If this was an actual person performing, I would have smiled all the way to the end. Since this is AI-generated, I feel no emotion towards this, and just listened for a few seconds. It's technically interesting.
Why is it worthless? Because the point of art was to communicate or convey something with other people and the AI has no idea because its not human.
A few words or a sequence of sounds can be enough to transfer great deal of feeling and meaning because we run about the same software and as a result we can generate the same output with a little bit of input. This is all done by looking inside and externalise it, that is someone feels something and makes a song from it and that song can be used to regenerate feelings in other people.
The current AI tech doesn't have a way to do that because doesn't have a way to look inside. At best, it can imitate things within some context but the output doesn't have any meaning at all. The most successful AI content was maybe the "Pope wearing Balenciaga" image but that wasn't because the AI thought it mean something but because someone looked inside and thought this can be interesting.
So no, AI isn't taking over the creative process. AI is taking over the mechanical part of it only, that is the part where the artist traditionally had to master a method of production or an instrument.
The AI evangelists keep pushing short videos or drawings that look "professional" and claiming that Hollywood is done, artists are screwed etc but those are worthless outside of the context that AI made it. No one is interested in paying or even spending time to consume this content, its extremely dull.
This is mixing up art with the art industry. Artists will struggle just like copywriters are struggling after the arrival of LLMs. Not everything in the art industry is trying to break new artistic ground or communicate some deep emotion to the listsener. For much of the industry, "good enough" will suffice if it's 10x cheaper.
Maybe with exception of strictly technical work like people who remove background in mages or calibrate instruments. Those people are screwed yes.
It boils down to the economic model and the financial and political choices like in every creative industry.
Regarding potential displacement, I would apply the stock photography theory to any creative industry. Ask yourself: is what I do in my creative endeavor the equivalent of stock content for the visual imaging industry? If the answer is yes, you might want to future proof your craft. If the answer is no (as in, your art is more than a simple soulless piece of easily digested and quantity-oriented content) then you will be fine in the long run after the current unsustainable hype cycle dies out.
The stock photography stuff is either documenting event or displaying low effort illustration for low effort productions. I guess AI can be good at churning Apple images for low effort Apple news.
On the wall, you will find an Obligatory Art. Sometimes it's just a canvas with 3-4 stripes of paint: you can imagine a purely mechanical process for churning these out; a conveyor belt with brushes hanging over it, perhaps. Other times it's a little more creative. Each room is slightly different. You can also sometimes see these in cheap home decor shops. It may not be much, but it does the job - it really does make the space more pleasant than just blank walls would be.
There are a lot of rooms to fill. Someone has to make all these. It may not be all that creative, but it sure beats working in, say, a produce packing plant. Meanwhile, it's hard to make a living in art - some are wildly successful, yes, but the tip of that pyramid is very small and getting there takes as much luck as skill; and there are a lot of people further down the pyramid who also need to eat while waiting for their big break.
Those are the jobs at risk from generative AI in its current state.
But these jobs never existed in first place, that generic art is done by contractors who charge for the materials.
If a friend recited a poem, would it matter to do if they read it off the Internet or composed it themselves? Of course it would.
If someone tells you they love you, does it matter if they are a robot or an honest human or a con-artist human catfishing you? YES, THAT MATTERS TO YOU. Yes you "refuse to enjoy" things that have suspicious sources.
But, I barely know any musical artist's name today. Most music is just something to listen to at the gym. It's pleasant enough, but I don't dig in to know who is singing at all. Every source is equivalent to me, as long as it's pleasant to the ear.
Perhaps you're different. The only question is, which attitude is more prevalent?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUU8joBb1Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoAbXwr3qkg
That's the thing about art: when people make general statements like this one, others will go on to create things purely to see what's outside the box.
Like so many people felt defrauded when they discovered that the Milli Vanilli leads didn't actually sing, and that wasn't even AI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milli_Vanilli
Edit: I might add that I already suspect any illustration that even superficially looks it might have been generated by AI. This has ruined the enjoyment of so many people's artwork whose style has been co-opted by AI.
Personally I think knowing the story behind music makes it better. The music isn't to everyone's taste, but for example Devin Townsend's wiki page / story is a trip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devin_Townsend
This song sounds like a disturbing uncanny-valley rendition of a slow Phoebe Bridges song performed by Taylor Swift using a broken auto tuner.
While I think it's technically impressive that this exists at all, I think this tune is still at the stage of "Pope in a puffer jacket".
Someone making a "proper" song where they just sang these words would be quite boring, then I'd rather spend my time checking out other music.
Why does this being computer generated ruin it for you?
Auto-tune has been around since 1997 so it's not like computers have not been a big part of a lot of music we hear every day.
If we get AGI, I could imagine feeling something towards the art such an entity creates, since a big part of the human experience that we would probably share with an AGI is inescapable death.
But for today's "AI" generated music, I feel the same towards it as I would towards the random step function output of a given tool in Ableton - sounds cool, now what can we do with that to make it into music?
So a human using the tools of sound production is what transforms the function output into music. (Please let me know if I’m misunderstanding you).
I think I see what you’re saying, but that’s already happened here hasn’t it? I mean, it's not as though an AI made the decision to generate this all by itself, a human had an idea to create this piece and wrote a prompt which created this output.
The order is of events is reversed from your Ableton example, but I would contend that this kind of production is no less musical than what someone could create using a DAW, simply that the tools are more accessible
(and I presume there is less direct control over what the end result is going to sound like, but the same could be said of conducting an orchestra versus playing a piano.)
Eta: For example, some people in this thread have complained that the AI generated voice falls into the uncanny valley. I agree, and I think that’s part of the art here.
Like, if Trent Reznor had produced Hurt not by putting his doubts, self loathing and pain into words and music, rather by typing "sad, trending on artstation" into a console then heading for lunch, I don't think it would be any way as meaningful even if it was note for note beat for beat the same output.
I knew nothing about Trent Reznor the first time I heard "Hurt". Often when a song is heard on the radio - perhaps a sentence that dates me, but even so - there is no explanation of where it came from or even what it's called to accompany it; or perhaps there may have been, but the listener wasn't paying attention until after they realised they liked what they were hearing; indeed, there used to be an entire industry for solving the problem of "I heard a song I like and want to know more about it, or at the very least find out what it's called so I can hear it again".
When I first heard "Hurt", it resonated because of how those sounds interacted with my own experience. Everything else came after. Had those exact same sounds any other origin, that first experience would not have been affected - I would have had no way to know.
This is reductionist IMO. The equivalent seems to me to be, "the meaning the reader of words imparts to the meaning is constructed in the reader's head..." but clearly the vast majority of the meaning of the words is derived from the writer's intention. Of course that can be misinterpreted, reinterpreted, co-opted, etc, but regardless, it doesn't mean the author can be simply ignored, or that a psuedo-random generation can be treated the same as human-generated.
This is not clear at all.
Written words are just marks on a surface. Whoever made them may have intended to convey something, but they made them and walked away; they are now absent, taking their intents with them; only the marks remain, and those are not sentient or even alive - they contain no intent. There is nothing about the patterns left behind in themselves that makes them different from any other patterns the universe contains as far as the universe is concerned. If handed a set of marks on paper with no other information, you have no way of knowing for sure how they came to be. You could guess, you could be super confident, but you couldn't be /certain/.
If a reader later comes along who happens to have studied the same pattern-codes as the creator of the marks, however, seeing them will make that reader recall the associations and build up meanings in their head. These may or may not be the same meanings the writer intended to convey.
Children learning to read understand this very well - reading is /hard/, associating meaning with code is /hard/, decoding similar meanings to everyone else is /hard/, aligning the associations spoken words trigger in your head with others around you takes /study/ and /effort/, even realising that you end up with different meaning in your head when presented with some symbol to what others get, though frequent, takes deliberate effort. Reading comprehension questions in elementary school tests are there for a reason.
To a well-practiced reader, the process is natural and seamless, and feels like telepathy; it /feels like/ meaning has been transferred directly from the writer to the reader. But it is not that, and many problems arise when people forget this.
Once you have learned to seamlessly decode symbols into meaning in your head and the process is fully automatic, symbols you encounter in the world will seamlessly trigger meanings in your head regardless of their origin.
This is the human condition: we are all locked inside our own heads, and you can't take a piece of yourself and place it inside another directly. The best we can do is shout into the void and hope something similar inside the person across from you resonates; but it turns out that human shouts are not the only thing that can make those strings vibrate.
When we encounter combinations of symbols in the world that trigger complex meaning inside us, we /expect/ them to have an author who intended to convey something like that meaning, because in the entire history of human experience to date, the only other way for such things to appear in the world has been incredibly unlikely coincidence, invariably accompanied by context that makes it clear it is coincidence. (A certain proportion of social media content is, in fact, people sharing instances of these coincidences!)
However, this is an assumption that we make, and the world is rapidly changing in ways that mean it may, going forward, no longer be a valid one.
More and more, we will encounter combinations of symbols in the world that trigger complex meanings in our heads but originate from no human intent beyond "I need a combination of symbols that will trigger these meanings in the heads of those who encounter them", if even that much is explicit. We are rapidly improving the processes that produce them, and one of the ways we are improving them is removing tells. You will see the symbols, they will decode into stories in your head, and you won't know for sure if a human author was involved or not.
It is vital, going forward, that we all remember that symbols triggering satisfying meaning in our head does not automatically imply deliberate human intent for that meaning in their origin, lest we be entirely unprepared for the brave new oncoming world, just the way a chunk of the populace was unprepared for nigerian prince emails in their heyday, or are still unprepared for telephone calls from "internet tech support" right now.
Conducting an orchestra is an important role but the music is mostly a result of first of all the composer, and then the conductor / arranger's interpretation as well as the skill of the musicians. I really don't see the similarity to a human input of "GNU license, sad, jazzy." The resolution is just way too rough.
In fact, imagine comparing the experience of reading Snow Crash, to reading the sentence, "Cyberpunk story with sci fi elements, VR universe, pizza delivery guy with samurai sword."
I would readily compare the experience of reading Snow Crash (one of the first SciFi books I read of my own volition) to the output that a LLM may produce from such a prompt. My iPhone informs me that I’ve spent nearly 10 hours playing with Characters.ai in which SF storytelling characters are my favorite to interact with. When I first read Snow Crash I felt like “finally, an author that understands that part of the story that _I’m_ interested in!” and my experiences of AI driven creative writing has felt similar. Certainly it feels less “magical” since I’m aware that I’m customizing the author to my personal taste - is that “magic” of feeling connected to the artist *the* art?
Listening to songs, as speaking with people, is in large part about enjoying the causes of the song rather than the mere variations in pitch.
Beethoven's 5th even, purely instrumental, is enjoyable because of how the composer is clearly playing with you.
To generate pitch variations identical to beethovens fifth makes this an illusion, one hard to sustain if you know its an illusion. It isnt an illusion in the case of the 5th itself: beethoven really had those desires.
Meanwhile, "To what extent can a piece of art be a thing that is of interest in itself, divorced from its creator, context, or any representation of anything in particular?" is absolutely a valid area for people to explore and one that artists are exploring all the time. There is now one more tool to play with in the toolbox.
I heard the exact same objections to the modtracker scene three decades ago - "it's just computer generated slop, I'm not interested unless it's a real person performing on real instruments". I maintain that not only was it a perfectly valid mode of expression then, but tools like Ableton grew in part from those experiences and are an integral part of much - most? - music now.
What you describe certainly exists, but it's not the entirety of art, and I would argue that at this point it's not even most of art.
AI-generated art may have a bit of the former (assuming the human had enough control over the details of the final output), but has practically none of the latter.
Hence, AI-generated output is not art. But art can be produced using AI tools somewhere in the process.
(1) When I look at art produced by one of those "artists" that commission the actual work to someone else, it's similar (I don't recognize the "artist" as the human I'm connecting to, ideas are a dime a dozen). However, it's still art because I can connect with the anonymous human which actually implemented it.
At first it will be kept secret, and then as it spread more and more among the industry, it will be more or less stated, but by that point people will be already accustomed.
This states from the outset that it is using AI tools, at which point I become more understanding. Someone had an idea, but lacked the singing voice or a friend with a singing voice & free time, so used a tool to fill the gap. This is better, at very least more honest, use of tech as a tool than, for instance, autotune on studio albums, IMO.
If you _really_ want it with a real human voice, perhaps contact some of the many performers on social media to suggest it might be an amusing way to generate some content to monetise. Or, of course, sing it yourself!
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[1] I've gone from clicking very few of facebook's “recommend for you” articles to clicking absolutely none of them – the number that are, or are indistinguishable from, hallucinations from an LLM that doesn't understand what is actually being written about, already dwarfs things that are worth reading. SciFi TV/film/book reviews and essays seem to be particularly affected, with “local” news links not far behind.
[2] “you won't believe this isn't AI generated!” — no, I won't, because it quite obviously is. I don't know whether to be insulted that you think just saying that will convince me otherwise or sad for the state of humanity that many do seem fooled.
[3] Too many people seem to think that slapping code out of copilot into a stackoverflow answer without nothing to check it for correctness in any way is acceptable, and before that was possible there was already too much bad (sometimes working but blatantly insecure) code out there that people were blindly copying. And that is before the potential licensing & moral issues that mean I have not yet been convinced to use anything like copilot myself, but I'm getting far off-topic here…
While I don't disagree there's a "human touch" to art, I'm not convinced it can't be synthesized to some degree. It may not be innovative, but I think since AI is extrapolating from learned data, it can at least mimic the current pop culture.