Except instead of pursuing policies that would help open models at the expense of Big AI, anti-AI people pursue just the opposite - policies that can cripple open source AI but have no realistic ability to meaningfully hurt big AI. It's so short sighted.

Actually, no, what they usually do is much more insidious: fingerprinting rather than watermarking. The fingerprint isn't actually included in the audio, it's included in a database. If they want to tell if the track was generated, they just try to match the fingerprint in the database. Can't filter it out of the track like you can with a watermark.

The two mainstream options (both about half a year old now, we're due for something better) are Ace Step-1.5 and Stable Audio 3 Medium.

Ace Step has full vocals with its music. See here for examples. The downside in my opinion (judge for yourself) is that it has Suno's flaw of sounding too "clean", "mainstream" and "uncreative", except even moreso (Udio was always much better than Suno at this, albeit "less well behaved" - but Udio is out of the game now).

Stable Audio 3 doesn't do vocals, though it has other useful features, like inpainting (great for fixing glitches in recorded tracks for example). In my view, it sounds a lot better. It can also be used to create sound effects. License is a bit more restrictive, though, if you actually care about that, but generally won't affect the average user.

Both are trained on fully licensed data and both are open-weights. So even if the devs released a version that included some sort of watermarking in the future (or someone developed a fingerprinting algo for the existing versions), you could just finetune them to break that.

TL/DR, if you want open source and want to just churn out a full track: choose Ace Step 1.5.
If you want open source and want to do instrumental tracks or to supplement manual work (such as your own vocals) or do audio editing: chose Stable Audio 3.

Why would it even need to be "guaranteed"? That is a really stupid standard. If it usually does better, that is quite enough. And it usually does better. Anybody denying that has simply absolutely no clue about the tech.

Same. I did think about skipping COVID late last year, but I noticed my that many of my students were down for 2 weeks or longer and some told me they had a "really bad flu". Probably COVID going round again.

Lies, lies and more lies. And no, 2 days is _far_ too short for a Covid shot to kill. You either die immediately or weeks later if the vaccine is the cause. You need to make up better lies.

Yep. One wonders whether they bomb Iran because they are _envious_ of the regime there ...

I disagree. Critical thinking is not natural for most people. And I doubt it can actually be taught to most people. But we have about 10-15% critical thinkers in the human race and they crop up in the most unlikely places, like people born into a cult, with no outside contact, that manage to find out what is actually going on and leave. That would indicate that for at least some people it is quite natural.

That is a really difficult question. We do not know enough.

Most or all dementia variants qualify, for example. As soon as it is more like kognitive incapability, maliciousness, narcissism, etc. it gets very murky, because Science still has no clue at all how a human mind works and why it is even possible.

Well, COVID does not kill that many people anymore, also because we know how to treat it now. What was true back when is that the COVID deaths (and deaths of others needing intensive care) go through the roof when you run out of intensive care experts and ventilators. And also remember that being on a ventilator for a longer time leaves pretty bad damage, the less the experienced the expert is, the worse the damage. Dying is not the only concern.

Yes, that is far too complex for the MAGA idiots. I guess they are also very surprised or outright deny the measles outbreaks. Or that they apparently still have not managed to find out where the explosive diarrhea comes from. Sack experts, stop tracking and you get far longer times to fis things like that. Apparently also too complicated an idea for these people. I wonder what medical disasters will be next.

I would say that, but many of them have children they inflict anti-vaxxing on. That is more like attempted manslaughter. On the other hand, especially the MAGAs seem to be perfectly fine with child abusers, so maybe that is part of their belief system?

Same. I am usually down for half a day after the classical shot. And the improved effectiveness is also very welcome.
Now they need to start working on the common cold as well. Would not mind at all getting rid of that one.

While COVID was horrible, one of its good effects is that vaccine research got restarted. Vaccines for humans had stagnated far too long.

This has to be a troll. Nobody on Slashdot is actually this stupid.

I often wonder how all these people who believed that COVID vaccines were a plot to sterilize or murder humanity have justified to themselves the continued-unchanged existence of babies-in-specific and humans-in-general, respectively.