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Comment by two-sandwich | Hacker News Reader

If you consider that Entertainment gives the viewer what they want, and art intends to challenge, none of what's created here is "art". It doesn't push boundaries, create new genres, or satisfy an uncomfortable curiosity.

The tech here is fantastic. I love that such things are possible now and they're an exciting frontier in creation.

It's very dystopian to feel that the robots are making generic human-music with indescribably lifeless properties. I'm not an artist, so I don't feel personally attacked. Much like image gen, this seems to be aimed at replacing the bare-minimum artist (visual or auditory) with a "fill in the blanks" entertainment piece.

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> Entertainment gives the viewer what they want, and art intends to challenge

This is a fruitless and snobby dichotomy that was attempted so many times in human history, and it makes no sense.

There will always be art made for success and/or money, but drawing a line is futile.

Händel used to be a bit like a pop musician.

And intellectual snobbishness or noble ideas do not make art more valuable.

A kid singing Wonderwall can be art, too. As can be a depressed person recording experimental field sounds.

Feel free to call art bad, but assuming an obvious and clear separation between art and entertainment is the exact opposite of the spirit that enables people to make or appreciate art, in whatever form, culture or shape.

>Händel used to be a bit like a pop musician.

Handel was never a "bit like a pop musician." This fundamentally misunderstands how music during his time, mostly funded and enjoyed under religion and wealthy patronage contexts, was listened to. Mostly only the wealthy listened to his works, and those elite audiences were prone to viciously enforcing stylistic norms. The only real way the working class heard his works were in the occasional public concert and occasionally in church. At no point in any of these settings was there a lack of stylistic gatekeeping or snobbery.

I know this kind of nihilistic "everything is good, I guess, good doesn't even mean anything" attitude is popular in some spaces, but this lack of standards or gatekeeping in favor of a tasteless desire for increasing slop production regardless of quality is how we got poptimism and the current state of music. No longer is there any taste making, just taste production via algorithms.

Sometimes we need a bit of snobbery to separate the wheat from the chaff, and being a gatekeeping snob against AI music is what our current day and age needs more of!

Well, in the end, the only thing this snobbery does is that it makes you look/sound old.

Nobody cares. I've heard the same thing when electronic music came up. The old ones couldn't stop complaining about this "computer music" where nobody does real handwork anymore.

I see it as democratisation of art. Everybody can do it now and this is a good thing.

Let's face reality. There is no way back. We'll see what comes of it. I've seen fascinating videos recently on reddit. Things people came up with and would have never gotten the budget to be made. It's great.

>Let's face reality. There is no way back. We'll see what comes of it. I've seen fascinating videos recently on reddit. Things people came up with and would have never gotten the budget to be made. It's great.

Yeah McLuhan and Postman were pretty clear about all of this. Enjoy the content you desire to consume.

It's not art. It's democratization of crap.

Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Cool, a movie quote. Nice.

How was your opinion more profound?

Pity the movie wasn't Lisztomania, 'cause, like, you know, Liszt used to be a bit like a pop musician.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisztomania_(film)

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peJ_ncxXung

Liszt was a very different musician in a very different time than Handel, and he was mostly just cribbing off of Paganini when it came to these antics.

But does Klaus Kinski's Paganini have the quotability and outrageous lighthearted over the top-ness of Russell's Lisztomania ?

There's a 2013 film The Devil's Violinist in the mix now apparently.

I did not want to argue in favor of AI-generated music (although of course, an artist can use any tool).

Regarding Händel, I think you are misunderstanding my argument.

What I meant is that, to my knowledge, his music was, at his times, a lot more pleasing to the popular tastes among his audience than, for example, Bach's.

The size or class of that audience was not my point, or that the production and commissioning of music was happening under different circumstances than today. I am well aware of that, and not sure why you think I wouldn't be.

In the end, there still was a metric of success, elite or not.

And it is simply not true that the main purpose of art is to "challenge". That can be a part of good art, but is not the primary purpose.

Art is also for enjoyment, by an audience (even if it is an elite audience), and also by the artist! I say that as a person who enjoys a lot of music that others might find obscure or unenjoyable.

But being "challenging" is not a value in itself. Twelve-tone music is as challenging as Freejazz or IDM or baroque music, all in different ways.

Some art is "challenging", but still artistically uninteresting and uninspired.

I was not making an argument for AI-generated slop, I was making an argument against ungrounded snobbery in defining what "art" is.

The societal circumstances you describe are not changing anything about my point. Among the wealthy, Händel was famous and a "crowd-pleaser" (for the wealthy elites, the royals, the clerical elites, it doesn't make a difference here), not a "challenger".

That was my point.

There was a discussion of "E-Musik" vs "U-Musik" recently on here, when a list was posted that reduced electronic music to Stockhausen and academic electroacoustic music.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-_und_U-Musik

There is no translation of these German terms, as far as I know. But that's no loss.

It attempts to split music into "serious music" and "entertainment".

"E-Musik" was meant to differentiate classical music from music aimed at being easy to listen to. And while efforts to create new "E-musik" in the 20th century led to some interesting music and experimentation, it also led to the funding of loads of boring snobbery (in my ears).

It's a good example for what I consider wrong about the definition I was answering to.

>Some art is "challenging", but still artistically uninteresting and uninspired.

I agree and would include 12 tone music (and specifically the Darmstadt School) in this category, as well as others like Xenakis. I think they should have been laughed out of performance halls and shunned, just like so many hack musicians were pre-20th century before classical music lost its gatekeepers (almost all art did with the death of modernism and the fragmentation of cultural narratives)

I think Handel is still a rough choice. He was more popular than Bach, but only because Bach was writing in somewhat outmoded styles for his time. Handel worked for aristocratic (and sometimes royal, see: the backstory of his Water Music as a way to repair relations with the new king of England) patrons and thus had to keep up with fashion. It was never about mass appeal but about making the person with the purse strings happy for Handel.

I see your point there regarding the money/power of the audience being a substitute for popularity with different interests, weakening my claim that Händel would've been "like a pop musician" at his times".

Sure, the comparison was probably painted with a brush that was too broad, thus flawed.

I should have gone into some more detail there regarding the music patronage demography

Art is a framing device largely independent of the content. It's how we get Fountain[1], Piss Christ[2], Comedian[3], Mother![4], 4’33”[5], and Seedbed[6] to name a few among countless others. To claim that AI content is incapable of being framed as art is nonsense when we have example after example of the diversity of what art can be. Let's remember, bad art is still art.

1. Marcel Duchamp. 1917

2. Andres Serrano. 1987

3. Maurizio Cattelan. 2019

4. Darren Aronofsky. 2017

5. John Cage. 1952

6. Vito Acconci. 1972

If that was true, then the development of a new urinal factory would have the same impact on art as the development of a new AI art models.

The framing is dependent on the content

Framings require creators; they don't arise spontaneously. Someone could turn a urinal factory into art, but art doesn't validate itself. Belief alone in artistic essentialism doesn’t make it so.

That's such a great pile of bullcrap, you could frame it and hang it up in a museum!

The point I'm making is that a unique framing only results in a single piece of worthwhile conceptual art. You can't have an infinite factory of ducamp's fountain. What makes the piece worthwhile is that it was an original idea.

Conceptual art is different from decorational art in this sense. The AI music is a largely a homogenous synthesis of existing works. The AI "art" is decorational, not conceptual art. You could make an arrangement of AI art that is conceptual, but how many arrangements can you make that are actually worthwhile conceptually if AI art is generally homogenous?

It's like asking how many worthwhile works of conceptual art can you produce with a urinal factory that makes identical clones of the same urinal? 0 to 1.

And besides, it's not nessisarially true that all framings have creators. Nature is an example of a system that cultivates and curates a certain type of life without any rational process.

I don't disagree that being novel has it's place in framing art, and I still believe that a Fountain Factory could certainly be framed as art.

To your other point, sorry, but artistic/aesthetic essentialism hasn't been serious position for at least a hundred years.

As long as there is a perceiver, there is a frame.

The idea that nature is intrinsically beautiful is a frame. It's fine to hold that but it shouldn't be confused with not having a frame.

There's a difference between a factory that is art vs a factory that produces art.

There's only one factory, and the concept works only once.

Mass-produced art is still art as long as people frame it as such and all indication suggests that they do.

I have some mass-produced art on my wall. But it's definitely not conceptual art, as some ancestor post was discussing.

The point of Fountain was to say that whether something is art should depend on the content and its absurd that a urinal could be considered art.

But the art isn’t in the content, it was in the statement it was making about the absurdity surrounding the fact you could pay to put anything in an art exhibition. Swap out the white urinal for a blue one, it’s the same point.

My favorite was David Datuna eating the $120k banana duct taped to the wall in 2019. A banana doesn’t transubstantiate into capital A “Art” just because someone paid a lot of money for it. In fact eating the banana was more Art than the original duct taping imo.

It is reminiscent of Fountain. Not sure if there was an intentional connection.

Art is communication.

That "generic" and "indescribably lifeless" feeling you get is because the only thing communicated by a model-and-prompt generation is the model identity and the prompt.

> and art intends to challenge, none of what's created here is "art". It doesn't push boundaries, create new genres, or satisfy an uncomfortable curiosity.

Art is, above all, subjective.

> It's very dystopian to feel that the robots are making generic human-music with indescribably lifeless properties.

Painters said the same thing about the camera. Photographers said the same thing about Photoshop.

This art is subjectively bad

The fact that these models have so many people irritated like there's sand in their pants is enough proof that they're pushing boundaries and making some uncomfortable.

Yes, because the people pushing the boundaries do not understand the value of the thing they are trying to commoditize. If they did, they wouldn't be trying to commoditize it. There is a pervasive attitude among technologists that they can improve things they don't understand through technological efficiency. They are wrong in this case and getting appropriate pushback.

Personally, music is sacred for me so making money is not a part of my process. I am not worried about job loss. But I am worried about the cultural malaise that emerges from the natural passivity of industrial scale consumerism.

Well put and reflects my thoughts exactly. It's borderline concerning there are people who consume this type of media by choice and forethought.

And they consume it without checking with you first. That's got to be the worst part.

wild take: critique != censorship. people can consume whatever they want and we can call out when the supply chain is built on unconsented scraping and zero stewardship CamperBob2

Not every boundary is worth pushing.

I'm hoping it will eventually become better, or maybe I haven't quite seen stuff prompted properly yet, but all I've heard coming from an AI feels aggressively mediocre and average, not in a "bad" way but in the "optimizing towards being palatable to the average person" way. Like the perfect McDonalds meal that the algorithm has found out can be 30% sawdust and still feel appetizing. I don't want that boundary being pushed. I feel we will live in a worse world if we do.

Besides the point, but I think that's basically what happened to Subway.

the boundaries of unemployment perhaps

boundaries of copyright

Epstein, the ultimate pusher of boundaries.

Then most music is not art, because I struggle to find non-generic music, at least for the genres I like. In 2020s, 4/5 artists are bent on trying to create a blend of aesthetics of the past, instead of even attempting doing something that sounds fresh and authentic. And very few of these who do succeed. This has been going on for a while.

If your art can be replaced by a model that recycles what’s already been done, maybe you were just recycling what’s already been done too.

How do you expect people to get good when AI is pushing them out of the entry-level stages where they were previously able to earn a modest living while developing their craft?

> oh now they won't have to do that boring mindless stuff like playing cover versions any more

That's how most musicians make their first $, doing covers or making something generic enough to be saleable as background music

AI eats the seedcorn. Anyone that needs space to grow? Crowded out. Entry level incomes, replaced. No more entry, sorry.

For all of human civilization the future has been built on the backs of those the came before (on the backs of giants). But that climb is slowing, maybe halting. Which then compounds when the new giants that would have risen up don't. AI replaces the messy, slow process of becoming with instant regurgitation, replaces those that would have grown. The future, built on the backs of giants, stalls when those giants never get the chance to rise.

AI is entropy weaponized against every layer of future progress. But everyone is too busy salivating at potential cost savings to see it.

Sorry, but no. I use AI as a writing tool, and its understanding prose and storycraft is nowhere near there, it's mostly useful for rough drafts and minor rewrites. Even in a hypothetical future where it's perfect at prose and storycraft, and it just asks you a few questions to get at the details of what you want then cranks out a technically outstanding novel, it still won't be there. People crave novelty, freshness and and a sense of the auteur, and AI will ALWAYS be bad at that (until someone creates an AI writer that simulates a fictional human author with a rich interior life before it starts writing, anyhow).

Ultimately we'll reach a technical "peak" in AI writing, and humans will still be the ones driving the AI, feeding it with the alchemy of their lived experience, directing creation at a high level. We'll even purposefully inject very minor imperfections into the writing in the name of voice, tweaking minor details in the name of personal harmony. The author will go from "creator" to "brand."

Tech is tech. What you create with the tech can be art.

These feels different than experimenting with a new synth or something though. It’s just feeding a sentence to the model.

'Just' is a loaded word here.

In image gen: comfyUI gives a node-based workflow that gives a lot of room for 'creative' control, of mixing, and mathematically combining masks, filters, and prompts (and starting images / noise {at any node in that process}).

I would expect the same interface for audio to emerge for 'power users'.

I draw a very sharp line: curating the outputs and crafting the sentence is enough to make it art. If neither of those happen, it's just slop.

It's actually a bit like photography. A bunch of randomly taken pictures piled together is not art. It needs to be done with purpose and refinement.

Basically, in my own opinion, art ≠ a function of technical difficulty.

Art = Curation, Refinement, and Taste

Disagree that curation and prompts adds artistry (dense intent reflected in the output) to AI generations.

"Curation" in AI can only surface the curator's local maxima among a tiny and arbitrary grab-bag of seed integers they checked among the space of 2^64 options; it's statistically skewed 99% towards the model's whims rather than anyone's unique intent or taste.

Prompt crafting is likewise terribly low fidelity since it's a constant battle with the model's idiosyncratic interpretation of the text, plus arbitrary perturbations that aren't actually correlated with the writer's supposed intent. And lord spare me the "high quality high resolution ultra detailed photorealistic trending on artstation" type prompts that amount to a zero-intent plea for "more gooder". And when pursuing artistry, using artist names / LORAs are a meta-abandonment of personal direction, abdicating artistic control and responsibility to a model's idea of another artist's idea of what should be done.

Fancier workflows generally only multiply this prompt-and-curate process across regions/iterations, so can't add much because they're multiplying a tiny fraction by a fixed factor.

I agree with you on the idea of prompts and seeds leaving much to be desired. So that's why I think more sophisticated steering is necessary.

The models' latent space is extremely powerful, but you get hamstrung into the text encoders whims when you do things through a prompt interface. In particular, you've hit exactly an issue I have with current LLMs in general in that they are locked into wors and concepts that others have defined (labelings of points in the latent space).

Wishy washy thinking: I'd be nice if there were some sort of Turing complete lambda calculus sort of way to prompt these models instead. Where you can define new terms, create expressions, and loops and recursion or something.

It would sort of be like how SVGs are "intent complete" and undeniably art, but instead of vector graphics, it is an SVG like model prompt.

Curation, refinement and taste is practicially worthless on its own. The technical difficulty of art is the investment that makes it worth considering.

So if you are right, then art will pretty much be worthless in the future. You can just iterate over the search space defined by "good taste" and produce an infinite amount of good art for no work.

Curation is not worthless. It's the exact opposite, in the abundance of stuff, it's extremely valuable.

Search is not free, and it can never be free. What happens when search gets easier and easier is that your demands for quality and curation will get higher until all time saved in search efficiency is spent on search breadth.

Ah yes, my porn hub search prompts are the highest form of art and human connection.

How dare you! Next you will say my current pornhub prompts refined over years aren't art either! Or that prompt results are purely for personal gratification and no one else cares about them.

"It's just pushing a button on the camera."

This is a stupid argument, because even with the most automatic camera you have to point it at something and make a decision about what to frame in. AI music is more like buying a bunch of old unlabelled records from a bargain bin and then praising yourself whenever one of them turns out to be worth listening to.

Of course it's a stupid argument, but it's exactly what the ancestors of today's AI naysayers said when photography became practical.

Then again, it's possible for an art form to exhaust its own possibilities. To the extent that "prompt engineering" is sufficient to generate any music or artwork we have in mind, that seems like an indication that we've reached that point. To the extent that it's not sufficient, that seems like an indication that there's still interesting stuff left to do.

Either way, if you are hoping that things will stay the same, then I'm afraid that neither art nor technology are good career choices.

ancestors of today's AI naysayers

This is dead wrong. People were open to using it as a tool then as they are now, but not all offerings are of equal value. I know a lot of musicians who would be into an AI 'session buddy' who could play along with them or serve as a tutor for advanced concepts. The existing offerings in the music space are at the level of Deepmind when it made everything look like a dog on acid.

As I've written before, proponents of AI music as an infinity jukebox completely miss the point of how music works. In a social context people want a jukebox to provide favorite (or at least famous) sounds that everyone can vibe along to. People listening on their own either replay their nostalgic favorites or iterate on them if they have a strong genre preference. AI could in theory replace a DJ at a nightclub where not everyone needs to know every song if the vibe is good and the beats are tight, but they will still want someone to focus on. Beyond an intimate small group of people, parties where loud music is blasting off a playlist (or DAT or CD changer) with nobody actively DJing don't work because people quickly feel that if the music is changing independently of the dancefloor then the collective connection is broken.

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