Comment by whstl
21 hours ago
> I am not buying it.
Coincidentally:
Just in the last few weeks, D'addario, one of largest guitar string manufacturers, posted on Instagram what is clearly an AI-song to advertise its new line of guitar strings.
After being called out on it being AI, they posted a mobile-recording of the song recreated in a DAW, but it didn't even match the timing or the notes played.
After being called on it AGAIN, they blamed it on LANDR and Apple Mastering "changing the notes", but those only do "AI knob tweaking", they're not generative-ai audio synthesis. LANDR itself replied.
After being called on it AGAIN, they finally caved and said one of their workers used Suno without their knowledge.
After someone contacted the worker, he said he was pretty clear in his communication with D'addario that he had used Suno.
EDIT: The worker claimed it was "his first time using AI" and "he didn't know", but after someone did some digging in his Instagram profile, there's a few Suno songs and a lot of AI posters and avatars.
This sort of ass-covering is getting crazy with AI...
Reminds me of politicians and public figures saying they got "hacked" after doing/posting something stupid and getting backlash for it. I guess "AI did it" is the new iteration on that.
Sir Norman Fry Compilation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REpNTi-9oRQ
And kids. I recently happened to see a pic on a kid's phone of him holding 5 vapes and a tin of snus, when challenged on it he said it was an AI-generated fake.
same for guns, they say it’s airsoft
At this rate politicians will be able to say “AI hacked me” soon
I think of it as a new version of "my brain made me do it"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/my-brain-made-me-...
Appears to have replaced "fake news" as the go-to response
"The dog ate my homework"
Just blame the next thing down the chain that can't defend itself, so you don't have to take responsibility.
4 replies →
So true. “AI slop” is the new “Fake news”
4 replies →
The issue is fake news is real and has somehow been co-opted by the perpetrators to attack any claim/media group that is critical of them or their actions. If you fact check these people they just scream “fake news” until their followers chant it with them.
Huh I guess it is comparable to “it was AI” lol
1 reply →
You're calling it ass covering but I kinda see it as buck-passing too. Seems like D'addario didn't want to hold the buck so they kept passing it down until it made its way back to the worker who did it.
Seems to me like that worker's ass wasn't covered at all and now everyone's all up in his shit on his socials, and the layers of management get to wash their hands, even though it's the management and executive that are pushing AI at all costs.
Going forward, I suspect one of the main employment opportunities left for humans in the AI era is "scapegoat". Corporations don't want to take any responsibility for anything. AI can't be responsible. So there's a market opportunity for a person who is willing to take a job where their main value-add is to receive the blame when something goes sideways.
What a sad dystopia we are creating.
Every staff member with a ChatGPT account gets a complimentary promotion to CISO...
Time for Benjamin Malaussène to strike again!
Not sure if I agree.
Until people started getting technical, they weren’t really passing the bucket to anyone. It was only partially with the LANDR lie, and then with the final accusation that they really “passed the bucket”.
Blocking commenters, having employees and endorsers mock customers, all that was 100% Daddario.
In fact a lot of people commended them for not throwing employees under the bus before it happened.
The solution is clear: yes we use AI, and we're okay with it.
There's no way Claude/AI recreated another persons app exactly, with the same name and branding, without being told to do so in some way. I just don't believe it.
And him not using it and calling out AI is just him covering his ass
> There's no way Claude/AI recreated another persons app exactly, with the same name and branding, without being told to do so in some way.
If you give a description of the app you want, and it matches another persons Open Source app. Then why wouldn't Claude do what it does every other time and pull from it's corpus of knowledge?
Now I would expect the human-in-the-chain to verify what is going on and ultimately they are responsible for any output they lay claim to.
In this case, AI assisted or not, it is a dick move. TFA claims they are backing out of this space completely - which is the correct thing to do.
But as with all "my punch simply slipped!" apologies their reputation is tarnished and they will need to demonstrate they are better in future - not simply say so.
> Then why wouldn't Claude do what it does every other time and pull from it's corpus of knowledge?
I dont know why, but I do know know that it doesn't. I know because I've tried similar things when playing around with AI to see what it could do. "Make an app similar to X app [link to repo]"
Depending on how its feeling, it may just read the readme or it may go through the codebase. But I've never gotten line by line code copying.
> I would expect the human-in-the-chain to verify what is going on
I agree with this, to the extent of your second point
> they are responsible for any output they lay claim to.
How far does the rabbit hole go for verifying what is going on? If the LLM did indeed copy an entire codebase at its own behest, what reason would the author have to verify that it wasn't copied, given that every other time they've used an LLM to code it never copied an entire codebase?
1 reply →
> The solution is clear: yes we use AI, and we're okay with it.
Except that some portion of D'addario's customers--presumably those that actually buy their guitar strings to create music via real guitars--aren't okay with it.
Yeah, I think that case is absolutely wild, because ostensibly the point of the recorded music was to showcase the strings.
6 replies →
I don't understand why you're getting downvoted, but you're correct. That's the reason for the complaints and the company has already taken an anti-AI stance precisely for this reason.
2 replies →
> There's no way Claude/AI recreated another persons app exactly
Entropy doesn't need to be set to zero for legally significant duplication
The already embattled Fender CEO said the other day that he plans for Fender to be at the "forefront" of AI, and that covering others' songs was "analogue AI".
The simple truth of the matter is that contempt for your customers is now normal. I expect this from Fender, now; they are utterly without soul.
But D'Addario are really one of the most analogue companies ever and they are still family-owned; they should have understood the magnitude of this problem right at the beginning and just apologised.
At least one of my three guitars will likely continue to have their PB strings, probably, because they still sound the best on my cheap Weissenborn clone.
But it is very disappointing and it leaves a bad taste. Perhaps I will revisit Rotosounds (wound in a factory very near where I grew up) for my PBs. The UK also has Newtone strings so I really have no reason to continue to support D'Addario (though the low-tension Aloha set I really like for the Weissenborn copy that lets me have a 15 on the high D is always backordered).
> The already embattled Fender CEO said the other day that he plans for Fender to be at the "forefront" of AI, and that covering others' songs was "analogue AI". >The simple truth of the matter is that contempt for your customers is now normal. I expect this from Fender, now; they are utterly without soul.
I think to some degree this is going to be inevitable for a while. No matter what people think about the ethics of AI or AI use, the fact of the matter is it exists, and it is shaking up and going to shake up a lot of the world. I personally think "AI" isn't really a product anymore than "The Internet" is a product. It's infrastructure in the same way the internet is, or to quote "Halt and Catch Fire", it's "the thing that gets us to The Thing".
The problem is no one really knows what The Thing looks like, so everyone is throwing anything they can think of at the wall and hoping to see what sticks. And they're dong this because they remember Sears and they remember Blockbuster. No one wants to be the next company that was positioned perfectly to integrate the new technology into their business model and missed the boat completely for short sightedness or lack of speed. "$foo but with AI" is the current generation's "$foo but on the internet", and everyone is scrambling hard to not be the next company that someone writes a "whatever happened to them" youtube video about.
Incidentally, this "AI as infrastructure" view I have is also why I really think governments should be getting into the space of building and distributing training data sets and models. Not only because it could reduce the overall amount of bot scraping and traffic if everyone who wants to build could go to a known good and clean source of training data, but also because nominal usage fees could help manage the copyright concerns. I've pitched it before in more detail, but I imagine something akin to radio broadcast royalty licenses, where people whose copyrighted works are part of the government training sets are paid out "royalties" from the pool of money brought in from licensing the training sets.
> I think to some degree this is going to be inevitable for a while. No matter what people think about the ethics of AI or AI use, the fact of the matter is it exists, and it is shaking up and going to shake up a lot of the world. I personally think "AI" isn't really a product anymore than "The Internet" is a product. It's infrastructure in the same way the internet is, or to quote "Halt and Catch Fire", it's "the thing that gets us to The Thing".
True. But the way it is approached is an exceptionally valuable yardstick for judging people's intent.
There is no way that "being at the forefront of AI" is a strategy that gets Fender anywhere except towards unthinking inward investment. Even in the narrow context of NAM captures and the like, it is clumsily antithetical to their audience to say this.
But writing off the one thing that actually sells guitars in the 21st century (covers bands!) as "analogue AI" is the most extraordinarily tone-deaf, rude, dismissive thing that someone who runs a musical instrument company could ever say.
8 replies →
In the late 2010s, the order (literally) from investors was to "hire as many devs as you can". The order now is to position the company somehow as being AI-centric or AI-powered.
> it is shaking up and going to shake up a lot of the world.
The problem is that this is only happening because the powerful are forcing it on us. This is exactly why the backlash against it has gotten so big. Had companies not jumped on the AI bandwagon and forced it down veryone's throats (sometimes putting your job on the line if you refused) the backlash probably would be non-existent. The AI boosters/pro-AI people will of course continue to claim that nobody is forcing you to use AI (I literally had this told to me on a different forum like 4 days ago, it was honestly ridiculous how delusional this particular booster was...)
2 replies →
Jeeeeezus. It's lies all the way down. Did we ever arrive at a true statement from them or is that where they left it?
The irony is how unnecessary it was. They could've just said, yeah you're right, we used AI. This is a level of lying you reserve for covering up a murder or something. Maybe they're just worried (and they're right to be worried) that it's easier to make music with AI than with their strings.
Lie and doubling down. And a lot of employees and endorsers fighting people in the comments, and calling people names. Not a good look.
> The worker claimed it was "his first time using AI" and "he didn't know"
This is not the defense they think it is.. If your mechanic rotates your tires and improperly torques the lug bolts "it was my first time using a torque wrench" isn't excusable. It's good to experiment and learn new things. It's not good to throw your little self-study project out into the world with your employer's name behind it and present it as production worthy material.
Before last year, I might've thought it was okay to throw out silly things as advertisements.
Do we know if it was the worker who presented it as such? Everyone has to learn and if they are learning on the job its up to their employer to ensure that the work product is reviewed or overseen by someone with adequate experience.
In this case, the author exchanged messages with someone, and he indeed claimed as such, according to the screenshots.
Oh...
People online post timelapses for their AI generated artwork, that are also AI generated.
I've been thinking about this. Almost every way we have to tell human from AI apart can be adopted and automated by AI. It's sort of a corollary of "every metric can be gamed".
It's disheartening for those of us who intrinsically value human authorship.
Maybe all “content” will just end up devalued and some prestige will move to more physical, local things like live performances, growing your own tomatoes and giving good massages. Nobody will care about showing off their tomatoes online and all that matters is sharing them with real people…
1 reply →
Well, we don't have Star Trek holograms yet, so you can trust what you can see performed in person.
(Good luck getting close enough to actually tell if the live performance is real or faked, though, for anything other than small, local or super niche bands...)
It's an easy "out" for those without the self-respect to admit when they do wrong.
It's like "The computer did it" from the 80's and 90's. Blame the tool for the operator usage.
It's pathetic.
Think about all of the cases that don't come out. Everyone hates AI, yet everyone is using AI.
I refuse to believe nearly 100% of game developers aren't using AI, but how many put the tag of shame on the Steam store page?
It's a very strange situation.
>I refuse to believe nearly 100% of game developers aren't using AI
Do you refuse to believe nearly 100% of written content isn't made by AI? Was your comment?
I struggle to imagine thinking that no one does things themselves, for fun. What a nihilistic view.
I don’t believe they are saying that 100% of the entire game or content is ai, they are saying that they believe that a huge percentage of titles have used AI for at least one part of the game, however small.
I can absolutely believe it, and I think it’s fine. If you have AI code up the logic for something boring but necessary (the setting screen ui, for one example. Don’t argue against this one example, that isn’t the point) it will leave a developer to work on the parts of games that actually make a difference to the experience.
Frankly, it would be silly not to use ai for some things. The trouble is that if it’s a binary “used ai” flag, there is no way to distinguish a one shot Claude slop game from someone who uses AI for internationalization
4 replies →
> I struggle to imagine thinking that no one does things themselves, for fun. What a nihilistic view.
Come on. There are shades here.
I guarantee that even your best programmers are using AI to run down certain classes of bugs--especially in corporate environments. Asking the AI to help you unwind some screwy source control merge or to remember some obscure set of flags is a damn good usage of AI, for example. Nobody thinks twice of using a search engine for this so AI is a no-brainer.
The issue is when people use the AI for all the code. I have to tell AI all the time "That code is there because X and you mangling it is a problem." or "You violated Y. Explain to me why you did that anyway and don't do it again."
The problem is that to do that you have to know the code and you don't know the code if you didn't write it.
Steam doesn’t need a AI disclosure label for things that are not player-facing IIRC.
[flagged]
What bothers me about the D'Addario thing is that it never crossed the mind of that employee or the company what they're doing was wrong.
Their customers are musicians. They want to hear what the strings sound like in a demo. What they did was not just dishonest, it's contrary to literally everything their customers do.
Whoever did it has no sense and shouldn't be working in that business. Full stop.
I say this as a D'Addario customer of 20+ years that will never buy their strings again.
Marketing has become so disconnected from reality that such things have been normalized and trivialized.
For example: since a few years now, it became extremely common for apps and games to be advertised with fake screenshots, fake gameplay, and fake interactions.
AI just put all that on turbo mode.
A marketing manager coming from apps/games (or other industry where this is common) joining D'addario will just push for AI music to be used because "that's how things are done".
[dead]