The threat of AI takeover looms…
You’re worried about the wrong robots.
By Cameron Gleaton, Bree Lee, Leo Hirano
Design Motivation
The motivation of this design is to explore the themes of copying/reusing sound. Especially now that some AI tools have the ability to copy voices and styles, people are using software to copy, reuse, or otherwise manipulate sounds on various ends of the ethical spectrum.
Our goal was to create a robot on the least ethical end of this spectrum. As you can see, the evil is visible through his expression.
Randolph being despicable
A topic explored in the class was novelty vs emulative. While few have sought to make an evil machine to copy music, we feel like Randolph, being a meta-commentary, did not clearly fit into these categories. Yes, few have sought to make an “evil” copying machine, but this is not necessarily a novel machine– our idea was a robot that copies, and many things copy other things.
As for emulative, the machine may be emulative of AI/human tendency to copy in a very abstract way. Mostly for the fact that (to forego the bit for a second) Randolph is not very good at copying music, and any future version would never have the same capabilities as digital AI music generation.
How it works – Circuitry and Fabrication
Because it didn’t matter too much to us how we achieved something that could copy music, we opted to stick with class materials and trash, as well as an earbud microphone for listening.
Our kick was made with a servo hitting a sour cream container
Our hi-hat was made by stacking a tin lid using a chopstick in a way that mimics a one.
How it works – Software
This max patch is meant to detect transients using layers of gates and filters/eq. Randolf then compares these transients and following sound to typical profiles of a kick/hi-hat to try to determine if it fits one or the other better or doesn’t fit at all. The patch also determines when he is listening (scheming, plotting) or playing (enacting his evil deeds).