When I first heard Melanie Safka’s “Look what they done to my song ma” I had no idea that it was a lament about the music industry which has now become a potpourri of writers, producers, session musicians, corporations and investors that exert a strangle hold over artists that are contracted to the big recording companies.
Enter the lament from singers and bands and mostly those who’s careers are now considered ‘inactive’ about how their songs have been ‘stolen’ to train ‘AI’ which seems to be regarded as some quasi human entity that listens to their recordings a steals away in the stealth of the digital night with said same tucked safely under its arms. Well; it’s a furfy, best kept to tales told around a fire to ward off the ghosts of the night.
Here’s a heretical statement. Music, images and texts as such, don’t exist in the digital / online world. The only things that have a corporeal existence are the files used to reproduce the same. The only time music, images and texts are ‘real’ is when they have a physical form. Outside of that, they are essentially just simulations, or in plain speak; reproductions of file content.
Web crawlers and the like have been around since the inception of the internet. They ‘scour’ online content ‘looking’ for header types that indicate what type of data a stored / linked file contains. They also look for stores of data that contain information about search histories, viewed content etc. Up until now no one has ever complained.
Enter the ghost in the machine; ‘Artificial Intelligence’. This algorithm / processing methodology was craftily ‘humanised’ at the outset to facilitate our pre-existing tendency to humanise (anthropomorphise) that which we can’t understand. Unbelievably successful.
But lets not waste time, you’ve been had. Our concerns about the issue and the algorithm / process itself aren’t even remotely aligned. What happens is roughly this. As far as stored online data goes; an appropriate file, when encountered is scanned and the file components (bits, as opposed to bytes) are converted to tokens. Tokens represent the smallest components of the file. At this stage the type of file i.e., sound. image or text is irrelevant. What we’re looking at here are relationships between parts. That’s what the ‘weight lifter’ with AI tattooed on its back is trained on. Not songs, not photographs, not paintings, not designs, not books, not web posts etc, relationships between parts. Nothing is stolen, or even borrowed / copied. The tokens are then transferred to the LLM.
The predicament people imagine they are in or maybe really ‘are in’ was facilitated by the shift away from physical products to digitised products. The soul of the creative process was sold down the river, and particularly for those in the music industry with the advent of streaming services. Without ‘digitised product’ the advent of AI into the domain of the ‘creative’ would be dead in the water.
Addendum.
The screen / device that I’ve used to enter this text into this post has a base refresh rate of 60Hz and an adaptive refresh rate of 120Hz. Whilst the text appears static and whilst it appears to scroll both visual phenomena are the result of the number of times the screen refreshes per second. 60Hz = 60 time per second and 120Hz = 120 times per second (to facilitate ‘smooth scrolling’). Same on your Phone and on your TV screen. In the world of digital imagery (Still and moving) everything is illusory. Nothing is real; it just appears to be, and when co-ordinated with sound, the illusion of reality is strengthened even further.
Art + Photography + AI 