IDEA FOR A NEW THREAD: Conceptual/lyrical analysis of albums

[Balor/SS1535]

The gist of things is that I bet most of the people who criticised me aboev, aswell as others whom I've talked to IRL who happen to have biased opinions on the use of such tools have never actually managed to, at least, try to see how they work out.

Get off your high horse, man.  I teach at a university and have to deal with how AI-generated analyses "work out" with a far greater frequency and seriousness than I expect you do.  It's my day job at this point.  And I can say that after reading many hundreds of these outputs over the course of several years of AI evolution that it is universally crap.  Yeah, we can point to a small handful of interesting outcomes (I'm looking at you Salitter Workings, maybe Harmony Korine's current work), but anyone who offsets their thinking to this thing is actively participating in the wholesale degeneration of human thought, society/culture, and the environment.

[Flames of Torture]

This forum has been on a slow decline since the Finnish language thread diverted most of the discussion activity anyway, so maybe this is a logical evolution.

Don't want to derail this topic too much, jut will comment on this.

I think the Finnish topic is mainly chitchat rather than deep discussion. Many (Finnish and other) posters have moved their activity to S&W forum, WCN Discord, one Finnish punk forum and probably other places, and I think that has more of an effect. Also, many Finns have lately been quite active in making zine and podcast related things, so that also shows in them being less visibly present here. Doesn't mean the forum would be in a great decline.

But as with underground things in general: if you want to see something happen, you will likely have to do it yourself. Goes for initiating forum discussions too. We all should find our inner Ken, hahah!

For anyone who hasn't kept up with the Finnish thread using a translation tool, the results are decent enough. It can be worth trying different tools if the discussion sounds garbled. I've enjoyed reading the chitchat from afar for some time now. If I want to "participate", I can just post elsewhere to the forum, in English, right? I see only advantages.

And what is the name of the Finnish punk forum you've mentioned?

I will attempt to engage with more discussion here myself!

[Flames of Torture]

That being said, can't we just all move along? I believe Deterge's album is about soap, indeed. Soap and money. Hatesville and Savage Inequalities, on the other hand, are unequivocally about love.

I will happily read your analyses when posted, provided they are actually written by you. I check the forum every day and would much prefer to see your thoughts posted than to hear crickets chirp. By all (sentient) means, let's move on!

[FreakAnimalFinland]

Forum activity comes and goes quite unexpectedly. Just like mentioned formerly very active punk forum noise topic, is nowadays often very dormant. Many formerly regular writers dont write there either. S&W, can be good stuff there, but is there much more activity than SI? Often hanful of topics are recent and quickly you see latest messages can date back even months.
WCN discord, I do not know, but I have been told forums in general are the old and slow thing while discord is more what people like to do these days. Never seen even how discord channel looks like, so no idea.

I have feeling as if general discussion online is a bit less? Forums in general, but also facebook groups and so on. What does it mean? Who knows. Has there been also small decline in noise podcast views? I have checked out some of the smaller noise related podcasts and quite surprised about relatively small numbers there appear to be.

I recall when chat / whatsup calls / zoom whatever first came, it felt as if "everybody" was using it quite a lot. Now almost big part of people I know, have dropped out from social media platforms, etc. It feels obvious that there has been quite drift away from digital world, at least by people I know.

[FreakAnimalFinland]

If anything can be learned from forum past, to activate people, there needs to be someone to starts new interesting topics that stir some discussions. I often find it curious that there seems to be challenge to start one. This topic should not discourage anyone. Sometimes you get criticized or ridiculed, but not that bad thing.

I feel that all one needs to do, is for example watch episode of WCN and every time, there are like handful of topics that could/should be discussed more. Something that could benefit from written form and multiple point of views.

What comes to lyrical analysis, I indeed also would appreciate human perspective.

[FreakAnimalFinland]

Oh man I am gonna spam this too much... but got to say that one reason I have heard many people dropped out from social media, was abundance of AI. Already before, it was like... join it to talk with friends or follow labels/bands for news. Now if you post something, most wont see it. If they post something, you wont see it. Instead, just total flood of ads and AI garbage. So keeping that stuff in minimum here is strongly recommended. Ethos of total DIY is advocated.

[Kaaoskultti]

The gist of things is that I bet most of the people who criticised me aboev, aswell as others whom I've talked to IRL who happen to have biased opinions on the use of such tools have never actually managed to, at least, try to see how they work out.

Get off your high horse, man.  I teach at a university and have to deal with how AI-generated analyses "work out" with a far greater frequency and seriousness than I expect you do.  It's my day job at this point.  And I can say that after reading many hundreds of these outputs over the course of several years of AI evolution that it is universally crap.  Yeah, we can point to a small handful of interesting outcomes (I'm looking at you Salitter Workings, maybe Harmony Korine's current work), but anyone who offsets their thinking to this thing is actively participating in the wholesale degeneration of human thought, society/culture, and the environment.

But we're not talking about album analysis done for the sake of fun, are we? I understand how overwhelming it is to be a teacher and have to deal with this daily. Excruciating, really. Then again, can't we all just get along?

I always wonder what FFH albums are about.

[Balor/SS1535]

The gist of things is that I bet most of the people who criticised me aboev, aswell as others whom I've talked to IRL who happen to have biased opinions on the use of such tools have never actually managed to, at least, try to see how they work out.

Get off your high horse, man.  I teach at a university and have to deal with how AI-generated analyses "work out" with a far greater frequency and seriousness than I expect you do.  It's my day job at this point.  And I can say that after reading many hundreds of these outputs over the course of several years of AI evolution that it is universally crap.  Yeah, we can point to a small handful of interesting outcomes (I'm looking at you Salitter Workings, maybe Harmony Korine's current work), but anyone who offsets their thinking to this thing is actively participating in the wholesale degeneration of human thought, society/culture, and the environment.

But we're not talking about album analysis done for the sake of fun, are we?

That's true, but I'll add some context to detail my point more.  I primary work with the classics---books, myths, plats, etc. that have literally been written about and discussed for thousands of years.  That means that AI has access to a massive amount of information to generate its "analyses" on the basis of.  Even with that it is still putting out superficial and repetitive results.

Place that in comparison to niche industrial/noise albums.  There is nowhere near the same amount of source material for the AI to consume, digest, and spit back out.  If the results are poor for something like the classics, then how can you expect anything of quality to come out of this?

You want to know what FFH is really about?  It's about one man who dwells on particular materials.  Some of those materials come from industrial tropes, others are personal, but the project becomes interesting because he thinks through it holistically.  It's not about taking shortcuts.  Even more, it's not about "fun."

I wish we could all go back to the days of the Industrial Culture Handbook, where we shared BOOKS rather than answers.

[NedOik]

The gist of things is that I bet most of the people who criticised me aboev, aswell as others whom I've talked to IRL who happen to have biased opinions on the use of such tools have never actually managed to, at least, try to see how they work out.

Get off your high horse, man.  I teach at a university and have to deal with how AI-generated analyses "work out" with a far greater frequency and seriousness than I expect you do.  It's my day job at this point.  And I can say that after reading many hundreds of these outputs over the course of several years of AI evolution that it is universally crap.  Yeah, we can point to a small handful of interesting outcomes (I'm looking at you Salitter Workings, maybe Harmony Korine's current work), but anyone who offsets their thinking to this thing is actively participating in the wholesale degeneration of human thought, society/culture, and the environment.

But we're not talking about album analysis done for the sake of fun, are we?

That's true, but I'll add some context to detail my point more.  I primary work with the classics---books, myths, plats, etc. that have literally been written about and discussed for thousands of years.  That means that AI has access to a massive amount of information to generate its "analyses" on the basis of.  Even with that it is still putting out superficial and repetitive results.

Place that in comparison to niche industrial/noise albums.  There is nowhere near the same amount of source material for the AI to consume, digest, and spit back out.  If the results are poor for something like the classics, then how can you expect anything of quality to come out of this?

You want to know what FFH is really about?  It's about one man who dwells on particular materials.  Some of those materials come from industrial tropes, others are personal, but the project becomes interesting because he thinks through it holistically.  It's not about taking shortcuts.  Even more, it's not about "fun."

I wish we could all go back to the days of the Industrial Culture Handbook, where we shared BOOKS rather than answers.

I have to emerge from my hedgerow for a moment in defence of the OP. For my part, I think lyrics and textual content in noise / PE get woefully little analysis, or even commentary, or anything. So I welcome any attempt to redress that.

On the AI question, I think what's being overlooked here is that the quality of AI output is determined, to a considerable extent, by the input. To state the obvious, or to quote Rust Cohle from True Detective: "You want answers? Well start asking the right fucking questions."

If you simply ask AI, "What does this mean?", you're likely to get something fairly generic back. But ask it to explore lyrics through an unconventianal lens and you can potentially get somewhere interesting. It can come up with all sorts of wonderfully weird shit; connections, tangents you might never have considered. And I think there's real value in that.

Funny you mention the Industrial Culture Handbook, as that was itself all about making connections between seemingly disparate stuff. That's something AI can do too, given the right juice. Doesn't mean you have to swallow everything it comes up with like a good little girl.

And just to flash my AI credentials: I work with advanced LLMs in my day job. There, I've said it (hehe). So you can assume Im not pulling this out of my rear end.

[Balor/SS1535]

The gist of things is that I bet most of the people who criticised me aboev, aswell as others whom I've talked to IRL who happen to have biased opinions on the use of such tools have never actually managed to, at least, try to see how they work out.

Get off your high horse, man.  I teach at a university and have to deal with how AI-generated analyses "work out" with a far greater frequency and seriousness than I expect you do.  It's my day job at this point.  And I can say that after reading many hundreds of these outputs over the course of several years of AI evolution that it is universally crap.  Yeah, we can point to a small handful of interesting outcomes (I'm looking at you Salitter Workings, maybe Harmony Korine's current work), but anyone who offsets their thinking to this thing is actively participating in the wholesale degeneration of human thought, society/culture, and the environment.

But we're not talking about album analysis done for the sake of fun, are we?

That's true, but I'll add some context to detail my point more.  I primary work with the classics---books, myths, plats, etc. that have literally been written about and discussed for thousands of years.  That means that AI has access to a massive amount of information to generate its "analyses" on the basis of.  Even with that it is still putting out superficial and repetitive results.

Place that in comparison to niche industrial/noise albums.  There is nowhere near the same amount of source material for the AI to consume, digest, and spit back out.  If the results are poor for something like the classics, then how can you expect anything of quality to come out of this?

You want to know what FFH is really about?  It's about one man who dwells on particular materials.  Some of those materials come from industrial tropes, others are personal, but the project becomes interesting because he thinks through it holistically.  It's not about taking shortcuts.  Even more, it's not about "fun."

I wish we could all go back to the days of the Industrial Culture Handbook, where we shared BOOKS rather than answers.

I have to emerge from my hedgerow for a moment in defence of the OP. For my part, I think lyrics and textual content in noise / PE get woefully little analysis, or even commentary, or anything. So I welcome any attempt to redress that.

On the AI question, I think what's being overlooked here is that the quality of AI output is determined, to a considerable extent, by the input. To state the obvious, or to quote Rust Cohle from True Detective: "You want answers? Well start asking the right fucking questions."

If you simply ask AI, "What does this mean?", you're likely to get something fairly generic back. But ask it to explore lyrics through an unconventianal lens and you can potentially get somewhere interesting. It can come up with all sorts of wonderfully weird shit; connections, tangents you might never have considered. And I think there's real value in that.

Funny you mention the Industrial Culture Handbook, as that was itself all about making connections between seemingly disparate stuff. That's something AI can do too, given the right juice. Doesn't mean you have to swallow everything it comes up with like a good little girl.

And just to flash my AI credentials: I work with advanced LLMs in my day job. There, I've said it (hehe). So you can assume Im not pulling this out of my rear end.

This all goes back to the original question of whether we want to (a) follow in the footsteps of undisputed artistic/critical innovators by thinking for ourselves or (b) hand that process over to corporate-owned probability generators.  That's the only question that matters here.

I really struggle to understand why this is even a choice in art, so I'll just requote the very apt slogan from above: "I cry for most of you, who surrender for comfort."

[FreakAnimalFinland]

Someone mentioned earlier about social media posts by noise artists that are now tagged as AI created. I am not sure, but I think there is this AI assisted option to post things?
Grouping image, text, music all at one post without doing much. Not sure how much AI "creates", if it just puts couple things together. Possibly it is not far from doing it with some sort of app? Of course, especially metal scene is full of total AI garbage. No way avoiding it. Even if I do not follow any "metal" online, feed still gets filled with AI versions of classic album cover paintings and "cover art becomes alive" -type of videos.

Despite criticism, if we'd throw hypothetically questions such as "what is the ideological, thematic or lyrical difference of Brethren, Deathkey and Bizarre Uproar", I would no be surprised if regular scene dude comes with less informative and less insightful reply than the free chatGPT? Someones personal take would be still more interesting, if they can apply something of personal history, time and place, into perspective.
EDIT: And furthermore, reading simple answer ain't really the same as digesting the meaning of the difference by knowing subject beyond "reply".

Even as means of research, I some details of information might be leading you to wrong direction. As example, if you'd try to figure out what is the classic Grey Wolves sample "you had your whole fucking life to think things over!". You can get the answer to source with simple search, but it will not answer why it was used, context or how it was recontextualized into something. Knowing the source, may be misleading from what art itself was expressing.

[BatteredStatesofEuphoria]

This all goes back to the original question of whether we want to (a) follow in the footsteps of undisputed artistic/critical innovators by thinking for ourselves or (b) hand that process over to corporate-owned probability generators.  That's the only question that matters here.

Is there really no room between A and B though? Can one still think for themselves while using AI as a tool? I'm not sure your argument was a definitive "No" to that question, but I would certainly disagree if so.

Everyone who innovated in some field had to do research. AI, when it comes down to it, is just a new tool to accelerate that process. You don't have to swallow everything an AI spits back as unvarnished truth. You can do further research and clarification, refining your thoughts and arguments in permutations. But most people don't do that. They just get an answer back and stop.

The problem is not AI itself. It is, as always, humans themselves, who'd rather outsource all our thinking. Our technology has way outstripped where we are socially and ethically as a species. I don't know how you fix that, but even if AI went away tomorrow and every hyperscalar went bankrupt, it wouldn't fix that underlying flaw.

[NedOik]

The gist of things is that I bet most of the people who criticised me aboev, aswell as others whom I've talked to IRL who happen to have biased opinions on the use of such tools have never actually managed to, at least, try to see how they work out.

Get off your high horse, man.  I teach at a university and have to deal with how AI-generated analyses "work out" with a far greater frequency and seriousness than I expect you do.  It's my day job at this point.  And I can say that after reading many hundreds of these outputs over the course of several years of AI evolution that it is universally crap.  Yeah, we can point to a small handful of interesting outcomes (I'm looking at you Salitter Workings, maybe Harmony Korine's current work), but anyone who offsets their thinking to this thing is actively participating in the wholesale degeneration of human thought, society/culture, and the environment.

But we're not talking about album analysis done for the sake of fun, are we?

That's true, but I'll add some context to detail my point more.  I primary work with the classics---books, myths, plats, etc. that have literally been written about and discussed for thousands of years.  That means that AI has access to a massive amount of information to generate its "analyses" on the basis of.  Even with that it is still putting out superficial and repetitive results.

Place that in comparison to niche industrial/noise albums.  There is nowhere near the same amount of source material for the AI to consume, digest, and spit back out.  If the results are poor for something like the classics, then how can you expect anything of quality to come out of this?

You want to know what FFH is really about?  It's about one man who dwells on particular materials.  Some of those materials come from industrial tropes, others are personal, but the project becomes interesting because he thinks through it holistically.  It's not about taking shortcuts.  Even more, it's not about "fun."

I wish we could all go back to the days of the Industrial Culture Handbook, where we shared BOOKS rather than answers.

I have to emerge from my hedgerow for a moment in defence of the OP. For my part, I think lyrics and textual content in noise / PE get woefully little analysis, or even commentary, or anything. So I welcome any attempt to redress that.

On the AI question, I think what's being overlooked here is that the quality of AI output is determined, to a considerable extent, by the input. To state the obvious, or to quote Rust Cohle from True Detective: "You want answers? Well start asking the right fucking questions."

If you simply ask AI, "What does this mean?", you're likely to get something fairly generic back. But ask it to explore lyrics through an unconventianal lens and you can potentially get somewhere interesting. It can come up with all sorts of wonderfully weird shit; connections, tangents you might never have considered. And I think there's real value in that.

Funny you mention the Industrial Culture Handbook, as that was itself all about making connections between seemingly disparate stuff. That's something AI can do too, given the right juice. Doesn't mean you have to swallow everything it comes up with like a good little girl.

And just to flash my AI credentials: I work with advanced LLMs in my day job. There, I've said it (hehe). So you can assume Im not pulling this out of my rear end.

This all goes back to the original question of whether we want to (a) follow in the footsteps of undisputed artistic/critical innovators by thinking for ourselves or (b) hand that process over to corporate-owned probability generators.  That's the only question that matters here.

I really struggle to understand why this is even a choice in art, so I'll just requote the very apt slogan from above: "I cry for most of you, who surrender for comfort."

Not to get into a game of ping-pong at this time of night, but to me this isn't an either/or issue. When we talk about innovators, didn't Uncle Bill Burroughs spend a good part of his life railing against precisely that kind of thinking? The whole either/or proposition? (You have to say that sentence in his voice.)

Surely there's room for thinking for oneself AND new tools, books AND algorithms, human intuition AND machine-generated associations. One doesn't necessarily have to exclude the other. You can still use AI and think critically, one doesn't cancel out t'other.

Anyway, I think Bill would have found the whole debate rather interesting. Or maybe Joan, before she got a bullet through her noggin.

[Balor/SS1535]

This all goes back to the original question of whether we want to (a) follow in the footsteps of undisputed artistic/critical innovators by thinking for ourselves or (b) hand that process over to corporate-owned probability generators.  That's the only question that matters here.

Is there really no room between A and B though? Can one still think for themselves while using AI as a tool? I'm not sure your argument was a definitive "No" to that question, but I would certainly disagree if so.

Everyone who innovated in some field had to do research. AI, when it comes down to it, is just a new tool to accelerate that process. You don't have to swallow everything an AI spits back as unvarnished truth. You can do further research and clarification, refining your thoughts and arguments in permutations. But most people don't do that. They just get an answer back and stop.

The problem is not AI itself. It is, as always, humans themselves, who'd rather outsource all our thinking. Our technology has way outstripped where we are socially and ethically as a species. I don't know how you fix that, but even if AI went away tomorrow and every hyperscalar went bankrupt, it wouldn't fix that underlying flaw.

I really don't think there is any need to find that middle ground, though.  As everyone has repeated above, there is nothing done by AI that cannot be accomplished by some combination of thinking for yourself, talking with other people, and reading.  So why would you want anything else---especially in a setting where we all supposedly want to engage deeply and personally?

The last thing people need, given the deficiencies that you mention, is to speed up anything.  We all need to slow down, and art is a great tool for retarding both speed and habit.  AI has been accepted as fast as it has because it caters to these weaknesses in human nature, so seeking out workarounds to use it without (supposedly) giving oneself over to it just seems to me like looking for an excuse to not take up the actual hard work that is needed to make the world a better place.