How much do you know? One of my strongest things as somebody who's looked to as a person who knows a lot, is that I will immediately go to 'I don't know' when asked that sort of question. I don't even make an additional promise, I just stop at 'I don't know'.

With your emphasis on 'confidently', it sounds like you're looking at social consequences. I find that stopping the conversation with 'I don't know' and getting on with what I'm doing, socially 'reads' as authoritative. I'm sure part of it is my lack of equivocation: if I went 'I'll get back to you, I promise I swear I'll be able to know eventually, soon, I promise, pinky swear I will honest!' there would obviously be no authority, I'd be grovelling.

I could probably double down, unethically. 'I don't know, what a stupid question, why would you even ask that malformed question, that's not a real question'. I think that would lead to suspicion, though.

'I don't know' can be a power move, if you HAVE the confidence to mean it and let it lie there. I guess that's the answer. "I don't know. This is what I'm actively doing now…" This relies very much on there being many things you do know…

If you postulate 'good', who is in there wearing the AI actor like a mask?

I find it easy to imagine some disabled, or disfigured, otherwise blocked-from-stardom person using tech like this to transform themselves and be able to express their truth without being unfairly judged by the physical form they were born into.

But that's not what we're talking about, is it? Be honest.

If you want to impress me, well, I'm a techie nerd. Make a furry celebrity actress, that's the expression of a person. Like a Hollywood-grade implementation of a VTuber. Let 'em be driven by a person that I can get to know and recognize. In this day and age I'm not wedded to forcing everybody to be trapped in the form they're born in, still less so in art.

But this is NOT what we're talking about. You're going to have an AI by committee, drawn from a pandering mass of popular reactions, producing problems not unlike modern-day movies that try so hard to pander to the audience at any given moment that there's no weight to them and no point to any of it.

Here's hoping we also get the other thing. Sort of 'T-pain autotune turned into a style' but for acting. And again, I'm down with it if it's letting artists execute on realities they are otherwise completely unable to reach. But that's not what we're going to get, is it?

> I find it easy to imagine some disabled, or disfigured, otherwise blocked-from-stardom person using tech like this to transform themselves and be able to express their truth without being unfairly judged by the physical form they were born into.

Outside of a select number of A-list actors, are there situations where the other 85-90% of actors are able to express their truth today?

One of the common problems with creative industries (and the primary reason I switched away from pursuing game development) was that you're not expressing your truth; you're expressing someone else's truth in exchange for money. And unless you have lots of other intangible and often uncontrollable qualities, and are willing to play politics, you will probably never end up in a position to express your truth (with any degree of notoriety) through your own or other people's work.

I am not disabled or disfigured, and while I'm blocked-from-stardom that's just because I have a fairly uninteresting existence overall that wouldn't warrant it on it's own. So I can only guess at this stuff from an outside perspective, but from where I sit, I don't see AI as a sea-change enabler for the people you're referring to.

> "I find it easy to imagine some disabled, or disfigured, otherwise blocked-from-stardom person using tech like this to transform themselves and be able to express their truth without being unfairly judged by the physical form they were born into."

Reminds me of a James Tiptree Jr. novella although in this case it's a remote-controlled artificial body instead of a remote-controlled digital avatar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Who_Was_Plugged_In . Avoiding spoilers, it doesn't exactly make one think that such avatarism would be a particularly good idea by the end of the story.

I'm a youtuber to support my programming project, and I see many people in my situation being a lot more shy about doing that. It's a lot of work to do it properly and takes dedicated attention to not have your parasocial community turn sour or vicious on you: it's no joke.

I wonder how much of this is people expecting that ANY media presence will throw them into the troubles people experience when they have all the media presence. I know if I blow up big enough (not much of a threat right now) that someone will come to hurt me, no matter how I am. That's not about me, it's about statistics. If I blew up that big I could probably afford security…

I think some people assume you'll be confronted with that sort of problem right away just by appearing on youtube etc. Sure you will… eventually. Or if you're staggeringly unlucky.

From a professional perspective, I never worried much and I'm pretty sure it helped me. But I totally understand if there were/are people who are very concerned about putting themselves "out there" when there is at least a remote possibility of some offhand remark or paragraph costing them their job.

Is a scrapbooker an artist? If a scrapbooker is an artist because of what collage is, is a MtG card collector picking layouts to arrange their cards in the array of plastic sleeves you can get, an artist?

If the MtG card collector is not an artist does that mean they're bad and need to stop?

If the MtG collector only orders the cards for the joy of making a pleasant composition and does not provide any function like finding the cards faster or keeping them in good shape.

I think they are doing art.

If the main reason is to keep their items clean, as much time as they use doing the composition or how good it looks, they are not artist.

I hang out with dubstep and DnB guys on a UK forum. If they're looking to rave out they'll make something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq0Pg7fnkAg

You'll notice many similarities in instrumentation, but how is Suno not like a bad RealAudio take on some of these noises haphazardly lumped together?

Or, same artist, different track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhvpCHfe0m0

Don't you need more focus and aggression to make even sell-out weak tea dubstep? I feel the generative process really severely fails to deliver anywhere near the correct sound, even for 'bad artificial lol dubstep' sounds.

Another even closer to the intent of the Suno one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3q_kmpq-9Y

Maybe you need to refresh the context - 99.99% of AI generated music, images or text is seen/heard only Once, by the AI user. It's a private affair. The rest of the world are not invited.

If I write a song about my kid and cat it's funny for me and my wife. I don't expect anyone else to hear or like it. It has value to me because I set the topic. It doesn't even need to be perfect musically to be fun for a few minutes.

You seem to be the one who doesn't understand how special it is if you think good music is so simple that AI can zero shot it.

People are mixing and matching these songs and layering their own vocals etc to create novel music. This is barely different from sampling or papier mache or making collages.

People made the same reductionist arguments you're making about electronic music in the early days. Or digital art.

OK, so it sounds like this is a 'I know for certain I can't code without AI and that I get nothing coherent done, and now I'm doing the greatest things all the time, so you're demonstrably wrong!' argument.

I would ask, then, if you're qualified to evaluate that what 'you' are doing now is what you think it is? Writing off 'does it lead to other problems' with 'no doubt, but' feels like something to watch closely.

I imagine a would-be novelist who can't write a line. They've got some general notions they want to be brilliant at, but they're nowhere. Apply AI, and now there's ten million words, a series, after their continual prompts. Are they a novelist, or have they wasted a lot of time and energy cosplaying a novelist? Is their work a communication, or is it more like an inbox full of spam into which they're reading great significance because they want to believe?

To be honest, if that person spent time coming up with world building, plot ideas etc all themselves, got the ai to draft stuff and edited it continuously until they got the exact result they wanted in the form of a novel, then yeah I would say they’re a novelist.

You can currently go to websites and use character generators and plot idea generators to get unstuck from writers block or provide inspiration and professional writers already do this _all the time_.

No, incorrect observation. I've been programming professionally longer than I've had my HN account.

[neddieseagoon] …and they did! [/neddieseagoon]

For some time now I've been supplying all my audio DSP plugins at airwindows.com pre-compiled on the Pi 400. (MIT open source, so it's not limited to that). The Pi version is included.

I mention this to make a point: you can't transform synths just by running some generic DSP code on a Pi and putting it in a box. Sound processing is also being transformed, and whether it's something like Hydrasynth generating poly aftertouch (but aliasing and not sounding that different from a VST) or Novation Peak/Summit receiving poly aftertouch (not generating :D ) but generating sound using custom hardware, sitting a VST on a Pi isn't going to get you a transformative synth.

Thing is, if you're able to dig into stuff like my DSP codebase that is actively under development AND plunk a VST synth onto a Pi AND do something interesting with the physical controls to direct the synth engine, that's starting to look transformative again. But just knowing about Pi isn't enough, you'll have to have a deep background in soundmaking and the ability to instrument-make in an interesting way.

If you have those things… game on. You can begin work FAR more cheaply than ever before, and that is how the Pi could be transforming synths.

I'm waiting for 24/96 audio hats to be common before I dig into this, even for stompboxes. I'm given to understand Electrosmith Daisy already has this, and that's a similar class of 'system on tiny board' that should be considered an audio Pi-like.

…and make copious use of 'Not Interested' and 'Don't ever show this channel to me again'.

I do keep having to whack it with more of that but it's expected. My recommendations sidebar is not actively obnoxious and if it hints at it, well, rinse and repeat. If it's gonna try to pander to me I will set extremely loud boundaries, and there's every opportunity to do that.