gabriel-solis.bsky.social
Musician, scholar, reader, writer. I’m sure things can always get worse, but I still work to make them better.
37 posts
55 followers
43 following
Getting Started
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Yeah, it’s funny to me that any Jews at all are taken in by these rabidly anti-Semitic supporters of Israel. They only want to bring the rapture and will be delighted to see Jews suffer. They just need to fulfill prophecy. Which is BATSHIT crazy in 2025. And also our national foreign policy.
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And it sucks worse that they now make a ton of AI junk music by mining copyrighted libraries and promote it over music they would sort of be expected to pay for. And it sucks that lots of people don’t notice. Lots of bad to go around there.
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I hear that and appreciate the point. I also remain stuck with the important differences between big corporate tech and you. Not in a systematic way, I guess, but also in a way that seems important. It deeply sucks that Spotify already doesn’t pay 99% of artists anything like what they should.
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Yeah, no, I also don’t. I think maybe it does operate differently, but I’m not certain of that. I can say that I enjoy more iterations of very similar art than iterations of very similar scholarship. But not in a categorical way. My guess is if there is a difference it is of degree, not kind.
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People would have, in large numbers, have been delighted to get a check. Done and done. Problem avoided. It’s garbage to argue they shouldn’t have. Like, buy the book. That’s what people do. Why not? Consider it an investment.
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Ok, also, on a separate line of thinking: there’s a really lot of money in tech, and yet the big innovations have all led to artists being paid less. Streaming music is the clearest example, but not the only one. Why, actually, couldn’t Meta have paid people for their writing to train the LLM?
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But inasmuch as this seems to revolve around a combination of knowledge and innovation/creativity, it seems like a problem that despite a long tradition of thinking about it in both theory and practice, I don’t think there’s a really satisfying account of what innovation or creativity is in art.
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I get that my thread here is about a separate issue, to a degree, but I think it’s relevant. I think we ought to have wide understanding of what constitutes a kind of “citation” in making art that should not trigger a compensation to the cited.
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I can’t really imagine why AI would change my strong feeling that The Specials should be compensated despite not making a thing that is specifically at the outer bounds of creativity/innovation. Or why I would not see it as a real loss that fewer people can be so compensated now.
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It’s not unlike the way non-machine learning synths, sequencers, etc. opened up sounds and tools to musicians in earlier decades.
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Also, goodness knows, I know artists who use machine learning as a tool in making art. And some of it is great! (Some of it isn’t, but that’s the way of all things). But notably, the machine bit of that art is incidental. It’s technical.
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I imagine I could hear a thing made by an AI and like it as much as I like this Specials song, but I can definitely confirm that I have not had that experience. I have thoughts about why that is, and some people might dismiss them as “magical,” but I don’t think that is it.
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It is probably innovative in some sense, but not a very strong sense. It’s creative, but only in the way that anyone making anything specific exercises creativity. All of that sounds like I’m saying it’s not very good as art, but I am 100% not saying that.
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I’m not sure if we have a useful definition of originality (/innovation/creativity/etc.) to work with wrt art-making that has any bearing here. I’m sitting in a bar right now, hearing The Specials. I know I love this recording, but it’s not because it is original.
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It’s just 🤷🏻♂️ without AI we would not be worse off. We would still find ways to go downhill! And I guess our refrigerators wouldn’t be able to sense if our milk was going rotten and order us some from the internet. Or whatever.
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I’m not even saying we’d be better off without it, except in the way I think we’d be better off without nuclear tech. We would still find ways to kill each other and poison the earth and air without nuclear weapons and power plants. But, you know…
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It’s not that I think it is evil. I get it, it’s a tool. It’s evil the way nuclear technology is evil. Which is to say it’s not, per se, but it sure will be used to do a bunch of evil shit.
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And look, I don’t really think there’s a future without AI. I just also think it’s blech. It’s not a thing that solves important problems. But it does make new porn, and weapons, so I guess there’s that.
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I mean, it’s *explicitly a slave labor program. No one in either regime is trying to obscure that.
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Yes, and…also racism.
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Man, I can’t follow things. Is that real post or a parody?
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Truly, though, no one in the Republican Party is being “dragged” anywhere. Nor is their voter base. This was always who they were.
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Indeed, though I’d say they have been explicit about this for a while. Just becoming *even more explicit. It’s just awful.
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So little of NEH allows for overhead. I think the effect there will be more like NEA, which is slated to more explicitly fund nationalist propaganda. Or just a big cut. Or both.
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To be clear, for my non-healthcare friends: this is where your healthcare provider goes to check the recommendations for treatment (medication, doses, etc.) when you are diagnosed with an infection or need contraception. There are other sources for info, but this is the best one. And now it’s gone.
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It’s being reported as specifically a takedown of HIV-related guidelines (an atrocity) but it also involves taking down all guidelines on contraception and sexually transmitted Infection treatment. Which every kind of person may need at one point or another.
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Looking like a real path to me right now. This place is increasingly dangerous. I wish I was more confident of the direction the UK is going.
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One, two, threeeee
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Surely that never actually works out in practice, though, right? That seems transparently like a theory capitalists use to justify consolidation of wealth/power.