About Ai
TiNRS consists of two people who have different opinions and interactions with Ai.*
Let’s start with my opinion (Priscilla) and interaction because it is the simplest. I don’t want any part of it Thank You Very Much. I think it represents the greatest theft in the history of mankind, we are using it for very stupid purposes and the economic hyperbubble will do a lot of damage.
I have no objections to the technology of LLMs itself and I think the matrix-magic of the inside of these models is just another sign of the ingenuity of the human mind. I see various useful places for this technology but as long as this bubble is being blown by the likes of OpenAi or Anthropic and we seem to be racing to build giant data centers to replace human workers with bytes, I do not wish to be involved.
There are more reasons and many things that I think are fundamentally misunderstood about Ai but these are the big ones. I have said no to ‘writing with Ai’ when asked by my former editor, I will not use it to create any visuals (I have used DALL-E in the past) and I do not want to involve it in making music. Because I am my own boss, I am free to make these choices.
The other part of TiNRS (Stijn) thinks Ai is the greatest meta-technology ever built rolled out by the most evil scum ever. He uses it as programming support. Vibe coding but instead of vibing the results he uses it to vibe the tools needed to build the results himself. Using Ai to create things that he would not have been able to create on the same timeline. Making our Fenix IV was already a generative project but now with Ai his generative tools can generate more generative tools.
He doesn’t see all the artifacts Ai is usurping as theft, but rather as undoing the theft done by IP in the first place so he can now finally freely build on the shoulders of giants of all sizes.
Using Ai has allowed him to solve puzzles in the intricacies of the BigFish synthesizer that might have otherwise taken months, to add way more modelling of various sounds, to easily translate academic audio papers into working code and to create a PCB router that finally gloops traces together in an organic fashion.
We both agree on the awfulness of the current use of AI but in striking a balance between the pros and the cons, we end up on different sides of the scales.
Ai at my fish
Another way we interact with Ai is the massive impact it is having on our plans. We cannot manufacture our BigFish synthesizer because the Ai bubble has eaten up all the RAM. What we need is either unaffordable or unavailable.
This is not a small thing. Stijn has been wanting to make this specific synth for almost 20 years and we were finally ready. Our skills and experience in audio design, hardware manufacturing and product design were finally advanced enough to take this on. Chips and compute were finally advanced enough to make this happen. We set up an entire keyboard factory to build the keys we wanted for this synthesizer. After years of design we prepared to shift our effort fully onto making BigFish.
Poof! BigFish gone – at least for now.
And perhaps it is gone for good because with all the audio-vibe-coding going on at the moment it seems like BigFish may no longer serve a purpose. On this too we have different opinions. We will have to wait and see what is going to happen and what is left when the slop settles. To see what we think when the necessary RAM does become available again.
After a short existential crisis we looked to what we could make – and what we wanted to make – and we arrived at a Day at the Beach. Using a lot of the BigFish design we are building a fabulous synthesizer that uses physical modelling to create its’ audio in real-time. Lots of compute but no RAM necessary. As irony would have it; this quick shift was made possible by using Ai to help calculate the physical models that produce the audio.
To Ai or not to Ai
Neither of us is happy with the how and who that is involved in Ai. Both of us think Ai is a massive bubble that has to pop someday soon. Both of us think that you cannot replace humans with Ai. Neither of us think that Ai represents human-like intelligence or that some sort of UberMachine is going to take over the world and wipe us all out. Both of us think that Ai can be very useful given a good understanding of its’ place in your process and what it should and should not be doing. For now I will continue to not use it and Stijn will continue to use it as programming support.
*this text is written without Ai. All TiNRS text on our website and in our manuals is written by me without Ai.
