Hacker News Reader

Comment by jatora | Hacker News Reader

> Also: I liked a song and it was sonos. I unliked it after discovering. I feel so stupid, so often.

This is asinine. Keep depriving yourself of things you enjoy I guess?

Every like to an AI-generated work is (literally!) one more data point in support of record labels dropping human artists for AI artists that will do what they want, perform where they want, and give all of their profits back to the label.

Movie studios are "signing" AI artists from AI studios for massive dollars; this is happening.

Maybe you don't care, but music is beautiful and difficult, and I really enjoy hearing works from people that have a passion for it.

You don't have to worry, though; most people are in your school of thought. "Who cares? It's good." Short-term thinking is best-term thinking.

I dont think AI music proliferation is in favor of music studios at all, hence why they want to crush it by all means necessary. You should question your stance when you find yourself on the same side as the MPAA/RIAA/etc.

I am in favor of being able to find music I like, with the least friction possible, without fueling the legacy music industry that is inflated far beyond reasonability.

> You should question your stance when you find yourself on the same side as the MPAA/RIAA/etc.

This is tribal thinking.

Not at all since i only asked them to question their stance

AI music is EXCELLENT for the labels.

They (theoretically) have the physical infrastructure and capital to produce entirely AI-generated records, master and press them, promote and market them, retain an in-house band to play the record and book venues for them to play in (see also: Live Nation/Ticketmaster).

The members of the band are replaceable, thus capping the compensation ceiling.

The label retains almost all of the revenue end-to-end in this model. No messy contracts (except to AI providers).

Why would they invest in human talent that has needs, like, idk, sleep, when they can have AI-generated artists that can be available any time for any reason? (Lots of people don't care where their music comes from, unfortunately, and Spotify, the biggest streaming app, is already working hard to desensitize people to AI-generated tracks.)

This is already happening:

- https://www.ohio.edu/news/2025/07/your-new-favorite-band-may...

- Even Timbaland (very successful producer in the 2000s) started an AI-only label: https://www.thefader.com/2025/07/25/imoliver-human-ai-music-...

That's like saying it's irrational to disregard a news report after finding out it was fake. You believed it and found it interesting at the time. Why would knowledge about it being untrue change that?

Because we don't read reports just to have something to read, we do because we want to learn something about the world. And actual music fans don't listen to music just to drown out the silence, they want to listen to what another human being has to say, someone with their own history, experiences, views on life and the world, something to say and the creativity to express it in an interesting way. It makes absolute sense to be pissed off at something artificially generated, devoid of any intent or meaning, statistically generated based on a mass-pirated library of real musicians' work, skinsuiting as music with content.

I admit there are situations where music is used just to have sound, and some people just want to have something on in the background without having to pax attention to it. And one could lament or not the fact that humans are no longer really necessary to produce vapid muzak. But going by the GP's words, I don't think that that's what they were doing or looking for.

Perhaps knowing a human with talent worked on it, putting some small part of themselves and their lived experience into the music has value to them? If so, then their actions make complete sense.

Human created music might have value to them, but it doesn't mean that the AI song was valueless. They admit they enjoyed it. So it doesn't make sense in terms of it not having value.

I wouldn't say it's asinine though. People reject creative output out of personal protest against the creator. Someone might love a movie only to refuse to ever watch it again because they found out the director was accused of something horrible.

Some people just don't want to support anything to do with AI. Although in this case the OP admits to also using AI directly so there's some inconsistency there, which is consistent with the state of confusion and uncertainty OP is expressing.

True, asinine was too strong a critique. I am just not in favor of emotional decision making where it can be helped. I can despise Tom Cruise as a person while still enjoying many of his movies. I know that some can't do that. I have always detached the creators from the art and that makes AI slot right in for me.

It's not emotional when there is still always a person behind these "works" that stands top benefit from it from you listening to it.

It's not asinine at all. Context matters in art. Otherwise, more songs exist that I would probably really like than I will ever hear, so I'm going to focus on the human-made ones. Besides, part of the joy of music extends beyond listening. For many people, myself included, if we feel really connected to a song we like to learn about the people who created it.

Context doesnt matter in all art. Sunset, aurora borealis, waterfall, clear night skies, etc. These are devoid of a creator and have beauty nonetheless. While they aren't "art", they evoke the exact same brain centers, which means the creator can be factored out of our enjoyment of external stimuli. And you can follow that chain of reasoning to a more rational stance on AI and art in general.

> Context doesnt matter in all art. Sunset, aurora borealis, waterfall, clear night skies, etc. These are devoid of a creator and have beauty nonetheless.

I'm sure the religious fundamentalists would have something to say about that XD I'm not one, though, but I don't much appreciate the framing of needing a more "rational" stance here as it kind of signals bad faith to me. There is nothing emotional about worrying about artists' livelihood which has already been under attack for decades before LLMs existed. I'm not saying that one HAS to derive (additional) enjoyment from the presence of a creator. I listen to plenty of human-produced music where I don't care about the artist but these are always songs that I listen to for a short period of time then never think about again. And of course this goes way beyond just who the creator is as a person, it's also about what they inflict into the art itself: the unique vocal inflections, odd ways someone play's an instrument, how they perform it... but that's getting more into this than I meant to when I started typing what I thought would be two sentences, lol.

Anyway, I'm also not saying that people can't enjoy generated output, I'm just not going to support it. Especially since there is still always a person behind it who is maybe going to benefit from people listening to it. No thank you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com