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Comment by blondin | Hacker News Reader

i am sorry but we (i make music in my spare time) need to worry.

to echo what the comment above is saying. not because this AI generated music is good. but because it is good enough for the vast majority! and this concerns other fields as well. the consumption economy has set the bar for music and entertainment in general very low. most people don't know (or think) that the bar is low. because they have not experienced anything better and probably never will.

what's gonna happen next will be sad.

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The thing is, and this applies to any other human made vs computer made thing: there will always be people who cannot or don't care to discern between quality and "whatever" (aka "good enough", but where "good" is a very low bar).

The people who would be satisfied with AI generated music are people who would not have paid for human made music in the first place.

You as a good musician will never lose a sale to an AI music source, because that buyer wouldn't have bought your music in the first place.

Now if you make your living providing easy listening background music, then you will eventually be replaced.

Not even that I think. Even background music has more purpose than AI generated one. But you are right ... some people may have a low threshold with being satisfied and hear this kind of music.

Look at Max Martin - his songs are massive hits because they are highly engineered and use a proved Swedish recipe / formula / composition techniques (ex: balanced lines) that on paper are actually quite simple. On paper.

If it were as simple as it looks, everybody would be a Max Martin or somebody would train an AI on his canon and maybe actually have something decent. Music is based in emotion, and the bits and bytes aren’t close to simulating anything close other than probably raw schizophrenia.

The current state of AI music? There’s no amount of money you could pay me to listen to it for an hour a day for a week. No way. It’s that bad.

Counterpoint: a moderately musically inclined person with Propellerhead’s Figure can come up with more pleasing and coherent music on their third or fourth try that would put any of these to shame. It’s just reality at present.

My wife is an illustrator, and she got really depressed when I showed her the image AI tools available today. Again, none of this stuff would replace her unique work, but it devalues the entire profession.

> but it devalues the entire profession

This. All the previous comments made really good statements, but, in the end, it's the value we give to art that might suffer from AI generated content, and the people who produce "real" art.

I'm sure textile weavers a century ago said the same thing, and the world replied that if a machine can do what you do even adequately, your profession was always overvalued.

In the end, it's an iron law of post-industrial capitalism that the market value of human effort eventually approaches zero.

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