Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Depends on the person I think but as a general suggestion, nah. I think the intention of that statement is to be comfortable in your own skin and have a reasonable level of self confidence.

I was getting agoraphobia once, slowly crept into it by accident. It was so comfortable. I had to do a bit of exposure therapy mixed with breath work and meditation to dig myself out. Your path is likely different but that’s what did it for me.

Depending on who you’re talking to that could be really good or really really bad advice.

I’ve never paid first and last months rent when renting although I have paid the entire lease in one shot before without a security deposit.

Beans knows what beans wants and is self actualizing. How many of your goals have you achieved today?

It do be like that. It does beg the question of how one actually finds a romantic partner.

That isn’t what I said but you’re free to take it that way if you prefer.

And there are similarities and we can equally pretend to not understand them as well.

So a musician who doesn’t fully and directly control all the sounds in their music is not an artist? Many big artists would fall short of your definition in that someone who isn’t them is controlling the lyrics, music production, final mix and so on. The artists on the label would be a massive farce as such and in actuality the producer is maybe the truest version of an actual producer.

I still don’t see the difference if someone has an idea in their mind and they are able to create that idea in the world with tool A vs tool B where tool A is a team of individuals, sound engineers, musicians, programmers and so on and tool B is a machine that can equally perform those tasks to create someone’s vision. The upside is that far more people have the capacity to exercise their creative will than before.

I do want to take time to state I am aware of the copyright issues in training some models and it is a very valid argument against certain companies and the use of certain models.

I also never said there’s no connection. Algorithms aren’t just a famous democratic politician winding and grinding to a song.

I am being pedantic although for sure some artists truly do have a very deep understanding of computers and electronic hardware for music production. The line is what I’m exploring. I think for instance with an NN one can most definitely have a vision, give a beatbox or musical rendition and continually edit it to their ultimate desire of what they heard in their mind. I don’t see the lack of creativity in that use case although putting “make a rock song” in the prompt and hitting GO and that’s it is definitely uninspired. That said that’s been a debate for a long time already with electronic music and genres such as mashups or styles of music which are essentially built from nothing but samples. For decades already there’s been artists mired in rumors they can’t sing, play any instrument or write music aka they’re just a face lip syncing or getting fully autotuned live.

That’s all to say that I’m not sure what you’re saying can be applied across the board without any concern for particular use cases. I understand what you’re getting at and it depends if the circumstance on hand is that or isn’t, NN’s or not.

Not a bot although a cookie sounds nice, depends what kind.

Edit: dang can’t even say I’m not a bot without getting downvoted. Anyways still wondering about that cookie

So the difference is just the understanding then? So if for instance it’s a small NN and the individual does understand the input output relationship then it’s art. To what level do you prefer people who use computers and electronics to understand the algorithms and electronics they are using? Like one could have a very fundamental understanding of the tools they are using to generate sounds or essentially no understanding whatsoever beyond button click makes computer / circuit go brrrrrrrrr. Like for instance I could design my own synthesizer and solder it or program a synth from scratch but I’m not sure all people who use electronics to generate sound have that level of understanding of the input output relationship. Like us someone who uses an electric piano but has absolutely no clue how the instrument operates in producing sound still an artist?

Never claimed that voice was produced using NN or other algorithms typically associated with AI.

Yeah you haven’t made any statements but I think we are both aware of the sentiments or feelings of people on the subject. Personally wherever there are strong feelings or clashing perspectives there’s a source of exploration and artistic creation.

Like for instance if someone created their own sample database, designed their own NN, trained it, and prompted it would that be enough human involvement or maybe if they had it generate then samples to be fed into a vocaloid then it would be enough or maybe for some that’s still not valid music.

I’m noticing this seems to be the heart of the issue, that is the level of human involvement. If that indeed is the issue then it would be interesting to explore where the line is just from an artistic endeavour. How much human interaction or effort is enough. If for instance someone recorded all their own training data, designed their own NN, trained it, and prompted it would that be enough or not? I also get the sense that part of the issue is the underlying algorithm, that is anything involving NN is bad regardless of the circumstance.

I think you’re saying. It’s the level of human involvement that determines if it’s good or bad? If so it would be interesting to explore exactly where the cutoff is.

It is different as in there isn’t a model or a neural network but both take real audio and algorithmically produce synthetic audio. It just seems interesting to determine one algorithm is good and another algorithm is bad.

China has been pretty direct about it with their east to west project. So far I really haven’t heard anyone in China complaining but maybe that’s because of their strict media control.