Come back to tell us how that's been working out 6 or 12 months from now.

You describe yourself as a vibe coder. In other words, you don't understand what you're shipping, and somehow that doesn't seem to concern you.

I'm not worried about your coworker, I'm worried about your employer allowing you to deploy a mess without requiring someone with knowledge to have challenged it, and I'm worried for your customers.

"getting people to pay attention to and enjoy something that you've created" is a lot harder still if you didn't really create the thing. I'm not trying to be snide, but the tools that allow you to produce that kind of output being available to everyone else kind of makes the point. That's why statistics show that barely anyone on Suno listens to anything but their own stuff.

And of course, especially for music, the human element is pretty much the entire point, so while a lot of people enjoy it for a while as a toy to play around, I don't think many people would seriously consider listening to AI music as being worth their time. It would be like knowingly and deliberately reading fake news.

As always in these discussions, I think people compare apples and oranges. LLMs are great with in-distribution solutions for solved problems with a lot of relevant prior material and in established technologies. Frontend stuff works great, for instance.

But for novel solutions, complex business logic, things deeply integrated with external systems... the code generation quickly turns terrible and useless. Especially if it's in anything but Python, Java, or JS.

Most of these differences in results end up being about differences in application. LLMs suck at out-of-distribution material, inherently.

You write "so much code that no one person could possibly understand it" as if it was a good thing. Surely, you're being sarcastic?

That's like saying it's irrational to disregard a news report after finding out it was fake. You believed it and found it interesting at the time. Why would knowledge about it being untrue change that?

Because we don't read reports just to have something to read, we do because we want to learn something about the world. And actual music fans don't listen to music just to drown out the silence, they want to listen to what another human being has to say, someone with their own history, experiences, views on life and the world, something to say and the creativity to express it in an interesting way. It makes absolute sense to be pissed off at something artificially generated, devoid of any intent or meaning, statistically generated based on a mass-pirated library of real musicians' work, skinsuiting as music with content.

I admit there are situations where music is used just to have sound, and some people just want to have something on in the background without having to pax attention to it. And one could lament or not the fact that humans are no longer really necessary to produce vapid muzak. But going by the GP's words, I don't think that that's what they were doing or looking for.

As someone who would consider himself in the same situation, I don't see dissonance, but pragmatism.

The scenario isn't a temporary crisis, it's total collapse, end of the world stuff. Why would I be so keen on surviving that? What for? Everyone and everything I enjoy in life would be gone anyway.

It's like the billionaires' apocalypse bunkers. What do they think they would be doing all day, and to what end? Even if they managed to secure enough clean air, clean food, and clean water, how many years are they planning to spend in their bunker pool, or watching their local movie library until the TV breaks? What's the end goal there?

I get that survivalists have a whole subculture, and it's an interest and hobby people enjoy doing, that's cool. But I think even they, if this happened and their skills allowed them to survive, would pretty soon start wondering why they would want to try to survive by all means possible in a barren, empty, dead world. If the survivalism is a fun hobby for someone, sure, but to force oneself to learn those skills for a potential apocalypse scenario doesn't seem to me like a reasonable thing to invest time in at all.

Emulating being the key word here. Putting words in a similar order as a critical thinker would, isn't the same as critical thinking. Have you looked at the output of "reasoning" models? It's funny, for sure, but not impressive or threatening. It exposes the models for the statistical word generators they are.

Add the fact that they totally suck at tasks outside of those spanned by the training data. I know there's a vision of the future where humans are all gig workers generating specialised training data for LLMs, but it doesn't sound much more plausible to me than a future where intellectual progress forever stops at the 2022 level, because everything will be done by LLMs and that's when anything new stopped being thought of.

We're not at the early stages. The LLM hype started almost for years ago! And for the past two or three years, progress has plateaued (if not regressed) and the economics, which still have to be figured out, point to it becoming an order of magnitude more expensive at least, compared to this aggressive marketing and VC phase.

I've been told for three years that it's the early days, and everything completely changes every few months, and these are the worst the tools will ever be. Meanwhile, I see very little technical progress, zero return on investment anywhere, negative infinity profitability on the side of the providers, and a fast growing realisation among the masses on all the myriad tasks they are systemically unsuitable for.

Of course it's not the same thing -- it's way worse.

The piracy comes first, and it's exactly the same thing. GenAI Corp. can't train models on illicitly obtained media before illicitly obtaining said media. And that very thing is already what private individuals got and get sued for millions over.

The GenAI Corp., having gotten away with that unpunished, then goes on to commit further violations by commercially exploiting the media with neither a license to do so, nor any intentions to pay the rights-holders for their use.

By the media conglomerates' own math, these GenAI companies should all be drowning in lawsuits over kazillions of bajillions of dollars.

> The piracy comes first, and it's exactly the same thing. GenAI Corp. can't train models on illicitly obtained media before illicitly obtaining said media.

My contention is that this is not happening. Most generative AI companies do not source their training data from illegal torrents and the few that do are currently paying for it. Further, I suspect the companies that get away with it today are _smaller_ not larger.

Training data is typically sourced by scraping the publicly available web.

> Of course it's not the same thing -- it's way worse.

Setting aside your own moral standards here, we should at least be able to agree that from a legal standpoint training a model is not copyright infringement.

Reminds me of one of my favourite episodes of one of my favourite TV shows ever, The Adventures of Pete and Pete. Technically a children's show, but with such cool, philosophical layers.

"What if you could only hear [your favourite song] once, and that was it?"

Also very relevant to modern day concerts, with so many in the audience focusing more on recording their crappy phone videos than on appreciating the live moment.