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On my 13th birthday, my parents gave me a portable CD player and that masterpiece Fresh hits of 1997. Like more than 600 million other peoplelong ago I swapped the CD case for the Spotify app on my phone. But I recently found my old birthday present and found it still works. Even using headphones from the 1990s, I was amazed at the richness of the sound.
My ears did not deceive me. CDs have a bit rate of 1411 kilobits per second, which is a measure of how much data is used to represent sound. Spotify Premium ranges from 24 kbps to 320 kbps, while free Spotify listeners are limited to 160 kbps at best. I realize this isn’t news to music fans. Neil Young, who reluctantly returned his music to Spotify this year after a feud involving Joe Rogan, he complained“There’s so much tone missing you can barely feel the sensitivity.”
If hundreds of millions of normal music listeners (like me) have decided to trade sound quality for convenience and variety, then fair enough. But what confused me was that I didn’t know I had done it. I just forgot how much better music used to sound.
There should be a word for this phenomenon. Qualitynesia, maybe? If wearing “rose-colored glasses” is the act of thinking that something was better in the past, when objectively it was not, this is its opposite: forgetting that something was better in the past when objectively it was.
This is not new. In 1937 Road to Wigan PierGeorge Orwell claimed that the century of mechanization had worsened the quality of food, furniture, houses, clothing and entertainment, but most people didn’t seem to care. Still, he blamed a “frightening promiscuity of taste” rather than collective amnesia. “Mechanization leads to decay of taste, decay of taste leads to demand for machine-made articles, and thus to more mechanization, and so a vicious circle is established,” he wrote.
Most of the time, high-quality options continue in a niche fashion, but become more expensive or inappropriate, relatively speaking, and fewer people either remember what they’re missing out on, or are willing or able to pay extra. In Great Britain, for example, clothing to calculate 10 percent of average family consumption in 1957; last year it amounted to 3 percent.
There are, of course, many counterexamples to products whose quality has improved over time, such as computers and telephones. All the same, my knowledge about music left me with the question: what is there in the world today, about which people in the future will have no idea about the quality? One obvious place to look is the creative sector, where AI is now starting to tap into.
Previous research suggests that when people know that something “creatively” was made by artificial intelligence, they find it mediocre and soulless. But if they don’t know, they he really likes it. Recent study found that people could not distinguish AI-generated poems from human ones, and actually preferred AI poems “in the style” of famous poets such as William Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath to actual poems by those poets. The researchers’ theory is that the AI ​​songs were less challenging.
Similarly, Coca-Cola’s new AI-powered Christmas ad, a version of its famous “The Holidays Are Coming” commercial from the 1990s, was popular when tested on humans who were not told it was AI. System One’s Andrew Tindall, who ran the tests, told me that’s because the AI ​​version relied heavily on “a great creative idea conceived over 30 years ago, by a human marketing team that built that idea and invested in it for more than 30 years.”
That sounds reassuring to people who want to believe in the irreplaceable value of human creativity. And anyway, just because people liked one AI ad doesn’t mean they’d enjoy AI movies or novels, which are more important to most of us. Moreover, history offers some examples of people who have regained a taste for quality. A new generation of young people is now driving a small increase in CD sales, for example.
Still, the disturbing thought remains. If people like AI-remixes with familiar feelings, once human content, and if they become increasingly difficult to discover and much cheaper to produce, we could drift into a world of increasingly bad remixes of previous remixes of previous remixes. And until that moment, would we even know what we’ve lost?
Joni Mitchell once sang, “Don’t always look like it’s gone, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.” But there is also a sadder possibility: that, until it’s gone, you don’t even remember that heaven was better than a parking lot.
