I have a very pragmatic view on music: all I care about is whether it sounds good or not. That’s it. That’s literally it. And from that standpoint the advent of AI music has been a major net positive for me.
You can choose to ignore that and come tell me about the ethics of using AI or how you care about the story behind the song and so on and that’s all fine but just note that you’re no longer addressing what I’m actually saying here.
I’m also not claiming it’s great - only that it’s good. I’ve yet to discover an AI song that I go back to like I do with many human-made songs but if I want to put on a playlist playing in the background then one consisting of entirely AI-made music reliably provides me well above average track after another whereas with organic music I need to sift through a ton of absolute crap to stumble upon the occasional good track that still rarely exceeds what AI is able to output. I can go on YouTube and put on a 2 hour playlist of Jazz House or similar and I don’t get the urge to skip a single track.
Currently I feel like where AI still trips is lyrics - they still are only plausible sounding nonsense once you actually start paying attention to it but especially for instrumental music it has far exceeded the level of a good average human artist.
Few examples of what I’m refering to: with vocals and without.
I just don’t think that’s how it works, man.
The ministries of truth, peace, etc. didn’t control people’s thoughts by confusing the dictionary, they controlled them with social pressure. The point of twisting language the way they did was to goad people into following along: the idea being that the more people pretend to believe something like 2+2=5, the more they will actually believe it—or, the less their belief or not even matters. Because it’s safer to agree. Nobody wants to be abnormal. And it is “normal” to believe the war is for peace.
What’s another example of this…
I don’t like the way that AI people insist that AI is a tool. Not that I disagree with them; there’s no twist of language. AI is, technically, an object which a person can manipulate toward some end.
I don’t like it because that’s not what they mean. When they say “tool,” they mean “not a disaster.” “No side-effects.” “To be used responsibly,” and that “the irresponsible get what they deserve.” Their insistance on the word “tool” is to close their ears and maintain the arrogant posturing that AI is our slave and we are its master. It is to imply shame or stupidity or incompetence for not agreeing with them.
But I can’t get any of that from the word “tool” alone. A tool is, like, a wrench. What does a wrench mean to me?
When was the last time it read the book? The entire point of Newspeak was to shape how people thought, and it worked like gangbusters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
You can’t grasp the concept of personal identity, let alone internalize it and actually have one, if the concept for it doesn’t exist in the language.
Orwell could not be more clear about this stuff. To the point where my teenage (before witnessing it first hand in the US) self found those parts to be boring and far fetched. Boy was I wrong.
From the book:
I haven’t read the book in a while, no. But I’m not above disagreeing with Orwell.
I just do not believe it works this way.
Think about the implications of this: how does our language have this concept of identity now when it didn’t used to?
What I see Orwell gesturing at in these paragraphs you’ve shown me is an intentionally poor education. A poor vocabulary would be a component of that, an important vector, but it’s not of the same kind as the colloquial usage of ‘literally’.
What you’re suggesting (charitably, I think) is that the corrosion of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ leads to a person’s inability to distinguish lies, not to be able to rediscover the concept—and rediscover it quite easily, I might add—which I find ridiculous. You don’t need the word ‘lies’ to identify that something that was said is not something that was, even if you have trouble expressing it.
Or more to the point, people who believe that freedom is slavery do not believe so because they think those words mean the same thing. Either, they have never been taught what freedom is and don’t care to invent it, or they have been convinced that freedom is only the power to choose sin intentionally, which is a sentimental lesson, not a linguistic one.
The only thing that bothers me is the idea that words carry this moralistic baggage themselves, or the vague suggestion that a person unaware of the Orwellian state could still be led by the phrase “freedom is slavery” into the same lobotimized world view that its people have.
I mean you can think what you want, or even write a dissertation about it and have it published. But what I’m saying is established fact among people who dedicate their lives to this.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379404191_The_Semiotics_of_Newspeak_Language_Power_and_Thought_Control_in_Orwell’s_1984
https://journal.ijarms.org/index.php/ijarms/article/view/757
https://www.academia.edu/721095/Orwell_and_the_Power_of_Language
And here’s Orwell himself defending his use of language as a means of control in the novel:
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/
This last one is actually really interesting, I recommend reading the entire thing.
Oh, it’s that essay. I love that essay.
However, Orwell does not actually make the case for this in it:
He certainly makes the case for a lack of intellectual hygiene, like having bad posture, leading to a lack of critical thinking, or clarity, but that’s not something I disagree with.
Think of it like this, okay: We haven’t invented wave-particle duality yet and I think, like a stupid person, that light is only a wave. How do you explain to me that a person, tragically, does not know what “literally” means, and so also cannot differentiate embellishments? Like, how does that process happen in the mind?
When a mom tells her daughter she was so hungry she ate “literally 50 cheeseburgers,” what is stopping this person from knowing about exaggerations? Do they forget? Do they never learn it? What is the actual mechanism?
In 1984, the answer I’m looking for would be the police.
1984 did feature people afraid to use their imagination for anything, but that was not solely the product of language. Some of it was the electric chair.
I just don’t like the confusion of Orwell’s ideas here—and he might disagree with me, smack me with a ruler and scold me for my lack of ‘gerunds’—this confusion of Orwell’s ideas with the very normal tides of our linguistic ocean. “Literally” has not actually gone anywhere.
The natives in North America had no word for ownership prior to the arrival of the Europeans, and therefore they had no concept of ownership. And it took a long time and being scammed again and again to grasp it once the word was added to their vocabulary (very much by force). A little bit easier to understand imo, since it’s not a word that they had and lost, per se. but one they never had.
I think it’s possible for words to lose meaning enough (and possibly with intention) to alter the way people think, but it takes generations.
I’m not sure making “literally” simultaneously mean both “literally” and “figuratively,” helps when we’re talking about every conversation in English everywhere. On such a scale, surely it can only do harm to the general acceptance of our shared reality.
It’s not that far off from Newspeak. Though instead of “the party will tell you what’s real and what’s not,” it’s, “go ahead and figure out what’s real. Oh you’re asking us if you’re correct? Oh that’s cute. Good luck.”
Isn’t it possible that ownership was just a difficult concept for the Native Americans to learn? I don’t think I’d grant that it’s intuitive.
I’m reminded of times I’ve talked to people about map-territory confusion. It can be difficult to get some people to see the difference between a road and the map of the road.
You could argue that not having a map might damage a person’s understanding of the land around them, but you wouldn’t really argue that they couldn’t understand it, right? That a beach is here and a forest is there.
Infants develop an understanding of object permanence without ever being taught the term, even before they learn words like ‘gone’ and ‘not’, but they do learn it.
I noticed this while re-reading some of Orwell’s thoughts in your links: Orwell is sometimes using the word ‘language’ to capture things I would describe as “uses of language,” like the rhetorical trick of framing a subject. Language is then used as a banner for all word-related attacks to one’s psyche. For instance, the state altering historical records is an attack by language because those records are written with language.
I don’t think this doesn’t work for Orwell. I do think he’s trying to grasp at something deeper, and it’s a nice way of unifying his ideas anyway. It is making this conversation more difficult, though.
I don’t really disagree with much of anything Orwell is saying. And yet, I do disagree with something: By his lessons, we have somehow found ourselves arguing about whether it is valuable to defend the lines we’ve drawn between different colors, as if the blurring between rose and maroon into “red” is something painful to lose.
I’m not really sure what you mean. If not The Party, who is there to tell us whether something is correct or not?