I dabbled with AI music for a bit with Suno. Worked out well for the most part, only way I'm ever going to hear music with themes for some of niche things I like, like Shadowrun. I threw a bunch of music genres at it and some were good enough that I added them to my normal playlist but after about 30 completed songs I had a hard time coming up with new stuff. As someone who has never tried to create music myself it was fun to play with.
There are two arguments about AI art, one of them is trivially reducible to the “is sampling/collage art”. If you are spending time expressing something using AI produced components then you are producing art, and probably the amount of time you spend working on it (either developing your skills or creating the work) roughly will correlate to how much value others see in it. It’s no different than building a hip hop track out of drum loops.
The second question is more interesting, which is “does raw AI produced artwork have any artistic value” and I am going to punt on the “artistic” part of that equation and answer the “value” part with no, and not because people might not enjoy it, but it falls victim to the classic “my five year old could so that” critique of modern art, except in this case it is true. Anybody can go to an AI and produce some mediocre media.
Where this gets interesting again is _volume_. What AI unlocks is exactly that anybody can create songs, videos and images for _themselves_. The value of it is probably the pennies worth of time ajd expense they put into it, but it might he worth it for them to make something, be mildly amused by it and immediately dispose of it.
You wanted some shadowrun themed music, you got it and enjoyed it. You made something of value only to yourself, but that seems okay? Multiply that times billions of people probably eventually people might luck into something genuinely good and worth sharing from time to time.
> people might luck into something genuinely good and worth sharing from time to time.
A) it would be impossible to find in a sea of AI generated slop
B) even if it were to be recognized as good, it would be instantly copied by other AI’s such that it would be very shortly thereafter be also considered slop
For any work to gain traction with an audience, there needs to be scarcity. Art and artists are valued because they are unique in some way, something about it or them cannot be replicated by others. The ability to instantly produce a piece of “art” negates any artistic value, at least as far as audiences are concerned.
I think your starting definition of value is basically worthless. Value is not about what things cost to make, but what people are willing to pay for them. You reached this conclusion by the end of your comment, but I think it's important to emphasize. My friend group has created incredible value with suno, mostly making meme songs we forget about after a day, but every once in a while we create lasting memories that have real emotional impact. It doesnt matter that anyone can do that, I dont think that cheapens the output at all.
The value you are getting is not from the music as an artistic product, but from the social connection and entertainment it offers your friend group. The meme songs and lasting memories you are getting are fungible with regards to other entertaining and emotionally salient creations you and your friends may share with each other, and not with regards to other pieces of music.
My comment was mostly that it lacks value to _others_. It was probably worth to your friend group roughly the time and money you spent on it. Nobody else is ever going to care.
It can definitely produce some good songs. One issue is a lot of its output ends up being very same-y. You use Suno for any period of time and you get a "Suno ear" where you can detect AI music from a mile off.
I played around with Suno a little too. It's actually kind of crazy what it can produce. I mean I don't think it's objectively good in any way but for many applications this (and a lot of other generative AIs) are what I'd call "sufficiently good".
When you move into an apartment or furnish a rental or whatever you might put stuff up on the wall. For many years that might just be some mass-produced prints from IKEA, for example. These might be photos or paintings but a lot of them are "abstract". For this kind of application, current generative AIs are probably sufficient to create what I'd call "wall fillers".
So if you were doing an indie game, it might not be large enough to pay for artists to come up with music or even some basic art assets but an AI can I think fill this role. You can use them as placeholders.
So I'm generally sympathetic to the plight of artists. There is certainly an issue with how these LLMs are trained and if that's "stealing". Legally and ethically we're still working this out because the issue is new.
But I also think there are some things you just don't need an artist for.
So this kind of music has a name, it’s called production music and it’s been long expected in the industry that AI-generated music will compete with the lower-end production music, basically elevator music or background music for corporate training videos etc. It is unlikely, however, that it will get much traction in scripted long form productions, partly because studios believe it’s a legal minefield, and partly due to resistance from creatives (whether justified or not).
My favorite example of resistance from creatives was the space shuttle landing gear button. The space shuttle orbiter was technically capable of performing an automated mission, with the exception of opening the landing gear doors. This was ostensibly so that there would be no risk of the heat shield being compromised, as the landing gear doors were in the heat shield. But it is widely acknowledged that this was an effort by the astronauts office to ensure the continued need of a human crew.
For what it's worth, I support manned spaceflight. But sometimes allowing "creatives" to impede progress has its costs.
Red herring. The Puritan work ethic that seems to always resolve to "human value=human income" (regardless of the ethic's stated intentions) is what causes this, not creatives in and of themselves.
I get that there is a strong online movement to destroy the traditional American Dream value of "work hard, and become rich" but that does not apply in fields where money is not the motivator. No single astronaut has ever expressed financial gain as a motivator for moving into that profession.
Quite the opposite, many have given up fortunes and prosperous businesses to move into spaceflight.
You misunderstand the movements, they exist precisely because of a perception that "work hard" doesn't seem to always mean "become rich", many see rich (correctly or incorrectly) as a product of luck, connections, or other factors unrelated to work. The price of everything constantly going up makes "work hard" work less. They actually would like the dream to work.
Anyway, someone may not want to pursue spaceflight for the money, but everything involved in spaceflight still costs a lot of money, which has to be justified. So I think the phenomenon is still there; people still want to appear to be proving themselves through appearing to work hard and appearing to be needed.
Well I don't know any economic system that guarantees the "get rich" part, nor any that enables such a thing without "work hard". But no other system has enabled so many poor people to become rich people, as has the American system.
I don't live in the US. But I recognize the American system for what it does well.
was looking at this a few days ago. my son got into cassettes last summer. even bought a dual deck off facebook market place to record mix tapes, worked great tape to tape.
setup a desktop with n8n, ollama, open webui, comfyui, and aider. work is dragging it's feet on AI orchestration and workflow tooling so figured I learn it a bit to get ahead of things. just need some personal projects that are interesting enough that I'll pour time into them.
The cynic in me thinks that this is a way for bigger farms to gobble up smaller farms by calling in ice but knowing that they will be able to keep ice from raiding them unless a bigger farm pays to have them raided.
Phrasing matters. using "didn't" puts a bad light on FEMA but if they used "couldn't" it changes things. no idea which it is but i'd bet it should read "couldn't"
From my limited experience, former coder now management but I still get to code now and then. I've found them helpful but also intrusive. Sometimes when it guesses the code for the rest of the line and next few lines it's going down a path I don't want to go but I have to take time to scan it. Maybe it's a configuration issue, but i'd prefer it didn't put code directly in my way or be off by default and only show when I hit a key combo.
One thing I know is that I wouldn't ask an LLM to write an entire section of code or even a function without going in and reviewing.
> One thing I know is that I wouldn't ask an LLM to write an entire section of code or even a function without going in and reviewing.
These days I am working on a startup doing [a bit of] everything, and I don't like the UI it creates. It's useful enough when I make the building blocks and let it be, but allowing claude to write big sections ends up with lots of reworks until I get what I am looking for.
My depth of stock trading stops at the buy low sell high level. Can someone explain a little more if you have time? What would have happened to those trades if splunk had went down 20%?
They bought $127 call options (the right to buy Splunk at $127) while Splunk was valued at $119 and the options were due to expire in one day. That's a cheap option to buy, given the improbability of a sudden jump like that.
The only way the buyer could make a profit would be for Splunk to go higher than $127 and if it went significantly higher, they'd stand to make an eye-watering return-on-investment multiple in one day. Which is what happens.
It would be suspicious if this turns out to be a speculative trader making a one-off transaction.
This is an overly simplistic view of options trading. Let’s say I had a view that the stock was going to be volatile, more so than options implied, but didn’t have a directional view. I could buy the calls and short the stock and scalp my gamma during the move.
Or let’s say I was short the stock and wanted to hedge during a volatile FOMC period.
I’m not really sure what you mean. If I buy 10 lots of ATM 0dte puts, and 5 lots of underlying, I will have a delta neutral position. If the market moves up, my put delta will be less than 50 due to gamma, so I am now net long. So I sell some underlying for a small profit which takes me back to delta neutral. Then the market moves back down again, and my put delta increases leaving me net short (again due to gamma). So I buy some underlying to keep me delta neutral. This is called gamma scalping.
In the above, I’ve just realized a small profit by trading the underlying and a small bit of theta burn. As long as the former is greater than the latter (as long as realized vol > implied vol) I make money.
Rinse and repeat this process over and over again.
You and I have vastly different definitions of 'overly simplistic'.
Scalping your gamma?
Feels like the stock market is just a bunch of jargon, subterfuge and financial sleight of hand. Like we learned nothing from 2008, and just created financial 'products' mechanisms and gambits out of thin air.
Stock shorting has got to be one of the most pants-on-head stupid things I've ever heard.
> Feels like the stock market is just a bunch of jargon
This is literally every industry. Do you think the average trader can understand the majority of discussions on HN w/o any domain experience? The jargon exists for a reason.
> Like we learned nothing from 2008, and just created financial 'products' mechanisms and gambits out of thin air.
The financial engineering issues in 2008 were fueled by other issues: simply we had the government suppressing true borrowing costs and fueling a housing bubble under socially progressive cover. These moves almost universally end in disaster historically. The "out of thin air" products I presume you're referring to all had/have legitimate use-cases: the problem is that nobody bothered to do proper risk management because the US Government was fanning the flames in one direction.
> Stock shorting has got to be one of the most pants-on-head stupid things I've ever heard.
That's probably because you don't understand the positive aspects. Shorting is absolutely critical to well functioning and efficient markets. It's not simply evil hedge funds betting against businesses or whatever trope you might have heard.
In fact, if housing was an easily shortable asset class, the above crisis you mention would have been far less severe (or possibly not happened at all) as short selling pressure would have kept prices at more reasonable levels.
> Feels like the stock market is just a bunch of jargon, subterfuge and financial sleight of hand.
Here, what they're doing is establishing a position which will make money if the stock moves either direction out of a narrow band. If you believe there's going to be a big industry upset, but don't know whether it will hurt or harm a specific player, you might enter this position. In turn, the overall market volatility is reduced and liquidity is added by your information being added to the market.
> Stock shorting has got to be one of the most pants-on-head stupid things I've ever heard.
All kinds of simple, legitimate reasons to short stocks. E.g. you are excessively exposed to that company's welfare for some reason (stock options, they're an important vendor, they're a big component in a mutual fund you own but you'd rather not own their stock, etc)-- you can take an opposite position by shorting. Or, here, you can use it to offset an option that moves in the opposite direction.
> Like we learned nothing from 2008, and just created financial 'products' mechanisms and gambits out of thin air.
This isn't too much like the house of cards from 2008. These types of strategies are not new; offsetting short positions by writing or buying options was in frequent use in the 1970s, if not before. Option use to profit from volatility (or hedge volatility) dates back more than 2000 years.
I'm not a big fan of esoteric, complicated financial schemes, or in creating options and financialized products for everything (e.g. cap and trade)... or situations where market players profit from privileged access to marketplaces (e.g. HFT). But the things you name are not any of these.
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