Episode 30: "CARTEL OF RESPECT" feat. Mat Dryhurst *FULL EP ON PATREON*

You're listening to the free version of Clout Farm for the full episode sub the Patreon geezer. It's a test designed to provoke an emotional response. What you reading? The enemy. Robo Clout Farm. I just entered the art world. I'm lost and confused. Help. I just entered the art world. I will not be used. Help. I just entered the art world. Why is everyone so mad? So bad. I just went into the art world. I just entered the art world. Why is everyone so mad? I just entered the art world. Why is everyone so sad? I just entered the art world. I don't know what to wear or how to act. Nope. I entered the art world. I'm happy, but that looks bad. I just entered the art world. They'll judge you for your hat. I fucking love NFTs. All their biggest brains from across their global network or whatever. Yeah, I just entered the art world. I'm lost and confused. like Drake just released like a million songs or something like an infinite trade and I was like I was we I was mood boarded on that a hundred percent stolen do there's the most human thing you've ever said DJ Pitch Bot 4000 here on Cloud Farm. Me, Boop, you are now listening to Robo Cloud Farm. Guest buffering. Guest is Matt Dryhurst. We did that because you're a technologist. Apparently, that's a thing. That's a fake thing, really, isn't it? Is it? Being a technologist in general? What is a technologist? It's just an engineer, isn't it?

Yeah, but then you'd be called an engineer. I think a technologist is just like this ambient term for people floating. It's a term people use, and I've probably used it myself, but when I hear it, it's a fake term. But you're using it to get paid? Paid? Poorly. Did Alex Williams used to advocate for abstract engineer? abstract engineer that sounds good yeah is that concept artist yeah oh wow Alex Williams that's a yes okay cool good is that splintering bone ashes is that him sorry is that splintering bone ashes the blog do you remember I don't remember that yeah no so this is very peripheral research Alex from his left accelerationist yeah yeah yeah I'll hopefully see him this week next week actually to tell him that you'll now be yak I've never been in EAC. EAC is a ridiculous splinter of more interesting things. What's EAC? EAC is, the term is effective accelerationism. And it's a splinter. It's a splinter from like, you know, you've heard about effective altruism. I am one, yeah. Oh, there you go. Free up my boy. SPF. So it's just this kind of, it's this odd, it's this odd thing where obviously, you know, the whole accelerations conversation is something that's quite old and was like a Twitter thing 10 years ago and people would debate about it. And then it's kind of like the equivalent of like, the way I characterize the IAC is it's like hot topic for this kind of thought where it's a lot of people who haven't read any of the books and don't really know what they're talking about, but they've kind of... you know inferred some of the meaning of it and so it kind of splintered into a like anti-culture war but purely benefiting from the culture war uh yeah odd group of people on twitter who don't read um right yeah and they're like we're pro-technology pro-progress i'm like that i am also that but um

You need a bit more to define like... Why are you so against inference? Some of us are really good at inferring stuff. No, inference is great. I guess I'm just being like old and miserable, but it's like, it's one of those things where, you know, you participate in something and then 10 years later you see it become something else and you're like, no, that's a, you know... A bastardization? Yeah, which is silly. Right. A lot of that culture, like, a lot of it's kind of grandstanding, so it's a bit like the whole... ea like effective altruist thing where like the the language inflation is insane okay we're like in order to make the perfect like eac tweet you like start talking about you know like uh uh god i'm trying to think my brain's not really working with it um uh yeah everything has to be exponentials okay yeah yeah it's like you kind of talk like you're a data analyst uh the whole time and it's just very silly um fortunately it seems like that balloon is deflated um yeah but Yeah. How did we get there? Alex Williams. Alex Williams is not an EAC person. On the record. Well, maybe, maybe before we get into anything, we should say you're Matt Dryhurst and you are in London. Yes. Prepping for your exhibition. Do you want me to say that? Yeah. Sure. You can say it as well. Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm Matt Dryhurst. I'm in London. a 10 minute walk from Serpentine Gallery where we have an opening next Thursday. And I've been in there since 7am this morning and it is currently 9pm or something. Half 8 maybe? Half 8, yeah. Slower than I might normally be. But nice to be here with you in my dormitory in the Goethe Institute. How do you get this hook up if you're not German? Just show a lot of love? i have no idea honestly i think i think i think it's most likely it's organized by serpentine because we're in the middle of it's a bit of a desert around here yeah so i think they probably have relationships with different institutions here who have apartments and like that's probably how it happened yeah it's right yeah we're not we're not entangled with the german government this well this is kind of what i was thinking i was like i'm assuming you must have just citizenship in germany i don't know i'm a british okay well then i've got no idea how you're here either i'm a british citizen yeah no no i'm holly

well it might be too personal uh one of us one of us might attempt to to get it because we have a son there and then there's the big question of like where are you going to be longer term you know like that becomes like a real like there's hypothetical questions that is like oh no we have a yeah they're dependent we you know um and berlin's nice i like berlin a lot i feel like berlin's a good place to have a family that's the thing i've always taken away for like yeah it's not it's actually i don't think it's a good place to go and chase your ambitions because i think like if you're like some 24 year old kid who wants to do catman it's just going to subsume you but i feel like actually i'm assuming it's yeah it's just like it must be a really nice place to have a child i'm assuming there's like good schools all that type of stuff when it when it when it comes to those questions there is i mean I talk about this a lot, obviously, because that's the perennial question of a certain, particularly my age, is like talking about places and the relative benefits of them. I mean, it's good to think about cities in terms of epochs, as opposed to just a city, because like... We moved to Berlin. I mean, we actually met in Berlin the best part 20 years ago. By we, you mean Holly Herndon, the American artist and composer whose work touches on themes of distributed identity, consciousness, AI, and more? This is true. This is true. Yes, yes, yes. My accomplice. Proceed. Yeah, so anyways, we met in Berlin 20 years ago, then left to California for a bit, and then came back in 2016. And so, in a sense, kind of... yeah got like a nice apartment set up and all this kind of stuff before it got crazy yep and so in a weird way what i would say is like yeah so if you were a beneficiary of that epoch of berlin amazing like that's why we can't leave basically because our overheads would go through the roof and right okay we just set up a life there wait so you're in the same place you were in 20 years ago

oh god no right okay no no no that would be crazy like yeah that's what i was thinking i was like yeah no no no no no but no but more we just you know we've been there long enough to benefit from things and things got way more expensive and so now there isn't that much of a difference between berlin and london yeah but the the pro on that side which is something that's changed you're not wrong i think for like you know the archetype of berlin is like you know 20 year old our student goes there to like self-actualize yeah Like, you have to be quite moneyed to do that now, I'd say. Oh, that's 100%. Yeah, it's crazy. Same in London, probably. Dude, for sure. But what has changed in the sense is that in terms of pursuing ambitions, whatever, I mean, it differs, but there are some industries that are actually kind of more present in Berlin. Like, when I first moved there 20 years ago, like, you... you didn't get a job in Berlin. You know what I mean? You can get a job there now. Like that's like, that's a new thing. That's not working in a cafe. Yeah. Yeah. Like there's, there's companies and stuff and there's, you know, it's still not London, but it's like, it's a bit more, it, it punches above its weight more even within like, not culture stuff, like, you know, cool artists living there. I mean like culture stuff, like culture industry stuff. Right. Okay. Because it's still got European cultural funding, things like that. Is that kind of what you're getting at? Do you mean like paintbrush manufacturing? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like there's little miniatures that you get. That probably also does happen. Pens. There's a lot of pens in Germany. Yeah, you can buy. But like, but more just like, you know, fashion is like. half of fashion is run people are wearing clothes no doubt yeah i was there yeah totally i don't know it depends where you go in berlin yeah oh facts but like the things like you know creative director right right director complex like that shit's run from berlin right that's what my dad calls a real job yeah exactly yeah yeah there's loads of real jobs in berlin now so like yeah so like berlin runs balenciaga like berlin you have like otterlinger and these kind of like big you know prominent things that like

so that's that's all out of berlin now yeah that's okay that blows my mind yeah i just assumed that stuff was all in paris i guess yeah that's the thing so in some areas it's like yeah in some areas it actually punches above you know above where you'd expect particularly from 20 years ago where it's like soundcloud hq famously in berlin yeah exactly soundcloud the founders of whom left to start a bike company did they really yeah they they do like scooters now or something that's a cool pivot it's kind of a ghost ship have you ever kicked it with the soundcloud guys years ago funnily enough i had one of the first soundcloud accounts i think myself by first i mean like they at the time i was working in kind of club culture stuff in berlin which was like 2000 2006 something like that and they uh they used to go around and try and like encourage you to use stuff because it was like a startup whatever this is what the neither guys are doing at the moment really yeah oh yeah of course yeah i know the nina guys i thought you said near i was like oh yeah yeah that that philosophical game yeah it's made its way into the clubs well in in another world there's a thing called near protocol which is like an ai data thing and i was like oh that's interesting uh but the uh uh yeah nina exactly exactly so there's a um they're wonderful i enjoyed your podcast with uh with mike with mike and with jack and jeff Yeah. Well, yeah, should we talk about all of them? That was a blast, yeah. Should we talk about, because you are an, you invested in Nino, right? I did, actually, yeah. Yeah. That's personal. Is that not, is that not publicly? Yeah, yeah. I think it is publicly not. Yeah. You had them on Interdependence, right? Yeah, and I think I actually disclosed that when we had them on Interdependence. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I actually haven't heard that one yet. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess. Was that with Mike? Sorry? Was that with Mike? It was all of them. Right. Yeah, it was all of them. Yeah, it was Mike and Jack. And our first, have you ever met Ian? He's one of the main guys there, but not one of the founders. I don't. Because he was the reason this podcast got started. Our patron, our papi. Oh, amazing. I don't know if I have. I maybe have if you say his last name. Ian Kim Judd. That name really rings a bell. Half Irish, half Korean.

Fantastic stack. That name really rings a bell. Well, he did Matt DeMarco's first tour, so that's probably where you know him. No, that universe, probably the person I know the most from that universe is Jeff. Oh, okay. And that's why I was really happy to see him on because Jeff's like the best. Yeah. That guy's so fucking cool. Fucking rock. Have you had the new album? I have and it's amazing. Yeah. Anything Jeff is involved with, I've said this like, I say this regularly. the latency between what happens in jeff's mind and the rest of the world is longer than with most artists yeah maybe too long for jeff sometimes yeah but like yeah just just the best so you think we're due for another like sugar ray revival era it was always going to happen right it's funny i remember um we had to do some work in barcelona a couple years ago and like there's a whole um you know it's really difficult to get your head around it or it's kind of it's so difficult to hear and it's probably quite uh obvious but like organic grocery stores i remember being in this organic grocery store in barcelona where it's like everything looked like a you know um looked what's the word like juicy yeah it was presented in this insane way and they were playing that you know um what what it's like a uh not it's not a banjo what's that annoying a ukulele ukulele but you know that like quintessential ukulele music from like web 2 that was yeah that was an era that was an era and they were playing that in there and i was like what's kind of crazy is like this really did usurp subcultures in a sense and it's only a matter of time before someone picks up on that aesthetic because in retrospect it's very much an aesthetic from a particular period of time that everybody knows and is awful right but but the sugar ray references and this kind of stuff kind of reminded me of that like in the same way there was that like so when you're talking about sugary you're talking about nostalgia for all these feelings yeah exactly it just takes on this whole other life in a way we're like whole foods pre getting bought by amazon totally this type of vibe yeah yeah well also even like i remember when there was an eve's tumor record kit that came out and i made some joke where i was like it sounds like uh opm do you remember heaven is a hot pipe yeah yeah yeah yeah because it has that heaven there's a hot pipe thing and i was like that there's a vocal timbre in here that i associate with that because i grew up

around about their time but younger people don't have any association with so now it's just like an aesthetic universe to play with because a lot of that shit's actually kind of cool if you disassociate it from yeah yeah you know it's funny that you say that rob has a classic because i'm of a different era i'm like the relationship you have to opm i have to like landfill indie yep so like hard fight etc and i i hear so much of that in like those used to more records as well yeah in the same thing and it's it's funny that it is now all up for grabs and it's so it's kind of spinning me out a bit thinking about the idea that we could have like a nostalgia for maxima parkour yeah yeah i mean i mean no i mean that but i actually more mean the feeling of going into a whole foods before i got bought by amazon That's what I'm really stuck on now, but it's completely true and a very real thing. It's really real. I mean, as venues and stuff died out, which you've kind of seen, that being the landscape of the city center. I mean, I remember going to shows like Tottenham Court Road, the Astoria, all that kind of shit. All that's gone, it's now an advertisement to go visit Jeddah or something. And that urban landscape's totally changed to the experience economy and the experience supermarket is an aesthetic experience, for better or worse. I'm not advocating for it, but it is. aesthetic experience where you're like that is very time stamped that's something yeah yeah and the whole foods kind of like that yeah ukulele music and you know the the optimism of kind of that web 2 period or whatever with the ukulele obviously it was the like the default iphone ringtone sound as well 100% do you like what is it like a chicken and egg situation or like do you do you think that like jason miraz and like vance joyer downstream of the iphone ringtone or the iphone ringtone is It's a good point. I don't know. Dom actually wrote this ahead of time. Wait, wait, wait. What year is the iPhone ringtone? Oh, sorry. 2008. 2008. Because you could go back a little bit and look at like Freak Folk and like Moldy Peaches and stuff like that. And like perhaps that's got a bit of iPhone ringtone. I guess I was thinking more because the iPod commercials with like the Tintings and stuff maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess it's also like Williams.

bug era as well they're like well this is kind of what i'm getting at yeah yeah yeah it's like it was like really lame iterations of freak folk stuff outside of folk stuff that was happening in new york where you're like you'd wear like a farmer's hat or something and then that that became the defining aesthetic of like you early youtube and yeah yeah like what's the band the uh what the band of the guy who like started patreon Oh my god, yeah. Because they have that style, right? It's like we're doing a Tupac cover in the style of, you know, in like a folk whatever. Wait, really? I didn't know that. That sounds so annoying. It's very annoying. But it is a thing. Dude, who is it? We owe everything to this guy. You can remember that. Pomplamoose. Pomplamoose, yeah. Yeah. Okay, I don't know. I think I've maybe watched his TED Talk or something like that fairly recently where he talks about Pomplamoose. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't... Yeah, but it's funny. I remember I actually did watch the same. It wasn't a TED Talk, but it was something like that. Is it something that he's done recently? It was something recently where he was talking about the next 10 years of Patreon or whatever, and there was zero, like, a vacuum of ideas in there. Yeah. But it struck me because I was like, oh, I'm going to look now because there's all these sites where you can look at, like, analytics of, like, who does well on Patreon. And for music. Yeah, we've never met on that. But it's bad because for music still, it was like the top musicians on Patreon are the ones who were basically the flagship representatives of Patreon. So Pomplamoose. Who's the other one who's like the, she's married to Neil Gaiman. Poor lady. Yeah. I've got no idea who this is. I'm quite pleased. She's kind of like a broken doll folk artist. She was like the voice of crowdsourcing. Right. That is a scathing phrase. But she was. Around about that time, she was like the champion of this idea. And it's like her and Pomplamoose who basically started championing the idea of patronage with these platforms are still the most moneyed or popular.

musicians on Patreon. No one has usurped them in the time, which I was trying to use as an example. Not even Shane Gillis? Well, but they're podcasts. So podcasts, porn, you know, like anime, hentai, stuff like this, that exists in its own universe. But when it comes to music, which was one of the original case studies, basically the only people who make money from it are the ones who were initially standing the platform or whatever right yeah which i think was kind of interesting i was like well we've had you know over 10 years of this why is there not a retrospective to be like this doesn't work why isn't why isn't someone doing pomplum who's hentai it sounds like that most most likely has happened it's a gap in the market yeah but but no but that yeah like that like you know the the kind of because all of it was like you had like web 2 and the idea of like democratization this kind of like everyone becoming like a little mini politician and like playing optimistic music and like whatever yeah it's very much ukulele is the instrument for that yeah it is it looks like a you know like a middling democratic party candidate in colorado's campaign or something it's like everything was like that but like that's an aesthetic that yeah sure is there to be played with and anyway a long way of saying that that jack and uh jeff's record reminded me i was like yeah like someone should totally own that euro. You're listening to the free version of Clout Farm for the full episode of the Patreon users. Did you ever hear that ringtone sweep that Ferrara did? I didn't. I mean, I'm not surprised that he did the ringtone sweep. Probably great. Yeah, it's like, not that my phone's ever not on silent because of the sheer quantity of notifications that I get due to being in high demand. But my ringtone continues to be a Ferrara one from that.

like era really yeah of course and he of course he's like the first person to like hop on that and and do it like slyly and mischievously but also the way that's like kind of sick yeah well he has his own kind of like universe right it's like yeah he's very deliberate about placing all these things in this particular universe that happens to be quite yeah quite prophetic i think he's yeah he's pretty special he's the best lucio says a lot of stuff like that who you see what do you mean like like sampling the generic apple ring do you do that yeah lucy yeah that song and it's like the intro it's the new type thermos i have not heard there but i was gonna ask matt do you know what neo-punk fm is no they're like a youtube channel that kind of is somewhere between anthony fantano and new models you know all right like they they have a patreon model but they do it all through their own platform Cool. I guess never opted in to that kind of mediated crowdsourcing. Sick. Cool. I don't know. I guess I wonder if you think that the future looks more like people doing that independently or there's going to be some kind of like... Probably. I think that's probably right. I mean, I think the challenge to be less kind of agreeable as a person or whatever, like... The challenge with the democratization narrative is that over time you get almost like, you know about like Pareto principles and stuff like this, or like 80-20. Right. It's like you can promise democratization, but then you're seeing this also like, you know, crypto stuff or like anything that kind of promised an explosion of kind of, you know, abundance for everybody over time. you know a very it's like 80 people don't benefit from it at all 20 kind of maybe benefit enough to speculate on being the 0.01 who get everything yeah and you're like that you know that's the challenge with any platforms like that it's like ultimately it gives tools to individuals and then off their own back some people do really well yeah yeah and that's great like uh you know but

regrettably like trying to design systems that benefit a large amount of people is really tough, particularly when you've had a lot of people, you know, sold a dream. I mean, less so kind of like my generation, but like, you know, I, I mean, I taught NYU for a long time and like, um, the, the, I wouldn't say kids, but the young adults there were great and like super switched on and like savvy, but like, it was really clear. Like everyone was like, I'm going to be a instant personality. I'm going to be a YouTuber. I'm going to be a, whatever this new hybrid thing is. And you're like, oh like there's a really small margin there and it's way even more chaotic than like the nepotistic kind of yeah old media industry you know i mean where it's like you could and and so there's this kind of more interesting question that is like an interesting way of problematizing it where you're just like is it more um is it more cruel to have you know top-down institutions where it's quite clear that there's a path and you either kind of get in or you don't or whatever or is it more so that's like a classic like gatekeeping model yeah exactly like a gatekeeping model is that more cruel than this kind of like jungle of potential possibility that you know where a lot of people dedicate their 20s and 30s to something that will never benefit them you know and you see that in more like brutal and you're like there's not i don't have like a solid answer for that but yeah it's kind of we've had enough of the everyone's going to benefit from, you know, like kill, slay the gatekeepers, whatever. And those narratives just keep repeating. And you're like, wait, we've seen this for like, you know, I'm not going to stand the major labels far from it, but like they still win. Do you know what I mean? Like in this kind of, in this kind of, you know, anyway, not to go into spiel about it, but, but I think that's, that's the interesting question to ask and being like, well, what post that optimism doesn't mean you don't have to be optimistic about doing something, but by all means do like, find a new yarn yeah you know like don't promise everyone everything like that that's like a tired how do you think something like ai fits into this then because i feel like the that technology doesn't in a way i don't feel like people have the same feeling of 80 you know everyone doesn't feel like they're going to get something from everyone's got their back up against the wall about it because it's going to take their job how do you think that fits into this idea that uh actually

How does it fit into that democratization narrative? Well, it's interesting. I mean, oh God, it's a good question. I'm stumbling because I want to answer it properly. No, that's all right, man. That kind of came to me on the fly as you were talking about it. You're the right person to ask. There's three possibilities, right? One that, you know, your average Guardian reader will encounter where... um there's a possibility that current methods in deep learning don't scale as people are professing i mean can't discount that that's a chance there may be there may be a ceiling on these are this is the kind of that graph you see where it's like no matter how much data they give it it's hitting this certain point it can't go above exactly the asymptote whatever right so that of course is a possibility yeah um and in those circumstances you look at it and you say well cool i mean I personally like language models. I think they're really fricking useful. And it annoys me when people discount that because they're kind of cool. Like you can get a lot out of them if you put good stuff in them. Image models are here to stay. Music models are here to stay. So yeah, we got a bunch of new stuff, but then, you know, society stays kind of the same. We just have new stuff, you know, that's possible, but that's, but even then in those circumstances, you still will see, you know, you will still see kind of. disturbances in certain industries because now everyone can make cool pictures or whatever whatever it is dude i'm trained as an architect um and a render takes an hour now whereas it used to take i was literally being hired to do by my art my last boss to spend two weeks on a render 100 i could do it a day before he fired me it's crazy yeah so the the benefits there are great and like downplayed because you know because many critics most of whom i promise you don't know what they're talking about will use the most extreme projections as being like look at these ridiculous people and then you're like yeah but you can do this crazy shit now have you seen this shit it's a bad thing yeah yeah anyway so that's the like the really sober the the more interesting is like what if they're not full of shit

and by by not full of shit i don't mean the like fantasists who are like yeah like you know we'll we'll reach agi in the next six years and then yeah and then you're like okay cool we've got much bigger problems than worrying about jobs in those circles yeah so let's discount them yep even though i think that there there's there it's not disinteresting it's just like people tend to overemphasize that there's this kind of middle ground where you're like what if this is bigger than the internet that's where i stand right okay and i do think it's bigger than the internet and i think that the um you know i always use like an example if you think about like you know i lived in uh san francisco around about the time twitter came out or whatever right when they is that like when they moved into their big headquarters and all that kind of that kind of time if i'm honest i can't remember it may have been i honestly can't remember it was around about the time and like zynga was like the big company farmville and like an uber uber was a big like yeah we really played an uber party first like really what well like the uber christmas party it wasn't a christmas party it was like some weird private event thing with like it was well we didn't know it was an uber thing we just right right right wait did you like do your shtick or did you just dj our foot and fire we did we played like a like a new beat uh so we used to have like a weird belgian new beat band oh that's cool your shtick yeah you know our shtick yeah yeah our very serious work um but uh uh no we didn't know it was just but but like early like inception of uber all this kind of stuff but you're like okay look like for those companies it's very fashionable to laugh at them fine like a lot of it is ridiculous you cannot claim that uh twitter facebook instagram uber have not had profound impacts on our economy job prospects whatever and also in a sense to get like consciousness right like I'm like in a space. And I remember the switch. It was around like Tumblr, Twitter time, going to a party and being just as present for an abstract group of people, many of whom I've never met, as I was for the people in the party. And that being like a weird schism that you resolved over time. Like you synaptically just resolved this idea that, you know, every person is simultaneously aware of their physical surroundings and some virtual world. Yeah. And I'm like, and that was as a result of like.

exchanging public text messages. Right. And being able to call a car through an application rather than a, like a newer, like the affordances of these models and how strange they are and what they allow you to do. You telling me that that shit's not going to, you know, create, I think it's bigger than the internet. Right. And I don't think you have to entertain the idea of some like, you know, lonely. lonely sentience in the server somewhere yeah to see it as a really big deal yeah and that's part of the reason i mean it's probably boring to talk too much on the data question but that's why like we're really interested in that because you're like when you start talking about like the bounties of this stuff you know there isn't a i mean open ai try to do it and i think fail like well there are people there who work on it uh with great intentions but it's like there's no political political economy really for that yeah you know people will reference marks and automation stuff that's cool like good yeah like you have some priors but like yeah this is a very different situation you know and you're like if data is one of the things it is this is the object of value here or vibe or you know whatever like what the fuck is political economy in that middle ground world where you don't have to fully drink the kool-aid but you're also just not knee-jerk dismissing something that is quite clearly insane yeah you know um so that that i have more to say on it but that's the interesting part of it how do you do that i would ask talking about political economy is like what do you think and you might not necessarily have an answer about this but do you see that or is there anything that you feel would be like a serious material difference to the world that could come from these technologies sure i mean well on the high end this is certainly not any area i have expertise in yeah But, you know, when you benchmark models at the moment, we all know how the models fail because people celebrate that and make jokes about it. But, like, you know, they're looking at, like, performance in math, right? And so they make silly benchmarks where it's like, they're as good as a PhD in math. What the fuck does that mean? Or, like, you know, or this could, what they'll do is so you have the Fields Prize, which is, like, a big math prize.

that as far as i understand it i'm not an expert in this area is fairly objective right they give you a bunch of really difficult things to solve and you solve it and you you know um so they pass these tests to the models and the models are performant and so the latest i think that the 01 um i'm probably botching this but they they argue that it performed well enough to rank yep as part of the field space and then you go and look uh and i was watching it i think he's a taiwanese kind of x shields prize winner who's you know been consulting on this and he's like yeah he's like you know he's preparing his math students at some fancy place to prepare for a future in which machines will be able to not only solve proofs but come up with proofs and i'm like look like it's one thing to kind of laugh at like you know uh hype men online i'd like trust me it drives me crazy too as someone who actually cares about this issue to see how many people are overnight ai experts right it's another thing to look at like field prize winners who are speaking to computer scientists and being like oh wow like this this you know server room just just competed with me on and and if you're talking about like changing math you're talking about changing society right like yeah it's one of the fundamental things we have to like discover stuff so yeah so the the where i stand on it is like it's good to be somewhat sober about it somewhat but at the same time when people who know a lot about this and have credibility on it are like no this is real you should probably take them seriously yeah absolutely um but i don't buy the you know everyone's losing their jobs overnight artists are irrelevant like i don't buy any of that because oh yeah i mean that's not that's just not true yeah i agree i just think that it's like it's where i fall is i'm like it's kind of exciting i'm like look you know we i grew up like they just turned 40 right it's like the people i admired growing up were uh subcultural figures or people who experimented with like wild modernist shit that like i never got to see you know and then there's this window of time of like we made an app you know like like it's kind of disappointing and you're like this ai question is like pretty profound there's it's an open question there's a room for people to participate in it granted uh it takes some resources to be able to participate at a certain level but like it's this big unanswered question

like that's pretty exciting i think um one other thing that i think this kind of touches back on an article you did like 10 years ago the legacy labels oh yeah article god well it's interesting because i re-listened to a podcast you did but you discussed it from seven eight years ago yeah and what was i think was really interesting about it i from a background i've been running band camp labels for like 10 years that's like kind of the bread and butter of what i do um and what the you kind of pointed to the fact that legacy labels to deal with and i'm speaking very broadly here but to continue to generate revenue after napster and everything else they relied a lot more heavily on sync sure yeah publishing and live and one thing that seems to be quite apparent and i've kind of from just talking to people i know in that world of kind of your larger independence the things that they're quite scared of is actually that why would why would these tv shows be paying a lot of money for music from an like an artist on a large independent when they can get it generated by ai and then all of a sudden we've now all of a sudden got an issue where how are these for example you know i run this kind of middle these middle-sized band cam labels yeah making money's never really been something i've thought about to be honest but these labels where they have staff and and you know you're kind of at that level where do you have any idea of where they go because you know like you say you're being able to generate music in a way that's not going anywhere it's hard to say but like if you look at precedent right so in a way i do think they say i think it's a bigger deal but let's put that to the side for a second if you're going off precedent a lot of these concerns happened around let's say the internet right like you would have a licensing publishing kind of operation you would work with a certain group of labels only a certain group of people ever got to record something high quality enough to be synced or this kind of stuff and so then you have this explosion of like stock music and you know everyone you know in their bedroom can record things and have this competition so where did it end up settling weirdly out of that you got you know the kind of a24 avant-garde industrial music complex right yeah like

that when everybody can do a certain thing relatively easily you go to the scarce thing which is like vibe yep narrative right like so weirdly you had this you know huge spike in interest in you know someone like a micheletty or someone like that to come in and bring something a little bit different or whatever it might mean and you're like well they could just get that music from whatever i think it's the same with the ai thing right like what what people will be what i think people who i don't think have thought this through properly will come out and say is like oh you just dismiss you know like no ai and you're like well good good luck with that like yeah i think the sober thing is being like no like factor this is a new tool set factor that like whatever you make is going to exist in a media landscape where anybody can type some words in and make something that sounds like it was made by someone really skilled 50 years ago that's just the world we live in from now going forward short of there being massive regime change or some like whatever the grid going off that's the world we're going to live in so you have to factor these tools are there then the question becomes how do you make distinction for yourself with those tools and that doesn't mean you have to become a computer scientist i just mean like there are going to be people who do it better than other people and there are going to be people i mean the the most resilient thing ultimately i remember seeing like anoni at sonar a couple years ago you know like her voice is kind of amazing like the show i was i was like on my knees where i'm like this i'm like you like fuck you your voice is just unbelievable you're not even trying and you know and i'm like like these things are lindy you know what i mean like like like somebody you know somebody who's like really skilled at like finger picking or whatever is gonna be totally fine it's just this big middle ground yeah of people who were like and so yeah the the sober advice i think in those circumstances is just like yeah get interested in it because this is i think it's bigger than the internet and i think that just as people were really quick to dismiss youtubers and influencers and all this kind of stuff not to say not to like hold them in really high esteem per se but the same is going to happen here there's going to be a whole bunch of new tools a bunch of new interactions and it's like it behooves you and and the only thing i would push back against you or in my definition of art

that is what being an artist is right not saying that an artist has to adopt ai but in my definition of art you try to do interesting things in the time you live yeah right and your interesting thing might be i fucking hate this ai shit i'm gonna do something in opposition to it or complete oblivion to it whatever that might be a thing that's totally fine but like but ignoring it just seems like a really bad idea for everybody um And I think, yeah, like in a world where like anybody can generate a, you know, a whatever, you've also got a factor that like most of those people are all going to make really dumb decisions. And again, in a professional scenario, I've not been in so many professional stories like this, but I infer this from friends who like do consultancy and like creative work for people. Like you're hired for your decisions. Yep. You're basically hired to be cool. Like you can do the stuff. But they could get anybody to do some stuff. They want you to be like, no, this Nike campaign is really fresh or whatever the language is. They want the cool person there to tell them what to do. And you're like, that's not going to change. You're still going to need people who, but those people who probably succeed are likely going to factor. that these tools exist. Because if you don't, you're really, that's just a really bad idea. No, no, no. I completely agree. You're listening to the free version of Cloud Farm for the full episodes of the Patreon Music. Please don't take him even though he can Your beauty is beyond compare With flaming lots of almond hair With leopard skin that eyes emerald green Your smile's like a breath of spring Your skin is soft like summer rain And I cannot compete with you joking

For the full episode, sub the Patreon geezer.