Is he real at all or an avatar?
These days you can't trust your eyes anymore. Dance robots will be better than us anyway in the future, so we could start accomodating to this thought.
Book says on2 meaning first step at 2?
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These days you can't trust your eyes anymore. Dance robots will be better than us anyway in the future, so we could start accomodating to this thought.better at soulless euro elevator salsa maybeIs he real at all or an avatar?
Imagine having a coach who is like your personal avatar who can teach you exactly what you need. A learning computer who has categorical knowledge of every musician and dancer on the planet with the ability to break down any concept and then tutor you as well as encourage you.
But then what would we talk about on SF?
How AI avatars are ruining Salsa.
He does seem to be a real person, Musa Starseed out of Brooklyn, now(?) in Boulder. Film person, he made a documentary about Cuban hiphop.
He seems to do some movement coaching for dancers. This interview he did with a PT on gait is pretty interesting
I'm afraid AI generated but real looking salsa dance videos will be posted soon and you can't say anymore if it's real or not. Or a real known dancer can be simulated by faking a dance from him/her. I don't see what's the incentive to do such things but some people enjoy to fool others. Or there is a financial incentive.
Back in 2021 after the perseverance rover landed on mars there were NASA videos on YT showing collections of photos in superb quality, I enjoyed watching (those were covid days at home). A bit later several accounts appeared with fake photos showing martian skeletons or martian house ruins in the sand, without saying it's fake but suggesting it's real. Simple minds may believe that. One of the accounts had an italian name: Italy has high unemployment amongst youngsters so I wondered if some guy from there tried to earn money this way because he couldn't find a real job. Google tells me for 1 million clicks on YT you may earn 1000 dollars, so that would be an incentive. Salsa videos don't get so much clicks so others will be faked much earlier. But if any photo or video can be faked what will we believe still? Maybe some people will lose interest in internet and start enjoying real people again. Or it doesn't matter anymore as long as that video is entertaining.
I sometimes watch political and current affairs commentary. Many AI generated pops up. Some are cloning the voice of famous commentators.
Every time I watch something on the YT, I wonder if is AI generated. There are clips of actors kissing each other which look very realistic but are AI generated.
The challenge is that the AI tools can generate upto 10 seconds of a video clip. That’s what Sora and nano Banana can do. However you can download a model locally to computer. One graphic card is enough to run a small visual language model. You don’t have to depend on the cloud.
Motivation may not be monetary. Some people will because they can. Some do it just for clicks. Creating fake salsa dancing is possible. Someone will have to fine tune a model with salsa dancing videos for trainings. I don’t know how well model will learn when videos have so many different angles. You won’t be able to control what the AI generated dance will look like. You can’t control the moves, etc. For that further training will be needed including reinforcement learning. Where you categorize the dance styles and also label individual moves. Then you can prompt “generate X person dancing salsa as a lead to {song name} with Y person in style of Z person. The dance should be 4 minutes and 30 seconds. Background should be like {name} congress”. If someone has enough time on hand to fine tune, technologically above is possible today. Training and fine tuning takes a lot of time so you will need that kind of access to GPUs in the cloud. Above is a simple prompt. You could choreograph the whole AI generated dance while cloning the dancers, or using AI generated dancers or a mix of both. To choreograph the model will have to understand each move and you will have to define the transition. Sophisticated trained model specifically for salsa, will require similar steps like training a beginner. That requires AI training to manually annotated and labeled videos. A properly labeled salsa training set can create advanced dancer (a clone of a person or AI generated person) very quickly.
You can tell very easily that it is AI generated. The couples walking together are unrealistically in synch. The walking movement doesn’t look natural. There are many other artifacts that give away it not being real.
To make it real is a hurdle but a small one for anyone with expertise, enough data to train, curated labeled training set and access to GPU cloud.
My thinking is that realistic Salsa movement synchronised to salsa music still has a long way to go.
There aren't many AI models for realistic dancing as of yet. For Salsa, it will take a lot longer to process good looking video and the AI community isn't exactly focusing on Salsa at the moment.
Right now the focus of AI seems to be on cat videos.
not really. All technology pieces are available. Time and effort is required.
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Sure, the technology is there, but the effort isn't and won't be for a while. Not while the commmunity demands more cat videos and political/celebrity satire.
Movement itself is tricky to make realistic. Rudimentary dancing videos are possible, but trying to match AI movement to the rhythm of Salsa is something else entirely.
Let's say it does happen. I'm not sure if the Salsa community will accept AI content so readily (music excluded). We will first see extreme stuff like AI dance avatars doing insane inhuman stunts, but who is going to make a fake video of two people dancing a boring Salsa basic for the purpose of learning when they can just show it just as easily in real life?
Would it benefit content creators to post fake videos of themselves dancing Salsa? How about posting fake videos of known Salsa celebs dancing in places they were never at?
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interesting take on "don't count" here, I wonder if that science holds up? good ad for his course at any rate
And on that topic: I notice in my patterny on2 class that's taught using counting that I have to free myself from the counting and dance to "inner clave/conga" to make it feel right. The count does help as a reference for communicating the movements though. Also there's a compromise in counting musically (uh-one *two* three, that pesky on2 fake "1").
If we want to escape the prison of counting then connect to the music/rhythm on the last beat of the 4/4 cycle, which is the gong-gong of the tumbao. Dancing On1, On2, On3, On4 no longer needs to follow the arithmetic progression starting from 1 where we calculate (brain) where to mark our first step. The gong-gong of the tumbao (feeling) is now our entry point absent counting.
We can now dance on all four timings without counting:
On1: no step
On2: 1 step
On3: 2 steps
On4: 3 steps
Each of these has a unique feeling to them. When your body memorizes them you can switch between them at will without any thought.
Adding numeric labels to the 4 or 8 beats to help people understand the overall structure of the dance is a path to hell paved by good intensions. Once on this path you fall prisoner to the arithmetic progression. As dancers this is the last place we want to be.
WellHelloThere
Changui
I often start on 6
Why not start on 8 with your last step, as with Son?
On the counting topic, started some small classes, trying to do something different to patterny repeat after me to the count. Did not go well, I think I've just repelled pattern dancers more than anything . Absolute beginners seem to pick it up better than established dancers. Had two newbies picking up the cu cun pa in cha cha cha better than established salsa dancers who kept asking for counts and couldn't get over the not starting on 1 thing. But I'm determined to try and keep going because it's pretty obvious this is what's holding back so many dancers.
I've noticed this too. Last patterny on2 workshop I did, I was out of sync with most as I was actually dancing to the conga as everyone else was counting. What I find nuts is when moves are taught to a count of 123 567 but when teachers dance to music they're actually dancing soft mambo timing so not stepping on 1. I get using the count to break down moves but if you don't actually take your 1 on 1 it is a little confusing!