4 ms·

The older I get, the more I appreciate craftsmanship. Applies to nearly everything. Lately, I’ve been sitting in a chair and listening to records - not doing an

The older I get, the more I appreciate craftsmanship. Applies to nearly everything. Lately, I’ve been sitting in a chair and listening to records - not doing anything else. There’s a connection to myself, the music and the artist that’s different than when I’m listening on Spotify with my AirPods on. To each their own (I mean that) but I do wonder sometimes…At some point, what’s the point?

jchw 3y ago
Some of this generative AI stuff is going to raise some interesting questions. Right now a lot of it is rough around the edges and distinctly inhuman. However, I do believe that even if we're not entirely on the right track, there's not much reason to believe a machine can't do human-like things as well as humans with enough computational power. Here's my guess: I think that this stuff will continue to iterate until it's to the point where the amount of control people have over it as well as the quality of handling edge cases is sufficient to allow people with fairly unsophisticated tools to create things that look fairly high quality. And once this happens, people armed with amazing tools but no better taste than they had before, will flood the Internet with a bunch of tasteless garbage at rates never before seen. It hasn't happened yet, but I think this is partly an accessibility issue (not everyone has datacenter GPU access, there's still limitations in open models, and many hosted offerings are pretty limited compared to what local models can do right now in terms of tooling) but also it will make a big difference if we hit the point where it's really genuinely just not possible to reliably distinguish AI generated images and sound. Then, even if people wanted to ignore AI generated media, it would probably quickly become pretty difficult, and many people will probably not be honest if it limits their reach and potential.
- DrSiemer 3y ago
  It will just raise the bar of entry. Tolerance for generic garbage will decrease. Elevator muzak producers are in trouble. Real talent will still float to the top.
  - diydsp 3y ago
    That would be the equivalent of automating out the middle class. Surely the prodigies will survive, but everyone else's dollars will only result in autotuned musical frozen dinners.
  - jchw 3y ago
    I like your optimism. In my opinion, popularity is not a great selector of raw skill/talent/quality. In practice, it does select for greatness certainly much more than random noise, but it's also quite arbitrary too, it both misses a lot of quality and selects a lot of low-quality crap. You could call it "taste", though it doesn't exactly matter what you call it. You know it when you see it. Every so often, someone sells me on why something is awesome and suddenly it 'clicks' for me in a way that it hasn't, and now I'm enjoying something on another level. Thanks to curation and filtering by picky people, you get to experience a lot of things that would be hard to discern on your own. In general, you still have to rely on your own untrained senses to judge things, so curation can be very helpful to find the best stuff. Sometimes you don't know why something is better, but that doesn't mean you can't tell. So then, a problem with generative AI is that it will mainly be optimized to mimic the appealing end results and then probably also tuned to prefer things that people respond positively to. That's cool and it can definitely produce results that people like, but I think it misses a lot of dimensions of artistic endeavors. Stable Diffusion today isn't drawing; it's forming pictures out of noise that look like they were drawn. No reason, imo, to believe an AI model won't some day actually be drawing; it's just not what's going on today. But because Stable Diffusion skips all of the details, it does things that don't make stylistic sense at all, like putting vastly overly photo-realistic details/rendering onto a cartoon drawing and other such bizarre things. On one hand, this is probably something that can be fixed, but I also think that fixing it is patching around the fact that it's generating images rather than creating them the way a person would. (To me, diffusion models feel like they could be the "imagination" of some AI agent that draws; but, ultimately, I have no idea what the future will hold.) The other thing that's awkward about the way this works is that it's a bit deceptive: looking at the end results, you can see things that are extremely impressive at times, but no doubt part of the problem is that it's difficult for us to actually evaluate it. For any of these very impressive generative models, I think that a surprising ability of being able to produce novel things has been demonstrated in many cases, but the truth is that even some less novel things tend to still be hard. Kind of like how you can generate a pig with a cowboy hat in space using one of these generative models, but ask it to generate two people holding hands and you may be treated with man-made horrors beyond our comprehension. (Or maybe it will work, but either way, the failure mode of these models is very interesting.) OK, so I droned on a bit there. But what I'm trying to say is, I think these generative AIs are basically all going to be tuned to be as appealing as possible to the average person. Because of that, they will short-circuit our dumb ape brains into thinking "Wow! This is surprisingly good!" even though they are often lacking much substance and a closer inspection may show plenty of issues and general strangeness. I think that more advanced AI agents might some day overcome this on a fundamental level, by simply not skipping "the hard part" and going right to the end result. That would help limit a lot of weirdness that just fundamentally does not make sense. Even when that happens, though, I suspect the domain of AI stuff will wind up being more limited than it initially appears, as the generative models will prove to have unintuitive limitations, and as a result of that, we may see floods of very same-y garbage stuff. I'd be glad to be very wrong here. In the past, the availability of powerful tools definitely did what you said: it raises the bar. I mean, seeing what kids are doing in Blender and Inkscape feels like proof of this. AI does change some variables in a way that is scary, though: it produces things effectively infinitely fast and infinitely voluminous compared to humans, and at least by my measure it often achieves superficially good results, and the flaws may not be apparent quickly and maybe not at all to the untrained senses. So maybe we're in for a flood of same-y garbage. Or maybe not. Guess we'll see.
- paul7986 3y ago
  AI Generative music sounds pretty darn good to me present day ... here's an AI Mariah Carey singing a 1990s Michael Bolton song ... you wouldnt know it's AI by just your ear. If you were familiar with the song and Mariah carey you'd probably think or ask I didnt know she sang this song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whqp81U19gg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whqp81U19gg
  - squarefoot 3y ago
    Still recognizable from some imbalance in higher frequencies which could also be due to the use or simulation of an harmonic exciter, and the usual "s" still sounding a bit fake, but yeah they made some pretty darn good progress lately.
- pyinstallwoes 3y ago
  Some time ago, far, far away, a human species became so enamored with their automatons that the entire world was essentially under the spell of their own creation. They became enchanted with their illusion, becoming their own disillusion. No one realizing the veil overmind glooming and looming. Reflections linger, memory pays mind to neither. Eager to discover what’s real, but the reel keeps playing what’s surreal. What’s it matter, if the mind can’t tell either from aether. Samsara, no Abraham’s Sara, abra-cadabra, open sesame, oh well, stuck in the loop, but who cares, we’re in this together so I’ll take either. Some say Samuel paved the way, eat the apple, it’ll be fine they say.
- Slow_Hand 3y ago
  I would argue that this has already happened and it's only a matter of degree now. The widespread availability of DAWs, streaming services, and music distribution services has greatly enabled people to create and publish their music online. Not to mention services like Splice which enable the purchase and curation of ready-made musical loops. It's never been easier to make a record, render it, and distribute it. Of course the problem then becomes one of sifting through the endless pool of releases. There's a lower ratio of quality signal to noise. So be it. I still get the majority of my recommendations from people who I trust to have good taste. I happen to think this enabling of creation is a net positive because it breaks down barriers for people to be creative and I consider that to be an intrinsically rewarding activity. At the end of the day creators still need to have good taste and discipline to see their vision realized or succeed, but the act of creating itself is beneficial to people on a personal level. Even if their creation is objectively hot trash.
  - zerbinxx 3y ago
    Yeah the democratization era is already well underway: arguably over, even, in that it’s no longer possible to become a “big star” from throwing together some shit in fruity loops and hitting it big. Every once in a while, a bedroom musician with a little talent will break through, but more and more music is either relegated to “good taste but unknown” or “weird conglomerate of ghostwritten tunes operated by a Hollywood finance group”. AI might as well already exist. Half of what you find on soundcloud is low effort/low skill/low expression anyway. Which I think is great.
    - dabbledash 3y ago
      Why do you think it's great?
DrSiemer 3y ago
Everything must always evolve, I suppose? I do wonder what will become of music when the Great Blender is done remixing everything. Hard to predict, but I'm sure we'll get something new out of it. Imagine a talented singer just freewheeling with an AI band backing the vocals. A few prompt nudges before you start ("something in the style of Aphex Twin with bagpipes"), some buttons to make live adjustments, with labels like "darker / brighter", "more pop / more alternative" or "activate cowbell". I guess the main thing to solve is reproducible output, but we almost have the technology to do this. You don't have to be a singer either. Practicing an instrument could be so much more fun when a complete song in the style of your favorite band is generated along with whatever you are doing.
peebeebee 3y ago
You could have said the same thing about a synthesizer. Look how that revolutionised music. AI is just another tool. This is just the beginning. People will use these tools in extremely creative ways.
- squarefoot 3y ago
  The not so subtle difference is that synthesizers and drum machines don't play by themselves, or when they do (arrangers) they're 100% recognizable from a real band. AI will change everything.
  - peebeebee 3y ago
    Not that much difference. You used to have to gather 4 musicians to form a band, pay for recording studio, record an lp, and tour to get your music out. This took years to get that sort of creativity out. Now you make a song on your laptop with some existing samples, and release it to SoundCloud. So it takes much less technical and theoretical knowledge to create a song than 70 years ago. This is just an extension of this. You will have loads of people making subpar music with AI, but you will also have incredible innovators using that technology to form new music genres. Happens each time we get a new tool. PEOPLE will use AI. AI alone can’t set up a nice production, or play on festivals. :)
    - helboi4 3y ago
      No. You no longer have to gather other humans. But electronic music production requires a wild amount of technical knowledge from a single individual, whereas being in a band only requires you to know how to play one instrument. To do electronic music production decently, you need to understand music theory, the actual physics of waves and how to manipulate that (synthesis), how to even process samples (you can't just chuck them in there), how to mix and master by yourself (bands would generally save up together from playing live to pay someone else for this - these are two fields that people dedicate their whole lives to, and that most electronic music producers do entirely by themselves alongside making the whole song), you need to be able to play piano a little bit usually... you need to learn loads of different hardware and software, and you need to be the sole composer coming up with an idea from nothing, usually containing a number of musical parts closer to a symphony than a rock band. Electronic music production is not easy. If you really just throw some samples in a daw, it will sound like a 10 year old made it and it will probably break people's speakers because it's not mixed and mastered properly. Electronic music is a mature enough genre (that incidentally even in its inception was originated by people who were also traditional musicians) that fans don't accept a macaroni collage of a song that once again probably would break their speakers.
theGnuMe 3y ago
I think these tools will unleash a Cambrian explosion of music from all types of people. It’ll be amazing.

jchw 3y ago

Some of this generative AI stuff is going to raise some interesting questions. Right now a lot of it is rough around the edges and distinctly inhuman. However, I do believe that even if we're not entirely on the right track, there's not much reason to believe a machine can't do human-like things as well as humans with enough computational power. Here's my guess: I think that this stuff will continue to iterate until it's to the point where the amount of control people have over it as well as the quality of handling edge cases is sufficient to allow people with fairly unsophisticated tools to create things that look fairly high quality. And once this happens, people armed with amazing tools but no better taste than they had before, will flood the Internet with a bunch of tasteless garbage at rates never before seen. It hasn't happened yet, but I think this is partly an accessibility issue (not everyone has datacenter GPU access, there's still limitations in open models, and many hosted offerings are pretty limited compared to what local models can do right now in terms of tooling) but also it will make a big difference if we hit the point where it's really genuinely just not possible to reliably distinguish AI generated images and sound. Then, even if people wanted to ignore AI generated media, it would probably quickly become pretty difficult, and many people will probably not be honest if it limits their reach and potential.

DrSiemer 3y ago
It will just raise the bar of entry. Tolerance for generic garbage will decrease. Elevator muzak producers are in trouble. Real talent will still float to the top.
- diydsp 3y ago
  That would be the equivalent of automating out the middle class. Surely the prodigies will survive, but everyone else's dollars will only result in autotuned musical frozen dinners.
- jchw 3y ago
  I like your optimism. In my opinion, popularity is not a great selector of raw skill/talent/quality. In practice, it does select for greatness certainly much more than random noise, but it's also quite arbitrary too, it both misses a lot of quality and selects a lot of low-quality crap. You could call it "taste", though it doesn't exactly matter what you call it. You know it when you see it. Every so often, someone sells me on why something is awesome and suddenly it 'clicks' for me in a way that it hasn't, and now I'm enjoying something on another level. Thanks to curation and filtering by picky people, you get to experience a lot of things that would be hard to discern on your own. In general, you still have to rely on your own untrained senses to judge things, so curation can be very helpful to find the best stuff. Sometimes you don't know why something is better, but that doesn't mean you can't tell. So then, a problem with generative AI is that it will mainly be optimized to mimic the appealing end results and then probably also tuned to prefer things that people respond positively to. That's cool and it can definitely produce results that people like, but I think it misses a lot of dimensions of artistic endeavors. Stable Diffusion today isn't drawing; it's forming pictures out of noise that look like they were drawn. No reason, imo, to believe an AI model won't some day actually be drawing; it's just not what's going on today. But because Stable Diffusion skips all of the details, it does things that don't make stylistic sense at all, like putting vastly overly photo-realistic details/rendering onto a cartoon drawing and other such bizarre things. On one hand, this is probably something that can be fixed, but I also think that fixing it is patching around the fact that it's generating images rather than creating them the way a person would. (To me, diffusion models feel like they could be the "imagination" of some AI agent that draws; but, ultimately, I have no idea what the future will hold.) The other thing that's awkward about the way this works is that it's a bit deceptive: looking at the end results, you can see things that are extremely impressive at times, but no doubt part of the problem is that it's difficult for us to actually evaluate it. For any of these very impressive generative models, I think that a surprising ability of being able to produce novel things has been demonstrated in many cases, but the truth is that even some less novel things tend to still be hard. Kind of like how you can generate a pig with a cowboy hat in space using one of these generative models, but ask it to generate two people holding hands and you may be treated with man-made horrors beyond our comprehension. (Or maybe it will work, but either way, the failure mode of these models is very interesting.) OK, so I droned on a bit there. But what I'm trying to say is, I think these generative AIs are basically all going to be tuned to be as appealing as possible to the average person. Because of that, they will short-circuit our dumb ape brains into thinking "Wow! This is surprisingly good!" even though they are often lacking much substance and a closer inspection may show plenty of issues and general strangeness. I think that more advanced AI agents might some day overcome this on a fundamental level, by simply not skipping "the hard part" and going right to the end result. That would help limit a lot of weirdness that just fundamentally does not make sense. Even when that happens, though, I suspect the domain of AI stuff will wind up being more limited than it initially appears, as the generative models will prove to have unintuitive limitations, and as a result of that, we may see floods of very same-y garbage stuff. I'd be glad to be very wrong here. In the past, the availability of powerful tools definitely did what you said: it raises the bar. I mean, seeing what kids are doing in Blender and Inkscape feels like proof of this. AI does change some variables in a way that is scary, though: it produces things effectively infinitely fast and infinitely voluminous compared to humans, and at least by my measure it often achieves superficially good results, and the flaws may not be apparent quickly and maybe not at all to the untrained senses. So maybe we're in for a flood of same-y garbage. Or maybe not. Guess we'll see.
paul7986 3y ago
AI Generative music sounds pretty darn good to me present day ... here's an AI Mariah Carey singing a 1990s Michael Bolton song ... you wouldnt know it's AI by just your ear. If you were familiar with the song and Mariah carey you'd probably think or ask I didnt know she sang this song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whqp81U19gg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whqp81U19gg
- squarefoot 3y ago
  Still recognizable from some imbalance in higher frequencies which could also be due to the use or simulation of an harmonic exciter, and the usual "s" still sounding a bit fake, but yeah they made some pretty darn good progress lately.
pyinstallwoes 3y ago
Some time ago, far, far away, a human species became so enamored with their automatons that the entire world was essentially under the spell of their own creation. They became enchanted with their illusion, becoming their own disillusion. No one realizing the veil overmind glooming and looming. Reflections linger, memory pays mind to neither. Eager to discover what’s real, but the reel keeps playing what’s surreal. What’s it matter, if the mind can’t tell either from aether. Samsara, no Abraham’s Sara, abra-cadabra, open sesame, oh well, stuck in the loop, but who cares, we’re in this together so I’ll take either. Some say Samuel paved the way, eat the apple, it’ll be fine they say.
Slow_Hand 3y ago
I would argue that this has already happened and it's only a matter of degree now. The widespread availability of DAWs, streaming services, and music distribution services has greatly enabled people to create and publish their music online. Not to mention services like Splice which enable the purchase and curation of ready-made musical loops. It's never been easier to make a record, render it, and distribute it. Of course the problem then becomes one of sifting through the endless pool of releases. There's a lower ratio of quality signal to noise. So be it. I still get the majority of my recommendations from people who I trust to have good taste. I happen to think this enabling of creation is a net positive because it breaks down barriers for people to be creative and I consider that to be an intrinsically rewarding activity. At the end of the day creators still need to have good taste and discipline to see their vision realized or succeed, but the act of creating itself is beneficial to people on a personal level. Even if their creation is objectively hot trash.
- zerbinxx 3y ago
  Yeah the democratization era is already well underway: arguably over, even, in that it’s no longer possible to become a “big star” from throwing together some shit in fruity loops and hitting it big. Every once in a while, a bedroom musician with a little talent will break through, but more and more music is either relegated to “good taste but unknown” or “weird conglomerate of ghostwritten tunes operated by a Hollywood finance group”. AI might as well already exist. Half of what you find on soundcloud is low effort/low skill/low expression anyway. Which I think is great.
  - dabbledash 3y ago
    Why do you think it's great?

DrSiemer 3y ago

Everything must always evolve, I suppose? I do wonder what will become of music when the Great Blender is done remixing everything. Hard to predict, but I'm sure we'll get something new out of it. Imagine a talented singer just freewheeling with an AI band backing the vocals. A few prompt nudges before you start ("something in the style of Aphex Twin with bagpipes"), some buttons to make live adjustments, with labels like "darker / brighter", "more pop / more alternative" or "activate cowbell". I guess the main thing to solve is reproducible output, but we almost have the technology to do this. You don't have to be a singer either. Practicing an instrument could be so much more fun when a complete song in the style of your favorite band is generated along with whatever you are doing.

peebeebee 3y ago

You could have said the same thing about a synthesizer. Look how that revolutionised music. AI is just another tool. This is just the beginning. People will use these tools in extremely creative ways.

squarefoot 3y ago
The not so subtle difference is that synthesizers and drum machines don't play by themselves, or when they do (arrangers) they're 100% recognizable from a real band. AI will change everything.
- peebeebee 3y ago
  Not that much difference. You used to have to gather 4 musicians to form a band, pay for recording studio, record an lp, and tour to get your music out. This took years to get that sort of creativity out. Now you make a song on your laptop with some existing samples, and release it to SoundCloud. So it takes much less technical and theoretical knowledge to create a song than 70 years ago. This is just an extension of this. You will have loads of people making subpar music with AI, but you will also have incredible innovators using that technology to form new music genres. Happens each time we get a new tool. PEOPLE will use AI. AI alone can’t set up a nice production, or play on festivals. :)
  - helboi4 3y ago
    No. You no longer have to gather other humans. But electronic music production requires a wild amount of technical knowledge from a single individual, whereas being in a band only requires you to know how to play one instrument. To do electronic music production decently, you need to understand music theory, the actual physics of waves and how to manipulate that (synthesis), how to even process samples (you can't just chuck them in there), how to mix and master by yourself (bands would generally save up together from playing live to pay someone else for this - these are two fields that people dedicate their whole lives to, and that most electronic music producers do entirely by themselves alongside making the whole song), you need to be able to play piano a little bit usually... you need to learn loads of different hardware and software, and you need to be the sole composer coming up with an idea from nothing, usually containing a number of musical parts closer to a symphony than a rock band. Electronic music production is not easy. If you really just throw some samples in a daw, it will sound like a 10 year old made it and it will probably break people's speakers because it's not mixed and mastered properly. Electronic music is a mature enough genre (that incidentally even in its inception was originated by people who were also traditional musicians) that fans don't accept a macaroni collage of a song that once again probably would break their speakers.

theGnuMe 3y ago

I think these tools will unleash a Cambrian explosion of music from all types of people. It’ll be amazing.