated” to it. Another uses GPS to learn your whereabouts and returns with a haiku incorporating local details and weather conditions (Montreal on December 8, 2021, at 9:32 a.m.: “Thinking of you / Cold remains / On Rue Cardinal.”) Twitter teems with robot verse: a bot that mines the platform for tweets in iambic pentameter it then turns into rhyming couplets; a bot that blurts out Ashbery-esque questions (“Why are coins kept in changes?”); a bot that constructs tiny odes to trending topics. Many of these poetry generators are DIY projects that operate on rented servers and follow preset instructions not unlike the fill-in-the-blanks algorithm that powered Racter. But, in recent years, artificial-intelligence labs have unveiled automated bards that emulate, with sometimes eerie results, the more conscious, reflective aspects of the creative process. Microsoft’s “empathetic” AI system, Xiaoice, designed to explore emotion in language, has composed millions of impassioned poems in response to images submitted by users. Deep-speare, the brainchild of Australian and Canadian researchers, caused a stir when it taught itself to write Shakespearean sonnets.

 

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