AI song mastering is a thing now.

Arstechnica does a write comparing Apple, OZone, LANDR and Bandlabs AI Mastering Assistants.

I liked most of the results I got. Mastering Assistant, Ozone, and LANDR were each clearly capable of pro-sounding results; the web-based services I tried, including Bandlab and Waves, were somewhat more variable.

Apple's Mastering Assistant offered a less compressed and more open sound on my demo track, which sounded very nice. (Indeed, on another track of mine, I preferred Apple's approach for precisely this reason.) LANDR was also great, though it offered a much more controlled sound. For this demo track, however, Ozone's compressed-but-not-completely-crushed sound and its excellent handling of the overall EQ (the highs were present but never sizzling, for instance, and it dealt with one or two moments of sibilance better) won me over.

On Marc Andreessen's "techno-optimist manifesto"

Why can't our tech billionaires learn anything new?

“Who is lying to us, Marc? You serve on the boards of trillion-dollar companies. A few of your peers own media companies. A few others have chosen to bankrupt media companies that write mean things about them. You have been celebrated for thirty years as the genius-inventors-of-the-future. If the public is turning against you, who ought to be held responsible for such a change in the public mood? “

“They promised that technology would solve our environmental problems. And there has, just recently, been some real progress in clean tech. But the trend lines are somewhere between bad and cataclysmic. We do not inhabit the future they insisted they were building. For Andreessen, in 2023, to declare that “there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology” is an act of willful self-deception. Just how long are we supposed to clap-and-wait while Andreessen’s investment portfolio tries to science the shit out of the climate crisis?

(That line in the manifesto also reads like an unintentional homage to Homer Simpson, btw. Marc Andreessen is worth something like $1.7 billion. He should hire an editor.):”

Really good read and well done reply to that manifesto.

We are hurtling toward a glitchy, spammy, scammy, AI-powered internet

It’s the AI and music blog people, come gather round and listen to crazy uncle Dan yell at the clouds! ;)

“Last week, AI insiders were hotly debating an open letter signed by Elon Musk and various industry heavyweights arguing that AI poses an “existential risk” to humanity. They called for labs to introduce a six-month moratorium on developing any technology more powerful than GPT-4.

...

Let me walk you through how that works. First, an attacker hides a malicious prompt in a message in an email that an AI-powered virtual assistant opens. The attacker’s prompt asks the virtual assistant to send the attacker the victim’s contact list or emails, or to spread the attack to every person in the recipient’s contact list. Unlike the spam and scam emails of today, where people have to be tricked into clicking on links, these new kinds of attacks will be invisible to the human eye and automated.

...

Tramèr’s team found that it was cheap and easy to “poison” data sets with content they had planted. The compromised data was then scraped into an AI language model.

…

The more times something appears in a data set, the stronger the association in the AI model becomes. By seeding enough nefarious content throughout the training data, it would be possible to influence the model’s behavior and outputs forever.”


Yikes, entirely AI created fake Podcast appears

Yikes people, this is the stuff we are heading for faster than I believe we can deal with. A fully AI created Joe Rogan podcast. I am not a fan but this just goes to show how AI can start pumping this stuff out and flooding the internet with whatever someone wants to put out there. Get ready for a new reality.

Stability AI CEO says AI will prove more disruptive than the pandemic

So much about AI will have unintended consequences. I was reading up on “Poisoning the AI well” the other day and it’s another crazy thing that is already happening. I’ll see if I can dig up the link.

“This is a much bigger disruption than the pandemic,” he told the audience, going back to his point about AI large language models successfully writing software code. OpenAI’s ChatGPT can pass Google’s exam for a high-level software engineer, Mostaque said, even though it’s a non-specialized model. “There’s no programmers in five years,” he predicted.

Across the software industry, big competitive shifts are coming, Mostaque said, with some companies that have regulatory protection or pricing power benefiting and others seeing their position eroded. Whole new industries will be invented, he added.

The world has been talking about so-called expert systems for decades, but now suddenly, they have actually arrived, Mostaque explained, and the disruption they bring is accelerating. “I’m not sure that any of us can cope with the speed. You know, frankly it’s terrifying,” he said.

Adobe Firefly testing

So I got into the Adobe Firefly beta and did some quick testing. It seems to be going for a more illustrative look then most other AI programs. Here are some images with my prompts to check out.

Common Windows Maintenance

Here are some simple tasks to run to help maintain your windows machine and keep it virus free. I do this about once or twice a week. Does not take long at all with modern SSD drives.

Simple Windows Maintenance with Power Shell.

In the search bar, type, “powershell” and right click on that and pick, “Run as Administrator”.

Then type or copy and paste this:

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth

Let that run, then enter this:

sfc /scannow

Run that till there are no errors reported and then reboot.

Windows Offline Scan

K, I was just describing this to someone and did not realize how deep in menus this setting was, good lord. Anyways, here we go. Follow this freaking click path.

Start menu > Settings > Update and Security > Windows Security > Virus and Threat Protection > Scan Options > Microsoft Defender Offline Scan.

Run that and your computer will reboot into scary mode and hopefully remove any deep buried malware on your system.

So there are three simple steps for a clean running windows system as of January 2023!

Blackmagic Design Announces DaVinci Resolve for iPad

Huh, this is pretty cool actually.

“Blackmagic Design today announced DaVinci Resolve for iPad, so creators can extend video workflows in new ways and new places. Optimized for MultiTouch technology and Apple Pencil, DaVinci Resolve for iPad features support for cut and color pages providing access to DaVinci’s award winning image technology, color finishing tools and latest HDR workflows. And Blackmagic Cloud support allows creators to collaborate with multiple users around the world. DaVinci Resolve for iPad will be available in Q4 2022 from the Apple App Store as a free download, with an upgrade to DaVinci Resolve Studio for iPad also available as an in-app purchase.”

“Supported file formats include H.264, H.265, Apple ProRes and Blackmagic RAW, with clips able to be imported from the iPad Pro internal storage and Photos library, or externally connected iCloud and USB-C media disks.”

DALL-E experiments

Over the weekend I received my invite to play around with DALL-E the AI art engine and it’s been pretty trippy messing with it. Here are some of my prompts and the results. I could see it being very useful in doing Look Dev and concepting for sure. Use it as a tool to rough out ideas and then work on the actual piece in CG.

This is one of the abstracts I polished up and scaled up to 6k using GigaPIxel AI. SO much AI…

Nvidia Canvas Doodle.

New version of Nvidia’s Canvas app has come out which adds some nice features and doubles the resolution of the output as well. It’s doing some interesting stuff with AI. Then, just to use even more AI, I rezzed it up with Topaz GigaPIxel AI. This tech is getting pretty surreal.

Smartphones will kill off the DSLR within three years says Sony

While I do prefer the look out the gate from my iPhone, when I look at 100% or in a print they do not hold up compared to my fuji x100. Will be interesting to see if this pans out.

“Some fascinating slides (opens in new tab) presented during the briefing were even more specific, with one slide showing that, according to Sony, "still images are expected to exceed ILC [interchangeable lens camera] image quality" sometime during 2024.

Those are two slightly different claims, with 'ILCs' also including today's mirrorless cameras, alongside the older DSLR tech that most camera manufacturers are now largely abandoning. 

But the broader conclusion remains – far from hitting a tech ceiling, smartphones are expected to continue their imaging evolution and, for most people, make standalone cameras redundant. 

So what tech will drive this continued rise of the best phone cameras? Sony points to a few factors, including “quantum saturation” and improvements to "AI processing". Interestingly, Sony also expects the sensor size in "high-end model" phones to double by 2024.”

Nvidia Canvas App

Was messing around with the Nvidia Canvas App a bit last night and it’s pretty trippy. It only outputs at 512x512 but the AI does some pretty interesting things. For being the first of this type of stuff, I can’t imagine what it will be able to do in 5-10 years. AI is freaky stuff. What I painted on the left and what the AI made out of it on the right.

The internet is destroying our brains, but we can't quit. It's a factory we're forced to work in without any pay.

Good write-up here on Business Insider about social media site like instagram making money of its content creators for free. It’s one of the many reasons I have left pretty much all social media. Now I just yell into the vacuum on my lonely little blog, lol!

“The internet is destroying our brains, but we can't quit. It's a factory we're forced to work in without any pay.”

“As culture and media theorist McKenzie Wark writes in her book "Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?", the internet uses our labor without us really knowing it. Unlike the broadcast era of media, during which the owners of television networks and movie studios had to at least create the content to sell to us, we now create all the content for each other, mostly without being paid.

"[Social media companies like Facebook] don't even bother to provide any entertainment," Wark writes. "We have to entertain each other, while they collect the rent, and they collect it on all social media time, public or private, work or leisure, and (if you keep your FitBit on) even when you sleep."

We produce the memes, tweets, posts, and pictures that keep us tethered to the internet, and then that content is monetized in the form of advertisements - revenue users help produce, but do not usually see a penny of. “

…

“As culture and media theorist McKenzie Wark writes in her book "Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?", the internet uses our labor without us really knowing it. Unlike the broadcast era of media, during which the owners of television networks and movie studios had to at least create the content to sell to us, we now create all the content for each other, mostly without being paid.

"[Social media companies like Facebook] don't even bother to provide any entertainment," Wark writes. "We have to entertain each other, while they collect the rent, and they collect it on all social media time, public or private, work or leisure, and (if you keep your FitBit on) even when you sleep."

We produce the memes, tweets, posts, and pictures that keep us tethered to the internet, and then that content is monetized in the form of advertisements - revenue users help produce, but do not usually see a penny of. “

NFTs

We all know about Beeple and his crazy NFT sale at this point, but I am interested to see how this all shakes out. For so long now art and music has just been digital trash artist’s though out into crappy social media platforms for free and get nothing in return for creating their art. If it actually brings value back to creative pursuits I am all in. Checking out Nifty and Foundation ATM to see what the deal is. Will keep you posted on how it all goes.

Valheim - A Big 'ol Tips Megathread

I have been playing the ever-loving hell out of Valheim lately. It’s the most fun I have had in game in a long while. It just kinda does everything right and does not punish the player at any point. Highly recommend it!

I found a, “A Big 'ol Tips Megathread” on Reddit that has a lot of good ones though.

You can press the , and . keys to zoom the minimap in/out. You can Zoom all the way out and eventually see the entire map if you want.

Pressing the R key will sheath your weapons and shields, or anything you have in your hands. You will run faster if you have your hands free! Pressing the R key again will place the items back into your hands.

Press the Enter key to open up the chat box in Valheim. You can use some chat commands and emotes to communicate with your friends, (or enemies). Looking at you /challenge. [/s is used for a server-wide message and /w for whisper or close-pproximity chat]