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Comment by drcongo | Hacker News Reader

My favourite thing about this is how proud he is of copying this idea from a million people on TikTok.

It seems similar to the DJ process though, right? Their creation process involves sampling, mixing, curating, etc. so the novelty is in figuring it out and getting it to work with his set.

I’m sure the first person to release a rap record felt proud even though they were copying lots of people who were rapping on the street.

The novelty here is being the first dj to do this for his crowd, not that he invented the process. So it’s exciting to him and the people in the audience.

All of this is true, I think I made the mistake of assuming some domain knowledge here - he's seen as a bit of a joke character by a lot of people in dance music, largely down to his seeming total lack of self-awareness. In some ways it's actually kinda charming, like here he has a child-like joy at having done this, whereas sometimes it's completely tone-deaf, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEI7oX0XxJw

I mean.. there’s a reason that others haven’t really done this as far as I know and that he only used a tiny sample for a couple seconds: the output from AI voice generation generally has a ton of artifacts and isn’t something you’d want to play on a festival sized sound system for more than a few seconds.

So he basically did the only acceptable thing I’d consider doing with this and.. it’s just not that interesting?

It’s certainly your prerogative to not find it interesting and your feelings are valid.

However, I think it’s interesting and can’t wait to see more djs and even new artists using this technique to create some neat art. And of course, it looks like there are tens of thousands of fans in that stadium who seemed kind of interesting.

I don’t think statistical sanity is a good measure for value, especially art, but I don’t think it’s noteworthy that you don’t find it interesting.

I understand that. But he's making a big deal out of using literally the two easiest tools out there to generate... a tiny awkward two second soundbite in a set. I just timed myself and it took me less than two minutes to do the same thing. Might take longer if you need to sign up first.

And this isn't to say that the time it takes to do something is important - the idea of course matters too. But the idea itself isn't original. And the result is just a TINY soundbite.

So it's just straight up not interesting from a production nor listening perspective, especially given the fact there are people out there doing much more creative, involved, and interesting things in the realm of AI assisted production. For example: https://twitter.com/thisiscyclops/status/1619085469198721038...

If David Guetta wasn't a big DJ, no one would care about this.

I don't think this is true any more. At least, I've heard generated audio from the latest models that runs for well over a minute without obvious artifacts.

I don’t know what else I expected to hear since progress in these spaces is moving crazy quickly. What models?

Elevenlabs, by some ex-googlers: https://beta.elevenlabs.io/ If anything, the results I've heard from this are better than the demos.

And VALL-E by Microsoft, which isn't quite as good, but notable because it can clone real voices with only three seconds of training data: https://valle-demo.github.io/

He's a bit mainstream, it's not so different from a million other mainstream artist picking up on underground trends

That's probably why it's newsworthy.

Very mainstream!

The pride isn't from creating it from what I saw, the pride is from finding something that was very popular. He said in an interview that it was a throwaway gag he did and wasn't expecting much from it.

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