Comment by jimt1234 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimt1234 | Hacker News Reader

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I recently watched a short video interview with an old music exec that claimed music production is dead. Now that virtually all music production is digital, and has been reduced to algorithms, new music will be created with near-zero time and effort. Bots will be able to crank out hundreds of songs per minute for any genre, then upload them to streaming platforms, flooding them and making it impossible for a human musician to compete.

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."

Will the AI generated music be lip singed by humans like Milli Vanilli? Because a big part of the appeal of music is the image and persona of the artist. So I don’t see pure AI music taking off until the entire artist can be generated. That means an AI generated human likeness with a personality that can be featured in AI generated music videos.

Either that or the metaverse takes off and avatars are normalized then I guess the artist could just be a computer generated avatar.

Sound (versus performance) being a musician’s principal economy is a modern phenomenon. Born with the phonograph, killed by streaming.

Or the performer is whomever you'd like it to be but some performers cost more than others based on rights? So if you'd like, you can be Rick-rolled by an AI generated dancing penguin in the style of Picasso with anime overtones for one price, but the original or AI up-scales thereof will cost you more (though, obviously, your willingness to accept AI-added background product placement built into the video will effect the cost).

Everything will be AI-generated? Most vocals these days aren't really "human" anyway. Almost all vocals these days are digitally filtered (Autotuned), some singers/songs more than others.

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.

Hatsune Miku

> 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."

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?

If you like eating Big Macs, more power to you.

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.

The problem isn't the new technology being easier to "fake" the art. Concerns about some art being "fake" because it uses technology is just a weird form of artistic elitism: new, therefore bad. I, personally, have no problem with people using AI art (unless they're using it just to trace over other people's work, which is wrong).

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.

"Then people wanted ... . Not anymore." I remember Elton John (singer known for energetic live performances) complaining at a music awards show in 2004 that Madonna won a best "live" performance" award even though she was lip syncing thoughout her show. No one cared.

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