alt Hacker NewsI have and I hated it.
The story is that I was getting into a new genre of music, namely Japanese City pop from the 1980s. I was totally unfamiliar with the genre and started listening to it on YouTube. I found one playlist, which I listened to a lot, thinking: “wow, this is very formulaic, and the lyrics are very generic” but I kind of thought that was just how the genre went. Finally had planned to use it for during a small local event, but when I went to find out who the artists were I embarrassingly found out it was all AI generated.
Thing is, in this instance I knew nothing of the source material, when I went to get actual songs, written by actual people, the difference was start. I would be able to recognize AI generated City pop in an instant now 8 months later. This experience kind of felt like I had been scammed. That my ignorance of the genre had been taken advantage of. It was not pleasant.
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I had a very similar experience, looking for music to play during D&D sessions. Not paying close attention to the music, it seemed like it fit the bill. Once I started listening more closely, there were lots of issues that became readily apparent.
My dad has also started sharing with me links on Facebook to pop songs that have been re-arranged in different genres. This was a big area of fun for a number of folks in my family several years ago as we discovered YouTube artists like Chase Holfelder who put significant effort into making very high quality rearrangements. But I kept noticing these weird issues in the new songs.
I've gotten to where I can identify an AI generated song almost immediately: there's a weird, high frequency hiss in the mix that sounds like heavy noise getting to overcome compression artifacts but the source from which it's coming should be clean. There's a general lack of enthusiasm to the lyrics and a boring, nonsensical progression to the lyrics on original arrangements. Sometimes, the person generating the song tries to hide that last issue by generating instrumentals only or they use one of those try-to-hard-to-sound-badass Country Rock genres that are popular on Tik Tok to stick on top of clips from the TV show Yellowstone (WTF is with that?!), but then when I check the details, there's an obviously AI cover art for artists I've never heard of. The accounts will be anthologies full of these artists that have never existed.
So, I know people keep parroting "a good artist can use any tool". But I've yet to see it. All this "democratizing art" (didn't know anyone was gate keeping it to begin with, certainly have not seen any lack of talent online in several years) doesn't seem to be producing results. It becomes pretty obvious very quickly it's all just a pump and dump scheme to Get Them Clicks.
You don't understand. I mean content that even now, you don't know it is AI.
Obviously you think the AI content that you can identify is bad. But there is content you've encountered that you think is good and not AI content, that actually is AI generated.
That's the survivorship bias.