“Hey darling, check out this song,” I forwarded a Spotify song to my girlfriend, “I love it.” Two weeks later, I shuffled to this song, fell in love with it and brought it up again to her. This time, we started an interest on the artist and googled her.
There was nothing.
Well, there were some reddit notes mentioning that the artist (Mary of Gold), could be an AI artist because no picture, no history can be found about her.
I didn’t want to debate about AI copyrights in this blog; I am clearly not an expert. What intrigued me was my reaction. Clearly, the song was still very good, and I did enjoy the voice and the progression. But knowing that I got personally engaged with a song that unexpectedly turns out to be generated by AI - it all felt different to me.
I started to wonder: should I not be listening to this song? Is that “discrimination”? But clearly it was so good. If there was a R&B version of Turing test, this would have passed, maybe.
If there are two songs, one written by a human and another written by AI, how should we judge them. Should they be judged by the same standards? I think eventually they will be. It is just like man-made vs machine-made redwood furnitures - eventually the market will judge its value. Maybe there was never really one standard of “judgement” - there have always been tiers, sometimes non-conforming standards to price things.
I later read a social media post from one of my non-technical friend, sharing her first experience of “vibe-coding.” It became clear to me that execution, or making a demo-ready app is now going to proliferate. People would no longer be bogged down by, “I have this wonderful idea, I just don’t have time / know how to put it into work.” Now everyone can do it.
What’s going to be more valuable?
- An easy answer: “better” idea is going to be valuable. Ideas that really solve people’s problems and helpful, are going to be important
- Resources, like capital, distribution, infrastructure, political powers, energy: those are still going to be scare and will impact the influence of your app.
- Laws of economics will still rule: people may run to publish their app online - but is it going to generate cash flows that feeds its operations? If not, a lot of the development will end up vanishing.
- Caveat: will the concept of “money” still stand in an extreme version of merchandise proliferation?
- Laws of physics will still rule: to assemble things, you still need to put a bunch of articles together. That’s a lower bound of resources you will need, and the resources are not infinite.
I tried to think of a metaphor in previous history where there was such a proliferation of merchandise and individual “makability”, the Industrial Revolution comes into my mind. We are, in the very beginning of an industrial revolution. A lot of new things will be built, many of it will not sustain the laws of economics, but human creativity will take us to an era that we couldn’t imagine before.
I am excited about it.