He went on to talk about all it takes now is for public acceptance to catch up to the technology. He talked about how audiences used to demand real, live performances, not lip-syncing or playback tracks. Not anymore. Then people wanted actually singers, not Autotuned singing. Also, not anymore. He had a few more examples, but the point is that it's not a huge leap for the public to accept bot-generated songs; it's already accepted that nearly all popular music is digitally manipulated. It's only a matter of time before the public collectively says, "Why should I care if it's a computer or a human making the song? I just like it."
Either that or the metaverse takes off and avatars are normalized then I guess the artist could just be a computer generated avatar.
So, yeah, that's the last step: detach the song from the singer, or the music from the musician. I don't like it, but I totally get it. The Gorillaz are pretty music there already. Yeah, they have human performers, but who are they? Where are they? I don't know. And I don't care. But I like it.
My main concern is one of curation and discovery. The Internet already does a pretty bad job of these. And as a result it is very difficult for new artists to be discovered and find any sort of audience. But now you have a force multiplier that specifically allows people to produce plausible, trend-forward, but not boundary-pushing art with no effort. And you can churn out hundreds of these per day to completely corner public art spaces.
The downside of this is that the AI is statistics-driven, so it's going to reinforce a lot of the trends of "mainstream" art. Think about how a lot of AI art trends towards this kind of realism-plus, overly cinematic look. Anyone not making that is going to be crushed by the trends.
Which of course is already a huge problem in music. "Pop songs" are a very rigid formula, like to the point where new hit music often comes with a flurry of lawsuits because it's difficult to actually create legally distinct work in this genre. The reason why music works this way is that the people running these companies have the same mentality as the hustlegrind idiots telling you to go spam poster sites with AI art. They are not creating art to communicate, they are creating art to fill a market demand.
So my concern is the "popification" of art, writing, and code, as all of that gets delegated to machines that are constantly reproducing whatever was popular back in 2021.
I guess I'm ahead of the curve because I'll ask it now: If I like a song, why should I care if it's a computer or a human making it?
Personally, I doubt if there will ever be a computer generated song that I will really like. But I also generally don't like popular music either.
Edit: I'm an outlier though. For example, I don't have much respect for someone like Elton John because he doesn't write his own lyrics.
For artists who need to get started, now they have a much harder time getting to that stable income channel.
Obvious artists are more extreme, but try getting a job as an aspiring programmer with no degree or experience who is just starting to learn to program. I imagine it would be about as bleak as being an aspiring artist.
Yeah, life sucks, i wish we all lived in a star trek world without money, but in the mean time here we are.
Like, now, we have a hard time doing architectural restoration because going all-in on modernism destroyed the pipeline and ecosystem for artisans like stonemasons.