Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

nonrandomstring

There's an area where we've been way, way ahead of the curve for 70 years now.

It's sound.

Long before GPT, image synthesis, video deep-fakes and these imagined "Photoshop for words", we had sound synthesis.

That's a very useful marker. Because we can read the things people were saying about the future of sound, their hopes, fears and predictions as far back as the 1960s when Robert Moog and Wendy Carlos were patching modular synths.

Most of the fears and predictions turned out to be rubbish. Musicians, orchestras and live events didn't get replaced. Instead we invented synth-pop bands.

And many of the things technologists imagined people would want to do, turned out to be way off the mark. To my knowledge Isao Tomita was the only talented artist to "replace an orchestra" with synthesisers. Most people who used the tools "as intended" were artless, and forgettable. Everyone else ran riot in the parameter space - messing and subverting the technology to get the weirdest punk-ass squelches and wobbles possible.

So I always have to look on these "How synthetic X is going to make the real X obsolete" with a pinch of salt.

I think there's difference between synthesizers, which I would compare to something like different paints and brushes and papers, and then Photoshop and Corel draw and whatnot; and where image generators are heading which is more analogous to automatic music generation.

I will also put it forward that for reasons I'm ignorant of, eye seems to be more readily fooled than ear. 20 years ago with crappy tools all I had to do was smudge and clone a hydrant in a photo and it would effectively be gone for 99% of observers. But similarly primitive ways of trying to change or alter a sound file were immediatelly noticed by all listeners.

> So I always have to look on these "How synthetic X is going to make the real X obsolete" with a pinch of salt.

From your comment, it seems that the linked article is far more fear-mongering than it is; I gathered a mostly optimistic tone from it.

The final paragraph -

> While some of these capabilities sound a bit scary at first, they will eventually become as mundane as “desaturate”, “Gaussian blur” or any regular image filter, and unlock new creative potential.

The analogy to sound synthesis is strange to me. As both a musician whose primary instruments are acoustic guitars and computer software, and as a writer of poetry, prose and essays. I can’t speak to fears of synthesis obsoleting other music performance, mostly what I’ve heard expressed is snobbish purity that it’s not “real”—either real talent, real music, or real performance. But at the end of the day, synthetic instruments are still instruments. Fundamentally a primitive like a string or a reed attached to something which lets you make sound from it. A “simple machine” in the mechanics sense. They’re not composition synthesis, which is definitely an area of exploration now, and which is more akin to image and video synthesis.

Photoshop conceptually sits somewhere between these two extremes of electronically-aided creation, but much closer to sound synthesis, than what the author is hypothesizing. I can’t even think of a text analogy for sound synthesis as you’ve described. The least nonsensical imagined example I can think of is “this word does not exist” (as in word synthesis), which would be more valuable as a game or a gag than as a tool.

While I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment, I think the antithesis to your argument is that where synthesizers "failed", modern sampling technology has crept in, especially in scoring. It's less common in the feature film industry, but a significant portion of TV and game scores are produced entirely with virtual instruments, or at least have a very heavy sampling component (e.g. recorded solo instrument against a synthetic backing track). Most people can't tell, or don't care - as will most likely be the case with AI-generated or AI-assisted content as it moves forward into various domains.

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