请看《金融时报》的详细报道：
On my 13th birthday, my parents gave me a portable CD player and the masterpiece that was Fresh Hits 1997. Like more than 600mn other people, I have long since swapped my box of CDs for the Spotify app on my phone. But I found my old birthday present recently and discovered it still worked. Even using headphones from the 1990s, I was staggered by the richness of the sound.
13岁那年生日时，父母送了我一台便携式CD播放机和一张经典唱片《Fresh Hits 1997》。和其他6亿多人一样，我早就把自己那堆CD换成了手机上的Spotify应用。但最近我找到了以前的生日礼物，发现它还能用。即使用的是上世纪90年代的耳机，我也被其音质的丰富所震撼。
My ears didn’t deceive me. CDs have a bit-rate of 1,411 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 realise this is hardly news to music aficionados. Neil Young, who grudgingly returned his music to Spotify this year after a spat involving Joe Rogan, complained, “There is so much tone missing that you can hardly feel the sensitivity.”
我的耳朵没有欺骗我。CD的比特率为每秒1411kbps，该单位用来表示有多少数据用来呈现声音。Spotify Premium的比特率从24kbps到320kbps不等，而免费的Spotify用户的比特率最高只能达到160kbps。我知道这对乐迷来说并不是什么新闻。尼尔•杨(Neil Young)今年不情愿地将自己的音乐作品重新放上Spotify的时候抱怨说：“音色缺失太多，里面细腻的东西几乎感觉不到了。”尼尔•杨此前为了抵制Spotify平台上的乔•罗根(Joe Rogan)播客将其音乐作品从该平台撤下了。
If hundreds of millions of normal music listeners (like me) have decided to trade audio quality for convenience and variety, then fair enough. But what disconcerted me is that I didn’t know that’s what I’d done. I had simply forgotten how much better music used to sound.
如果数以亿计的普通音乐听众（像我一样）决定为了方便和多样性而放弃音质，那倒也无可厚非。但令我不安的是我并不知道自己放弃了什么。我已经彻底忘了曾经的音乐听起来有多美妙。
第一，学习stagger的用法。这个词作及物动词，表示to make someone feel very surprised or shocked，使〔某人〕惊愕[震惊]，例：What staggered us was the sheer size of her salary. 令我们感到惊愕的是她的薪水之高。
第二，学习grudge的用法。这个词作及物动词，表示to do or give something very unwillingly，勉强做〔某事〕；勉强给〔某物〕，常用搭配为grudge doing sth，例：I really grudge paying for poor service. 服务很差，我实在是不愿意付钱。
第三，学习aficionado的用法。这个词作名词，表示someone who is very interested in a particular activity or subject and knows a lot about it，……迷；狂热爱好者，例：an aficionado of fine food 美食家
There should be a word for this phenomenon. Qualitynesia, perhaps? If wearing “rose-tinted glasses” is the act of thinking something was better in the past when it objectively wasn’t, this is its opposite: forgetting something was better in the past when it objectively was.
应该有一个词来形容这种现象。或许可以叫“品质失忆症”？如果说戴着“玫瑰色眼镜”是指主观认为过去的东西更好，而客观上并非如此，那么这个词就是它的反面：主观上忘了过去的某样事物更好，而客观上它的确更好。
This is hardly new. In 1937’s The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell argued that a century of mechanisation had worsened the quality of food, furniture, houses, clothes and entertainment, but that most people didn’t seem to care. He blamed “the frightful debauchery of taste” rather than collective amnesia, though. “Mechanisation leads to the decay of taste, the decay of taste leads to the demand for machine-made articles and hence to more mechanisation, and so a vicious circle is established,” he wrote.
这并不是什么新鲜事。乔治•奥威尔(George Orwell)在1937年出版的《通往威根码头之路》(The Road to Wigan Pier)中指出，一个世纪以来的机械化进程使食物、家具、房屋、服装和娱乐的品质每况愈下，但大多数人似乎并不在意。他将此归咎于 “可怕的品味堕落”，而不是集体失忆。他写道：“机械化导致品味下降，而品味下降导致对机械制造物品的需求，从而导致更多的机械化，这样就形成了一个恶性循环。”
Most of the time, high-quality options carry on in a niche way, but they become more expensive or inconvenient, relatively speaking, and fewer people either remember what they’re missing, or are willing or able to pay the extra. In the UK, for example, clothing accounted for 10 per cent of the average family’s spending in 1957; last year it accounted for 3 per cent.
大多数时候，高品质的选择以一种小众的方式继续存在，但相对而言，它们会变得更加昂贵或不方便，只剩下一个小众群体还坚守，他们要么还记得缺失了什么，要么愿意或能够支付额外的费用。以英国为例，1957年服装占普通家庭支出的10%，而去年只占3%。
第一，学习amnesia的用法。这个词作名词，表示the medical condition of not being able to remember anything，记忆丧失，遗忘（症）。
第二，学习vicious的用法。这个词作形容词，表示very unkind in a way that is intended to hurt someone’s feelings or make their character seem bad，狠毒的，恶毒的，恶意的，例：Sarah can be quite vicious at times. 萨拉有时相当狠毒。
There are, of course, plenty of counter-examples of products which have improved in quality over time, such as computers and phones. All the same, my realisation about music left me with the question: what is there in the world today which people will have qualitynesia about in the future? One obvious place to look is the creative sector upon which AI is now beginning to encroach.
当然，产品随着时间推移品质不仅没有下降反而提高的例子也很多，比如电脑和手机。不过，我在音乐上意识到的事情让我产生一个问题：当今世界上有什么东西，是人们会在未来患上“品质失忆症”的？一个显而易见的领域是创意行业，而人工智能正开始蚕食它。
Research so far suggests that when people know something “creative” was made by AI, they find it mediocre and soulless. But if they don’t know, they quite like it. A recent study found that people couldn’t 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 real poems by those poets. The researchers’ theory is that the AI poems were less challenging.
到目前为止的研究表明，当人们知道一些“创意”作品是由人工智能创造出来的，他们会觉得它平庸而没有灵魂。但如果他们不知道，他们就会很喜欢。最近的一项研究发现，人们无法区分人工智能生成的诗歌和人类创作的诗歌，而且实际上人们更喜欢具有威廉•莎士比亚(William Shakespeare)和西尔维亚•普拉斯(Sylvia Plath)等著名诗人“风格”的人工智能诗歌，而不是这些诗人的真正作品。研究人员的理论是，人工智能诗歌读起来没那么富有挑战性。
Similarly, Coca-Cola’s new AI-made Christmas advert, a version of its famous “Holidays are Coming” one from the 1990s, was popular when tested on people who weren’t told it was AI. Andrew Tindall from System One, which performed the tests, told me that was because the AI version was leaning heavily on “a great creative idea invented over 30 years ago, by a human marketing team that has built that idea and invested in it over 30 years.”
同样，可口可乐(Coca-Cola)最新的人工智能圣诞广告——仿照该公司上世纪90年代著名的“节日将至”广告生成——在不告知受试者是人工智能生成的情况下，受到了他们的欢迎。执行测试的System One公司的安德鲁•廷德尔(Andrew Tindall)告诉我，这是因为人工智能版本在很大程度上依赖于“一个30多年前发明的伟大创意，而这个创意是由一个人类营销团队在30多年前打造和投资的。”
第一，学习encroach的用法。这个词作不及物动词，表示to gradually take more of someone’s time, possessions, rights etc than you should，逐步侵占[侵犯]；蚕食，例：Bureaucratic power has encroached upon the freedom of the individual. 官僚权力已经侵犯了个人的自由。
第二，学习mediocre的用法。这个词作形容词，表示not very good，不太好的，例：I thought the book was pretty mediocre. 我认为这本书非常一般。
That sounds reassuring for people who want to believe in the irreplaceable value of human creativity. And in any case, just because people liked one AI advert doesn’t mean they would enjoy AI films or novels, which matter more to most of us. What’s more, history does offer some examples of people reacquiring a taste for quality. A new generation of young people is now driving a small rise in CD sales, for example.
对于那些想要相信人类创造力具有不可替代价值的人来说，这听起来令人欣慰。无论如何，人们喜欢一条人工智能广告并不意味着他们会喜欢人工智能电影或小说，这些对我们大多数人来说才更重要。此外，历史确实提供了一些人们重拾品味的例子。例如，新一代年轻人正在推动CD销量的小幅增长。
Yet the unsettling thought lingers. If people do like AI-remixes of familiar-feeling, once-human content, and if they’re increasingly hard to detect and much cheaper to produce, we could drift into a world of steadily worsening remixes of previous remixes of previous remixes. And by that point, would we even know what we’d lost?
但这种令人不安的想法挥之不去。如果人们确实喜欢人工智能对熟悉的、人类生成的内容进行的混剪，而且如果这些人工智能混剪的内容越来越难以识别，制作成本也越来越低，那么我们可能会陷入一个越来越糟糕的混剪世界，一直用之前的混剪内容继续混剪。到那时，我们甚至还能知道我们失去了什么吗？
Joni Mitchell once sang: “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” But there is a sadder possibility: that by the time it’s gone, you don’t even remember that paradise was better than the parking lot.
琼妮•米切尔(Joni Mitchell)曾经唱道：“事情不总是这样。直到失去后你才知道曾经拥有过什么。”但还有一种更可悲的可能性：当你失去它的时候，你甚至不记得天堂曾比停车场好。
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