The Taylor Swift Album Leak’s Big AI Problem
(www.wired.com)
from Dragxito@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 2024 17:48
https://lemmy.world/post/14474864
from Dragxito@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 19 Apr 2024 17:48
https://lemmy.world/post/14474864
threaded - newest
Downvoted for paywalled source and lack of summary
When I clicked on the link I got an annoying “Subscribe Now!” that covered the bottom half of the screen. It had a minimise button. It came back once, but again had a minimise button.
I was able to read the article.
I agree that a summary would have been helpful.
You’re allowed to read four articles per month for free. After that the notification becomes a paywall.
Interesting.
My browser deletes all cookies on close, I wonder if I’ll have the same experience. I suppose time will tell…
Something I appreciate about Lemmy is that garbage links get downvoted into oblivion like they observe. Unlike the alien site where people don’t even open the link and just argue about the headline.
Welcome to the post truth era.
I think people are making too much of it.
Humans lie (or get things wrong) all the time and we have always had to be careful what content we trust. AI doesn’t change that in the slightest. If anything it potentially makes it easier to fact check things since we can now quickly and easily use a language model to compare a statement to related trusted content.
Tools like the Bot Sentinel are improving at a rapid pace lately botsentinel.com
My point was that the existence of “AI” doesn’t even matter. In a world where information can be spread so quickly and where people will jump to conclusions even faster, misinformation will spread at the speed of light. Retractions are slow and hidden so, this murkiness will pervade.
Full text:
Apr 19, 2024 9:06 AM
When The Tortured Poets Department leaked, some Taylor Swift fans swore it must be AI. Expect that to be a common refrain.
<img alt="Photo of Taylor Swift" src="https://media.wired.com/photos/6621be351ebbf4d79be15691/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/GettyImages-1987932445.jpg">
Photograph: Neilson Barnard/Getty Images
On Thursday, Taylor Swift did a very Taylor Swift thing: She posted an Instagram story with a link to buy “Fortnight,” the first single off of her new album, The Tortured Poets Department. It was cute, maybe even unnecessary. Taylor Swift is one of the biggest recording artists in the world. She announced TTPD in February while accepting the Grammy for best pop vocal album for her last record, Midnights. Swift sold 19 million albums in the US alone last year; she doesn’t have to post IG stories about a new single. Yet there she was getting the internet all frothy like it was 1989.
As she posted, though, something else was agitating her massive fan base: The Tortured Poets Department had leaked, allegedly spreading thanks to a Google Drive link that made the rounds online. (Piracy is back, baby!) Almost immediately, there were two camps: One said true fans would wait until the album’s official release, at midnight on Friday. The other couldn’t wait and pressed Play anyway. Among that latter group was a subcamp: people who thought the leak—or parts of it, at least—were the product of artificial intelligence.
Claims of “gotta be AI” come from several corners, but many seem to stem from one particular line, in the album’s title track, in which (alleged) Swift sings, “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist.” (The rumor mill is speculating it’s a line about her ex, Matty Healy.) The audio has since been removed for copyright violation, but when an X user posted that snippet online, the suggestions that it was AI-generated quickly followed.
Upon the album’s release, everyone learned that the song was, in fact, real. They also learned the tracks that had been circulating before the album’s release were only part of the package. Swift returned to Instagram at 2 am Friday to announce that it was actually a “secret DOUBLE album”—The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology—31 songs in total. But the “must be AI” reaction remains a complex one.
Online life is awash in AI-generated fake-outs. Just a few years into the LLM revolution, the need to not believe your lying eyes is a given. Same goes for your lying ears. The bigger problem is that while skepticism and fact-checking are, generally, always a good idea when getting information online, AI has become so prevalent that it can also be a cop-out. Don’t like what your honest eyes see? Convince yourself it’s AI.
What makes this all even trickier is that AI is progressing to the point where composing something like The Tortured Poets Department doesn’t seem too far out of its realm of possibility. An AI version of Johnny Cash has already covered Swift’s “Blank Space.” “Heart on My Sleeve,” an AI-generated song from 2023
I'm confused. Is this a problem with the album or a problem with idiots on twitter?
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Archive link of the article, archive.ph/MMHW2