AI can’t be all that bad. The problem I’m always seeing with AI is a double-edged sword. You have corporations shoving AI in just about everything, treating it like its a cure for cancer and that really rubs people the wrong way. Then, on a more of a society level, you’ve got people who use AI for an assortment of things like making art with AI and still accredit themselves as an artist to people who treat AI like a therapist when it is not advised to.
However, I’ve found some benefits with AI. For example, I’m chatting with ChatGPT on credit cards, because it is something I may lean towards getting into. It’s helping me better understand than most people have tried explaining to me. Simply because it is giving me a more stream-lined response than people just beating the bush.
An amazing use for it in audio engineering is for feedback suppression. The old way to give yourself more headroom required you to sit there and turn up the gain until feedback happens and cut that frequency. Now you just turn on the feedback suppression and it does all that for you on the fly. It’s game changing for live sound, every major venue has it now.
Great for film sound too. You’re filming a rainy scene and the rain is way to loud? You had to get the actors into the studio and do voiceover, now you can often just filter it out.
Oh yeah you’re right! It’s the same for all unwanted noise. Rustling, wind, buzz, ac noise. All of it can be filtered out now! You can even take away the reverb from an untreated room and add in your own reverb. Convolution reverb is amazing, you can actually capture the reverb of any space you want and add it into your recording in post. I honestly don’t know how much an expensive treated room matters over some investment in the plugins that let you do those things.
An example for movies: instead of trying to capture the actors talking inside their helmets for Interstellar, they actually made an IR inside of the helmet itself and added that to the overdubs!
The way you create an IR (impulse response) to capture the reverb of a space is you take a speaker and play a sine wave (or a gunshot/balloon pop,) then record it with a good mic. Then just take that WAV file and put it into a convolution reverb plugin. It sounds identical, the technology is amazing! You can use this to capture all kinds of analog circuitry like guitar amps also, that’s how they make those guitar amp plugins.