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.
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.
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.
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.
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