At the newspaper I worked at in the 1980s, there was the story of the longtime reporter who came in to work the day after computer terminals were installed in the newsroom. He went to his desk, where, in the spot where his typewriter had sat for decades, a giant new monitor with a blinking green cursor awaited. He looked at the screen, picked up his bag, and said “I’m done,” never to … [Read more...]
Creativity Versus Skills
Artists often conflate creativity with skill. It's not surprising. The ranks of successful artists have largely been confined to those who not only have compelling creativity and vision but also have or have access to the specialized skills required to execute on that creativity. So how much of a piece of art is creativity and how much is skill? For the sake of argument, let's say it's perhaps … [Read more...]
How Digital AI Twins could Transform how We Make Art
For all of the explosion of data in the past couple of decades, it's remarkable how disconnected and crudely measured much of the world around us still is. Weather forecasts, for example, have improved enormously in recent years, yet still aren't reliably accurate. The problem has been three-fold -- not enough ability to measure, incomplete data, and not enough computing power to make sense of the … [Read more...]
How Should we Measure Art?
In the wake of 9-11, security experts wanted more data to detect threats to security. In the explosion of data collection that followed, it became obvious that more data created more noise, perversely in some cases making it more difficult to see embedded threats rather than less. More is not always better, and data is meaningful only if a.) you're measuring the right things, and b.) you know the … [Read more...]
Classical Music has Lost a Generation. Blame the Metadata (in part)
Classical music has lost a generation's worth of music lovers beginning in the late-90s with the rise of file-sharing and Napster. A significant part of the reason might be: metadata. Metadata are the tags that travel with every audio recorded track. For a piece of music or a recording to be found, it needs to be tagged. Metadata comes (mostly) in three varieties: Each track travels with … [Read more...]
When “Vacuum Cleaner for Babies” Beat Taylor Swift: Fixing the Music Streaming Problem
On a panel at SXSW recently, John Dworkin, a VP at Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company, told the story of how at one point last summer, a Taylor Swift song placed at No. 7 on the Billboard charts. At No. 6 was "Vacuum Cleaner for Babies," the sound of a vacuum cleaner that parents can play on a loop to soothe babies and help them sleep. He used the example to illustrate how … [Read more...]
The Essential AI: Translating the Art of What We See, Hear and Experience
AI is getting very good at translating text and speech from one language to another, transposing not just words, but also meaning, and in real time. I previously wrote about the implications for opening up the world's culture from behind language barriers (for example, only three percent of the world's literature is translated into English). But in thinking about ways to explain the conceptual … [Read more...]
A Framework for Thinking about Disruption of the Arts by AI
Enough experts in artificial intelligence saying that AI will "change everything," suggest that it's worth pondering what the "everything" means. The short answer is we don't know. But we do know that technology has had profound impact on how the world works. And we know that the digital revolution beginning in the 1990s changed how we interact in profound and unexpected ways over the past thirty … [Read more...]
How Subsidy for Big Tech Wrecked the Arts (and Journalism)
In the 2010s, cheap solar panels from China began flooding the US market, killing off US domestic panel-makers who couldn’t compete on price. The US government slapped a 40 percent tariff on Chinese panels, claiming under World Trade Organization rules that China’s government was unfairly subsidizing panel-makers. Given how quickly solar panel costs were plummeting and the Byzantine ways in which … [Read more...]
Some Thoughts on Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” Movie
It’s a trap to review the movie a filmmaker didn’t make. A difficult temptation as it turns out with Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, the director/writer/actor’s passion project about Leonard Bernstein. Maestro isn’t really a movie about Leonard Bernstein or his career, or even about music per se. It’s not really a “biopic,” in the traditional Hollywood sense of the word. In the absence of all this, … [Read more...]