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Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

hef19898

>> My colleague Spencer Kornhaber, writing about Ed Sheeran’s new album, surmised that its dull lyrics could’ve been composed by “a neural network trained on Sheeran’s past work.”

Well, technically that is what happened? Besides the "artificial" bit of course.

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The lyrics were in fact composed by a neural network (Sheeran) trained on Sheeran's past work, all Sheeran's life experiences up to that point, and any new things that he had experienced since releasing his penultimate album. The colleague instead is sarcastically implying that, because they are dull, the lyrics sound like they were produced by a network exclusively trained on previous lyrics. Such a network would not be able to produce any content that was not simply a transformation of previous lyrics.

> The lyrics were in fact composed by a neural network (Sheeran) trained on Sheeran's past work

The use of the term "neural network" to refer to artificial intelligence is an interesting and perhaps successful marketing term, but it's not really correct to say that Sheeran's actual works are composed by a "neural network" in the same sense that any computational product is. It's a collision of terminology.

In computing, neural networks are at best a model for cerebral computation - and even then, they're an incredibly crude model, as any neuroscientist will tell you that cognition works very differently from LLMs. Even when they arrive at similar outcomes, the paths they take to get there are radically different.

They are indeed radically different: one is very well understood in terms of how it works, and the other - neuroscientists have absolutely no idea how it works.

Maybe he was just trying to communicate indirectly his dislike for the new album.

The comment you are replying to seems to be pointing out that Ed Sheeran himself, i.e. his own brain, is trained on the past work of Ed Sheeran. That's how I read it anyway.

Yes, that's what I understood and why I said that maybe the author just doesn't like Ed Sheeran's music.

Well, Ed Sheeran self-trained himself, including positive feed-back on past work, on his own work. So in a sense, he still beats a Sheeran-bot!

This no critique of Ed Sheerans work so, I actually do like his older albums. The last one didn't leave an impression so far to actually remember it.

I don’t listen to the radio/album versions of his songs since I think they are a bit dull, but I thought his Tiny Desk concert was great.

It seems pretty obvious to me that whoever wrote that sentence did not like the album and was trying ineffectively to communicate.

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