WTF-Beta

@ShiroKuro Yes, the first soprano part is fun, because in the music we've had so far, it tends to be high harmony rather than the melody. I've always sung alto or second soprano because I enjoyed singing harmony and also because I was usually singing in choirs where everybody didn't read music. Some of these songs are totally in my range and some of them are a leeeeeeetlllllle bit high. Fortunately, one of them is the one where I'm playing piano, so I'm saved from struggling with it.

The music is a mix, so far. We're doing an a capella version of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" with som really amazing harmonies. There's a Leadbelly blues song that I think is called "Sylvie." I forget the name of the one I'm playing piano on, but it's a setting of a really beautiful poem about light and community. I sang in the choir director's large choir last year, so I already knew she had what I consider to be good taste.

That's a problem with playing piano. You never get to perform on your own instrument!

Clearly, the teacher understood that problem, since he agreed that the piano gave you some issues.

Next time!

I went to my first vocal ensemble rehearsal and had a great time.

The director is very creative in running the rehearsals. As I already said, she spends a lot of time with improvisational exercises and movement, which is great musically but also a good way to get comfortable and get to know each other.

She had us move around and stand next to different people, so she could see how our voices blend and place us in our parts. I was really surprised that this ended up with me singing first soprano. I am not all that comfortable in the upper part of my range, so I think this will be a fun challenge, but also that she may end up moving me to second soprano.

Most of the music is a capella, but one had a beautiful piano accompaniment and she asked if I'd play that. The chords and harmonies are unusual, but it's in C and didn't seem to require big hands or a lot of speed, so I said, "Sure," and ended up sight-reading it with the group. It went well, so it looks like that will happen. We don't perform until January, so I'll have time to polish it up.

I'm so happy to be able to do music with people again!

@ShiroKuro There's a karaoke place here that has individual rooms like that. If I can get a good chunk of my family here at the same time (always a challenge), I think going there would be a hoot.

I'm so sorry.

Bernard, that resonant experience is why I prefer an acoustic piano. It sure would have been easier and cheaper to switch to a digital piano when we moved (or one of the other times I moved), but I can feel the music in my hands and through my feet, and to a lesser extent in the rest of my body. The acoustics in this house are really bright, so I put down a rug, hung window treatments, had the piano voiced, and keep the lid down. With all that dampening, it sounds good now, although I think people driving down the street can hear me.

Acoustic music is its own experience. And you're right, so is singing.

I haven't sung much for more than a decade, and I felt like age was starting to affect my voice, but now I think it was more a case of chronic allergies. I had sinus surgery about a year ago, followed by another minor surgery, followed by more allergies and bronchitis. It dragged on for months and I wasn't sure I was going to be able to do the choir concert in May, but I started getting better about that time. Now, I think I'm finally getting the benefit of the sinus surgery. The hoarseness is almost gone. And it's a good thing, because the ensemble director is sure that I'm a first soprano. I've sung second soprano and alto all my life, so singing first in this ensemble is going to be an interesting experience!

@ShiroKuro Claire de Lune has been on the edge of being too hard for me for my entire adult life. I just keep hashing through it, because it's so pretty. I did that last week, in fact.

That's great, Bernard. I'd love to hear more about how the class works. (I'm sorry if you've already talked about it elsewhere.)

Does the teacher choose your pieces? And is there an overarching theme, like everybody's working on the same composer or time period? Do you ever do in-class sight reading? In such a small class, it would be cool if people interested in four-hand music could be paired. I suppose there's even a tiny repertoire written for three people.

Studying music in a group sounds like fun. I did various group musical activities in Florida, but I never had the opportunity (nor the time) in Oklahoma. Earlier this year, I sang with the community chorus here and had a great time. The director also runs a smaller ensemble, eight voices. I really admired the music they were doing, so I auditioned and got in. The rehearsals aren't like anything I've ever done before, with lots of improvisation and movement. I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

What did you study for fun at The New School, Jon?

My son is getting a second master's degree. I don't think it's strictly necessary for his job, but it's in computer science, so I am also not sure it's strictly fun, either. Maybe it is for him. lol

As for me, BS from Murray State, MS from Ole Miss, MFA from Rutgers Camden, PhD from U Exeter.

The last two were fun, but the MFA also made the academic career possible. The PhD was good for the academic career and it's currently getting me the opportunity to write academic books for not very much money and to do teaching gigs that are fun and reasonably well-paid.

@jon-nyc

I've started taking Jane Friedman's newsletter, because I trust her reporting. Today's newsletter spoke to your question about whether other big AI companies trained on pirated work:

OpenAI’s piracy looks to be worse than Anthropic’s piracy
One of the key AI lawsuits I’ve been following is this one in the Southern District of New York—a different district from the one where the Anthropic case was settled, and the home of New York publishers and landmark copyright cases. It involves both the Authors Guild and the New York Times, since the court consolidated the cases. Over the last couple of weeks, a lot of information has come to light from unsealed documents. The New York Times is probably taking great pleasure in publishing articles about what’s in these documents, revealing things like:

A Microsoft director calling AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history”

OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT writing that AI posed an “existential threat” to publishers

OpenAI developing a hack to get around the New York Times paywall

The disclosures related to books are equally bad. OpenAI, like Anthropic, created an internal library of books from the pirate website LibGen and even shared those works with outsiders. One of OpenAI’s employees testified, “The better we do on GPT-X, the more worried genre fiction authors will become about us substituting for them on Amazon.” And an OpenAI researcher described his mission as creating a machine to supplant human authors."

The presumption in the writing community is that attorney's fees will be taken out of the $3000, but I haven't seen that confirmed. I also have not seen anything confirming how much the attorney's fees will be.

Splitting the payout with the publisher 50/50 seems to be the default. I looked over my contracts to see whether this was true for me. My subsidiary rights clauses specify a 50/50 split for most rights sales, but I didn't see anything on the list of specified rights that I thought definitely applied in this case. My agent, however, said that the 50/50 split applied in my case, so that's what I put on my claim, since she negotiated the contracts and presumably knows. (Interestingly, I know of no route for agents to be paid. My agent has gotten her 15% for things like audiobook sales, but I don't think this is the case with the Anthropic settlement.)

Some publishers, including big ones like Wiley, are trying to take 100%, which is unconscionable. Those writers' claims, and those of writers who didn't go with the 50/50 default, are finding that their claims are being disputed by their publishers. Will this result in lawyers' fees eating the claims up? Nobody knows, but it will certainly delay their checks. My 50/50 claims were not disputed, so I am supposed to receive my first payment in December, but I will believe it when the checks are in my hand.

I believe they all trained on pirated work, because there's no other way to get enough material (other than obeying the law and paying for it), but I can't say I'm absolutely certain about that. It's hard to be sure of your sources these days.

I do know there are other lawsuits, but they seem to turn on different fine points of copyright law, so winning the Anthropic one doesn't mean that they will all go the same way. There was a big news story a few months ago saying that Meta didn't just train on pirated databases, but it was revealed in discovery that they had discussed it by email (or text, but anyway, it was in writing), and went so far as to talk about destroying the databases, thus confirming that they did it and knew it was illegal. But then the news cycle moved on and I've heard nothing else. And, of course, I have to trust the reporting that this was true, which is a problem these days.

We've been told that the Anthropic payout is coming in installments and the first checks will go out in November. I don't even know yet how much mine is supposed to be, but I guess I'll know a little more then.

It would seem like a simple enough instruction.

Have you tried that? I don't use LLMs, so I don't know how well it would work.

I still haven't had time to look for the article, but your point triggered a question I can't answer. I'm told that the algorithms don't have the kind of memory that we use for writing, They predict the next word, but they don't plan the whole piece and they don't recall what's already been written when they get further into the piece. This means that a fully LLM-written novel will not and cannot have the kind of coherent throughline that a (competently) human-written novel would. (It also calls into question whether it's actually a novel, since a novel has narrative constraints that differentiate it from a book-shaped pile of pages. I have not done a lot of reading in narratology and I haven't read a fully LLM-written novel, so I can't say much more than that.)

Anyway, when I think through how I'd go about writing, say, an email when I've been told to keep it under 200 words, it's a multi-step process. I plan what I'm going to say, I say it, I check the word-count constraint, I check to see if I said what I'd intended, and I edit accordingly. I'm not sure current models do that kind of thing very well. It may be that it's a sufficiently recursive process that such a process would multiply time and energy demands to an extent that would make writing succinctly difficult.

If I run across the article, I'll post it here. It was just a day or two ago.

That's a good point. It seems like the companies who are wringing their hands over this could figure that out.

I've read recent articles where companies that embraced AI for things like emails and internal reports are bemoaning the time being wasted because AI writing is so verbose. It seems like the algorithms could be tweaked for that, but I really don't know if it's possible.

Absent something in the code that privileges succinctness, an LLM has no incentive not to write long. The text is generated almost instantly. Why waste resources slimming it down for the convenience of human beings? It's more efficient to just let slop be slop.

@CHAS It has made me appreciate the humanity of the errors students make.

@jon-nyc Yup. And it's Schedule C income, so I pay extra social security.