The Pop Corporation

Much like recreational drugs, AI is a fine toy to muck around with if you already know what you’re doing, but wildly annoying in the hands of know-nothings with loud mouths and their hangers on who think it’s the future maaaaan. Anyway, with that, like recreational drugs, we’re going to have to live with it while actual humans worry about their jobs.

Google, a company who don’t care much for humans but have an eerie, thin pretence of concern, are bang into AI when it comes to creating music. They’re launching a thing called MusicLM in January that’ll be able to generate music from text. Oh, in news that will make your eyes get wet and your mouth go ha ha this is fine, everything is fine, they say AI will be able to read your brain and produce tunes based on your brain activity.

Researchers studied the data from some willing test subjects and got them to listen to 15 second music clips from various genres (blues, classical, country, disco, hip-hop, jazz, metal, pop, reggae, and rock, if you’re interested) and then used the brain data to train a deep neural network to learn about what happens with brain activity patterns and different elements of music, like what your brain does when it hears rhythm and what emotion it feels.

Ha ha. Great stuff. Absolutely fine. Just great.

Then, the model once it had been trained up, it can reconstruct music and you can find out more while feeling vague despair over on the research site. You can listen to some clips too. And do listen to it. It’s not abstract ambient stuff – it’s like a mangled facsimile of pop music, like an image with too many fingers or something.

HA HA HA HA. HONESTLY, EVERYTHING IS COMPLETELY FINE.

Let’s just have the world’s most powerful search engine that reads all our emails and tracks what we’ve been buying and looking for into our actual brains too. That’s just fine. Absolutely nothing weird about that! Ha ha ha! What? Some people send them their actual DNA samples too with that 23 & Me thing as well? Great! Just magic.

Fucking hell.