Comment by LouisSayers
9 months ago
What you're mentioning is like the difference between digital vs analog music.
For generic stuff you probably can't tell the difference, but once you move to the edges you start to hear the steps in digital vs the smooth transition of analog.
In the same way, AI runs on bits and bytes, and there's only so much detail you can fit into that.
You can approximate reality, but it'll never quite be reality.
I'd be much more concerned with growing organic brains in a lab. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that people are covertly working on that.
Are you familiar with the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem?
If so, what do you think about the concept of a human "hear[ing] the steps" in a digital playback system using a sampling rate of 192kHz, a rate at which many high-resolution files are available for purchase?
How about the same question but at a sampling rate of 44.1kHz, or the way a normal "red book" music CD is encoded?
I have no doubt that if you sample a sound at high enough fidelity that you won't hear a difference.
My comment around digital vs analog is more of an analogy around producing sounds rather than playing back samples though.
There's a Masterclass with Joel Zimmerman (DeadMau5) where he explains the stepping effect when it comes to his music production. Perhaps he just needs a software upgrade, but there was a lesson where he showed the stepping effect which was audibly noticeable when comparing digital vs analog equipment.
You are correct, and that "high enough fidelity" is the rate at which music has been sampled for decades.
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At least for listening purposes, there's no difference between 44.1 KHz/16-bit sampling and anything above that. It's all the same to the human ear.