Ancestors

Written by Wolf480pl on 2025-01-26 at 12:24

Was there ever a concern that Miku would make singers lose their jobs?

I don't think there was....

If not, why? What does Miku (and Vocaloid technology in general) do that makes it not-a-threat and could AI become not-a-threat in a similar manner?

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Written by asie on 2025-01-26 at 12:33

@wolf480pl@mstdn.io

Vocaloid never set out to deprecate physical singers altogether, neither in marketing (which is a sin of many AI companies) nor in functionality. It provided an alternative with its own pros and cons, which was particularly useful to independent music creators who could not afford to collaborate with a human vocalist, or wanted the distinct style of voice synthesis offered. It'd be like seeing Taylor Swift as a threat to all other pop musicians.

(Vocaloid also lacks the copyright/voice ownership concerns; the voice samples of Saki Fujita were used consensually.)

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Written by asie on 2025-01-26 at 12:34

@wolf480pl@mstdn.io

A lot of LLM-based technology was already adopted without most people batting an eye; neural network-based upscaling or casual machine translation comes to mind. Heck, even generative AI was seen as a fun casual toy for the first year or two of its online presence. It is only when that technology was used to justify not making people's jobs easier, but removing entire classes of jobs (replacing them with a worse, but cheaper, end result!) did the outrage begin, really.

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Written by asie on 2025-01-26 at 12:35

@wolf480pl@mstdn.io

In short, nobody would be taken seriously if they said "Sony can now fire all its vocalists, because they can just use Hatsune Miku". Replace "vocalists" with "artists" and "Hatsune Miku" with "Midjourney", and suddenly instead of scorn you get a VC funding round.

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Toot

Written by Wolf480pl on 2025-01-26 at 12:38

@asie good analysis.

But is "replace artists Midjourney" a credible threat because of inherent properties of Midjourney (eg. vs Vocaloid's limited selection of voices, and the training data being ethically sourced)

or is it just a human factor of being able to convince VCs, and Vocaloid with VC funding would be just as dangerous?

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Descendants

Written by Wolf480pl on 2025-01-26 at 12:43

@asie

also

neural network-based upscaling

Yeah, waifu2x was fun.

Even though at that time I was already contemptful of AI in general.

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Written by Wolf480pl on 2025-01-26 at 12:53

@asie also, what if part of the problem with AI is that it pulls off a Sybil Attack?

There is one Taylor Swift, and people can generally tell a song by Taylor Swift from a song not by Taylor Swift.

There is a few Vocaloid voices and they're easy to recognize.

But a generative AI that can create millions of personas overloads our ability to attribute work to an artist, or information to a source...

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Written by asie on 2025-01-26 at 13:02

@wolf480pl@mstdn.io that's actually an interesting insight

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Written by asie on 2025-01-26 at 13:09

@wolf480pl@mstdn.io but also, another thing:

observe that popular forms of piracy and generative AI training broadly rely on the same networks of accumulating and distributing information, requiring the same type and scale of copyright infringement to operate, but people support one and oppose the other

piracy (and, say, Hatsune Miku) empower the little guy: they allow an independent artist or researcher to access information without paying a toll to corporations (say, a music label, or an academic publisher)

generative AI (and, say, cryptocurrency) typically empowers the corporations: the cost of operating them is exorbitant and only accessible to the already rich, meaning that instead of the little guy benefitting from the works funded by corporations, it's corporations benefitting from the works created by the little guy

a kind of Robin Hood mentality, essentially

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