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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

His projection is valid because it's not a qualitative problem, it's a quantitative one.

Music may already have been turned into a commodity selected by traits other than quality, but tools like this bring the effect up to a whole new level, a whole new order of magnitude.

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Every tool that makes it easier to create art is good in my book. In years past you had to actually have the instruments and had to know how to work them. Now you can much easier learn to use simpler tools to get even better results, which just increases the amount of people that can actually realize their creativity.

But part of the whole point of listening to music is enjoying the expression of the people playing the instrument. Music is much more than just the final output of a machine, it's an expression of the soul. You may be able to create music more easily with this tool, but I guarantee it will be soulless, just like Google.

The results certainly will not be better. They will be a hideous amalgam from a computer. Just listen to real music created by real people (preferably live) and you will know how hideous these results really are.

Everything, even EFFICIENCY, has its limits to how much we should have.

The sheer amount of pop music and its pop-ularity contradicts you a bit here. Because one can play live AI generated music just as well, hop around on the beat and prompt the viewers to put their hands in the air - a live performance is (arguably much) more than the music. But I may be wrong, maybe the pop assembly line is not the sign of commoditization I seem to see, and won't gain that much from AI support.

You are right. The pop assembly line is EXACTLY what you describe. However, that does not mean we should create new technology to make that assembly line even MORE efficient! Instead, we should work on changing and dismantling society so that it is LESS efficient.

The same arguments were made to dismiss rock music when compared to classical music. And a world without the Velvet Underground would be more soulless to me.

I've heard soulless music performed by highly trained musicians playing on great instruments. And soulful music played on crappy instruments by untrained musicians. On average, the great music comes from the more trained musicians on the better tools.

AI is just another tool. The vast majority of music is terrible. It will continue to be terrible. And a few geniuses will use AI the way Hendrix used the electric guitar. I'm excited to hear what that will sound like.

> The same arguments were made to dismiss rock music when compared to classical music

Just because people were wrong in the past doesn’t mean they are wrong now.

> AI is just another tool

Not all tools are the same. A tool that changes how sound is amplified (like an electric guitar) is vastly different than a tool that can theoretically replace the human in the loop entirely.

Someone playing a piano and someone playing an electric piano are much, much closer to each other than someone pressing the start button on a player piano is to either of them.

That same argument has been wrong over and over again. So there's no reason to believe it's now suddenly a good argument unless given solid evidence.

Distortion was just another tool, and first rejected as highly undesirable. It's literally "just" putting an electric guitar through a tube amp and turning up the knob. And it revolutionized music. It sounds amazing in the right hands.

The more important point that I already made is the not all musicians are the same. Give a piano or a player piano to the vast majority of musicians and the output will be common and familiar. Give either to a musical genius like Hendrix and they'll manage to get something beautiful and new out of it. I'm looking forward to what the handful of geniuses out there will get out of AI. It's going to be fun.

Is a photograph soulless?

If people love paintings, they won't be replaced. But they will go to places photographs can't.

We're going to find out who loves music, and who loves manufactured crap. Wait, I think we already know.

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