elum retweeted
The line between creation and consumption just disappeared.
For the entire history of recorded music from Edison’s phonograph in 1877 to Spotify in 2026 the relationship between artist and listener has been one-directional. The artist creates. The listener consumes. The artist records a song in a studio. The listener plays it on a device. The creative act belongs to the artist. The listening act belongs to the fan.
Spotify’s AI remix tool erases that line. The listener becomes a creator. The fan becomes a remixer. The consumption act becomes a creative act. The person who spent 10,000 hours listening to music can now spend 10 minutes transforming it and the result lives on the same platform, in the same playlists, generating the same royalties as the music that took 10,000 hours to create.
This is either the most democratic moment in the history of music a tool that gives every listener the creative power that previously required a studio, a producer, and years of training or the most dangerous a tool that devalues the creative labor of professional musicians by making their work infinitely remixable by anyone with $5/month and an idea.
The answer is probably both. The democratization is real. The devaluation risk is real. And the 640 million listeners who will decide which reality dominates are about to get the tool in their hands.
The music industry has survived every technology transition vinyl to cassette, cassette to CD, CD to MP3, MP3 to streaming. Each transition was traumatic. Each was survived. Each created new winners and new losers.
AI remixing is the next transition. The music will survive. The question as always is which musicians survive with it.
elum retweeted
Every religion in history has promised miracles and warned of the apocalypse. Anthropic is the first to file both with the SEC.
elum retweeted
The funny thing is everyone was saying AI slop code will cause a cyber crisis but it’s actually all the old human slop causing it and the AI is just cleaning it up
elum retweeted
I think AI risk advocates - especially those with vested interests - would have a lot more credibility if they presented their plans for mitigating existential risk in conjunction with plans for mitigating regulatory capture and wealth/power centralization risk.
eg if they sad, “here’s our plan for:
a) slowing down AI development AND
b) simultaneously we’re going to donate 49% of our (non-voting) equity to a public fund AND
c) here’s our plan for ensuring regulation doesn’t block healthy competition or unfairly advantage us commercially
When a) is presented without reference to b) and c) it becomes very hard to believe that the true motivation is an altruistic concern for public welfare.
elum retweeted
Great term.
Sending slop grenades at work is one of the fastest ways to my shit list.
Lazy work used to mean too little output.
Now, with AI, it often means too much and more work for everyone else.
@tobi call it "slop grenades."
A "Slop Grenade" is when you let AI produce the work and pass it on without adding any value (including checking it).
Someone else has to wade through it, catch the mistakes, and clean up the mess.
You save time and look productive but someone else pays for it.
elum retweeted
The tech companies built the internet, which took the advertising business away from newspapers, and then most of the news business, and the gatekeeping on the marketplace of public opinions. The papers see tech as the natural enemy
elum retweeted
The social media crackdown happens in the context of a regime that loses public support and is faced with subversion. Ending privacy and controlling opinions is the whole point.
elum retweeted
Before LLMs I believed the analogy—I think it was Yud’s—that making AI via chatbots was like making real flowers by getting really good at sculpting wax. For most of the past 25 years, I thought we’d hit RSI via RL before anything learned English.
In that regard, I see us as lucky. AGI will come from “thoughts” we can read, literally. As important, LLMs are an expensive industrial process, not conventional PC software. AI cannot trivially self-improve as it could were it mostly code—as many assumed it would be.
None of this was guaranteed. AGI was feared to happen in a basement. It was supposed to explode.
Because it doesn’t, we can let capabilities out one by one. We can see what genuinely sucks about AI. We can integrate, adjust, and live in the Kurzweilian line-fitting world.
Even if it’s been unclear at times how long our stay is, I’m grateful we’re here.
elum retweeted
Stop using the industry PR term “age verification” and start calling it what it is: ID checks for the internet
elum retweeted
It's disheartening to see so many root against Zcash.
We owe so much to the courage of the Zcash team: ten years ago, Zcash was a moonshot.
They were the 1st to deploy a *fully* anonymous payment system and the 1st to deploy a zkSNARK-based cryptosystem.
Rooting against the team being able to recover from this bug is rooting against all other serious privacy efforts for cryptocurrencies: they are all based on the same nullifier techniques via circuit-based zkSNARKs.
This is not a zero-sum game.
Zcash has been showing us the way for over a decade and will continue to do so.
e.g., Zcash will soon be the 1st team to deploy a *formally-verified* zkSNARK circuit implementation for anonymous payments.
