Scorpion is a TV show that ran from 2014 to 2018. It involves a group of brilliant (to say the least) but socially awkward (to say the least) people who help the government battle threats and/or solve crimes.
The episode Risky Business aired on Nov 10, 2014 (episode 8).
In the episode someone wrote a program that (in todays terminology) scrapes the web for all pop songs that were hits for the last 50 years and creates hits that share those properties and hence will be popular. And it works!
1) The episode says that if the fans of group X find out that they didn't create their own music, but its computer generated, then sales will drop. This may be true but I am not quite sure WHY its true. If I LIKE listening to a song, I will still like it even if I know it was computer generated.
2) While they didn't go into any detail about what the program does, it SOUNDS a lot like ChatGPT to me.
3) Could ChatGPT do that now? Has it already? Lance happened to read an earlier version of this post and emailed me a link which says this is already happening to some extent. The link is here but might be behind a paywall. (Note- My spellchecker DOES think paywall is a word. Yeah! It also thinks that spellchecker is a word. Yeah!)
4) Is it impressive that the shows writers predicted this kind of technology way back in 2014?
5) In the real world would someone be murdered because they are going to reveal that group X's songs were not authentic? Either TV has far more murders than the real world OR on TV they just get caught more often. I would like to think that TV has far more murders (see here). It certainly has far more interesting murders.
(4) Is it Impressive that the show's writers predicted this kind of technology way back in 2014?
ReplyDelete(NB: I don't know the show. But it's all relative.)
I think we ought to be a bit more meticulous in how we use "impressive". If we were to use "impressive" for this context, how "impressive" ought we think was Isaac Assimov who in "The Fun They Had" which was written in 1951 yet set for the year 2155,
already introduced "ChatGPT" as the "mechanical teacher".
Thus highlighting the idea of a completely automated, adaptive and computerized home schooling system in unix terminal like fashion. (Back then of course the power of programs and software was less well understood and everything had to be "mainframe"/mechanical in some way.)
Equally intriguing, these days uses everyone uses "prompt" for ChatGPT ... Isaac Assimov uses "flashing" instead.
(http://web1.nbed.nb.ca/sites/ASD-S/1820/J%20Johnston/Isaac%20Asimov%20-%20The%20fun%20they%20had.pdf)
3) Could ChatGPT do that now? Has it already? Lance happened to read an earlier version of this post and emailed me a link which says this is already happening to some extent. The link is here but might be behind a paywall. (Note- My spellchecker DOES think paywall is a word. Yeah! It also thinks that spellchecker is a word. Yeah!)
ReplyDeleteIn fact, I currently have a student looking into (something similar to) that now. It looks to be quite possible.
4) Is it impressive that the shows writers predicted this kind of technology way back in 2014?
No... computer generated music is a quite old field, I did a project on it in high school in '96 including writing a program which generated some Bach-like melodies. I was mostly basing off a book on fractal-based music which must have been published a decade (or two) earlier.
I recently ran into this (1928) song on YouTube.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8NJ-MIfFHI
Canned Heat had a monster hit with it back in the 1960s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBhpiUFSYWI
I'm still perfectly happy with Canned Heat's version. But I doubt I'd be happy with a computer-generated rehash. Canned Heat were playing in and relating to the social context of the times.
For most people, musical taste in pop music is defined by what caught our attention in our early to late teens, so the problem for computer music is to speak to current young listeners. (That is, styles change for a very good reason; we don't want to listen to what our parents were listening to.) So the idea that algorithmically copying old pop music could create new pop music is somewhere between problematical and ridiculous.
a little bit of Top 40 fun across the decades
Delete"Can’t Help Falling in Love” - Elvis Presley in 1961, Corey Hart in 1987, UB40 in 1993
"Stand By Me” - Ben E. King in 1961, Spyder Turner in 1967, John Lennon in 1975, Mickey Gilley in 1980, Ben E. King again in 1986
"The Loco-Motion” - Little Eva in 1962, Grand Funk Railroad in 1974, Kylie Minogue in 1988
"I Only Want to Be with You” - Dusty Springfield in 1964, Bay City Rollers in 1976, Samantha Fox in 1988
"The Way You Do the Things You Do” - The Temptations in 1964, Rita Coolidge in 1978, Daryl Hall & John Oates featuring David Ruffin in 1985, UB40 in 1990
EG(7:51 PM, May 28, 2023) is not EG (8:35 PM, May 30, 2023)
ReplyDelete