Blocklist for AI Music on YouTube
surasshu.com
surasshu.com
We did something similar by sharing a dataset of around 7,000 AI-generated fake podcasts on Kaggle:
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/listennotes/ai-generated-fak...
Back in the day there were tons of people who were totally opposed to the rising genre of "electronic" music. Today you couldn't call electronic music "not music" without drawing the ire of lots of people.
In the same vein, people opposed the internet, digital drawing tablets, digital cameras.
AI is interesting because it can be use to "just prompt", and those outputs can't be called art. But actual artists are using the technology as just another tool to accomplish even bigger things:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_SgA6ymPuc
https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1ihq048/i_was_ai_l...
Of course AI will still be used for slop and fan fiction, and people will endlessly try to fix Star Wars and Game of Thrones [1]. But that shouldn't be used to detract from the medium, because there will be an abundance of people doing amazing work that stands on its own legs.
One way or another, this bug will be fixed in time.
> ‘Till then, there will be a short delay. Please return to your seats.
I'm not sure anyone is calling AI music "not music." It's just so far a bit rubbish. It mostly gets called AI slop which is kind of fair.
Maybe we'll get a Donna Summer - I Feel Love moment but I don't think it's arrived yet. I Feel Love was probably the first big electronic music hit and did stuff you couldn't do with regular instruments.
There's always resistance to new genres of music. Rock'n'roll was considered evil, a bad influence on children, by the establishment of its day. People didn't like electronic music because they thought it wasn't creative enough, and that it was just "noise".
AI generated music -- at least the current iteration of it -- is different. For the most part it's created in order to flood platforms with low-effort content in order to win advertising dollars. It's spam, plain and simple.
I'm not saying that all AI generated music is spam, or that it won't turn into an art form that people appreciate. But right now, the majority of it is not the result of creative endeavor. EDM and other new genres didn't really go through this initial spam period.
Even if this doesn't look the same as other new tech, it still rhymes with a lot that's happened to us before.
Turn off your YT watch history and search history. I've advocated for this on HN for years. Watching one or two AI slop videos won't ruin your recommendations, leaving the algorithm to rely on your likes to find you stuff you'd want to watch.
Now if only YT could fix search and allow me to block Shorts.
Not to say there’s no value today; most pure AI music is terrible and I don’t want to listen to it. But that’s a very temporary state of affairs.
I picked out a few random channels from this blocklist and some of them are posting new 2-3 hour compilations every day. The person running the channel is probably barely even listening to the tracks before before uploading them, assuming they're listened to at all, the whole process could well be completely automated.
Honestly, you could say the same about Marvel movies made by humans.
This sad situation was caused by internet. It made it possible for us to have unlimited art, writing and video to "consume" so any new work has to compete with a backcatalog spanning decades. This makes royalty revenues tank, so creatives moved to ad based revenue. This caused the attention scarcity situation where we are right now, and enshittification is the outcome. It all started long ago when AI wasn't even a blip.
But fortunately AI can clean up web content, so I hope we can distill the good parts and get high quality back. But I don't expect Google or Meta or X to do it for us. We need to power this revolution with local models.
As mentioned, current AI music is listening to recordings of Muzak like what they use to play in elevators and at Dennys.
I would say the progress in AI music is basically non-existent. Ironically, MusicLM can make some very unique and interesting sample material. The more popular models though are just slop.
Interesting. Do you have an example?
I quite like music with uncommon modes and weird scales and Suno isn't too bad at emulating this - especially with Arabic music (e.g. "swirling dramatic orchestral arabic music with oud guitar" will yield many good, if stereotypical, results). I'm not familiar enough with traditional regional music to pick out all the flaws so it works for me, but a "local" would probably say it sounds unrealistic in the same way that Suno-generated typical Western pop and rock sounds off to my ears.
I hope we soon have a "Flux" like equivalent model, but for music, that you can run locally/fine-tune,etc...
It’s the same reason some people don’t like generic pop music due to its formulaic commercialism.
So if people are discriminating AI art because they want to experience the emotions that the authors put into the pieces, then I’m ok with that right up until it can be argued that AI experiences emotions.
Show me an AI with an opinion; an aesthetic preference.
Show me an AI that has emotions.
Show me an AI that’s chosen to make sacrifices to produce its art.
AI cannot produce art. Images are not intrinsically art. Sound is not intrinsically art. Art requires thought and intent. AI is not capable of either.
All the emotion serve as a shortcut for behaviors that make evolutionary sense.
Things suck before they get better and then keep on getting better.
I won’t argument on the art part, but these common AI stereotypes are not true.
After all, there are artists that collate "samples" from other artists and produce music from all those different samples. They did not play any instrument, they merely arranged and modified these samples into a product that they presumably find pleasing.
Doesn’t mean the result is ideal, far from that. But your “bullet points” imply some specialness which has to be explained. Personally I don’t love the style of refusal you’re demonstrating, because it’s similar to if you know you know and other self-referential nonsense. At least add some becauses into your arguments, because “it has no X” is a simplification far below the level of usefulness here.
Anyway, how does that prevent creating AI personas again?
But you say there is no one there, just a model? No, there is someone. There is a real flesh and blood human prompting the model. It's the result of many iteration cycles. At the very least it has some meaning for the prompter.
I love AI music and would greatly appreciate some recommendations of channels to listen to.
The only way I can stomach YT at this point is with blocktube and unhook; I can disable parts of the interface, block channels and content individually or with regular expressions, and filter comments with regex - a necessity given how many scams are being run right now.
I dread the day they drop RSS feeds for channel updates.
https://github.com/amitbl/blocktube
Edit: also see how YT search gives you unrelated nonsense. User-hostile may as well be their mission statement at this point.
I can't be that weird about using music on YouTube rather than YouTube Music, the post shows someone doing the same thing.
Or digital photos. Or digital illustration.
AI film isn't great right now, but people are still finding their legs:
https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1ihq048/i_was_ai_l...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_SgA6ymPuc
I find this medium is one of the best to showcase what people _can_ do with AI, because it requires manual integration of so many different techniques and inputs.
When more real artists start doing this (and fewer early adopters / hypesters), the future is going to be explosively indie. A Cambrian explosion that will cater to the long tail of super niche interests. I'm all for it. Less boxed Disney/Marvel/Star Wars spam, and more super edgy and innovative drama and fantasy.
Hollywood hasn't really given us much good sci-fi or fantasy. Now all of the world's creatives can start visually articulating their ideas.
A good set of analogs to predicatively compare this to might be the overwhelming number of amazing YouTube creators, or indie game designers. That's what will happen with "AI" art.
Perhaps you're not a part of the growing community that spends entire weekends making a singular "AI" art pieces. It's a growing creative medium, and the things being created can't simply be "prompted".
You might generate a photo of a consistent character, pose them using DwPose / 3D IK, extract them, comp them into another scene. Do the same for two other characters and a prop. Then use that composition as a single shot from a shot list for your AI film. Animate it, then rinse and repeat for a few hundred shots. After the shot list is complete, record the lines, capture facial performances, fix the errors, fix lighting, upscale, and publish. Easily a week of work for one person.
AI can be used in workflows by actual artists. It's a tool.
In the end, made by inspiration or by some algorithm, following patterns, marketing studies or whatever, by AI or not (if there are cases you can tell), what matters is your experience.
And then the AIs are making something that, from your point of view, are indistinguishable from whatever happened before. What makes it more or less real than what was already happening, from your side?
Also, I do feel at my core that creation is superior to consumption, so even though I'm not bothered by AI output (even as a musician and an artist), I have a feeling of respect and admiration for those who create that I simply do not feel for people who type a request into a prompt. Effort and work for a goal are respectable.
The ends do not always justify the means, and even if the end result is identical, there is a greater implication on what it means to be an artist, and possibly many negative (and positive) externalities as a result of being able to get the same results with little effort. The art is identical, but the effect on humans is not necessarily. We are changed by the journey, both the artist and consumer. The actual effects of short circuiting the journey isn't something we can fully appreciate until we've had generations of humans who have lived with this. It might be a good thing, but it's not guaranteed that it won't be potentially more negative than positive in the long run. I'm optimistic, but I think it's foolish to not be cautious and skeptical about potential side effects.