4 ms·

You are not being deprived of any rights. You just don't have them exclusively. Make music, or don't. Up to you. Either way, there will be machines also making

You are not being deprived of any rights. You just don't have them exclusively. Make music, or don't. Up to you. Either way, there will be machines also making music. So, what?

chpatrick 3y ago
How are people going to become professional musicians if it stops being a career?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- progbits 3y ago
  Plenty of people make music for fun while having other careers. A lot of the masterpiece painters did it for passion and lived in poverty (I'm not saying that is good, but clearly a career is not necessary for great results).
  - chpatrick 3y ago
    Sure but most renowned artists had the time to become really skilled because they could dedicate all their time to it. If no one wants to pay humans for art any more, how will that happen?
    - prmoustache 3y ago
      People pay a lot of thing much higher because they are less perfectly made by humans. All the time.
    - Tadpole9181 3y ago
      Then become politically active and make sure we have a strong safety net with healthy labor rights that allow everyone to have ample free time. You don't ban music production software.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    You can never reach a high proficiency of playing a musical instrument if you have another career. It takes an insane amount of practice.
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  Becoming a professional musician isn't a "right" of any kind. You don't have a "right" to be paid to do anything you want. You're certainly allowed to do it (barring outright criminal activity), but don't expect to be entitled to monetary compensation.
  - jillesvangurp 3y ago
    Plenty of musicians make money doing live performances. Since Spotify, record sales are just not a great revenue stream any more. I don't see AI impacting this much. But of course there are going to be some musicians that specialize in background music or other forms of, relatively, low value music work that are going to be affected by this.
- jerojero 3y ago
  Why would I go see a jazz band made of 20something year olds when I can just go into youtube and hear all the masters in the comfort of my bedroom? Oh, maybe because watching live music is a different experience. Maybe because being the best is not as important as simply doing something most people can't do. Funny thing is, when you go to shows of people who are not yet professional musicians but might be studying, might be in a band with their friends and so on... most of the people who attend these shows are their friends and also other musicians. Most musicians are not professional musicians.
- Davidzheng 3y ago
  Strange question. Tautology they can't. But AI will be better than humans everywhere so why is this one different
- Davidzheng 3y ago
  But the question is if this is your passion why is being a hobbyist not enough. If there are no limitations of what you can be/do as a hobbyist
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  Being a professional musician is already a fraught career with low rates of success. This is even more true if you exclude people that are working with modern digital systems. Not a lot of jobs available for orchestral musicians, for example. But there still are people making art with older techniques. There is a greater variety of art being made today than ever before in history. The development of new techniques has made art richer rather than poorer. Yes, the most commercially focused art chooses techniques based on price (far cheaper for a single person to stack synths than to pay a full orchestra) but that's okay. Hip hop and electronic music have been creating totally new things for decades without ever touching a physical instrument. Music didn't die, it flourished.
  - chpatrick 3y ago
    This is different though, because the end game of AI music isn't better music technology for musicians, but replacing musicians. I'm worried we're going to go into a dark age where society forgets how to make truly creative new art due to lack of incentives, and the AIs won't make anything new due to lack of anything creative to train on. We'll just regurgitate the pre-AI stuff forever.
    - akaij 3y ago
      If we're fast-forwarding the tape, why not directly go to the ultimate conclusion that the end game is AI replacing humans, period? This is not a slippery slope; new art will be created regardless of incentives and skilled people who learn to augment their craft with AI will probably create better works of art.
    - UncleMeat 3y ago
      Why is it different? I don't see how any of the incentives go away here.
      - chpatrick 3y ago
        Because previously if you honed your skills as a musician there was a chance that you could do it for a living, so there was another incentive to get better. Electronic tools just facilitated human creativity, but the random listener couldn't sit down with a synth or a DAW and just press a button to get music out. But if all the money drops out of the music industry because the consumers can auto-generate unlimited music, how will that work?
- victorbjorklund 3y ago
  You could make the same argument against recordings (and people did). It would take away jobs from the musicians. Yet, 136 years later and people are still creating music and playing instruments.
nonbirithm 3y ago
I think it may be worth asking if social media has the capability to deprive a subset of people of living a peaceful life, because of its mental health effects. It is the users' choice to stop using social media, but they don't, maybe because their friends are all their and it drags them back into the orbit of algorithmic timelines and depression. Is it simply a matter of saying "up to them" to stop using? Now imagine in a group of people you share a hand-crafted song but one of your friends who isn't as interested in producing music takes your song as inspiration and creates something that sounds better. Imagine they aren't even trying to do this to intentionally one-up you; they think of it as the same kind of sharing and creation. You may disagree but their definition of self-expression differs, and it's difficult to change people. But this happens consistently and the bar is raised ever higher each time. How well someone handles this kind of scenario depends on mindset. Is the joy in being better than others, or pursuing the craft and learning things, or sharing in the experience in consumption? People will have different values. But I think the bias in AI is for people to focus on the end result without needing to put in a lot of effort. It's the entire selling point of these products - taking out the effort in getting a high-quality result. Yet the effort spent on human art isn't wasted effort. The effort doesn't just go towards the finished price, but to the satisfaction of the artist themselves. It stimulates their neurobiology. And in a lot of tutorials for hand-crafted art, the mindset taught is to focus on the process and not the end result. Generative art contradicts that bit of knowledge, and it could cause dissonance. In Stanisław Lem's story about the electronic bard, the existence of the impeccable poetry-generating robot does not directly deprive the poets of their ability to create their own poems. Instead, after perceiving the generated work to be higher quality than anything they're capable of writing, the poets become depressed and commit suicide. You could say the poets didn't have the right mindset of how to approach life, but I think it raises a good point. It's the mental state of people who create and how society views these tools that matters. You will always have the ability to put pencil to paper regardless of what big technology does, but will you want to if you think the rest of the world has moved on without you? I think maybe in modern times the effect will be closer to: artists scale back or give up their craft because the potential audiences vote with their wallets and attention spans for people who rent server farms. It's the despair at seeing the public valuing the end-result over the human element in a broader cultural sense. It's feeling as if a piece of yourself is being lost in an eternal void. And it's the idea that generative models could become a fundamental part of society. Billboards are generated because those cause the most successful ad campaigns. People hold massive music festivals exclusively made of generative synth lines because they attract the crowds. The taste of your drink is algorithmically modeled with ingredients adjusted for the best product-market fit possible. What stops these people in their tracks is perceiving the world as one that values the machine over the human, and even if you value the human, you still have to get in line with the machine - everyone else is doing it. Generative models could retrain our value systems. It's not so much what generative models take away than how they change the public's perception of art itself. It is the depression and mindset changes that come with knowing the poetry-robot will be there for all eternity. Older forms of thinking become outdated, some which may be considered virtuous or delicately intertwined with the human spirit, and this causes anguish and despair at the state of things, and the ever-improving army of poetry robots that sees no end in sight. Because we haven't put an end state on improving technology, and I think deep down some of us believe there was never meant to be such an end state in the future. We would have to spin terms like degrowth and Luddism into something more palatable to have any chance of creating one.

You are not being deprived of any rights. You just don't have them exclusively. Make music, or don't. Up to you. Either way, there will be machines also making music. So, what?

chpatrick 3y ago

How are people going to become professional musicians if it stops being a career?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
progbits 3y ago
Plenty of people make music for fun while having other careers. A lot of the masterpiece painters did it for passion and lived in poverty (I'm not saying that is good, but clearly a career is not necessary for great results).
- chpatrick 3y ago
  Sure but most renowned artists had the time to become really skilled because they could dedicate all their time to it. If no one wants to pay humans for art any more, how will that happen?
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    People pay a lot of thing much higher because they are less perfectly made by humans. All the time.
  - Tadpole9181 3y ago
    Then become politically active and make sure we have a strong safety net with healthy labor rights that allow everyone to have ample free time. You don't ban music production software.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  You can never reach a high proficiency of playing a musical instrument if you have another career. It takes an insane amount of practice.
Ferret7446 3y ago
Becoming a professional musician isn't a "right" of any kind. You don't have a "right" to be paid to do anything you want. You're certainly allowed to do it (barring outright criminal activity), but don't expect to be entitled to monetary compensation.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Plenty of musicians make money doing live performances. Since Spotify, record sales are just not a great revenue stream any more. I don't see AI impacting this much. But of course there are going to be some musicians that specialize in background music or other forms of, relatively, low value music work that are going to be affected by this.
jerojero 3y ago
Why would I go see a jazz band made of 20something year olds when I can just go into youtube and hear all the masters in the comfort of my bedroom? Oh, maybe because watching live music is a different experience. Maybe because being the best is not as important as simply doing something most people can't do. Funny thing is, when you go to shows of people who are not yet professional musicians but might be studying, might be in a band with their friends and so on... most of the people who attend these shows are their friends and also other musicians. Most musicians are not professional musicians.
Davidzheng 3y ago
Strange question. Tautology they can't. But AI will be better than humans everywhere so why is this one different
Davidzheng 3y ago
But the question is if this is your passion why is being a hobbyist not enough. If there are no limitations of what you can be/do as a hobbyist
UncleMeat 3y ago
Being a professional musician is already a fraught career with low rates of success. This is even more true if you exclude people that are working with modern digital systems. Not a lot of jobs available for orchestral musicians, for example. But there still are people making art with older techniques. There is a greater variety of art being made today than ever before in history. The development of new techniques has made art richer rather than poorer. Yes, the most commercially focused art chooses techniques based on price (far cheaper for a single person to stack synths than to pay a full orchestra) but that's okay. Hip hop and electronic music have been creating totally new things for decades without ever touching a physical instrument. Music didn't die, it flourished.
- chpatrick 3y ago
  This is different though, because the end game of AI music isn't better music technology for musicians, but replacing musicians. I'm worried we're going to go into a dark age where society forgets how to make truly creative new art due to lack of incentives, and the AIs won't make anything new due to lack of anything creative to train on. We'll just regurgitate the pre-AI stuff forever.
  - akaij 3y ago
    If we're fast-forwarding the tape, why not directly go to the ultimate conclusion that the end game is AI replacing humans, period? This is not a slippery slope; new art will be created regardless of incentives and skilled people who learn to augment their craft with AI will probably create better works of art.
  - UncleMeat 3y ago
    Why is it different? I don't see how any of the incentives go away here.
    - chpatrick 3y ago
      Because previously if you honed your skills as a musician there was a chance that you could do it for a living, so there was another incentive to get better. Electronic tools just facilitated human creativity, but the random listener couldn't sit down with a synth or a DAW and just press a button to get music out. But if all the money drops out of the music industry because the consumers can auto-generate unlimited music, how will that work?
victorbjorklund 3y ago
You could make the same argument against recordings (and people did). It would take away jobs from the musicians. Yet, 136 years later and people are still creating music and playing instruments.

nonbirithm 3y ago

I think it may be worth asking if social media has the capability to deprive a subset of people of living a peaceful life, because of its mental health effects. It is the users' choice to stop using social media, but they don't, maybe because their friends are all their and it drags them back into the orbit of algorithmic timelines and depression. Is it simply a matter of saying "up to them" to stop using? Now imagine in a group of people you share a hand-crafted song but one of your friends who isn't as interested in producing music takes your song as inspiration and creates something that sounds better. Imagine they aren't even trying to do this to intentionally one-up you; they think of it as the same kind of sharing and creation. You may disagree but their definition of self-expression differs, and it's difficult to change people. But this happens consistently and the bar is raised ever higher each time. How well someone handles this kind of scenario depends on mindset. Is the joy in being better than others, or pursuing the craft and learning things, or sharing in the experience in consumption? People will have different values. But I think the bias in AI is for people to focus on the end result without needing to put in a lot of effort. It's the entire selling point of these products - taking out the effort in getting a high-quality result. Yet the effort spent on human art isn't wasted effort. The effort doesn't just go towards the finished price, but to the satisfaction of the artist themselves. It stimulates their neurobiology. And in a lot of tutorials for hand-crafted art, the mindset taught is to focus on the process and not the end result. Generative art contradicts that bit of knowledge, and it could cause dissonance. In Stanisław Lem's story about the electronic bard, the existence of the impeccable poetry-generating robot does not directly deprive the poets of their ability to create their own poems. Instead, after perceiving the generated work to be higher quality than anything they're capable of writing, the poets become depressed and commit suicide. You could say the poets didn't have the right mindset of how to approach life, but I think it raises a good point. It's the mental state of people who create and how society views these tools that matters. You will always have the ability to put pencil to paper regardless of what big technology does, but will you want to if you think the rest of the world has moved on without you? I think maybe in modern times the effect will be closer to: artists scale back or give up their craft because the potential audiences vote with their wallets and attention spans for people who rent server farms. It's the despair at seeing the public valuing the end-result over the human element in a broader cultural sense. It's feeling as if a piece of yourself is being lost in an eternal void. And it's the idea that generative models could become a fundamental part of society. Billboards are generated because those cause the most successful ad campaigns. People hold massive music festivals exclusively made of generative synth lines because they attract the crowds. The taste of your drink is algorithmically modeled with ingredients adjusted for the best product-market fit possible. What stops these people in their tracks is perceiving the world as one that values the machine over the human, and even if you value the human, you still have to get in line with the machine - everyone else is doing it. Generative models could retrain our value systems. It's not so much what generative models take away than how they change the public's perception of art itself. It is the depression and mindset changes that come with knowing the poetry-robot will be there for all eternity. Older forms of thinking become outdated, some which may be considered virtuous or delicately intertwined with the human spirit, and this causes anguish and despair at the state of things, and the ever-improving army of poetry robots that sees no end in sight. Because we haven't put an end state on improving technology, and I think deep down some of us believe there was never meant to be such an end state in the future. We would have to spin terms like degrowth and Luddism into something more palatable to have any chance of creating one.