To me the feeling of AI generated content is less "slop" and more "in-flight magazine". It can have a surface sheen of quality that you can lure you in, but you realise it's devoid of any vitality or soul.
When recorded music was invented, musicians protested. Recorded music was devoid of any vitality or soul. Recorded music still became a hit. Then we got the synthesizer. Again we got the same complaints, lifeless and without soul. The synthesizer still became a hit. Now the next step is happening, and we see the same complaints all over.
Only time will show if the next step will happen anyway. My gut feeling tells me that AI art will gain acceptance over time, and we will just think of it as "art" or "music", just as we did with recorded mysic and synthetic sounds.
Humanity lost some things when it gained recorded music. It made the profession of performer less valuable, and diminished the number of performers who could make a living. But humanity got something very valuable in return — the ability to record and play back music. The same goes with the tradeoffs made for photography and motion pictures.
I see little value to humanity in tools that are able to generate an endless amount of music derived from existing music, specifically designed to neatly slot into the place of human artists. We gain little in return from that.
Some people will make an argument like, this lets people generate lots of low-quality music for use in elevators or grocery stores. Well, there is already a massive oversupply of completely free music which can do that. Do people pretend to not know this?
The other weak argument is that it lets people express themselves who haven't studied or practiced music. But, it doesn't, because the interfaces (text prompts or "upload an existing file") are designed to take the place of a human being given instructions for criteria to fill, as if they were a worker, not an expression of the person giving the instructions. If the person giving the instructions were expressing themselves, most of the AI tool would not be redundant. It's as expressive as telling another person to write a song for you with some instructions. Hardly expressive at all.
"Music derived from existing music" describes almost all music ever written. So not any kind of argument against AI?
And the quality of music generated by AI is increasing geometrically. Be careful to consider that any music heard today will be among the least quality generated by AI. Because it will get better with practice, at the speed of light.
That first comment I can get behind, but probably not in the way intended. Recording technology made performers less valuable, so fewer could make a living. The AI composers (and performers) will go further down that road. My conclusion? Get used to it. Just like human-adding-machines got replaced by calculators. And a generation of weavers, replaced by looms guided by punched cards.
This phenomenon is not new, and will go down a well-worn path.
> "Music derived from existing music" describes almost all music ever written. So not any kind of argument against AI?
I don't know why you are calling out this particular sentence fragment. That wasn't meant to differentiate AI-generated music from human created music.
> My conclusion? Get used to it.
What's the upside? I don't get it. I don't understand why you even replied to me. You didn't address the point I was making. The point was the examples I gave — photography, audio recordings, film — which are much closer to AI music than your examples of punch cards and looms — had clear upsides to humanity, despite also having some downsides. AI music and visual art seems to be almost entirely downside. Sorry to restate what I already wrote, but you didn't address it at all.
Except to say, poorly I suppose since the point didn't come across, Get Used To It.
This is nothing new, your examples are great ones too, the benefits we got are, lots more art for everybody. To take the side of the composer/performer/artist is natural I suppose, but that's such a tiny fraction of humanity. To ignore the clear and positive upside, even claim it doesn't exist, is disingenuous?
To criticise AI music for being the same as human music, is a curious thing to say if one doesn't want to distinguish the two somehow? I missed that point entirely I guess. I don't know why that sentence was there at all then.
> To criticise AI music for being the same as human music, is a curious thing to say if one doesn't want to distinguish the two somehow? I missed that point entirely I guess. I don't know why that sentence was there at all then.
This is still not relevant. You don’t need to bring it up again. I wasn’t criticizing it for that.
As for the rest of your comment, you didn’t state any upsides for AI generated music, but you did spend time to attack me, so I think we’re done here.
I'm not sure I follow your argument, because neither synthesizers nor recordings write music.
For augmenting comoposers, sure, GenAI can be a tool like others. Musicians have been incorporating rhythms and melodies shipped with their electronic instruments for ages.
Entire genres have been defined by sounds and synth presets, too.
So I do see a bit of the similarities that you describe, but I think this is largely misleading.
> I'm not sure I follow your argument, because neither synthesizers nor recordings write music.
The argument is that each technology advance accompanied resistance followed by adaptation. "Recorded music" was arguably as paradigmatically disruptive over "live music" as "AI generated music" will be.
The two are fundamentally incomparable beyond the surface level fact that "things will be different". Recorded music changed the way we experience music. AI tools may change the way we make music.
From my perspective the implications of this are dire. AI can completely remove the human element. The skill, creativity, and collaboration required to produce music is a big part of my appreciation for it. Once that's gone, when Spotify can generate exactly what I want to hear, Music as we know it loses its value.
You're not wrong. A paradigm shift is not an incremental change but a disruption of fundamentals.
> From my perspective the implications of this are dire.
These changes are scary, especially as people try to come to practical terms with the new reality.
> AI can completely remove the human element. The skill, creativity, and collaboration required to produce music is a big part of my appreciation for it.
I still hate autotune. I feel that it ruined music. But, on the other hand, it allowed people who were excellent musicians but terrible singers to make excellent music, even masterpieces. I don't think autotune was a paradigm shift really, but it was pretty disruptive.
People are deeply creative, social, collaborative, musical, artistic, hierarchical and status conscious. These traits will always drive people to make music and share it, and derive meaning from it. People will still pay other people for the music they make.
Photography utterly disrupted the social role that painters held as documentors. No one needed to hire a good painter to have a portrait. They could hire a photographer more cheaply for more accurate documentation. Artists working in the medium of painting really had to grapple with the question of what art is, if academic faithful representation of reality is no longer valued by society. Painting thus began to change. Impressionism led to Suprematism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Conceptualism, Modernism, Post Modernism.
Artists today will have to grapple with similar questions raised by AI generated art. But humans are creative, indomitable, curious and tenacious. I am absolutely excited to see the art that future human artists will make in the face of all of this.
This was implicit as an intent in the public statement of Ek, Spotifys CEO, when he said that they're not gonna ban AI-generated music per se (and there already is plenty on Spotify).
Somehow this nudged me a bit when I switched to YTM, although the bundle with YT background playback on iOS was probably the bigger nudge.
There's plenty of AI-generated music on YouTube as well, but for the moment their recommendation algorithm and catalogue is just better for me.
For now, it also doesn't seem to suggest me any AI-generated music whenever I use autoplay or suggestions.
I'm not falling for the illusion that this won't change though.
Another side of it is that it will enable the creation of more music around more topics than before, by non-musicians. The accessibility bar is lower.
For a lot of people, music is a way to express their emotions, and not just by creating/playing it, but by listening to it. Now, you'll be make your own hyper-specific music with lyrics around topics specific to you, without learning any of the underlying skills yourself.
I've certainly wanted some kinds of music/representation in music of some of my experiences to exist, but not enough to go out and learn to make it myself. Now/soon I should be able to do that with AI tools, and I think that's actually neat!
My comment was a reply to someone talking about being expressive with AI music generators like these. The points you are making have nothing to do with what me or the person I was replying to said.
They are connected but you aren't seeing it. The average person can't create baroque music based on a bunch of words they like. That's a lot of musical expressivity for someone who doesn't even know guitar chords.
You are just skipping the step that all of it had the human element considered, which to all of us is a very intrinsic part of "art". When AI generates a piece of entertainment it's ok to just call it entertainment, it's not art until AI actually has something we can relate to as consciousness (aka a "soul").
Hard disagree. I don't think anyone considers that, unless they're an art critic, a philosopher, or a snob.
For a normal person, whether something is art or not, is a mix of 1) whether they like it, 2) whether they can, or conceivably could, enjoy it together with other people, and 3) whether they're supposed to enjoy it or call it art, because other people claim they do (social proof).
Examples:
- Pop songs are strongly 1, 2 and 3a (enjoyment), but not necessarily 3b (considered High Art). Most people don't care, or couldn't even tell, if the songs they like were written and performed by actual humans or by machines; they experience them through some machine anyway.
- Paintings. I recently visited a Van Gogh exhibition, and I can't honestly say I liked most of it. Most paintings, in general, are ugly. We call them art because we're supposed to call some paint scribbles on a canvas art, particularly when they're framed and put in a museum (as opposed to bought off the street!) and decreed Art by People In Authority Over What Is or Isn't Art. For this exhibit in particular, my ability to enjoy the paintings was proportional to how much I knew about Vincent van Gogh's life - for those paintings I had some context for, I enjoyed them even though they're otherwise pretty bad to me. But most people, most of the time, don't have any context for paintings they're viewing, and they still call them art.
Hell, arguably, the best "paintings" in that exhibit were a couple that were obviously AI-generated - like Vincent wearing VR goggles, or animated Vincent inviting the patrons to the exhibit.
Nah, what I think is death of art for regular people is quantity and personalization. The most important aspect of day-to-day art experience is that you can enjoy it together with people around you. It's a problem for TV shows and books these days, and even more with "Internet original" videos - there's just so many of them, and with everyone's getting their own personalized feed, it's getting hard to find common creative works you and your conversational partners both seen. Everyone's experience is becoming disjoint from everyone else's (except for occasional superhero or wizard movie) - at which point you eventually realize that enjoying unique art no one else has is pointless waste of life.
I never thought much of Van Gogh’s work until my sister recommended I read Irving Stone’s novel Lust for Life. I loved it and did a deeper dive on Van Gogh and his contemporaries. Now, he’s one of my favorite artists.
For me, one problem with AI art is that there isn’t context for any of it. It’s just there and didn’t come from anywhere.
Eventually, some prompt engineer may build up a coherent body of work that is moving or provocative, but we aren’t there yet.
I like listening to Soundtracks, but if you've not played the game/watched the movie, it can be hard to get into it (Listening to NieR: Automata is a journey). Listening to one track is like reading one chapter of a book. It may be your favorite one, but there's something more substantial into consuming the whole work. I know people listen to music to set up moods, but everyone has that playlist/album where they listen to the whole thing just for the sake of listening. Or watch a painting for contemplation, not to judge whether it's beautiful or perfectly made. And that is why I can't enjoy AI generations. There is nothing to connect too.
P.S. I don't mind people using AI as tools, but the human agency needs to be visible and relatable. If it's only a prompt, don't ask why I don't value it.
I'm a soundtrack person too, and that is my point: you may like some tracks from a game you loved, and you probably have no idea whether or not the music was human or AI made.
Human is still writing the prompt. That's your human element.
The prompt can be detailed, creative, and innovative. Kinda like a composer comes up with an idea for a new piece. But now the composer won't need the technical ability to translate it into musical notation.
Not sure if writing the prompt is the human element because an AI can easily write prompts. I think a stronger human element is in the training data (while that training data isn't dominated by AI generated content itself).
All our current AIs need prompts to produce content. So, you'd need to enter a prompt so that AI can produce a prompt for you.
But I guess you could develop some variant which just generates prompts in a cycle. But most of the generated prompts will pretty bad, so it will in turn produce heaps of crap.
That's where the human element is still needed - try a prompt, evaluate the result, tweak the prompt again. If this doesn't produce a good result, try a different idea. It's not even that different from how artists produce content these days (the create <-> evaluation cycle). Current AI is not good enough to be able to judge the produced content (that's why it produces so much crap after all).
There's way more human input in the training data than in the prompt is my point, many orders of magnitude more. Of course there needs to be something to start some chain, but that's like saying a human needs to press "deploy" or "start", it applies to any tool. Even a perpetual motion machine needs someone to start it.
Not really unless you have perfect memory. What people do is learning rules and breaking them. The rules exist outside of your mind, you're just trying to conform in some ways and distort them in others. You do not blindly copy what came before. When drawing a portrait, there are the rules of anatomy, perspective, colors and light, and your medium of choice. A style is a particular combination that you know works, but you still have to know the rules in the first place. You study masters to learn what is and what is not important in those rules, not to recreate their works in details. I've not heard of any art classes that train you by copying everything that has been produced.
Generative AIs don't remember the original media, they just detect/extract patterns out of them. They aren't able to recreate pixel perfect anything. Ask it to give you a Mona Lisa and the result would just kinda resemble the original. (kinda what a mediocre artist would be able to produce going by their memory)
> I've not heard of any art classes that train you by copying everything that has been produced.
You don't have to learn it, because it's the second nature for humans. We learn by imitation. Babies learn to talk by imitating sounds from parents. Artists learn by imitating style by masters. That's what generative AI does as well.
I see AI as just another tool. Like Photoshop, a software mixer, electrical powertools in my wood-working shop, a 3D printer in my office.
All of these had immense impact on the way we create (or make art). And despite all this, we still use waterpaint, perform music on ancient instruments, make furniture with minimalistic tools, or use clay to make objects.
I'm not pessimistic about generative AI. If anything, It'll allow more people to create. Allow new and unprecedented art forms. It will have an effect on the way people make money with art. But so did photoshop, digital audio mixers, a table saw, and a CAD/CAM machines.
If taping a banana to the wall, or eating said banana is art, then I feel like making a machine sadly sing the MIT license to you has to qualify. The idea to do this is wonderful to me.
I would consider that the whole act of making the a machine that can generate music and then making it generate a song of the MIT license could be considered 'art'. That doesn't make the end result 'art' in isolation art.
Like the banana. The bananas isn't art, taping a random banana to a random wall and eating a banana isn't art. A particular person taping a banana to a particular wall for a particular reason is what make the whole thing art.
I definitely agree that you shouldn't. To me absolutist arguments about if AI-generated content is art or not makes no sense. AI is a tool, like for example carpentry, that can be used for many purposes. Most carpentry isn't art, it's craftsmen building useful things and solving practical problems. But there are definitely artists out there using carpentry as the medium in which they express their artistic intent.
True. But undeniably, current creative types will be displaced. That will be disruptive, will damage individuals ability to make a living.
Not a lot of individuals, to be honest. Only a handful of people make any kind of living from composing. Millions try it, but have to be content with performing for their friends. Which will continue unchanged.
So the actual economic impact of AI music will be different from the scenarios being described. What is true is, we will all have a lot more musical listening choices. Which is a net good for the rest of us?
The difference here is that no one wants to listen to this shit. It is extremely corny and generic. Cringeworthy.
Algorithmic music has already been around for decades and it never became popular. In the 90's it was of interest only to a small group of academic music nerds. The same is true today. Avant-garde shit for nerds. No one wants to listen to it.
I am under a rock of denial of how bad popular music has become. I was checking out some other tracks on this site and now believe AI could eventually take a lot of musicians jobs, for advertising and so on. But there won't be an AI Kurt Cobain.
AI's bread and butter will be "customers who just want generic art for generic commercial use, any quality art, and pay as little as possible for it." It's probably never going to need to create the next Billie Jean hit.
> When recorded music was invented, musicians protested
> we got the synthesizer. Again we got the same complaints
I honestly don't believe this happened. Citations?
You make it sound like one day there was no recording and then bam! flac quality recordings of musicians, out of the blue. You do realize it started with exceedingly shitty wax cylinders that sounded absolutely atrocious by today standards (and by the past standards as well)
>After the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, all bets were off for live musicians who played in movie theaters. Thanks to synchronized sound, the use of live musicians was unnecessary — and perhaps a larger sin, old-fashioned. In 1930 the American Federation of Musicians formed a new organization called the Music Defense League and launched a scathing ad campaign to fight the advance of this terrible menace known as recorded sound.
>The Music Defense League spent over $500,000, running ads in newspapers throughout the United States and Canada. The ads pleaded with the public to demand humans play their music (be it in movie or stage theaters), rather than some cold, unseen machine.
>Joseph N. Weber, the president of the American Federation of Musicians, made it clear in the March, 1931 issue of Modern Mechanix magazine that the very soul of art was at stake in this battle against the machines.
No, it was about recorded music, as the article says. The movie made use of the Vitaphone sound system. The claim was about musicians protesting the introduction of recorded music.
I want to run a experiment on humans to see if we are worthy of a turing test.
1. We tell a human (test subject) that they will be a judge but they are a test subject. We will tell them that there will be two chats -- one will have a human and the other will have a computer and they need to decide which is which.
2. We will then give them access to two real time chats but the twist is both of them will be humans.
3. Our test subject needs to rebel against the experiment and say they are both humans.
What percentage of the population will be able to say both chats are humans? Is this a humane experiment? Will any ethics board clear it? Does it have any scientific value?
Dunno, but it could probably get published and I'd at least read the comments when it gets posted to HN.
Tricky bit is the design in the signaling and instructions so as to avoid biasing the results while still allowing the desired 'both are human' response. Something like a check box for each chat if that chat was a robot. If you have the budget I'd also run the control Turing test, human x computer, as well as a computer x computer test.
Surely this just tests for freethinking and non-conformity. Much like
Milgram and Asch found.
About a third of people are highly suggestible and agreeable, they
readily follow authority, fall for scams and can be hypnotised. About
a third cannot be easily conned or hypnotised, are vigilant,
"disagreeable" and likely to go their own way.
Even of that highly sceptical, independent third, it takes a lot of
courage to say "I totally know this is bullshit, and I'm done". Only
a handful of Migram's subjects were able, not just to assert a moral
objection to hurting a fellow human being, but to question or see
through the whole ruse of fake scientists and stooges. Even if you can
spot that, it takes rather a rare human to act on it, to call it out
and walk away - or rather escape the parameters (get outside the box)
you've been placed within.
Sadly you could say the same of the 80% in just about anything human-made. The 80% of software, music, furniture, etc.
Maybe there will be a change of feeling, it's starting to come to me, instead of seeing this AI generated content as "soulless" etc I'm starting to see it as an extension of OUR human generated work. It's more like an endless remix of HUMAN talent.
All of that is boring though. The exciting stuff is all that will be displaced, and how we will solve the myth or meritocracy.
AI slop (to me) would be to pass this off as a song or something meritorious to listen to.
IMHO this and things like it are basically a sub-class of comedy or satire, so I have time for this sort of thing. It's a joke, and should (can?) only be appreciated as artistic as someone saying "Wouldn't it be funny if ... ?" because now that casual thought can be turned into a pretty instant "well here it is! LOL!".
I don't think you're supposed to appreciate it as music. Maybe I'm calling it wrong though.
(edit - I will admit that upon further thought, I'm not sure how I feel about this when compared to, for example, Nina Gordon recording "Straight Outta Compton" as an accoustic, mildly lamenting singer-songwriter style number 20-some years ago. It's clearly in the same satrical arena but one took a lot more effort and imagination. Kinda, because there was a lot of effort and imagination that went into both the training data and the model, even if this specific output was only a passing joke. It's quite hard to reason about this stuff...)
In my experience, there's less of a distinction than you might think.
A lot of satirical songs are absolute bangers, because (for example) to do a send-up of the tropes of X music, you must know all the tropes of X music, and be able to perform them. So a lot of satirical music is actually done by people with a lot of skill and passion for the thing being satirised.
And because satirists don't have to worry about being predictable or unoriginal, they can put in more crowd-pleasing cliches per minute than 'serious' artists, giving them the most intense X of all X artists.
(Not saying the MIT license is a banger though - just that some satirical songs are)
Personal opinion, but I think you're calling it wrong. Also personal opinion, I absolutely hate the idea of it happening, buuut...
I think it's a bit like everyone who said "black cabs in London have nothing to fear; X years of 'The Knowledge' will always be better than a guy with an App in an old Prius..." Except it was all wrong. Black cabs are probably still superior, but the bulk of people (and especially new customers) are all using Uber, because it's easier and they just don't care.
It sucks that production factory, literally built to make money, AI created junk music will be a thing, but it most likely will. Someone will exploit that they can make a ton of cash with low risk and budget. They'll have the connections to, despite initial (somewhat) faux outrage from the public/press, get radio play/playlisted online ("probably even 'ironic' addition from the hipster music crowd"). The song will be an earworm, and aside from the musicians that hear all the flaws, the passive every day mom and pop listeners will get the hook stuck in their head and it'll just be another great tune like any other.
I don't think we'll replace 'celebrity', I think that'll still happen, and I think maybe greater appreciation will happen to 'real musicians' (with a face!). But 'everyday' disposable pop (like all those one hit wonder tunes that are still played in nightclubs, pubs, throwback radio, wedding discos) - that's going to be disrupted massively.
I guess my point was that I don't hate the linked tune because it's not someone asking me to listen to a song, it's a joke and one that does have some humour to it.
I can absolutely see this tech (if it's allowed to) replacing a lot of working musicians who do music for ads, jingles, tv, film etc. And yes, disposable pop is probably on the chopping block.
> disposable pop ... that's going to be disrupted massively.
I wonder how the disruption will play out - the world is already drowning in content created by humans. If we envision that AI can make disposable pop to the same standard (and I have no reason to doubt it) then that surely creates an absolute deluge, almost boundless in size, of stuff. Promotion will become more or less the only art, to make things stand out from the crowd, and that can probably only continue for situations in which people want a shared experience. For an awful lot of situations the streaming of entirely ephemeral audio would probably do. It could as easily kill 'pop' as a business on the audio side, as it could steal it.
I'm just sorta daydreaming about possible outcomes here. All sorts could happen.
Art will realign to put more value on live performances. Don't worry, people who push AI art don't understand that art is a form of communication between humans. They might learn when the bubble pops and they are left with a trillion shiny "art" objects that are worth nothing, because nobody wants to look at them.
100%. I compare it to the invention of cameras - before that you could make an honest living as a portrait painter, no inspiration needed. Afterwards, painters needed to lean into artistic qualities to stand out. But also, 'Photography' was born - what was seemingly just a press of a button turned out to be an artform.
Not totally true. Yes, there's value in live performances and human connection but most of the songs we listen don't stimulate that. Hell, often we don't even know what the musician looks like, who they are, how they sound live, etc. They're just items in our Spotify queue that are only there to give us a dopamine hit with their sequence of well-composed sounds.
There's a craving for a deeper connection but that's usually the smaller part of our everyday consumption.
> Not totally true. Yes, there's value in live performances and human connection but most of the songs we listen don't stimulate that. Hell, often we don't even know what the musician looks like, who they are, how they sound live, etc. They're just items in our Spotify queue that are only there to give us a dopamine hit with their sequence of well-composed sounds.
If you are a little bit of a critical listener you listen to those songs because you connect to them somehow, that's the power of music, it's a language for emotions that you don't need to know how the artists look like, or their backgrounds, to feel what they try to convey. Having the context/background might help to intellectualise a piece of music but the feeling comes from the art itself.
I mean theres a lot of like crap production music for film and Tv out there. I imagine like cheap reality tv shows will start using AI music. Maybe anime, which is always looking for ways to make its arduous production methods easier and cheaper because the industry is so volatile and not guarunteed to be profitable. But I think to make properly decent money as an artist you need to tour. This has been the model ever since streaming took hold. So yeah, its not going to be that profitable to be a faceless AI pumping out stuff into your spotify stream. I think the market will be in music for TV.
Sorry to disagree, we already crossed the line where the "Her" movie could turn into a real story. To say it more clearly: It won't take a long to see people even having affective relationships with AIs.
Sure, some desperate lonely people have very close relationships with ie pillows. What OP says will most probably be true though - when there is ocean of cheap/free perfect AI art, it will be worthless.
What will be worthy is imperfect human-created art. We already went through this decades ago with expensive hand made vs cheap machine made stuff, this is just another iteration.
I am not saying it will be great to be an artist, just like in the past few famous live in limelight and most will struggle to stay afloat.
Having pets improves your mood and health. In a measurable way. So people already have "effective" relationships wit their pets. What's the difference between an effective relationship and an affective one?
Oh I'm not saying that having a relationship with an AI is a bad thing per se. I actually enjoy the discussions with the LLM models, even the small ones that I run locally, in a way superior rate than the conversations that I often have with human beings, and pretty sure I'm not the only one. I didn't create yet an "entity" with some kind of persistent memory which will turn into my personal daily assistant (my personal Jarvis) but that's definitively in my to do list.
The experience of knowing there's a human behind the message is valuable. People hated corporate propaganda "art" before AI was a thing, for the same reason it is not human.
Depending on the AI tool in question, and the level of control it offers the human, there can definitely be a human behind the message, even if the final output is AI generated, the human had a creative vision and used the available tools to make it happen.
It's no different than using Photoshop.
Unless you only consider art done with oil and on a canvas to be the "real thing."
I know plenty of people, including me, who has no real knowledge about those humans.
And sometimes not knowing is better like the example with Rammstein and row zero were some manager woman was asking other woman if they want to meet their rockstars.
Btw. on a good electronic music set, knowing the arist is probably more a quality sign than a personal aspect. Knowing that i like what arist xy does, means i might like to keep an eye on future work because i like the style of it.
Nonetheless, i do also think that fandom and doing real tours will still be the unique things for bands. There should always be a market for human content.
If you can pay for a live performance and have to time to go there, yes.
A lot of people can't and a 5-10$ Spotify/Apple Music/... account is all they can afford (if at all).
AI music will disrupt this market.
Spotify for example will try to produce their own AI music (like they already do with regular music).
The Christmas playlist will then mainly contain their music.
That saves a lot of money for the.
I don't quite get why this is downvoted;
it may not be the absolute truth, but in my personal anecdotal experience, there is quite some truth to it.
I have had a lot of fun playing around with image generation and chat gpt.
But have also had the non-surprising "Hedonistic Fatigue"
that comes with excess access to something originally valued.
I have now been able to generate 4 and 5 digit numbers
of pictures of awesome colourful steam locomotives and epic dungeon vistas,
but now find myself fatigued by "what on earth am I going to use 5000 dungeon pictures for?",
coupled with the dread of being forced to CHOOSE from 5000 options.
And I learn the known principle,
that when you can choose from 4 options, you are happy you
picked the best of 4,
but when you can pick from 5000 options,
you are left feeling inadequate with "I almost certainly was
not able to pick the best of those 5000 options,
and trying to do so would exhaust me".
So suddenly, picking something from your menu of options,
feels dreadful and fatiguing..
(I get the same feeling sometimes, when trying to pick a movie to watch
out of 16.000 options).
So yeah, no doubt the AI sketch/refinement tool will be merged into our
creative process,
but for the time being, I feel a second generation of alienation-estrangement
with my "available options".
I'm going to assume that like me you're not an artist, or at least not the kind of artist who can generate 5000 dungeon pictures by hand.
I've been thinking about it the same as you but something that I think we're missing here is what can the person who can already make 5k pictures by hand do with this kind of tool?
It makes me think of the later albums that Frank Zappa produced with a Synclavier. That guy went hog-wild on that thing and banged out some unbelievable albums.
What would he have been able to do with AI generated music technology if it was the Synclavier of his time? What are the Frank Zappas of our time going to do with AI?
They made it illegal to produce exact replicas of Frozen at the push of a button; they could make AI illegal too. Except, the only reason it's illegal to copy Frozen is that it gives rich people less money. Generative AI gives rich people more money, so if anything, it'll be illegal not to use it.
It's not an apt analogy, unless you think that the production of generative images will be restricted to a few parties (because that is what copyright does, it restricts the right to copy to the originator).
And then if it was restricted to a few parties, they still have to compete with human artists, they can't just charge whatever.
"Art" already puts more value on live performances and scarcity. Popular music consumption is largely removed from that.
Yeah, the last two live mega tours (Taylor Swift and Beyoncé) have a tad more personality than the average artist, but the usual stuff that you would hear on the radio might as well be AI generated and live-performed by animatronics and a significant chunk of the audience wouldn't care or even notice.
I think the first place we will see large scale AI music replace 'real' music is in the 'lo-fi' background music that just about every bar, restaurant and shop has going in a loop. Instead of having various playlists, the restaurant owner can just choose between some styles, moods and tempos in an app and the AI will autogenerate an endless steam of background music that matches the vibe they are going for.
Yes, this is why the most popular songs on the radio atm are all mass produced, generic (for their genre) crap that doesn't really stray beyond the proven money making methods.
I mean people watch Love Island on TV for chrisssssakes. Humans can definitely be mindless consumers, where the sugar salt and fat in fast-food is the same as false drama, outrage, sex and violence in media. We all got buttons and they're so easy to push. Just look how popular TT is versus the type of content on there; mostly short-lived mindless stuff.
Suno links have already become what grey screenshots of ChatGPT were just after it came out, listened to a few at first and now I just keep on scrolling.
There will be a TON of these 60-second tracks, and no one wants to listen for anywhere near that long while skimming a feed, so these will now be ignored.
If you ever turn the radio on or hear the spotify weekly top playlist, it's not like contemporary cookie cutter pop music is any better. At least with this anyone can quickly experiment quirky new ideas!
