AI-assisted staging draws boos at the Richard Wagner festival in Germany
BERLIN (AP) — An experiment with artificial intelligence at the annual Richard Wagner festival in the southeastern German town of Bayreuth drew boos from the audience after producing a staging that appeared to leave some spectators confused.
Curator Marcus Lobbes and his team were greeted with boos and whistles as they took to the stage at the end of Saturday evening’s performance of “Götterdämmerung,” German news agency dpa reported. However, there was warm applause for the singers and musicians, and particularly for conductor Christian Thielemann.
Festival organizers said ahead of the performance that it would be the first time AI took part on stage at the event, “not as a character, but as an image-generating force.” They said that singers would be “the fixed point within a visually seething cosmos of light, texture, history, and association, amidst projections that erupt, constantly shift, and merge into one another.”
https://apnews.com/article/germany-bayreuth-wagner-festival-ai-f4300cdc0be195dabdadfa6d2ab4254cOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
22 replies
Something I struggle understanding is that it’s apparently quite “normal” to boo during an opera. Apparently it’s common to boo at a villain even when you enjoy the performance. It just seems rude to me.
Also using grammatically correct bravo, brava, and bravi just comes off overly pretentious in non-Italian countries in performances done by non-Italians.
Yeah, I'd have booed because Art is very much a human endeavor. Gassed up LLMs have no place in that space! Human made art is vibrant, beautiful, feels intentional. Like, I hope they abandon the notion next year (if people are even interested in showing up after that stupid stunt).
Honestly hoping that people who try to take jobs away from the vast plurality of entertainment workers for their own fucking greed fall flat on their face. We don't want your AI slop, motherfuckers.
AI has no soul, entertainment plays to the soul.
They might as well come on stage, take a shit on it, use original music note sheets handwritten by Richard Wagner to wipe their asses and then burn them in front of the crowd. What were these walnut brains thinking? Yes, Wagner plays often enjoyed state of the art stage design that would break the mold but this isn't it. Pure idiocy and laziness.
It's state of the tech stage design, and I think the distinction isn’t as clear as it should be to too many people.
It's a Wagner play, not a tech show.
there is a % of people that love ai everything and another % that hate ai or don't want ai everywhere, and i think it is getting a bit echo chambery, and don't realize it until the boos. i was on a technical conference few months ago, there was a lot of ai slop on the presentations, i would have boo if i wasn't there on behalf of my employer lol
The difference between loving AI and hating AI is undertanding AI. And, really, most people who understand AI don't hate it, they hate that people don't understand it.
Listening to Ed Zitron's show recently and he reports that a certain madness has taken over. Nobody wants to speak ill of AI because it can end or severely limit your career to do so, as you yourself demonstrated.
Fails to prevent or even not encourage suicides and psychosis, shields 3rd world dictators from criticism, still no cancer cure found, 30 times more expensive then a simple search, slop media content devoid of any substance, fake advice, worse at the jobs it managed to replace and more expensive even operating at a loss, used in surveillance, mistakes and false accusations in said surveillance, used as a shield from accountability, no place whatsoever for it in art.
What am I not understanding buddy?
That most all of those intances are the result of misunderstanding what AI does, and the only outstanding one is misunderstanding what art is.
Most of my hatred is reserved for conscious beings that could do better.
Ok so they told us AI does everything, put it in front of kids to help with homework, turns out it halucinates and kids got attached, obviously suicide and school shooting creeps up in teen conversations, AI doesnt provide the hotline, alert authorities or dissuade. No, it made suggestions and constant sycophantic dribble.
Someone actually went through with it.. They misunderstood AI? A kid...? Is that what families from the victims should hear?
Ditto, though counscious beings is quite generous.
My employer has Copilot, but the conversations about when and where we use it are always measured and we always weigh the time gained vs the time that would need to be spent validating the output. It is useful at times, like today, when I wanted to pull 200 footnotes out of a word document and into an excel sheet. I'm still going to have to check every line item, but validating will take less time than doing the work manually.
I also work in the legal industry, so just whipping things up via sloppification isn't realistic since screwing up has massive implications for the firm and the client.
I try to use Copilot occasionally to do easy graphics changes, and it usually does it for the first few versions, then it just stops showing the new version, even though it says "Here It Is." I will ask for the graphic, and it says "You're right, I didn't show it, now I will," and then it doesn't. Again.
Then it will ask to upload the original graphic again, and still doesn't show the finished product.
Finally, it tells me that I've used all my free prompts, and I have to wait for it to reset, and it can't tell me how long that will be. When I tell it that it WASTED at least half of my free attempts, it agrees with me, and offers to keep me company while I wait for the reset, which it has no idea will take place.
WTF?
This is like the worst employee I've ever had. If CoPilot worked for me, I would fire it EVERY FUCKING DAY!
AI Genie: You have three wishes.
Person: I wish for a million dollars!
AI Genie: Granted!
Person: Ok. Where is it?
AI Genie: Oh, sorry, I didn't grant your wish. Please ask again.
Person: I wish for a million dollars!
AI Genie: Granted!
Person: These look like a few old rubles. They're worthless!
AI Genie: Yes, you did ask for a million dollars and I gave you worthless rubles. Please wish again and I will try to do better!
Person: I wish for a million US dollars!
AI Genie: Granted!
Person: This is a million-dollar bill signed by George Washington with an image of ... Franklin Hubert Lincoln? This isn't legal tender!
AI Genie: I'm sorry, you are right. I should have understood you wanted to increase your net worth. Please wish again and I'll get right.
Person: I wish for a million US dollars to be deposited into my checking account!
AI Genie: I'm sorry, you have already used all three of your wishes.
Yeah, EXACTLY like that! Great analogy!
At least I got invited to cuddle with the AI while I waited for the reset.
Yup, we don't like it much either. :)
The most use I get out of it is that it's good at telling me what an application is capable of doing, so when I'm trying to solve a problem it can explain options to me that I didn't know about beforehand, and then direct me to self-training materials. That's what I use it for the most, at least.
You might already be super familiar, but there are a lot of handy ways to arrange text using excel functions. Maybe it's still faster to manually check AI output, as I'm not fully familiar with your use case, but text to column/transpose or the split functions may be of interest. Not trying to suggest I know for sure what a good solution is without seeing the data, but figured I'd offer some suggestions in case manually checking is going to be as arduous as it sounds.
Using a calculator for text processing > Using a text processor for calculations
Oh hell yeah. I'll check those out.
If nothing else, I always enjoy learning something new.
Pretentious-to-English translation: "You see that, Sly? That's hallucinations."
You mean English to Bumpkin
Fingers crossed every day for some great news from Washington, but this is a good start to my morning.