I have to say, I completely lost it at the whisper '(The "Software")' (0:18)... give this tech another year or two and it will be better quality than your average radio song.
Only time will show if the next step will happen anyway. My gut feeling tells me that AI art will gain acceptance over time, and we will just think of it as "art" or "music", just as we did with recorded mysic and synthetic sounds.
I see little value to humanity in tools that are able to generate an endless amount of music derived from existing music, specifically designed to neatly slot into the place of human artists. We gain little in return from that.
Some people will make an argument like, this lets people generate lots of low-quality music for use in elevators or grocery stores. Well, there is already a massive oversupply of completely free music which can do that. Do people pretend to not know this?
The other weak argument is that it lets people express themselves who haven't studied or practiced music. But, it doesn't, because the interfaces (text prompts or "upload an existing file") are designed to take the place of a human being given instructions for criteria to fill, as if they were a worker, not an expression of the person giving the instructions. If the person giving the instructions were expressing themselves, most of the AI tool would not be redundant. It's as expressive as telling another person to write a song for you with some instructions. Hardly expressive at all.
And the quality of music generated by AI is increasing geometrically. Be careful to consider that any music heard today will be among the least quality generated by AI. Because it will get better with practice, at the speed of light.
That first comment I can get behind, but probably not in the way intended. Recording technology made performers less valuable, so fewer could make a living. The AI composers (and performers) will go further down that road. My conclusion? Get used to it. Just like human-adding-machines got replaced by calculators. And a generation of weavers, replaced by looms guided by punched cards.
This phenomenon is not new, and will go down a well-worn path.
I don't know why you are calling out this particular sentence fragment. That wasn't meant to differentiate AI-generated music from human created music.
> My conclusion? Get used to it.
What's the upside? I don't get it. I don't understand why you even replied to me. You didn't address the point I was making. The point was the examples I gave — photography, audio recordings, film — which are much closer to AI music than your examples of punch cards and looms — had clear upsides to humanity, despite also having some downsides. AI music and visual art seems to be almost entirely downside. Sorry to restate what I already wrote, but you didn't address it at all.
This is nothing new, your examples are great ones too, the benefits we got are, lots more art for everybody. To take the side of the composer/performer/artist is natural I suppose, but that's such a tiny fraction of humanity. To ignore the clear and positive upside, even claim it doesn't exist, is disingenuous?
To criticise AI music for being the same as human music, is a curious thing to say if one doesn't want to distinguish the two somehow? I missed that point entirely I guess. I don't know why that sentence was there at all then.
This is still not relevant. You don’t need to bring it up again. I wasn’t criticizing it for that.
As for the rest of your comment, you didn’t state any upsides for AI generated music, but you did spend time to attack me, so I think we’re done here.
It's important to distinguish these things.
For augmenting comoposers, sure, GenAI can be a tool like others. Musicians have been incorporating rhythms and melodies shipped with their electronic instruments for ages.
Entire genres have been defined by sounds and synth presets, too.
So I do see a bit of the similarities that you describe, but I think this is largely misleading.
The argument is that each technology advance accompanied resistance followed by adaptation. "Recorded music" was arguably as paradigmatically disruptive over "live music" as "AI generated music" will be.
From my perspective the implications of this are dire. AI can completely remove the human element. The skill, creativity, and collaboration required to produce music is a big part of my appreciation for it. Once that's gone, when Spotify can generate exactly what I want to hear, Music as we know it loses its value.
You're not wrong. A paradigm shift is not an incremental change but a disruption of fundamentals.
> From my perspective the implications of this are dire.
These changes are scary, especially as people try to come to practical terms with the new reality.
> AI can completely remove the human element. The skill, creativity, and collaboration required to produce music is a big part of my appreciation for it.
I still hate autotune. I feel that it ruined music. But, on the other hand, it allowed people who were excellent musicians but terrible singers to make excellent music, even masterpieces. I don't think autotune was a paradigm shift really, but it was pretty disruptive.
People are deeply creative, social, collaborative, musical, artistic, hierarchical and status conscious. These traits will always drive people to make music and share it, and derive meaning from it. People will still pay other people for the music they make.
Photography utterly disrupted the social role that painters held as documentors. No one needed to hire a good painter to have a portrait. They could hire a photographer more cheaply for more accurate documentation. Artists working in the medium of painting really had to grapple with the question of what art is, if academic faithful representation of reality is no longer valued by society. Painting thus began to change. Impressionism led to Suprematism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Conceptualism, Modernism, Post Modernism.
Artists today will have to grapple with similar questions raised by AI generated art. But humans are creative, indomitable, curious and tenacious. I am absolutely excited to see the art that future human artists will make in the face of all of this.
Somehow this nudged me a bit when I switched to YTM, although the bundle with YT background playback on iOS was probably the bigger nudge. There's plenty of AI-generated music on YouTube as well, but for the moment their recommendation algorithm and catalogue is just better for me.
For now, it also doesn't seem to suggest me any AI-generated music whenever I use autoplay or suggestions.
I'm not falling for the illusion that this won't change though.
Another side of it is that it will enable the creation of more music around more topics than before, by non-musicians. The accessibility bar is lower.
For a lot of people, music is a way to express their emotions, and not just by creating/playing it, but by listening to it. Now, you'll be make your own hyper-specific music with lyrics around topics specific to you, without learning any of the underlying skills yourself.
I've certainly wanted some kinds of music/representation in music of some of my experiences to exist, but not enough to go out and learn to make it myself. Now/soon I should be able to do that with AI tools, and I think that's actually neat!
> as giving those instructions to a person to create a song for you
Most people don't have access to such a person.
A tool like this will open up a lot of possibilities.
No, they won't turn into the next Hans Zimmer.
For a normal person, whether something is art or not, is a mix of 1) whether they like it, 2) whether they can, or conceivably could, enjoy it together with other people, and 3) whether they're supposed to enjoy it or call it art, because other people claim they do (social proof).
Examples:
- Pop songs are strongly 1, 2 and 3a (enjoyment), but not necessarily 3b (considered High Art). Most people don't care, or couldn't even tell, if the songs they like were written and performed by actual humans or by machines; they experience them through some machine anyway.
- Paintings. I recently visited a Van Gogh exhibition, and I can't honestly say I liked most of it. Most paintings, in general, are ugly. We call them art because we're supposed to call some paint scribbles on a canvas art, particularly when they're framed and put in a museum (as opposed to bought off the street!) and decreed Art by People In Authority Over What Is or Isn't Art. For this exhibit in particular, my ability to enjoy the paintings was proportional to how much I knew about Vincent van Gogh's life - for those paintings I had some context for, I enjoyed them even though they're otherwise pretty bad to me. But most people, most of the time, don't have any context for paintings they're viewing, and they still call them art.
Hell, arguably, the best "paintings" in that exhibit were a couple that were obviously AI-generated - like Vincent wearing VR goggles, or animated Vincent inviting the patrons to the exhibit.
Nah, what I think is death of art for regular people is quantity and personalization. The most important aspect of day-to-day art experience is that you can enjoy it together with people around you. It's a problem for TV shows and books these days, and even more with "Internet original" videos - there's just so many of them, and with everyone's getting their own personalized feed, it's getting hard to find common creative works you and your conversational partners both seen. Everyone's experience is becoming disjoint from everyone else's (except for occasional superhero or wizard movie) - at which point you eventually realize that enjoying unique art no one else has is pointless waste of life.
For me, one problem with AI art is that there isn’t context for any of it. It’s just there and didn’t come from anywhere.
Eventually, some prompt engineer may build up a coherent body of work that is moving or provocative, but we aren’t there yet.
P.S. I don't mind people using AI as tools, but the human agency needs to be visible and relatable. If it's only a prompt, don't ask why I don't value it.
The prompt can be detailed, creative, and innovative. Kinda like a composer comes up with an idea for a new piece. But now the composer won't need the technical ability to translate it into musical notation.
All our current AIs need prompts to produce content. So, you'd need to enter a prompt so that AI can produce a prompt for you.
But I guess you could develop some variant which just generates prompts in a cycle. But most of the generated prompts will pretty bad, so it will in turn produce heaps of crap.
That's where the human element is still needed - try a prompt, evaluate the result, tweak the prompt again. If this doesn't produce a good result, try a different idea. It's not even that different from how artists produce content these days (the create <-> evaluation cycle). Current AI is not good enough to be able to judge the produced content (that's why it produces so much crap after all).
> I've not heard of any art classes that train you by copying everything that has been produced.
You don't have to learn it, because it's the second nature for humans. We learn by imitation. Babies learn to talk by imitating sounds from parents. Artists learn by imitating style by masters. That's what generative AI does as well.
All of these had immense impact on the way we create (or make art). And despite all this, we still use waterpaint, perform music on ancient instruments, make furniture with minimalistic tools, or use clay to make objects.
I'm not pessimistic about generative AI. If anything, It'll allow more people to create. Allow new and unprecedented art forms. It will have an effect on the way people make money with art. But so did photoshop, digital audio mixers, a table saw, and a CAD/CAM machines.
Like the banana. The bananas isn't art, taping a random banana to a random wall and eating a banana isn't art. A particular person taping a banana to a particular wall for a particular reason is what make the whole thing art.
I definitely agree that you shouldn't. To me absolutist arguments about if AI-generated content is art or not makes no sense. AI is a tool, like for example carpentry, that can be used for many purposes. Most carpentry isn't art, it's craftsmen building useful things and solving practical problems. But there are definitely artists out there using carpentry as the medium in which they express their artistic intent.
Not a lot of individuals, to be honest. Only a handful of people make any kind of living from composing. Millions try it, but have to be content with performing for their friends. Which will continue unchanged.
So the actual economic impact of AI music will be different from the scenarios being described. What is true is, we will all have a lot more musical listening choices. Which is a net good for the rest of us?
Algorithmic music has already been around for decades and it never became popular. In the 90's it was of interest only to a small group of academic music nerds. The same is true today. Avant-garde shit for nerds. No one wants to listen to it.
> we got the synthesizer. Again we got the same complaints
I honestly don't believe this happened. Citations?
You make it sound like one day there was no recording and then bam! flac quality recordings of musicians, out of the blue. You do realize it started with exceedingly shitty wax cylinders that sounded absolutely atrocious by today standards (and by the past standards as well)
>After the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, all bets were off for live musicians who played in movie theaters. Thanks to synchronized sound, the use of live musicians was unnecessary — and perhaps a larger sin, old-fashioned. In 1930 the American Federation of Musicians formed a new organization called the Music Defense League and launched a scathing ad campaign to fight the advance of this terrible menace known as recorded sound.
>The Music Defense League spent over $500,000, running ads in newspapers throughout the United States and Canada. The ads pleaded with the public to demand humans play their music (be it in movie or stage theaters), rather than some cold, unseen machine.
>Joseph N. Weber, the president of the American Federation of Musicians, made it clear in the March, 1931 issue of Modern Mechanix magazine that the very soul of art was at stake in this battle against the machines.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/musicians-wage-war-ag...
> live musicians who played in movie theaters
and it wasn't about recorded music, but mechanical pianos
It is a test that selects for the ability to deceive.
1. We tell a human (test subject) that they will be a judge but they are a test subject. We will tell them that there will be two chats -- one will have a human and the other will have a computer and they need to decide which is which.
2. We will then give them access to two real time chats but the twist is both of them will be humans.
3. Our test subject needs to rebel against the experiment and say they are both humans.
What percentage of the population will be able to say both chats are humans? Is this a humane experiment? Will any ethics board clear it? Does it have any scientific value?
Dunno, but it could probably get published and I'd at least read the comments when it gets posted to HN.
Tricky bit is the design in the signaling and instructions so as to avoid biasing the results while still allowing the desired 'both are human' response. Something like a check box for each chat if that chat was a robot. If you have the budget I'd also run the control Turing test, human x computer, as well as a computer x computer test.
About a third of people are highly suggestible and agreeable, they readily follow authority, fall for scams and can be hypnotised. About a third cannot be easily conned or hypnotised, are vigilant, "disagreeable" and likely to go their own way.
Even of that highly sceptical, independent third, it takes a lot of courage to say "I totally know this is bullshit, and I'm done". Only a handful of Migram's subjects were able, not just to assert a moral objection to hurting a fellow human being, but to question or see through the whole ruse of fake scientists and stooges. Even if you can spot that, it takes rather a rare human to act on it, to call it out and walk away - or rather escape the parameters (get outside the box) you've been placed within.
Maybe there will be a change of feeling, it's starting to come to me, instead of seeing this AI generated content as "soulless" etc I'm starting to see it as an extension of OUR human generated work. It's more like an endless remix of HUMAN talent.
All of that is boring though. The exciting stuff is all that will be displaced, and how we will solve the myth or meritocracy.
IMHO this and things like it are basically a sub-class of comedy or satire, so I have time for this sort of thing. It's a joke, and should (can?) only be appreciated as artistic as someone saying "Wouldn't it be funny if ... ?" because now that casual thought can be turned into a pretty instant "well here it is! LOL!".
I don't think you're supposed to appreciate it as music. Maybe I'm calling it wrong though.
(edit - I will admit that upon further thought, I'm not sure how I feel about this when compared to, for example, Nina Gordon recording "Straight Outta Compton" as an accoustic, mildly lamenting singer-songwriter style number 20-some years ago. It's clearly in the same satrical arena but one took a lot more effort and imagination. Kinda, because there was a lot of effort and imagination that went into both the training data and the model, even if this specific output was only a passing joke. It's quite hard to reason about this stuff...)
A lot of satirical songs are absolute bangers, because (for example) to do a send-up of the tropes of X music, you must know all the tropes of X music, and be able to perform them. So a lot of satirical music is actually done by people with a lot of skill and passion for the thing being satirised.
And because satirists don't have to worry about being predictable or unoriginal, they can put in more crowd-pleasing cliches per minute than 'serious' artists, giving them the most intense X of all X artists.
(Not saying the MIT license is a banger though - just that some satirical songs are)
I think it's a bit like everyone who said "black cabs in London have nothing to fear; X years of 'The Knowledge' will always be better than a guy with an App in an old Prius..." Except it was all wrong. Black cabs are probably still superior, but the bulk of people (and especially new customers) are all using Uber, because it's easier and they just don't care.
It sucks that production factory, literally built to make money, AI created junk music will be a thing, but it most likely will. Someone will exploit that they can make a ton of cash with low risk and budget. They'll have the connections to, despite initial (somewhat) faux outrage from the public/press, get radio play/playlisted online ("probably even 'ironic' addition from the hipster music crowd"). The song will be an earworm, and aside from the musicians that hear all the flaws, the passive every day mom and pop listeners will get the hook stuck in their head and it'll just be another great tune like any other.
I don't think we'll replace 'celebrity', I think that'll still happen, and I think maybe greater appreciation will happen to 'real musicians' (with a face!). But 'everyday' disposable pop (like all those one hit wonder tunes that are still played in nightclubs, pubs, throwback radio, wedding discos) - that's going to be disrupted massively.
I guess my point was that I don't hate the linked tune because it's not someone asking me to listen to a song, it's a joke and one that does have some humour to it.
I can absolutely see this tech (if it's allowed to) replacing a lot of working musicians who do music for ads, jingles, tv, film etc. And yes, disposable pop is probably on the chopping block.
> disposable pop ... that's going to be disrupted massively.
I wonder how the disruption will play out - the world is already drowning in content created by humans. If we envision that AI can make disposable pop to the same standard (and I have no reason to doubt it) then that surely creates an absolute deluge, almost boundless in size, of stuff. Promotion will become more or less the only art, to make things stand out from the crowd, and that can probably only continue for situations in which people want a shared experience. For an awful lot of situations the streaming of entirely ephemeral audio would probably do. It could as easily kill 'pop' as a business on the audio side, as it could steal it.
I'm just sorta daydreaming about possible outcomes here. All sorts could happen.
There's a craving for a deeper connection but that's usually the smaller part of our everyday consumption.
If you are a little bit of a critical listener you listen to those songs because you connect to them somehow, that's the power of music, it's a language for emotions that you don't need to know how the artists look like, or their backgrounds, to feel what they try to convey. Having the context/background might help to intellectualise a piece of music but the feeling comes from the art itself.
AI music is pure entertainment, not art.
What will be worthy is imperfect human-created art. We already went through this decades ago with expensive hand made vs cheap machine made stuff, this is just another iteration.
I am not saying it will be great to be an artist, just like in the past few famous live in limelight and most will struggle to stay afloat.
It's no different than using Photoshop.
Unless you only consider art done with oil and on a canvas to be the "real thing."
And sometimes not knowing is better like the example with Rammstein and row zero were some manager woman was asking other woman if they want to meet their rockstars.
Btw. on a good electronic music set, knowing the arist is probably more a quality sign than a personal aspect. Knowing that i like what arist xy does, means i might like to keep an eye on future work because i like the style of it.
Nonetheless, i do also think that fandom and doing real tours will still be the unique things for bands. There should always be a market for human content.
AI music will disrupt this market.
Spotify for example will try to produce their own AI music (like they already do with regular music). The Christmas playlist will then mainly contain their music. That saves a lot of money for the.
But have also had the non-surprising "Hedonistic Fatigue" that comes with excess access to something originally valued. I have now been able to generate 4 and 5 digit numbers of pictures of awesome colourful steam locomotives and epic dungeon vistas, but now find myself fatigued by "what on earth am I going to use 5000 dungeon pictures for?", coupled with the dread of being forced to CHOOSE from 5000 options. And I learn the known principle, that when you can choose from 4 options, you are happy you picked the best of 4, but when you can pick from 5000 options, you are left feeling inadequate with "I almost certainly was not able to pick the best of those 5000 options, and trying to do so would exhaust me". So suddenly, picking something from your menu of options, feels dreadful and fatiguing.. (I get the same feeling sometimes, when trying to pick a movie to watch out of 16.000 options).
So yeah, no doubt the AI sketch/refinement tool will be merged into our creative process, but for the time being, I feel a second generation of alienation-estrangement with my "available options".
I've been thinking about it the same as you but something that I think we're missing here is what can the person who can already make 5k pictures by hand do with this kind of tool?
It makes me think of the later albums that Frank Zappa produced with a Synclavier. That guy went hog-wild on that thing and banged out some unbelievable albums.
What would he have been able to do with AI generated music technology if it was the Synclavier of his time? What are the Frank Zappas of our time going to do with AI?
And then if it was restricted to a few parties, they still have to compete with human artists, they can't just charge whatever.
Yeah, the last two live mega tours (Taylor Swift and Beyoncé) have a tad more personality than the average artist, but the usual stuff that you would hear on the radio might as well be AI generated and live-performed by animatronics and a significant chunk of the audience wouldn't care or even notice.
I mean people watch Love Island on TV for chrisssssakes. Humans can definitely be mindless consumers, where the sugar salt and fat in fast-food is the same as false drama, outrage, sex and violence in media. We all got buttons and they're so easy to push. Just look how popular TT is versus the type of content on there; mostly short-lived mindless stuff.
There will be a TON of these 60-second tracks, and no one wants to listen for anywhere near that long while skimming a feed, so these will now be ignored.
I wouldn't be surprised is all caps gets interpreted by it completely differently over multiple iterations.
Experiment: https://suno.com/song/3338f5e5-b36d-4596-815d-cd2804c9a344 (generated lyrics)
Same lyrics all caps (chorus): https://suno.com/song/b176c658-9e9c-4a4b-b05e-6db291f415c9 didn't really do anything.
After loads of different attempts trying to get something different: https://suno.com/song/398ef310-94b8-493a-ae61-22b790875689 not really that great.
Tbf I think it's because it's been trained on genres and maybe lyrics and lacks info on vocal styles and other stuff present in tracks during the training...
What I would like to see is what happens if you ask it to do in 5/8, 5/4 or any of the 7/* variants and see how that goes (I have no idea, might actually work). There are some examples in common music but not a lot especially for the more obscure ones. Unless they also trained it on a lot of international folk songs.
And yes it can do odd time signatures. It can do all sorts of genres like art pop, cinematic scores, ambient, math rock, avant garde, baroque, etc.
TBH that's a pretty low bar; "radio" songs have been engineered and polished for a very long time now. I have no hard numbers but gut feeling says radio music only represents 1% of the music industry.
I almost feel compelled to take action against the corruption and crookedness.