Is the AI audio revolution already here?

For me, Internet changed a lot by 1998. Just being so easy to find people to talk to or meet up with. Order things. Access to information. It wasn't that widespread, but it was commonly used by people that were high school and college aged by 1996. By 2003 the online dating stuff really exploded. All of a sudden I had more messages and even phone numbers than I could handle. It was pretty rare for me to run into someone who wasn't using the Internet for a lot by 2004. The adoption seemed to happen a lot slower with older generations. Slower with people who were maybe more blue collar and never really got into tech. Guys that I knew who couldn't find the c drive in Windows Explorer unless you pointed right at it. Nowadays people who would never have used a desktop use the Net through phones. As a result a lot of antisocial people are abusing its capabilities. These types have turned the online dating market polygamous, become toxic social media influencers, and use GPS to go commit crimes in areas that they would never have ventured to previously. Then there's all the other scams. It can actually be quite dangerous to put yourself out there online.

There's so many new types of computers on the horizon. Quantum, biological, I forget the others. These PCs we're using now are going to be extremely archaic and obsolete in the 2030s, if not earlier. Creativity is going to shift to consumers creating their own stuff. People will still create things to sell on the marketplace, it's just a question of if consumers will still want them as opposed to what their computers are generating. Right now we have a lot of badly written entertainment. ChatGPT can write storylines that are worlds better than the major pro wrestling companies, for example.

Our society is so messed up compared to a year like 2008 that I'm looking forward to these changes. At least it will be better for my health. Ironically, it will be easier for people to go backwards if they wish. There will most likely be all sorts of communities with differing levels of tech. You'll probably be able to have communities based in 1990s environments with maybe better medical care. They'll just stay static in regard to certain tech. Then people can just leave if they want a different experience.

??  Horribly disturbing or a Godsend to Travis fans?

Will we be subjected to Elvis doing Taylor Swift and Madonna songs for the rest of eternity?

I think gear prices are tanking already, especially at the high end.
Forget what sellers are asking, what are they actually getting?
Are people still willing to pay $4k for that KM84 listed on Reverb?

Prices initially dropped after the COVID frenzy subsided but now AI has to be factored in and will only become more significant as it appears in every aspect of our lives whether we like it or not.

With cost of living pressures mounting and income for most dropping how many can continue to afford to spend crazy money on gear?

And from a client’s perspective how long before even charging $20 an hour for a well equipped studio with esoteric vintage gear the studio owner paid a fortune for is now too much for clients when they can type some text into a box, upload a sample of their own voice, and in a couple of minutes generate something that would have taken them weeks and a bunch of $$ to produce and then upload it to all the streaming services the same day?

The playing field hasn’t changed, it’s being concreted over and replaced with a theme park with free rides.

From what I’m hearing from an avid classic car guy prices are falling in that market as well.

Well, I see the same trend...but it didn't stop my excitement today when the brand new Buzz Audio Zodiak EQ showed up on my doorstep :-)

I'll probably have to be more cautious about my purchases, but for now I'll just stay positive
-Chris

Unless it’s a 250 GTO which seems to be around 10x the price of a 275 GTB.

Blank expression?

He’s involved. It’s illegal in TN to use someone’s voice without consent for AI.

There has been a literal explosion of AI generated YouTube channels lately.

I watch a lot a photography related YouTube videos specifically showcasing renowned photographers from the past.

I reckon about 80% of those videos created in the last year are AI.

They mostly follow the same formula with a slideshow of the photos including music and captions (often misspelled) and sometimes AI generated voiceovers which are typically just scripted directly from Wikipedia often with mispronunciations.

Sometimes the same photo appears more than once in the slideshow most likely due to being cropped differently or the contrast or colour is different enough to fool the AI algorithm into thinking it is a different photo altogether from the other.

It really does wear thin pretty quickly especially when you are prompted at the end to “like”, “subscribe” and support all the hard work of the channels ‘creator’ by sending donations to their Patreon account. 🙄

Someone made a bunch of obscene AI songs and posted them to Youtube. I listened to some and they sounded like modern music made by humans. Then I watched a bunch of Frontiers Records stuff and some modern metal to see if there was anything new I might want to listen to. All this Frontiers and Metal stuff just sounds like one homogenous blob. Same fake drums, same production choices, same bad loudness war mastering, same vocal tuning and drum time fixes, just one assembly line product after another. It's not that different from AI because so much of it is fake. The other day I saw something about Hatsune Miku at the Auditorium Theatre on their Facebook. They showed this massive line of people lining up to get into the show. I look it up and I guess it's some kinda digitally projected character with a backup band. So, I load up a live video. The music sounds just like this AI stuff. This must be the closest thing to an AI concert that we have. It's not something I would want to watch and I'm just baffled as to why thousands of people are showing up for it. Well, I'm also baffled why thousands of people paid tons of money to see stuff like Motley Crue, Guns N Roses, and Kiss this year. Must have a lot to do with social conformity. Social pressure. Stuff not too different from brainwashing. You get to feel important if you partake. If we go back to stuff like New Kids and Vanilla Ice, you couldn't give them away in 1993 due to social pressure. Now they got most of their fans back and a lot of new ones because they're considering socially acceptable now. 26 years ago you would get a lot of flack from fans of stuff like Manson, Korn, and NIN if you liked King Diamond and Cannibal Corpse. Now every form of hard rock and metal is considered part of the same whole.

This is how we got Gangsta Rap adopted by rich kids in affluent suburbs. MTV and the media and entertainment complexes of the 1990s told everyone this was the hip thing to listen to. And it's the same thing with public health. We could have a new pandemic with a 50% fatality rate and people will be out bragging about how they're throwing caution to the wind because it's seen as the cool thing to do by conservative media. I live zero covid and I'm very aware there's a ton of pressure on me to not put on a 95 mask at indoor events I'm going to with a group. But I could care less about the stigma. Point being that social conformity has already dictated that fake music is acceptable. It would take a real radical change in culture for people to reject all this fake music and go back to wanting something that's all analog and sounds like it came from 1991. At some point we'll see AI-generated stuff that sounds like it's authentically from 1991. It'll be simple at first. Then it'll start generating stuff on par with The Black Album and Use Your Illusion. There was a recent video about AI and jobs from Fanatical Futurist that I need to watch. Should be more than interesting.