I have a very pragmatic view on music: all I care about is whether it sounds good or not. That’s it. That’s literally it. And from that standpoint the advent of AI music has been a major net positive for me.
You can choose to ignore that and come tell me about the ethics of using AI or how you care about the story behind the song and so on and that’s all fine but just note that you’re no longer addressing what I’m actually saying here.
I’m also not claiming it’s great - only that it’s good. I’ve yet to discover an AI song that I go back to like I do with many human-made songs but if I want to put on a playlist playing in the background then one consisting of entirely AI-made music reliably provides me well above average track after another whereas with organic music I need to sift through a ton of absolute crap to stumble upon the occasional good track that still rarely exceeds what AI is able to output. I can go on YouTube and put on a 2 hour playlist of Jazz House or similar and I don’t get the urge to skip a single track.
Currently I feel like where AI still trips is lyrics - they still are only plausible sounding nonsense once you actually start paying attention to it but especially for instrumental music it has far exceeded the level of a good average human artist.
Few examples of what I’m refering to: with vocals and without.
The natives in North America had no word for ownership prior to the arrival of the Europeans, and therefore they had no concept of ownership. And it took a long time and being scammed again and again to grasp it once the word was added to their vocabulary (very much by force). A little bit easier to understand imo, since it’s not a word that they had and lost, per se. but one they never had.
I think it’s possible for words to lose meaning enough (and possibly with intention) to alter the way people think, but it takes generations.
I’m not sure making “literally” simultaneously mean both “literally” and “figuratively,” helps when we’re talking about every conversation in English everywhere. On such a scale, surely it can only do harm to the general acceptance of our shared reality.
It’s not that far off from Newspeak. Though instead of “the party will tell you what’s real and what’s not,” it’s, “go ahead and figure out what’s real. Oh you’re asking us if you’re correct? Oh that’s cute. Good luck.”
Isn’t it possible that ownership was just a difficult concept for the Native Americans to learn? I don’t think I’d grant that it’s intuitive.
I’m reminded of times I’ve talked to people about map-territory confusion. It can be difficult to get some people to see the difference between a road and the map of the road.
You could argue that not having a map might damage a person’s understanding of the land around them, but you wouldn’t really argue that they couldn’t understand it, right? That a beach is here and a forest is there.
Infants develop an understanding of object permanence without ever being taught the term, even before they learn words like ‘gone’ and ‘not’, but they do learn it.
I noticed this while re-reading some of Orwell’s thoughts in your links: Orwell is sometimes using the word ‘language’ to capture things I would describe as “uses of language,” like the rhetorical trick of framing a subject. Language is then used as a banner for all word-related attacks to one’s psyche. For instance, the state altering historical records is an attack by language because those records are written with language.
I don’t think this doesn’t work for Orwell. I do think he’s trying to grasp at something deeper, and it’s a nice way of unifying his ideas anyway. It is making this conversation more difficult, though.
I don’t really disagree with much of anything Orwell is saying. And yet, I do disagree with something: By his lessons, we have somehow found ourselves arguing about whether it is valuable to defend the lines we’ve drawn between different colors, as if the blurring between rose and maroon into “red” is something painful to lose.
I’m not really sure what you mean. If not The Party, who is there to tell us whether something is correct or not?