Hacker News Reader

Comment by pelotron | Hacker News Reader

I was involved in a conversation about cheating in video games the other day, and the topic shifted to AI use in music. Someone said, "using AI is like using an aimbot for music." I absolutely love that comparison since it highlights the shortcut past creativity/skill to get a computerized best result while also associating it with blatant cheating.

The "enables creativity" argument is ironic since the root of the word is "create" and AI users are literally removing the "create" step from their production process.

View on HN

I made my wife a song about how we met using Suno. It took me about 4 hours to get the lyrics just right, rewriting them (without AI help, it’s terrible with lyrics), plugging them in, seeing how they sounded, fixing them some more to get the verse so it sounded right.

She thought it was really special and she cried as we listened to it while holding hands in the car. I can’t play guitar, and I can’t hit some notes with my low singing voice, but I wrote every word and it felt like something really special to the both of us. I don’t really care if people think I “cheated”. To torture the analogy, it’s like cheating in a two player game since I’m not publishing this song to anyone else.

It's more like going into a video game and tuning the difficulty all the way down so you are virtually invincible. It's taking the fun out of the game for some, but for others that's the only way to play it.

Cozy games where you basically can't lose are a booming industry in the last decade, so that outlook is certainly bullish for AI creative tools!

And you know what? I’ve got a medically complicated kid with a million doctor’s appointments and a full time job. I often switch the games down to the easiest mode. Then sometimes a new Dark Souls comes out and I relish every moment, if I’ve got the time.

I’ve been having Suno make random instrumental chiptunes, too, and it’s got me interested in buying a MIDI keyboard to play around with. Which 40 years ago people were saying that wasn’t real music, either.

>a MIDI keyboard to play around with. Which 40 years ago people were saying that wasn’t real music, either.

Citation needed

> 4 hours

That made me imagine -- in the future when AI is much more advanced, maybe I could just prompt it with say "something sentimental to make my wife cry." I mean, I still came up with the idea and ultimately it's the thought that counts right. What's the limit here? Is this some sort of human emotion exploit, or a legitimate bonding experience?

I think expended effort is what counts here for these types of interactions, and how much of that effort is tailored to the specific person.

I mean, we're almost always standing on the shoulders of other people, and we're almost always using tools. But if the output is fully mechanical and automatic without being tailored for the specific person, it's hard to see it as personal in any way.

It’s rarely the thought that counts. It’s the committed effort. Presents aren’t just nice because they needed those socks. More importantly, they’re a signifier that you consider the person to be worth thinking about. You value them enough to spend time and effort thinking about them. Then you followed through. This is why we don’t just give people money as a present.

The effort that you put in is often what people like most about a gift. Don’t try too hard to hack around that.

Biggest blockers:

1. Wives aren't a monolith. The prompt is underspecified, or else individual taste and preciousness is dead.

2. No matter how good the tech today is (or isn't) getting, the responses are very low temperature. The reason it takes a human 4 hours to write the poem is because that is time spent exploring profoundly new structures and effects. Compare this to AI which is purpose-built to hone in on local optima of medians and clichés wherever possible.

> I mean, I still came up with the idea and ultimately it's the thought that counts right. What's the limit here?

Sociologically, devoid of AI discussion, I imagine the limit is the extent to which the ideas expressed in the poem aren't outright fabrications (e.g. complimenting their eyes when really you couldn't care less). As well, it does not sit right with humans if you attempt to induce profound feelings in them by your own less-than-profound feelings; it's not "just the thought," it's also the effort that socially signals the profundity of the thought.

> Wives aren't a monolith

Usually they are. Most people are surprisingly similar and predictable, which is why basic manipulation tactics are so successful. Sure, you have 10% of people who truly are special, but the other 90% has a collective orgasm while listening to whatever is the hottest pop star.

> The reason it takes a human 4 hours to write the poem is because that is time spent exploring profoundly new structures and effects.

Most likely dude spent 4 hours doing exactly the same things that everyone else does when making their first song. It's not like within these 4 hours he discovered a truly new technique of writing lyrics. Each instance of human life that wants to write songs needs to go through exactly the same learning steps, while AI does it just once and then can endlessly apply the results.

> it's not "just the thought," it's also the effort that socially signals the profundity of the thought.

In close relationships yes. When dealing with those you less care about, it's the result that matters.

That would indeed make it meaningless.

I'm going to draw this example out to make it more realistic.

"Say something sentimental to make my wife cry" you prompt. The computer comes back:

Ok, tell me a few things about your wife. How did you meet? What are her favorite things? Tell me about some great moments in your relationship. Tell me about some difficult moments in your relationship.

Ok, tell me a few things about you. What do you love about your wife? What have you struggled with?

Ten minutes of this kind of conversation and I'll bet the LLM can generate a pretty good hallmark card. It might not make your wife cry but she'll recognize it as something personal and special.

Four hours of this kind of conversation and you might very well get some output that would make your wife cry. It might even make you cry.

The work is adding context. And getting people to add meaningful, soul-touching context is not easy - just ask any therapist.

Grand Theft Auto V launched with auto-aim ('aimbot') as default in 2013. It is one of the most successful games in history, bringing joy to many people.

Are you arguing that's not a real game because of this?

Yours is a bad faith argument based on an overly narrow pedantic acontextual definitional gripe. Not worth engaging.

You say this, and yet you did. Not by actually explaining why you think my argument is bad mind you, but instead by just throwing big words around.

Bravo.

Maybe we can distinguish craftmanship from creativity. This case can then be cast as one of deploying creativity without embodying the traditional craftmanship (ability to play guitar, sing low notes). I don't see that as illegitimate, so long as no false credit is taken about the said guitar playing, low note singing.

Can an artist be good if they can't draw a good circle by hand? Yes. Except they can't take credit for the goodness of circles that appear in their work, if not drawn by them.

[Edit: "responsibility" -> "credit"]

I think it’s also potentially a sense of taste, like being a music producer vs a music creator.

When AI art was nascent and stable diffusion came out, I put probably 1000 hours into really getting good at using it. I like to compare it to picking up pretty seashells on the sand. When working with those old models where many results were terrible, the prompt was akin to driving to a beach you know has seashells, then generating 100-200 pictures on an A100 was like combing through the beach to see if you find any good ones. Finally you could clean up the couple few that were real gems and get something that looked nice. It may not be artistry, but that doesn’t mean it has zero value at all.

Although let’s be real, most people aren’t going to make a living being a beach comber looking for pretty things that washed up on the shore, when even a kid can do it.

I've been doing this. I've been a poet/songwriter for a while, but I'm no musician. This lowers the bar and provides a great deal of relief from the "creative boilerplate" necessary when booting up a song from zero using a DAW, especially for me, a non-musician.

So, I get a good song by throwing spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. Then I can export the stems to the DAW and replace the AI vocals with my own. A little audio processing and mixing later and the whole song is mine.

That’s a good idea actually! The AI did a fantastic job of making a tune that sounded good and matched the style I was going for, then a lot of the iteration was changing the verses because I discovered there’s a lot of lyrics that sound extremely “cringe” when you listen back. Like nails on a chalkboard, a “you know it when you hear it” situation.

My wife wrote a song for a story she’s been working on, and honestly her sense of verse and timing gave an output with me writing a simple style prompt that sounded absolutely fantastic. But she’d spent hours writing and refining that song as it’s important to the story.

Replacing the AI vocals with my own would likely work, although there’s a certain note in the chorus that’s beyond my vocal range. I bet if I practiced it and recorded myself singing the chorus 50 times I could get one result that sounded right, though. Thanks for sharing.

It was special and you didn't cheat: you wrote the lyrics and they meant something to you and your wife, which is what matters. If you asked someone else to set the music for you, it would still be music about something meaningful to you both. The AI part of this is pretty meaningless, but you made it meaningful by putting something real into it and sharing that with another person.

I do like the idea that another person commented of exporting the stems and actually singing the vocal portion of the song. It’d be fun to sing again (I sang some in high school), but I feel I never would have been able to come up with the tune in the first place if I’d started from zero.

As a semi-professional musician, sounds fair to me.

You wrote the lyrics. There are professional songwriters with many hit songs who only write lyrics. Some can't even play an instrument, much less compose music. So what do they do? They work with a music composer. They hire a music arranger. They hire a band.

So in this case, you still did the foundational songwriting part yourself, but instead of hiring humans to help you finish it, you hired AI.

I disagree. The point of playing a shooter game is to have fun and be competitive while abiding by the rules of the game. Using aimbot is circumventing the whole purpose.

The purpose of making music is to make music. So why does it matter what tool you use to do it? Because tools like Logic or Garageband can create lots of sounds for you is that removing creativity? Really shouldn’t music be recorded with a live band every time? Those music production tools are destroying creativity… No. Obviously not. AI does enable creativity. Turns out it also requires a lot of skill to use it to get something good.

The purpose of eating is to ingest nutrients, but that's not why most chefs enjoy cooking, or why people pay more for nicer meals.

Come to think of it, AI Stans do remind me of people bending over backwards to justify how their Soylent farts made them more skilled at living life.

> Turns out it also requires a lot of skill to use it to get something good.

I agree. I don't like blaming/crediting a tool, for how it is used.

Some tools may be too dangerous for "just anyone" to use, and there may be justification in restricting access, but I'm not sure the tools should always be banned.

I was just talking about this, with a friend who leans conservative (but not nuttily so). He was telling me about watching all these shows about folks living north of the Arctic Circle, and how everyone walks around with guns, because polar bears look at us as walking snacks. In those cases, the gun is an absolutely necessary tool, and no one even thinks twice about it.

Not so, New York City.

But it would be a life-endangering mistake for someone in NYC to dictate to an Alaskan Inuit, that they can't carry a gun, and it might be a life-endangering mistake for an Alaskan to insist that everyone in NYC walk around with a gun (I won't get into the political arguments, there, be draggones).

I agree. My problem with AI produced media is that a lot of the things I've seen are really bad. If someone uses AI, but has taste and takes the time to curate and fix the output, then the output can be fine.

Just like with digital effects in movies, plastic surgery, and makeup - if it's done well, there's a good chance I didn't even notice it. If it's clearly noticeable, it's often because it's not done well.

I think you can compare to another "uncreative" way of making music: sampling. The way the Timelords do it in "Doctorin' the Tardis" is pretty terrible (in their case on purpose, I believe). There are plenty of hip hop examples where I think musically not much is added to the music, but the lyrics and maybe the act do add a lot. And then there are bands like Daft Punk that will chop up and recontextualize the samples to the point that it's clearly a completely new thing.

There were plenty of hiphop examples where the samples are recontextualized as well, then Puff Daddy came along and attempted to rap over virtually unchanged Led Zeppelin songs and everyone ate it up. AI Is doing the same thing to music that he did decades ago. ruin it.

I didn't mean to say all hiphop is like what I mention. I'm 100% sure that hiphop also does sampling in really interesting ways, I'm just not as familiar with the examples. This was not not meant as a diss, and I wasn't saying all hiphop does things the same way. I was just mentioning examples that I'm personally familiar with of "Sampling Slop", "Different kind of creativity", and "Using Sampling as a completely new instrument".

For the middle category, I meant things like Gangsta's Paradise. I really like the song, I think Coolio really adds something. But you can hear much more of "Pasttime Paradise" in there than you can hear "More Spell On You" in Daft Punk's "One More time"

I mention Daft Punk because it's really accessible: there are videos on youtube that can show a layperson like me exactly how they chopped up the samples.

People just enjoy and value the process of making music. Just like you could enjoy the process of drawing, or doing sports. Given the amount of talented musicians that do not live off their art, most of the time they value the process and the result and if other people like it too and pay for it it’s even better. Most music is not produced to give emotions to other but to the musician. It happens we share the same emotions that the musician sometimes. So if you remove the process or devalue it, it’s touching the artist in its heart and values because most of them worked on their craft for years.

One person using more software to "make" music does not remove the process or devalue music for another person who wants to use less software to make music. Replace music with anything in this reasoning.

Exactly right. It's like arguing there is only one way to make food for enjoyment. It's pure snobbery to proclaim there's only one proper way to do X thing along these lines. Making art is just the same, there is no right way to do it.

The HN crowd wants everybody sitting at home on UBI suffering trying to be creative. It's like arguing for hand washing clothes to get that full, proper, drawn-out, brain smashing experience.

Now sit at home and be a good boy, take that UBI, create and be productive - but don't make it too easy, don't you dare use AI, bleed for that UBI.

>Now sit at home and be a good boy, take that UBI, create and be productive

Honestly i prefer that listening marketing bro's on linkedin posting about how AI means X is finished and everyone who learned X needs to pay for their webinar on writing prompts.

Actually with AI the music is made for you. I don’t have to learn how to play the piano the guitar or anything. I just prompt what kind of instrument I want to. Is that still « making music » ? Idk, for me it’s not the same. In the end I’m not a musician. I just enjoy music. But I can understand that the reality of some people is different from mine as regards to what is « making music ». My view or use of AI does not invalidates theirs.

> My view or use of AI does not invalidates theirs.

This reads like you agree with my sentiment.

Absolutely and I hope you understand my point as well. Actually I’ve never been able to learn an instrument and I always wanted to make music. I’m all in to make music without having to learn anything complicated. Other people might not have the same definition of mine or like what I could produce without their craft.

It's not real music if you aren't hand crafting the atoms that make up the molecules of the medium you are vibrating to create sound waves.

I feel like there should be an XKCD for this

During Christmas shopping, I saw several books and board games with illustrations in the signature ChatGPT cartoon style [1, 2] as cover art. (As well as a coloring book that was literally only ChatGPT images) They were sold both in comic shops and large book stores.

I found it just sad, honestly. Nothing against using some AI help to create good cover art, but not even bothering to change the default style screams "low effort".

That's the effect I'm fearing. Sure, AI could probably be used to create new high-quality content by people who really put in the effort, but in reality, it just seems to define a new level of "good enough" that lowers the overall level of quality.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1o0sfzz/chatgpt...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kmao1t/i_asked_ch...

AI isn't being used the same way as a drum loop or an electronic instrument, It's being used to vertically integrate services like Spotify so that they don't have to pay as much for content. Maybe you have found a place for generative AI in your workflow that fosters creativity, but this is not how it's being used the vast majority of the time.

The purpose of music is (usually) to touch people emotionally. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how it was made. There is no cheating when there is feeling.

Generic AI music so far does not touch me. I might tolerate it in the background, but I know there is great music being made with the help of AI. (Which is different from letting the AI do it all)

An aimbot in competive playing is indeed cheating and sucks the fun out for others. But if you have fun with single player aimbots, why not. (I know some games integrated autoaim and they can still be fun)

AI music models are a tool. They're only as good as the person doing the steering and curation.

I am a filmmaker. I have made photons-on-glass films for decades.

I have always wanted to make big-budget sci-fi and fantasy films, as have my friends and colleges who went to film school. The barrier to entry is almost impossible to climb. Most of my friends wound up in IATSE or doing commercial work, but never had the chance to follow through on their passion projects.

Ten thousand kids go to film school every year. Very few of them will wind up being able to make what they dream to create. It's a fucking tragedy that all of this ambition withers on the vine.

Getting a large film budget requires connections. You see a lot of nepotism. Sometimes a director who was in the right place at the right time with the right ideas will make it, but that's such a survivor's bias problem. There are orders of magnitude more people that didn't make it. Talented people full of dreams. And that's a tragedy - imagine how many Martin Scorseses, Hayao Miyazakis, Yorgos Lanthimoses, Denis Villeneuves, and Chloe Zhaos we're losing.

AI is the first tool that will level the playing field for truly driven individuals. I mean this with my full heart - this is a great tool for creative and driven people. It's the arrival of the printing press for us.

But the news of this gift has been twisted and soured by the media and by popular influencers who push only a fear agenda.

By trying to make AI films, I have been doxed, sent death threats, insulted, called thousands of names. Every day! People pour out hatred, racist comments, sexist comments - they literally want me (all of us) to DIE because they've been taught to hate this.

I can't even begin to tell you how exhausting this is. Instead, let me focus on the good.

Here's a list of (what I think) are really good AI films. Each of them takes 10+ hours of work:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4 - Made by a film school grad as a demo of real filmmaking combined with AI VFX.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAQWRBCt_5E - Created by a Hollywood TV writer for an FX show you've probably seen. Not the best animation or voicing, but you can see how it gives a writer more than just a blank page to convey their thoughts.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWZYP5jn5w4 - Music video. Slightly MAGA-coded, but made by a Hollywood VFX person.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U - Made by a film school grad as a Robot Chicken homage. If you're going to tell them "don't use AI", then are you going to get them a job at Disney? Also, all the pieces are hand-rotoscoped, the mouth animations are hand-animated, and every voice is from a hired (and paid) voice actor.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4NFXGMuwpY - Made by a film school grad as a Robot Chicken homage. See previous comment.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_KXYpaTe_8 - Another slightly MAGA-coded music video. Made by the same Hollywood VFX person.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hlx5Rslrzk - Amazing Spider-Man vs. Carnage anime created with ComfyUI and other models.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqoCWdOwr2U - Christmas Grinch anime. It's really funny if you like Jojo and get the references.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKYeDIiqiHs - Totally 100% cursed. Made by a teenager following the comic book's plot. Instead of this teenager spending 100 hours on Fortnite, they made this.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps5Dhc3Lh8U - A Pixar-like short film

These tools do not remove the need for editing, compositing, rotoscoping. You still have to understand film language, character arcs, story, pacing. The human ingredients still have to be there.

By using these models and tools, directors and editors can finally pursue projects that would require many people and potentially very large budgets. Like the Red vs. Blue creators sitting down and making machinima, they can create vivid sci-fi worlds or whatever genre or mood they want to evoke.

AI is a tool. In the hands of an artist, you can make art with AI.

Yes, people are using AI to make slop. Cameras also make slop - selfies, food pics. Your own camera roll is full of garbage.

People are posting slop AI because it's novel. If we'd gone from "no cameras at all" to "smartphones" overnight, you would see so much smartphone camera slop it would be unbearable. We, as a society, had time to develop filters and curation around cameras. That'll eventually happen for AI too.

Cameras can make incredible art in the hands of an artist. They can also make a lot of shit. But we don't demonize the cameras. Soon, our feelings towards AI will become equivalent.

But right now, it's extremely painful to be a creative person using AI.

I -

ABSOLUTELY HATE

ABSOLUTELY DETEST

   THE "ALL AI IS BAD" MEME

IT IS MIMETIC VITRIOL

People have let this stupid meme boil over to the point of sending death threats and doxxing creators. And that is beyond unacceptable.

We need to stop adopting angry slogans of hate and start thinking on a case by case basis with nuance.

This entire conversation needs way more humanity and humility.

And we need to accept that there are good things being created with AI too.

I agree with you on pretty much all that you’ve said here. Thank you especially for the recommended viewing!

I wonder what happens, though, as the economics shift? It’ll be great, creatively speaking, for people who have a project inside them itching to get out into the world. Those were always the people who made the most interesting art anyway.

But viewership economics aren’t expanding in the same way. Same number of viewers, less patience for feature-length work, less willingness to pay.

If the status quo only generated enough money for an already-small universe of Hollywood professionals to feed their families through their creative work, what happens when even that withers?

Film school, it seems to me, is partly about the access to equipment and talent, but mostly about the time and community expectation to dedicate every waking hour to your creative project.

Art and commerce have always been awkward bedmates, but it makes me a little sad that the price for anyone being able to create is that ~none of them will be able to make money from their creative labor.

Hollywood budgets aren't growing, but they're not shrinking either.

Most recent cost cutting has been Hollywood offshoring IATSE jobs to Europe and Asia. 80% of Atlanta's once burgeoning film production has moved away. We have tremendous, multi-billion dollar studio facilities here too.

I do expect AI to eventually be used for saving on VFX costs, pre-production, and even B roll, but I don't think it'll replace principal photography right away. It might be used in more animation projects.

I don't think those budgets will disappear. Rather, I think they will be spent on other projects to increase the slate of offerings.

Meanwhile, completely orthogonal to all of this, the creator economy has been growing tremendously year over year. We have lots of independent creators that are now household names and brands.

Some indie YouTubers that have grown big include:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zach_Hadel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivienne_Medrano

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Haver

All of them were offered network deals.

I suspect we'll see a rise of indie filmmakers and that the field will begin to look more like writing, indie music, or indie games. Anyone can bring their talent and not much capital and make interesting and compelling work.

The problem, as always, will be discovery. A lot of good work will still go unseen. But this is better than the work not being practical or possible.

As long as people capture minds and attention, there will be incredible value in creating and captivating. Artists will get paid. It's just a matter of artists breaking through and finding an audience.

As a longtime musician, I fervently believe in doing the best you can with the tools you have.

As a programmer with a philosophical bent, I have thought a lot about the implications and ethics of toolmaking.

I concluded long before genAI was available that it is absolutely possible to build tools that dehumanize the users and damage the world around them.

It seems to me that LLMs do that to an unprecedented degree.

Is it possible to use them to help you make worthwhile, human-focused output?

Sure, I'd accept that's possible.

Are the tools inherently inclined in the opposite direction?

It sure looks that way to me.

Should every tool be embraced and accepted?

I don't think so. In the limit, I'm relieved governments keep a monopoly on nuclear weapons.

The people saying "All AI is bad" may not be nuanced or careful in what they say, but in my experience, they've understood rightly that you can't get any of genAI's upsides without the overwhelming flood of horrific downsides, and they think that's a very bad tradeoff.

I agree with them.

The Corridor Crew [1] are luminaries in our field, and they are incredibly bullish on this tech.

They've made dozens of essays and done tons of experiments showing that they think AI is going to be great for our field:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSRrSO7QhXY (scrub through the timelines to the end of these videos to see)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq5JaG53dho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUFlOynaUyk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVT3WUa-48Y

Listen to them.

Our entire industry pays attention to them, and they're right!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corridor_Digital

The Corridor Crew [1] are luminaries in our field, and they are incredibly bullish on this tech.

They are literally "react" youtubers who have never worked a single day as professional vfx artists.

This is like saying Jake Paul is the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

I created a jazz fusion supergroup in Suno capable of impossibly tight jamming. I believe the synth player has 8 arms. I'm not even selling it as an output of my own creativity - even though I partially feel like it was - but rather, it was just fun to make! I had a ton of fun with it, even downloaded stems and mixed a lot in a DAW. I still LOL at how fresh some of it is. Suno rocks. Top 40 is garbage anyways, and the best music out right now are live bands, imo, so I don't feel that I'm encroaching on anyone else's artistic opportunity (hopefully) by doing these Suno projects.

That said, I haven't shown it to anyone... I'm not trying to make anyone mad. But what's the point of working on any music, AI or not, if nobody wants to hear it? This was a bit of a depressing realization for someone who was always fearful of letting anyone listen to my own actual music. It doesn't matter how much I piloted the prompt, or mixed down the stems, and how good the final result is, because at the end of the day, its just AI... I really don't know how to feel about the whole thing - there are legitimate arguments against AI for creative use, it's hard to not feel like a hypocrite or something for even using it..

"The purpose of games is (usually) to win. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how you won. There is no cheating when there is winning."

People care about authenticity, though. There are people who get bothered by things like fake DJs, ghostwritten songs, lip synced live performances, and manufactured artists (such as many kpop groups).

And as for single-player aimbots, I agree that it doesn't do anyone any harm, but what's the point? It's like running the course of a marathon on a segway. If you're just doing it by yourself, then I suppose it doesn't hurt anyone, but you can't really say that you ran a marathon, can you?

"but what's the point? "

The point of playing video games?

Having fun. You don't achieve anything for real anyway, unless you are playing professional e-sports. And some games can still be fun, with aimbot. There is more to games than precision mouse work. I remember a arcade space shooter, where flying the aircraft was speedy action with dogfights, and you had only to do rough aiming, the rest did the "targeting computer". But I also have seen FPS shooters with that option and people enjoying the action and boom boom boom feeling powerful.

"There are people who get bothered by things like .. lip synced live performances, and manufactured artists"

And that would actually be me as well. But I try to keep an open mind even with the shallowest mainstream popsongs. Not liking it because of the source, but to see if I feel the music. Usually I turn it off a very quickly though, but I still don't talk down to my niece for example who likes it.

I'm not sure I want AI to touch me emotionally.

It feels insincere and manipulative, especially when I don't know upfront if the content (music, video, text) is from another human being or from AI.

AI will become good enough to write songs better than humans; it's a matter of time. But it feels like someone tries to hack my mind, exploit my human instincts, it doesn't feel like genuine art the way it was for the whole human history - people expressing themselves, creating and sharing something beautiful with each other.

The end result is an automated personalized "enjoy" button, and this is sad.

> But it feels like someone tries to hack my mind, exploit my human instincts, it doesn't feel like genuine art the way it was for the whole human history - people expressing themselves, creating and sharing something beautiful with each other.

There's a thin line between art and business - quite often the goal isn't to have you feel something, it's to sell you product that you pay for, and if by the way you feel something, that's cool.

> AI will become good enough to write songs better than humans; it's a matter of time.

I'm unconvinced. The process of songwriting is so dependent on being able to listen to what you've made and decide whether you enjoy it or not. We can train a model to imitate popular music, but we can't train a model to enjoy music, because we can't quantify enjoyment and turn it into a data set. You can train an LLM on soup recipes, but you can't train one to taste the soup and tell you whether it's good or not.

That's part of what offends me so much about the notion of AI-assisted "creativity." Creating music should be a way of engaging more deeply with music, but you've discovered a way to pay even less attention to music than before. None of the details in an AI-generated song really matter; they were chosen arbitrarily, because they seemed normal. Indeed, they are so normal that your ear will slide right off of them.

You can't fix a soup that someone else prepared—not as an amateur. You don't know what went into it, so you can't pick out the individual flavours and decide whether they're right or not. They were never "right" for you, because you didn't pick them. It's like ordering a Big Mac, taking it apart, and trying to workshop it into Duck à l'Orange. All you get is a Big Mac with some orange slices on it. Maybe you like Big Macs; maybe you're happy. It's a pretty poor substitute for creativity, though.

> The purpose of music is (usually) to touch people emotionally. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how it was made.

The touching you emotionally part is due to the quality of the underlying creative work. I'm sure the GP's wife was touched- they put in the work to make something- but the fact is that work they did was enabled by the theft-at-scale of work others have done.

You can square this with your own ethics however you like but there's simply no getting away from the fact that all of this, the text, the music, the video, all of it only exists because of theft of creative work on an industrial scale. These models did not come from the ether- they are weighted mathematical averages based on ingesting shit tons of existing creative work, made by people, the vast majority of which was ingested against those creatives' explicit wishes.

Unfortunately most people don't give a shit where things come from as long as they get whatever they want in the end, which is why our economy is almost exclusively run by sociopaths.

"You can square this with your own ethics however you like but there's simply no getting away from the fact that all of this, the text, the music, the video, all of it only exists because of theft of creative work on an industrial scale"

I know enough of music creation to know, all music we enjoy is created by "theft". Meaning taking a riff from here, a melody from there. And tweaking it. AI just automated it. Not sure, it sucks with the whole buisness modell around it. That only some profit and not the truly creative composers. But that .. is hardly a new thing. There are many, many awesome musicians out there. Always have been. But only some become "superstars". Where a whole industry pushes them so they stay on top no matter what. That's not fair, but AI did not change this.

This argument always hinges on pretending that "humans being influenced by other humans" is the same thing as "a model ingesting millions of works without permission," and it just isn’t. Not even remotely.

Human influence is selective. It’s contextual, filtered through taste, memory, culture, and intent. A metal songwriter doesn't subconsciously absorb the entire global corpus of music; they draw from the artists who shaped them, or deliberately subvert something specific. That’s literally the creative process: choosing what to reference, twist, or subvert, reject, counter.

A model doesn't do that. It doesn't choose influences, it doesn’t have tastes, and it doesn't have intent. It just digests everything it's fed into a massive statistical set of averaged patterns that it has found, and then regurgitates them on command so as to "minimize error." Calling that the same thing as human inspiration is like saying a wood chipper is just an automated sculptor because both involve wood going in and differently shaped wood coming out.

The music industry fucks musicians raw, to be sure, but this is not guaranteeing anything for musicians in the slightest, quite the opposite: it just makes it so users of the models can also fuck musicians. How is that good at all? The exploitation of artists at scale being the status quo is not a reason to excuse even more exploitation, that's certifiably insane.

"A metal songwriter doesn't subconsciously absorb the entire global corpus of music; they draw from the artists who shaped them"

They also draw from the people around them. The music they hear when they are in public spaces. Etc.

Out of curiosity, have you ever done composing?

Anyway, one can create very shallow songs by hand. One can also give empty vague prompts.

Or one can make a complex music arrangement, manual editing of tracks, have some AI generated mixed in, very detailed prompts etc. If that ain't creative to you, that is your opinion. I think different.

If it were just an average, we'd only get gray sludge. Models learn the manifold distribution - they don't just mix existing works; they discover the hidden rules by which those works were created. This is reverse-engineering of human culture, and that's exactly why control over the latent space is so critical - otherwise, we surrender culture to an algorithm that has "learned the rules" but has no concept of meaning

> Someone said, "using AI is like using an aimbot for music."

Ok. Lets go with that analogy. Whats the problem with someone playing a single player game with an aimbot on? Sure they wont get good at the aiming part. But it feels kinda up to them on if that matters or not.

Additionally, I wouldn't see anything morally wrong with that. Now, if someone entered into a music competition, where only human made music was allow then I agree that this would be "cheating". But what if its not that and the listeners simply are OK with the "aimbotted" music?

> Whats the problem with someone playing a single player game with an aimbot on?

People are doing it on the server where all the musicians live, and they have no other place to go, only disconnect.

> where all the musicians live, and they have no other place to go, only disconnect.

No actually. Those musicians are free to continue making whatever music that they want and can refuse to listen to the AI music if they dont want to.

The fact that 2 other, unrelated 3rd parties both like to make AI music and listen to AI music is not the musicians area of control here. They do not get to decide what other people like to listen to or make.

You're confused at multiple levels.

> free to continue making whatever music that they want

Never said they weren't.

> can refuse to listen to the AI music if they don't want to

A musician can be a listener, indeed. If you believe a listener has this freedom and will keep it, you're most probably mistaken. No one besides musicians and discerning, ideologically relentless listeners is interested in making NN-generated music distinguishable and supporting the right of filtering it. The goal is to supplant one with the other.

> The fact that 2 other, unrelated 3rd parties both like to make AI music and listen to AI music…

Listeners is not an unrelated party to a musician. They form a vital symbiosis. And it's a zero-sum game, as listener's attention is a limited resource.

> They do not get to decide what other people like to listen to or make.

This is an unrelated point. Who decides what is a separate topic.

The crux of the issue is that we have two types of superficially similar product which are in fact substantially different (hope this does not require clarification) and incomparable in terms of resources necessary for their creation. This begets unprecedented power imbalance and incentives for deceit, biased legislation and other moves to solidify this situation.

> Never said they weren't.

Great! Problem solved then.

> A musician can be a listener, indeed.

Ok! They can listen to different music then.

> Listeners is not an unrelated party to a musician

No, musicians do not own other listeners. If other listeners want to listen to something else, thats their choice.

> we have two types of superficially similar product which are in fact substantially different

Ok! You are free to care, and other can think they are similar enough for them and their own purposes.

To use the video game analogy, I think it's more about PVP vs "bots" as opposed to PVP vs "humans". A lot of PVP games (especially battle royale style) struggle with the question of whether to include dumb AI characters as "fodder" for people to play against. The PVP purists, pro players, and streamers tend to be against bots because they think the game should be a pure test of human skill. Normie players, less skilled players, and players who just don't have the time to master the game tend to like to play against a mix of bots and humans. Some people just don't like PVP and would prefer to just play against bots only.

I'm not going to weigh in on which side I'm on, but I notice the discussion around AI "making creativity too easy" and "devaluing practiced skills" to be similar to the discussion around bots in PVP games.

The long history of art shows a story of technology developments and how artists have creatively applied them as new techniques and mediums.

Is AI music today able to emulate what a brilliant human artist does? Not really. But is it something that artists can leverage creatively? Absolutely.

AI can do the most basic first pass of creation. For a senior engineer writing code is a relatively small part of the job. There is a paradox where complete novices can churn out content / code that looks decent, but is superficially empty or a maintenance nightmare waiting to happen if the complexity increases even a little. On the other hand, for senior engineers, it is truly useful. If you treat the AI like a modestly skilled junior developer and actually still design your software it just does a lot of the boring boiler plate for you. You are still doing almost everything important. When you understand the code and could write it yourself you can almost always keep the LLM on track towards your objective, achieve appropriate code quality, and finish the task quicker. They are also really decent at refactoring and doing boilerplate. Especially in languages like C++ with a lot of boilerplate.

I imagine the same idea above holds for media (music, film) as well. When you understand how to prompt and can get the right scene with all the right constraints you are saving time. The human is still composing, editing, and storytelling. The LLM again becomes a relatively interesting but boring tool in your workflow to speed up some aspects.

Right now the power of LLMs is that you can funnel parts of your workflow that they can handle well and you save a lot of time for minimal design cost in terms of how to use them.

I find many of the top videos on civitai.com to be amazing

https://civitai.com/videos

The analogy is great, but it breaks down when we talk about professional use. An aimbot in multiplayer is evil because it ruins the game for others. But an aimbot in game development (e.g., procedural aiming animation) is just a tool. The problem with current AI video is that the model often shoots not where the director wants, but where it's easiest to hit (the template)

There's literally no problem at all with using aimbots, the problem is when you're playing with other people and lie about it. In fact, many games have built in aimbots simply because it's a fun mechanic (Ion Fury and Borderlands: Pre-Sequel are two that come to mind.)

Using AI to create music is like having your mom buy you a surfer wardrobe in the 80s/90s even though you lived in landlocked midwest or a skater wardrobe even though you didn't skate.

No, comparing to an aimbot is too charitable. Using AI for music is at best like watching a gaming stream and you barely choosing the game, though not the streamer.

That is an excellent way to put it. Thank you for relaying this.

Agree... AI enables output, not creativity. The mediocre confuse one for the other.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com