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Comment by throwaway1280 | Hacker News Reader

This is an incredible achievement, but as a musician, I wish this would go die in a fire.

I'm a bedroom hobby musician with no dreams of ever making it big, but even so, I'm looking at the hours I'm spending trying to improve my skills and thinking what's the point, really, when I could just type in 'heavy metal guitar solo at 160bpm, A minor' and get something much much better?

I know there is value in creating art for art's sake. I've always been up against a sea of internet musicians, even when I started back in 2000. But there's just something about this that's much more depressing, when it's not even other people competing with me, but a machine which hasn't had to invest years of its life in practice to beat me.

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As a fellow (hobbyist) musician, I feel you, but after doing a lot of introspection I realized that it's the art (and the process) that I really like, not (just) the end result (though that is of course a rewarding aspect). For example, jamming out to a kickin' song is fun, even if I'm just covering something. I also realized that my own ability to produce things isn't affected by this (as long as you don't want to make money on it). As someone who loves to play bass but is generally bad at writing bass riffs, I also see some fun potential to use AI to get bass tracks that go along with my main guitar riffs. I can always throw them out and rewrite from scratch later, or just iterate on them to get them where I like them. I do think I'll feel a bit lof a loss of "artistic purity" with doing something like that, but the more I think about it, the biggest reason that might bother me is because I'd feel judged by other musicians :-D

When Harmonix was in the concept phase for Guitar Hero, there were two slides in the presentation. The first was the "con" slide: novel game style risks not finding a market, technical challenges of the new style of gameplay, requiring peripherals for a game is a famous pathway to low-volume sales.

The next slide was labeled "pro," and it was just a picture of Jimi Hendrix on-stage mid-performance.

I'd submit to you the notion that even if the machine can create a billion billion iterations of music, it still cannot create what you will create, for the reasons you will create it, and that's reason enough to continue. Hendrix wasn't just "a guy who played guitar good." And a machine that could word-for-word and bar-for-bar synthesize "Foxy Lady" wouldn't be Hendrix.

Hendrix, also, can't be you. Nor you him.

It is embarrassing how much time I spent playing that dumb game instead of actually practicing a more versatile instrument.

I am not sure if this will be any help to you at all, but the technical skill of music - especially in (from your comment) heavy metal - has only ever been a tiny part of it. You probably know a guy in a local pub band who can note-for-note play every singly thing that Toni Iommi ever recorded, for instance.

There are hundreds of bands who play three-chord doom or mindless-shredding grind who just learned one thing and do it well, and who play to hundreds of people multiple times a week (often including me). We go to see these bands not to see what they can play, but to see what they are saying with what they play.

This is why I feel that I can never describe LLM-generated content as 'art'. Art is about the story. People will go and see a punk band who only know three chords if they play songs about things that resonate with them. Bit of a tangent, but this is the same reason that I genuinely believe that if you could bio-engineer a steak that tastes exactly like one from a well-looked-after cow from a notable breed and a good farm, most people would still prefer the cow. The story matters - the fact that a person put effort and experience into something really is important.

"This solo is sick" is a fun plus-point, but it doesn't matter if the song doesn't mean anything to you. If proficiency was the only thing that mattered then we'd all be listening to the worst kind of prog.

I can't see the future, but I imagine that the human art community may actually get more vibrant when divorced from being a way to make a living. Perhaps a return to something like a patronage system for the exceptional artists.

Open mics, music circles and concerts also remain untouched for the moment.

Like you, I am just a hobbyist making beats in my room. No expectations of ever being a real musician. But when I'm jamming and I create a beat and synth line, start adding other instruments and really get a song going, there is a feeling that I get that an generated song will never ever ever be able to recreate for me. It's like a rush, an almost a euphoric tingling (and no I'm not on drugs) that happens that almost feels like a runners high. No output from a prompt-driven AI algorithm would ever do that to me. That's the value I see in making art for arts sake, for practicing a craft and for trying to just get better at something for the sake of getting better at it.

I would suggest that instead of feeling demoralized by ai that you instead ask what can you offer musically that an ai cannot. I also would suggest trying to let go of the notion that music is primarily about achieving a certain level of technical proficiency. There are no limits on your growth musically unless you artificially constrain them because you are deluded by a technology to believe that you don't already have what you need inside of you.

Do you regularly play with other people? That is a good way to disabuse yourself of the notion that all that matters is technique.

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