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From the article: > Each participating artist has partnered with us and will have a hand in helping us test and learn to shape the future of AI in music. Let

From the article: > Each participating artist has partnered with us and will have a hand in helping us test and learn to shape the future of AI in music. Let me correct that: each participating artist has been given a wad of dirty cash in return for their help in training replacements for mass music. Notice that I said "mass music" -- people will always be able to create by hand, but it's clear that the ultimate goal is to create a system whereby people pay for AI generated music (either with money or with ad views) and no longer need human-created music for commercial purposes. > Our music AI experiments have been designed in line with YouTube’s AI principles, which aim to enable creative expression while protecting music artists and the integrity of their work. This is hardly a protection. It only protects existing, secure artists. It does not protect new artists from being outcompeted by AI. (Music composed by humans could still be better but AI will compete simply because it is cheap and widely available.) This article written by Google is a testament to the true nature of Google, which is the nature of being a leech and parasite. OF COURSE, at first, this tool MIGHT be interesting and provide new ways of creating music, but we have to remember that it will mainly function in the context of YouTube, which is about superficial consumption and advertising. The addictiveness and widespread usage of YouTube is becoming a societal problem, and this technology will standardize AI music into becoming mainstream. Many people think that AI is just a tool to aid in music creation. It is for now, but what it actually does is three things: (1) It creates a new standard where music is no longer about human expression but about creating a basic layer of entertainment to go along with advertising. (2) It changes the minds of human beings to think more like machines. (3) At some point, it will be so advanced that it will hardly need anyone to create it, and Google and other big tech companies can use it to be an alternative to traditional musicians, who will not be able to compete and therefore will not be able to do what they love to survive. Remember, technology at first is an optional curiosity but successful technologies ALWAYS become entrenched in society and modify it significantly, and in this case, for the worse. Shame on Google for this and I truly despise them.

vjerancrnjak 3y ago
But isn't music more than just the music track? People like to listen to the same music, go to concerts, share it with others, share the experience of audience/artist performance. Moments where music is truly important in one's life will never be replaced by meaningless bit fiddling. I cannot imagine people caring about books, music, art created by bit fiddling. They will always care about things created by other people. We do not watch chess engines playing together, even though the level of play is "godlike". AlphaZero didn't make human chess less popular. Chess is extremely popular now and it is mostly due to personalities participating in it and the ease of access (streaming videos...). I find the demo where a random song from an artist you like is created very weird. Who would want to do that? And why would anyone connect to that? Will these people save these random creations and relisten them? Will they remember these moments by remembering these random silly unique tracks? I cannot imagine that at all.
- taopai 3y ago
  Well, this could have the potential to make infinite covers of your favorite song. But think about it, people used to watch the same movies in DVD. The movies they loved. Now people watch and infinity of short random videos (tik tok, instagram)... Technology changes the habits of people, specially in young people. Think about it, one friend sends a song auto-generated from some text, it is "a song made by someone", at least that will be their perception...
  - vjerancrnjak 3y ago
    I still don't see the pull. Take a band like The National. I'm 100% certain most of the listeners absolutely do not care about covers at all. This musical world where we generate random stuff that will be consumed equivalently to current music just does not feel real. What will probably happen is that people just won't listen to music or get passionate about it at all. That might already be happening because gaming is something what music was for the generation when pull of the games was not as strong. Young people today will probably never care about Beatles or Bob Dylan or contemporary bands. The music is just not the main interest. Just imagine AI making games and everyone in the industry losing their job. It just does not work that way. Product is not the end. Music does not work that way. Music is more than the product. Any creative history is focused on a group of people and their audience, not on the songs/books/poems in general, but the whole experience of creativity and its outputs.
- helboi4 3y ago
  I do think music is slightly more immune to this than some other forms of art because music is usually so tied to a personality and a physical presence that there will be ways for artists to overcome this to some extent.
- phatskat 3y ago
  I think the bigger concern should be around things like backing scores, soundtracks, and other instrumental music. Things that you might have paid a composer to do, or a local orchestra to perform, can be done by AI and a synth. This has similar energy to the writer’s strike - save money by removing the first layer of human effort. For some things (like the backing music in a commercial) this is sufficient, and for others you can have AI generate the base and then have a human “punch it up” with their vocals or by performing it on live instruments. I don’t think we risk losing music production in general, but I do think there’s a legitimate concern that many many smaller, less publicly visible music jobs will be lost.
taopai 3y ago
I guess someone will make it, if not google or others will. This is the next iteration of music. First we had only live concerts, then we had recordings, and finally auto-generated music. I hope some old dudes with long beards will like to hang out and jam with me when I'll be old.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  If not google, others will? That is like justifying stealing from an old man on the street by saying that because the street is dangerous, someone else will do it anyway. This is not the next generation of music. It is one possible future that we can oppose if only we were not so convinced that technology is completely deterministic and can't be opposed.
  - taopai 3y ago
    I am not justifying this. But that's how life works. Someone invents something. Some people love it and others hate it. It's like forums. There ara people who hate forums and prefer good old books. There are people who hate books and love forums. There ara people who love both Some people like watching plays. Others like cinema. And some play videogames. But be sure this will hurt professional musicians. Not pop musicians, I mean professional musicians that earn a humble living.
raincole 3y ago
> It creates a new standard where music is no longer about human expression but about creating a basic layer of entertainment to go along with advertising. The most music we (humans collectively, not you and me specifically) hear are made for one single purpose: profit. It's not an AI problem. It's nothing new. Actually it's older than you and me.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  You are ignoring the fact that there's a new problem: the ability to milk it with an extreme level of efficiency. Imagine a burglar who robs houses. He might rob 1-2 per month. Now imagine the same burglar being given a technology that allows him to rob 1000 houses a month. Wouldn't you say that's much worse, even though it essentially arises from the same problem?
amarant 3y ago
As a indie game developer, this could plausibly enable me to add decent sounding soundtrack to my games. I couldn't afford to pay a proper artist, and my musical skills are... Limited.. It _is_ just a tool, a new instrument essentially, one that is easier to play than most. People being angry that there is now a new instrument that is much easier to play than the one they spent years to learn come across as entitled brats to me. This will enable me to express myself in a way I couldn't before, how is that not about human expression? It's a accessibility thing as well. Expressing oneself through music has always been nearly impossible to the tone-deaf among us. Now that may change, and you want to stop that because it might maybe potentially affect how much money you can earn from playing music? Glory to Google for enabling the musically impaired to express themselves through music!
- barryvan 3y ago
  Have you considered something like https://www.indiegamemusic.com/ https://www.indiegamemusic.com/, where a lot of artists have their music available free or super cheaply?
  - amarant 3y ago
    I have, and it kinda works, but I usually have a pretty good idea of what I want the theme to sound like, and I'm never able to find something that even resembles my vision. That leaves me with 2 options: hire an orchestra and a choir, along with a composer to make the sound I want, which would cost me a lot more than my games ever sell for, or pick a sound that's never quite, or usually even close to, what I had in mind. With this tool, I'm hoping even someone as musically untalented as me could take the music that's playing in my head, and get it(or something very similar to it) playing on some speakers. It probably won't win me any musical awards, I don't expect this to to magically take me from zero to Vivaldi, but if I can make a tune that sounds like what I imagined, it'll be a win for me. I'll add here that I really for the life of me cannot see the harm in that, even though you didn't really imply there would be, but others in this thread have been screaming it pretty loudly, so it appears to be a concern among fellow hn'ers
    - 3y ago
mypastself 3y ago
> traditional musicians… will not be able to compete and therefore will not be able to do what they love to survive. Why would anyone owe the musicians a job just because they enjoy doing it? I don’t expect anyone to defend my love of coding when I’m replaced by a future iteration of an LLM. > Music composed by humans could still be better but AI will compete simply because it is cheap and widely available If it’s truly better, the market for manmade music will still exist. If bland/poor quality art is no longer produced by humans, what’s the loss? > It changes the minds of human beings to think more like machines Not sure how this works, or why it’s so bad.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  > If it’s truly better, the market for manmade music will still exist. That is definitely not true. There are other things that determine what is sold besides quality: ability to mass produce, economies of scale, bullying tactics, etc. > Not sure how this works, or why it’s so bad. Because thinking like machines means that we are locked into the cycle of optimizing resource usage to expand and grow forever and not be stewards of the environment. Thinking like a machine means being a human cog in the consumerist machine of selfishness. Thinking like a machine means facilitating the endless growth of technology that furthers us from connecting genuinely with other people in a small community.
- Juliate 3y ago
  > If bland/poor quality art is no longer produced by humans, what’s the loss? Because even artists often produce bland/poor stuff, sometimes even some that sells well? (or that is recognised several decades/centuries, to be actually great work)
- butlike 3y ago
  Eh, I don't think anyone owes musicians a job, but I also don't think that jobs going anywhere. The painter is still an artist if they use the factory-produced canvas. The musician is still an artist if they use the mass-produced Fender. Or a mass-produced sample library.
midenginedcoupe 3y ago
Amen. I'd only add that the sort of music they're aiming at is already pretty much at your end state. Muzak (and its slightly more advanced cousin Library Music) isn't about human expression, but about a background noise to convey a loose mood. God forbid we should just listen to what someone has to say - it always needs a distracting background interference to go with it. But, like it or not, creating this drivel does put the food in the mouths of a great number of professional musicians. Even big-name recording studios aren't busy full time with wonderful new creative experiments, it's jingles and library music that keep their doors open. But even this work has been declining sharply for decades, and this new wave of tools will just continue that decline. If anything, it's going to entrench the music profession for the privileged as there'll be an even smaller pot of work available and so only those that can afford the massive time investment and comfortable with the risk of being without work will survive. And all this because the people building and paying for these tools are themselves musically illiterate - they don't know what makes good music, or why muzak is utterly devoid of the thing they profess to love and democratise.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  Well perhaps we should try and rethink society instead of trying to make its generation more efficient...
seydor 3y ago
> it's clear that the ultimate goal is to create a system whereby people pay for AI generated music The goal is to create background music for youtube videos without paying artists anymore at all. Youtube videos feel sterile because they lack music with emotion and are all recycling the same audio library tracks. It's a way to allow some pop culture to youtubers who are scared to death of copyright claims.
- anonymous344 3y ago
  Yes. And who owns copyright for these songs? Of course not the user. If one of the 1 000 000 00 songs becomes a hit, it's a bank for the google owners.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  Commercial background music is already sterile, even if it is written and performed by humans. Here is a video from four years ago complaining about this sort of commercial music - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIxY_Y9TGWI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIxY_Y9TGWI.
DannyBee 3y ago
"(3) At some point, it will be so advanced that it will hardly need anyone to create it, and Google and other big tech companies can use it to be an alternative to traditional musicians, who will not be able to compete and therefore will not be able to do what they love to survive." What is your definition of "traditional" here - historically, both music and art were not full time jobs for most. It was a thing people with a passion for did as a side gig, with some (but not a lot) of people eventually sustaining themselves full time with art. Or it was done by already rich people who did not need to work and could afford to be people of leisure. That was true even of organized things like orchestras, etc. Doing these as a full time job is a relatively recent thing, and even there, "surviving" has been limited to a remarkable few. Even a decade ago, 30% of musicians had a second job. The 70% was not mostly "bands" but,again, permanent things like orchestras, etc. Trying to forcefully keep jobs alive that don't need to exist is insanity, and rightfully gets pointed out as such in other contexts. This would be no different in this case. Here, it's also totally non-obvious that if these things go back to "people pursue it as a side gig because they love it" we will be any worse off than we were in terms of quality of art/music, happiness, you name it. Because that was the way of the past and art/music were not just fine, but most people even consider it better!
- DannyBee 3y ago
  I'll also add - the times folks have spent fighting change in what jobs are needed rarely ends up well vs the time spend helping people adapt to that change. You have to know the change is real, of course, but once you do, we've ended up with insane results when we try to fight it.

vjerancrnjak 3y ago

But isn't music more than just the music track? People like to listen to the same music, go to concerts, share it with others, share the experience of audience/artist performance. Moments where music is truly important in one's life will never be replaced by meaningless bit fiddling. I cannot imagine people caring about books, music, art created by bit fiddling. They will always care about things created by other people. We do not watch chess engines playing together, even though the level of play is "godlike". AlphaZero didn't make human chess less popular. Chess is extremely popular now and it is mostly due to personalities participating in it and the ease of access (streaming videos...). I find the demo where a random song from an artist you like is created very weird. Who would want to do that? And why would anyone connect to that? Will these people save these random creations and relisten them? Will they remember these moments by remembering these random silly unique tracks? I cannot imagine that at all.

taopai 3y ago
Well, this could have the potential to make infinite covers of your favorite song. But think about it, people used to watch the same movies in DVD. The movies they loved. Now people watch and infinity of short random videos (tik tok, instagram)... Technology changes the habits of people, specially in young people. Think about it, one friend sends a song auto-generated from some text, it is "a song made by someone", at least that will be their perception...
- vjerancrnjak 3y ago
  I still don't see the pull. Take a band like The National. I'm 100% certain most of the listeners absolutely do not care about covers at all. This musical world where we generate random stuff that will be consumed equivalently to current music just does not feel real. What will probably happen is that people just won't listen to music or get passionate about it at all. That might already be happening because gaming is something what music was for the generation when pull of the games was not as strong. Young people today will probably never care about Beatles or Bob Dylan or contemporary bands. The music is just not the main interest. Just imagine AI making games and everyone in the industry losing their job. It just does not work that way. Product is not the end. Music does not work that way. Music is more than the product. Any creative history is focused on a group of people and their audience, not on the songs/books/poems in general, but the whole experience of creativity and its outputs.
helboi4 3y ago
I do think music is slightly more immune to this than some other forms of art because music is usually so tied to a personality and a physical presence that there will be ways for artists to overcome this to some extent.
phatskat 3y ago
I think the bigger concern should be around things like backing scores, soundtracks, and other instrumental music. Things that you might have paid a composer to do, or a local orchestra to perform, can be done by AI and a synth. This has similar energy to the writer’s strike - save money by removing the first layer of human effort. For some things (like the backing music in a commercial) this is sufficient, and for others you can have AI generate the base and then have a human “punch it up” with their vocals or by performing it on live instruments. I don’t think we risk losing music production in general, but I do think there’s a legitimate concern that many many smaller, less publicly visible music jobs will be lost.

taopai 3y ago

I guess someone will make it, if not google or others will. This is the next iteration of music. First we had only live concerts, then we had recordings, and finally auto-generated music. I hope some old dudes with long beards will like to hang out and jam with me when I'll be old.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
If not google, others will? That is like justifying stealing from an old man on the street by saying that because the street is dangerous, someone else will do it anyway. This is not the next generation of music. It is one possible future that we can oppose if only we were not so convinced that technology is completely deterministic and can't be opposed.
- taopai 3y ago
  I am not justifying this. But that's how life works. Someone invents something. Some people love it and others hate it. It's like forums. There ara people who hate forums and prefer good old books. There are people who hate books and love forums. There ara people who love both Some people like watching plays. Others like cinema. And some play videogames. But be sure this will hurt professional musicians. Not pop musicians, I mean professional musicians that earn a humble living.

raincole 3y ago

> It creates a new standard where music is no longer about human expression but about creating a basic layer of entertainment to go along with advertising. The most music we (humans collectively, not you and me specifically) hear are made for one single purpose: profit. It's not an AI problem. It's nothing new. Actually it's older than you and me.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
You are ignoring the fact that there's a new problem: the ability to milk it with an extreme level of efficiency. Imagine a burglar who robs houses. He might rob 1-2 per month. Now imagine the same burglar being given a technology that allows him to rob 1000 houses a month. Wouldn't you say that's much worse, even though it essentially arises from the same problem?

amarant 3y ago

As a indie game developer, this could plausibly enable me to add decent sounding soundtrack to my games. I couldn't afford to pay a proper artist, and my musical skills are... Limited.. It _is_ just a tool, a new instrument essentially, one that is easier to play than most. People being angry that there is now a new instrument that is much easier to play than the one they spent years to learn come across as entitled brats to me. This will enable me to express myself in a way I couldn't before, how is that not about human expression? It's a accessibility thing as well. Expressing oneself through music has always been nearly impossible to the tone-deaf among us. Now that may change, and you want to stop that because it might maybe potentially affect how much money you can earn from playing music? Glory to Google for enabling the musically impaired to express themselves through music!

barryvan 3y ago
Have you considered something like https://www.indiegamemusic.com/ https://www.indiegamemusic.com/, where a lot of artists have their music available free or super cheaply?
- amarant 3y ago
  I have, and it kinda works, but I usually have a pretty good idea of what I want the theme to sound like, and I'm never able to find something that even resembles my vision. That leaves me with 2 options: hire an orchestra and a choir, along with a composer to make the sound I want, which would cost me a lot more than my games ever sell for, or pick a sound that's never quite, or usually even close to, what I had in mind. With this tool, I'm hoping even someone as musically untalented as me could take the music that's playing in my head, and get it(or something very similar to it) playing on some speakers. It probably won't win me any musical awards, I don't expect this to to magically take me from zero to Vivaldi, but if I can make a tune that sounds like what I imagined, it'll be a win for me. I'll add here that I really for the life of me cannot see the harm in that, even though you didn't really imply there would be, but others in this thread have been screaming it pretty loudly, so it appears to be a concern among fellow hn'ers
  - 3y ago

mypastself 3y ago

> traditional musicians… will not be able to compete and therefore will not be able to do what they love to survive. Why would anyone owe the musicians a job just because they enjoy doing it? I don’t expect anyone to defend my love of coding when I’m replaced by a future iteration of an LLM. > Music composed by humans could still be better but AI will compete simply because it is cheap and widely available If it’s truly better, the market for manmade music will still exist. If bland/poor quality art is no longer produced by humans, what’s the loss? > It changes the minds of human beings to think more like machines Not sure how this works, or why it’s so bad.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
> If it’s truly better, the market for manmade music will still exist. That is definitely not true. There are other things that determine what is sold besides quality: ability to mass produce, economies of scale, bullying tactics, etc. > Not sure how this works, or why it’s so bad. Because thinking like machines means that we are locked into the cycle of optimizing resource usage to expand and grow forever and not be stewards of the environment. Thinking like a machine means being a human cog in the consumerist machine of selfishness. Thinking like a machine means facilitating the endless growth of technology that furthers us from connecting genuinely with other people in a small community.
Juliate 3y ago
> If bland/poor quality art is no longer produced by humans, what’s the loss? Because even artists often produce bland/poor stuff, sometimes even some that sells well? (or that is recognised several decades/centuries, to be actually great work)
butlike 3y ago
Eh, I don't think anyone owes musicians a job, but I also don't think that jobs going anywhere. The painter is still an artist if they use the factory-produced canvas. The musician is still an artist if they use the mass-produced Fender. Or a mass-produced sample library.

midenginedcoupe 3y ago

Amen. I'd only add that the sort of music they're aiming at is already pretty much at your end state. Muzak (and its slightly more advanced cousin Library Music) isn't about human expression, but about a background noise to convey a loose mood. God forbid we should just listen to what someone has to say - it always needs a distracting background interference to go with it. But, like it or not, creating this drivel does put the food in the mouths of a great number of professional musicians. Even big-name recording studios aren't busy full time with wonderful new creative experiments, it's jingles and library music that keep their doors open. But even this work has been declining sharply for decades, and this new wave of tools will just continue that decline. If anything, it's going to entrench the music profession for the privileged as there'll be an even smaller pot of work available and so only those that can afford the massive time investment and comfortable with the risk of being without work will survive. And all this because the people building and paying for these tools are themselves musically illiterate - they don't know what makes good music, or why muzak is utterly devoid of the thing they profess to love and democratise.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
Well perhaps we should try and rethink society instead of trying to make its generation more efficient...

seydor 3y ago

> it's clear that the ultimate goal is to create a system whereby people pay for AI generated music The goal is to create background music for youtube videos without paying artists anymore at all. Youtube videos feel sterile because they lack music with emotion and are all recycling the same audio library tracks. It's a way to allow some pop culture to youtubers who are scared to death of copyright claims.

anonymous344 3y ago
Yes. And who owns copyright for these songs? Of course not the user. If one of the 1 000 000 00 songs becomes a hit, it's a bank for the google owners.
UncleMeat 3y ago
Commercial background music is already sterile, even if it is written and performed by humans. Here is a video from four years ago complaining about this sort of commercial music - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIxY_Y9TGWI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIxY_Y9TGWI.

DannyBee 3y ago

"(3) At some point, it will be so advanced that it will hardly need anyone to create it, and Google and other big tech companies can use it to be an alternative to traditional musicians, who will not be able to compete and therefore will not be able to do what they love to survive." What is your definition of "traditional" here - historically, both music and art were not full time jobs for most. It was a thing people with a passion for did as a side gig, with some (but not a lot) of people eventually sustaining themselves full time with art. Or it was done by already rich people who did not need to work and could afford to be people of leisure. That was true even of organized things like orchestras, etc. Doing these as a full time job is a relatively recent thing, and even there, "surviving" has been limited to a remarkable few. Even a decade ago, 30% of musicians had a second job. The 70% was not mostly "bands" but,again, permanent things like orchestras, etc. Trying to forcefully keep jobs alive that don't need to exist is insanity, and rightfully gets pointed out as such in other contexts. This would be no different in this case. Here, it's also totally non-obvious that if these things go back to "people pursue it as a side gig because they love it" we will be any worse off than we were in terms of quality of art/music, happiness, you name it. Because that was the way of the past and art/music were not just fine, but most people even consider it better!

DannyBee 3y ago
I'll also add - the times folks have spent fighting change in what jobs are needed rarely ends up well vs the time spend helping people adapt to that change. You have to know the change is real, of course, but once you do, we've ended up with insane results when we try to fight it.