Creator w/ @hollyherndon Oxford HAI Lab / Ethics Institute Strange Rules May -Nov @ Venice Starmirror June-Oct @ K21, Düsseldorf
Berlin, Germany
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Strange Rules opening @ Palazzo Diedo Venice
Curated with @HUObrist @hollyherndon & Adriana Rispoli
Architecture with sub, led by Niklas Bildstein Zaar
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Spotify is 16 years old, billions invested, went public making investors a boatload, barely turns a profit. No new ideas.
Still vaunted as the most plausible future model for music.
Opensea likely makes 9 figures profit yearly. Artists happy.
When does the narrative shift?
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I think there is a mental health crisis amongst both journalists and artists, and I think that ad driven platform capitalism is largely responsible
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Coming from someone potentially about to incur significant losses this year from canceled tours - now would be a *great* time to spend $5-10 on that new record you like.
Gutted for artists who have been planning new releases for the coming months.
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If only musicians had something of value they could sell, a remote experience meticulously crafted to provide an hours worth of entertainment for a reasonable price. Almost like a book, or a movie, but with sound.
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Black Mirror is always fun but the scary tech thing has run its course.
Time for some economic horror. Someone needs to capture tfw you book an Airbnb and realize the houses in the nice neighborhoods are rented by jobless heirs of ppl who paid peanuts for them in 1982
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Always sobering to learn scenes you’ve been in for over a decade simply don’t exist for almost everyone else
I can't tell if all of these things are incredibly early and I live under a rock (bc I've seen and heard close to none of these things irl) or an inflation of the impact of incredibly niche new york art scene subcultures, but leaning to the latter
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Losing music journalism is devastating. No archive, no history, no scrutiny, no culture, just atemporal confusion. No past, no future, no progress, just things happening.
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Old music industry: listeners dig through records to decide which artist to spend their money on
Streaming industry: artists dig through listeners to decide which demographic to spend their money on with targeted follow pleas
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Releasing our first @spawning_ tool to help artists see if they are present in popular AI Art training data, and register to use our tools to opt in and opt out of AI training
I think we have created a way to make this work out well for everyone
Visit haveibeentrained.com/
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When something generates enough steam to warrant people writing long essays about how it’s not art, it’s probably art
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The left are missing a generational opportunity by dismissing AI, largely due to their apparent disinterest in reading about how it actually works
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Bandcamp is great. My concern is that it is an aging community, kindof like a suburb. It flatters a romantic association with record store culture I fear I do not share with anyone under 25. Far preferable to the streaming mistake, but a bandaid in lieu of something more dynamic.
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In case its helpful, here is a slide I show often outlining some distinctions between how I view independent and interdependent musical practices.
By no means comprehensive, but clarifying enough
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Dropping a new human soon
My friends @Ottolinger1000 made me a beautiful baby dress for the @ArsElectronica award ceremony 🤰👼🐣❤️ Thank you I love it! That was a special evening!
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This HEN drama is a great case study to teach one advantage of blockchains over web 2.
Namely platform risk. HEN founder shut the platform down.
No stress, the art, identities, transactions and contract are still there for anyone to build a new interface.
Pretty useful
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Cardinal rule: never model your arts career on people whose parents have wikipedia pages. I am regrettably confronted with this situation at an increasing rate.
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Conservative Party using club music sounds, aesthetic and language to try and gather support for Brexit. Told you it would get stranger. Buckle up.
It’s time for MPs to come together and vote to #GetBrexitDone.
Then we can focus on the priorities that make a difference in the quality of life for everyone across the UK.
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Concerned that if we deprioritize the issues of decentralization and protocol ownership and make this narrative purely about buying jpegs, there is literally nothing to stop the central actors of web 2 from selling jpegs and no-one telling the difference.
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It plays along with music generated from a diffusion model that creates new songs based on the (volunteered) training data of choirs from across the UK
It holds a symbolic score generating model encased in brass, that can generate infinite scores for it to play
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Spotify sucks, but like any good vampire story, we invited them in. The difficult question is to ask how and why this happened so easily. Does anyone recall when Spotify became the default player for indie publications, and what incentives were offered to make that so?
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99.99% of art is bad is any medium
Many more people publishing art means you will see a lot more bad art, but the ratio is probably the same.
The urge to emphasize the bad and show no curiosity to seek out the good, or challenging, exposes a reactionary small mindedness I find deeply ignorant and uncultured.
it's weird that AI art is almost indistinguishable from what a human would produce and yet everything i've seen so far has the aesthetic value of one of those paintings where a dolphin is jumping with a moon in the background
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Spent a month spawning this video work with @hollyherndon each scene is generated from text prompts and directed with tools built by @ExquisiteCorps5, allowing for incremental prompt updates to sculpt the scene and “camera” movements. Proud of it. Minting on @withFND later today!
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Instagram is like an eerie abandoned theme park with a few mechanical characters someone forgot to unplug still going through their choreography
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Huge
Nina v2 provides:
- a permanent archive of your music
- 100% of sales go to artists
- profit splits can be programmed in
- paid writers
- interlinked discovery
Everything people have been calling for in the wake of the bandcamp debacle
We used to joke that Nina was the hardest way to release music. That’s no longer the case. In fact, we think it may be the easiest.
Nina v2 is live.
Beyond being easier to use, your most-requested features are here:
Albums.
Discovery.
No crypto required.
Nina is 100% Music.
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On the cover of @ArtReview_ with a beautiful piece of writing on our art by Chris Fite-Wassilak in advance of our @SerpentineUK opening tomorrow
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Far from COVID hysteria about virtual concerts, the future of live music hinges on deeper relationships between people and venues. Membership based social clubs would be a start. Like gyms, they eliminate risk of walk up and allow for easy and consistent support
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Who would have thought that social networks with economic incentives to target your most base anxieties and emotions might actually fuel radicalisation and violence?
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zoom stock crashing upon vaccine news, and with it the credibility of all the “in the future we will be raving isolated in our bedrooms” takes
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Dune chose to spruce up the Pink Floyd song because it's Warner IP, just like the Blade Runner reboot had Sinatra and Elvis IP (Warner & Sony).
The true dystopian tale is being sold repackaged 20th century stories in perpetuity
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At what point is the perpetual rehashing of 20th century subcultural sounds and ideas considered less a revival and more a terminal condition
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Audio from my 'Protocols' CTM talk, an unfiltered attempt to understand what is going on in contemporary music, where things will likely go in the short term, and what we might want to try out long term to salvage the good stuff
soundcloud.com/ctm-festival/…
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Haaland is like one of those custom players you would make on PES for a laugh.
Lets make him 7 foot. Speed 20. Strength 20. Shooting 20.
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Maybe music in the 90s seemed effortless/non pretentious because artists were supported by sales security, video budgets, relative scarcity of both competition and media channels etc. Must have been pretty relaxing to just think about making music the whole time in cheap cities.
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Pitchfork news is devastating, and symbolic.
We don't have the career we do without the curiosity and context building of publications like Pitchfork. If they can fall, it all can, and it all may well be in the process of doing so.
I take no pleasure in feeling unsurprised despite the shock.
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In the 10's I spent as much time as possible informing artists that protocols would grow to threaten web 2 platforms and that digital ownership of art and artist collectives was the next coming phase, and we should prepare accordingly.
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If I can give one piece of advice for ppl on either side of the AI art culture war unfolding (having battle scars from NFT culture war)
Twitter will serve you the argument best designed to bring out the worst in you. In reality, most people are reasonable and cautiously curious
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Brandolini's Law: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."
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We made a songbook (designed by @_MichaelOswell_ and @casedeclined) specifically for AI training.
If you sing all the songs in it you will have fed a model every phoneme in the English language
We took this book on tour to record 15 choirs across the UK to produce the dataset
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Most interesting thing about new Black Mirror is the integration of market testing into narratives
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It’s surreal that I be the subject of controversy over the provenance of data used in my art (about the provenance of data)
Your talking points on this issue are my throwaway observations from 2018
Joke world
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Was almost kicked out the Amnesia Scanner show last night for vaping. Standing next to ten industrial vaping machines.
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Are ppl really giving Bjork shit for working with IRCAM AI tools that is unacceptably ignorant
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Question isn’t “is radical culture threatened by brands”, rather “Are we rly that radical if rando shoe company is chill with our agenda?”
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Every artist should be mandated to play the sphere
Audience members will be drafted like jury duty to register their satisfaction in a grand tournament
Only the ultimate winners will be immortalized as “artist x - The Experience” and perform in the sphere for eternity
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I should never read the comments but wow many people in the arts have some seriously unhinged opinions about AI and tech more broadly
Hope you are happy with your bitcoin NFTs that are killing the environment like your unethical AI!
Coming from a professor
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Important not to underestimate this. It's remarkably proficient, others will follow, and there is little to impede these systems from mimicking anything.
While a little on the nose, the framing of this is consistent with the switch that happened around web 2 prioritizing consumer driven experience over artist first narratives. Playlists were always about soundtracking *your* life, and this approach just seals that deal. Arresting that ideology will involve quite a few hard truths.
The cream of artists will always find a way to distinguish themselves in the time they live in, but this next year will be brutally illustrative of how 99.9% of media is autoregressive. Fortunately art is a great deal more than media.
I oscillate between excitement and despair, and think the truth is somewhere in the middle, but no use underestimating what is coming. People need a plan.
You can make great music, whether you're a shower singer or a charting artist. No instrument needed, just imagination.
Make your song today at suno.ai 🎧
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If Soundcloud goes down, think of all the silent web pages in the press archives. Single point of failure / a decade rendered mute.
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Could make sense to redefine "The Underground" to mean those who are attempting to abstain or practice to a degree outside of the ad driven visibility industry. That is no trivial feat, however it feels like an appropriate update.
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You guys don’t get it yet
Slop will accelerate the demise of the attention economy in favor of something new
Using models well is the most literate I’ve ever felt. Understand them.
The poptimists and sloptimists have won. Our new issue, “After Words,” describes our postliterate moment, when everything from serious criticism to literary fiction to children’s books seems on the verge of being replaced by content trash.
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In 1966, Bell Labs spent 10 months collaborating with John Cage, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg and many others to present new works that speculated on the future of artistic performance across fields
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One way to remedy the rampant, trickle up, culture of extraction in the pop music industry is to counter it with a radical new regime of full, joyous, attribution. Show the world how many wonderful ppl worked to make an idea happen, for culture's sake.
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What I see is a bunch of smart and principled people being ravaged by a crisis of purpose and community, and hopefully coming to terms with the fact that the tools and narratives they were sold to liberate themselves are in fact now their captors
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Is anyone working on a more resilient alternative to bandcamp, or has anyone come across a promising idea that is as yet unfunded?
I'm trying to determine if there are any other avenues being pursued outside of crypto.
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The pop artist manipulates attention via feedback loops of edgy empty gestures and their complimentary hot takes. We are both the instrument being played and the product being sold.
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I have been passed reliable information that THIS will be the year that lofi aesthetics finally dethrone capitalism
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You know when you are an English product of the class system when the first section you skip to on a wikipedia page is 'early life'.
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Very positive to see two platforms emphasize producer payments in this way. Encouraging that consensus on this issue has quietly come some distance over the past few years.
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I find this one particularly beautiful
The diffusion model cycles through lead singers from the dataset
And the accompanying organ piece in mixolydian hits my gut
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Listened in on a clubhouse last night with young pop artists, many on majors
Their perspective on Web 3 was so well informed and sober.
Each one spoke on how they would rather build a career sharing equity with their audience than focus on streaming
This is happening.
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Who will be the first big DJ to offer splits of their live fees to artists whose music makes up their set?
DJ DAOs are another likelihood that will be very positive.
The (achievable) infrastructure necessary to facilitate that shift will be highly transformative.
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Every new model release will impress, with good reason. Assume it's done. The superficial layer of media is calculable.
More interested in what kind of art we make once anyone/anything can effortlessly create media that would superficially appear as virtuosic last century
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The potential of this tool for education is staggering. 20 seconds to write a scene to a kids book explaining how GANs work.
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This is why I take signs of feudalism seriously. We are all now court artists, or jesters, for platform capitalists and their ad driven incentive structures. This is not hyperbole, it is a grotesque reality.
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People are understandably very exhausted by those working in technology saying everything is about to change, regrettably at the moment it does appear everything is about to change
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I like the Kanye player. We've been moving towards idiosyncratic scarcity models for years. We aren't far off a broadway model of having to attend shows to hear a new LP.
Once others follow, ppl will come around to the NFT proposal of scarce ownership AND free access and reuse
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Random NFTs selling for 6 figures are a bubble, but this transition is bursting a bubble too.
The web 2 era of illusory “democratization” and giving away work for nothing was a decade long bubble.
It was nonsense, and bursting that illusion is painful but necessary to move on
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I'm going to refer to the ideal as "Interdependent Music" from now on. Seems sticky & illustrative. Independence without mutual support + obligation = hellscape. A re-reading of what made the original indies special was the interdependence + resiliency of artist led networks..
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Ok. So Ek spoke with @stuartdredge and gave some sincere comments on criticisms that have been levelled at Spotify from working musicians. It is useful because it confirms his ideological position
musically.com/2020/07/30/spo…
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“Post truth” is hilarious to me. I was a kid in the pre-internet 90s, where Uri Gellar bent cutlery with his mind, “satanic” teenagers were convicted of murders they didn’t commit, George Michael was straight and Bill Cosby was a wholesome role model.
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You are missing the point if you expect yearly arguments about ambient music to “go anywhere”. They are best appreciated as comforting repetition, anachronistic environmental stimulus, collapsing time into a drone, a neutral control to contemplate where we were the last time
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The dataset is now the largest available to researchers, future proofed by recording each choir ambisonically to provide precise recall of the sound in each room
This dataset is owned by the choirs in question through a new IP structure we created alongside @SerpentineUK Future Art Ecosystems team to allow for common ownership of AI data
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Think of it as a gift for the Adam Curtis doc about the death of the culture industry
Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create.
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A massive effort by Spawning team to release the largest curated public domain image dataset
This is enough to train a foundation model and move us past the paradigm of wanton web scraping
We will soon have competitive Public AI models, and we want to lead that charge
We’ve put 12.4 million of the most beautiful images in the public domain into an image-text dataset with community governance.
Public Domain 12M is completely free. Its 30+ terabytes of images are hosted on AWS, so downloading them is fast and won’t negatively impact the cultural heritage organizations who originally shared them.
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Beyond that all indications so far suggest Kanye is using an AI model of his own voice and work
If you think everyone making AI Kanye music for free will stop him making money you have no understanding of where the bulk of his income comes from
Oh no…. even greater saturation of attention with your image through anyone having the ability to make music as you
The opposite is the problem - in an attention economy there are only <100 main characters who are no longer constrained in output or modality
So people who would rather listen to a new Kanye album every day get a new Kanye album every day
And Logan Paul can release a novel a day if he wants that will reach more people than any novelist
Not an AI problem, a human attention problem
If Kanye West is using AI to make his music ( & giving the finger to musicians trying to protect copyright) then why shouldn’t we all use AI to make Kanye West music for free?
Then his earnings will be zero.
West is a good example of the self-destruction of the contrarian.
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Attention economy turning everything into a culture war of mutually inaccurate arguments is a bigger threat to both AI and trad creative fields than AI or trad creative fields are to each other
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My first response to seeing the LaMDA conversation isn’t to entertain notions of sentience.
More so to take seriously how religions have started on far less compelling claims and supporting material.
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We have long needed a complete reconsideration of sampling discourse. Gregory C. Coleman, who played the amen break (one of the most used samples in music history) never received royalties and died homeless. That is beyond shameful.
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The music ai agent trend does at least get to the meat of the reality that in almost all cases popular music is now fungible/interchangeable and the scarce elements are parasocial stickiness and proximity to existing celebrity
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Most working on web 3 are not obsessed with prices. When price action occurs, in protocols or anomalous NFT sales, people write articles. The media is obsessed with price and speculation, and often disinterested in covering more interesting applications. Distorts things.
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Teasing our book release in London
Some seem to find the title provocative, which I find peculiar as it is a statement of fact worth digesting and getting on with
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