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Comment by p1esk | Hacker News Reader

I predict that in 2 years half of the music people listen to on Spotify will be AI generated.

Wanna bet? Cuz I think I’m 2 years Spanish language tracks will increase streaming by 20% and AI won’t even break 10% of listened to material.

You know how I know? The Rolling Stones are still touring. Most people don’t go to Spotify or YouTube for discovery, they go for convenient on demand.

Maybe not among you and your friends, but Spotify playlists are where a lot of music discovery happens these days.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/apr/28/streaming-musi...

Not sure that article is making the point you have in mind:

“people let playlists run on in the background when they serve inoffensive, bland music they can’t be bothered to turn off. If you look at the music Spotify has broken, it’s all chill-out stuff. That isn’t art, it’s wallpaper.”

AI can create inoffensive wallpaper

I specifically bookmarked this comment so I can start using it as an example of singulatarian/DL delusion in 2 years.

2 years ago, did you also think a prediction of "a widespread high quality AI image generation in 2 years" is an example of singulatarian/DL delusion?

As I said, we will see in 2 years. I am confident that your prediction (which was not "widespread music generation" but quite specific - in a platform in which the majority of streaming is generated by a handful of artists) will be spectacularly wrong.

I'm sure the names of the "handful of artists" will still be attached to the music, it's just the music will be AI generated. Most of those artists don't compose their hits anyway.

Yes, I expected goal-post moving in line of "even if a single beat is AI-generated, the entire song counts for AI-generated".

Or, the more likely one, in this case, "the first draft of the beat was AI-generated, then human-edited and the vocals were by the singer but they were processed, so it's AI-generated". Typical singularitarian bullshit.

No goal-post moving here, I predict that the entire song, every sound in it, including vocals, will be AI generated. Optionally with the name of your favorite human artist attached to it. Whether people will know (or care) that it's fully AI generated I don't know, it depends on how Spotify decides to promote such songs.

I initially thought your prediction was "AI-generated, with mostly human vocals and some editing" - which has no way of occurring in 2 years even for new songs, let alone if you include the legacy catalog.

This insane interpretation will not only not occur in 2 years, it will not occur this decade. Singularitarian delusion runs higher than even I imagined.

Again, I'm pretty sure 2 years ago many people would had said similar things about image generation. And yet here we are today using Stable Diffusion.

It's interesting you react so strongly to my prediction. Are you a musician? How much do you know about music generation research?

First, your prediction is analogous to something like "in 2 years, 50% of images used in {ad platform}/getty, will be AI-generated". Your prediction is actually "AI-generated without human editing". This is not true today and will not be true in 2 years from now even for images.

I am not a musician, have no musical (or any other art, actually) talent and have kept up (shallowly) with state-of-the-art music generation for a decade (because of idiocy kurzweil has spewed out).

I am "reacting strongly" because I detest singularitarians and everything they stand for. This board in particular has been a hotbed of delusion and idiocy for the last 6 months in every single AI thread I have read comments in.

And 10 years ago, did you predict that self driving cars were 2 years away?

music generation is a lot more similar to image generation than to self-driving cars

I'm questioning your ability to predict future improvements in performance on one task based on experience with a different task.

I don't know about half, but if Spotify don't have a large AI team they're missing the boat. They have a perfect opportunity to segue their audience into cheap content they create themselves.

Ray Kurtzweil predicted this in the 80s

Predictions rely on everyone forgetting how wrong you were

Maybe half a percent? But very doubtful...

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