5 ms·

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 syn

by Max-q 2y ago

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.

piva00 2y ago
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").
- The_Colonel 2y ago
  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.
  - vasco 2y ago
    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).
    - The_Colonel 2y ago
      > AI can easily write prompts 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).
      - vasco 2y ago
        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.
        The_Colonel 2y ago
        And your brain also has way more training data (all the knowledge you gained, all the art you've seen) than what you yourself produce as "art".
        skydhash 2y ago
        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.
        The_Colonel 2y ago
        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.
- berkes 2y ago
  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.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  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.
  - criddell 2y ago
    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.
- IanCal 2y ago
  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.
  - dagw 2y ago
    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.
    - IanCal 2y ago
      Why look at the end result in isolation? Isn't that just ignoring the human element then complaining there isn't one?
      - dagw 2y ago
        Why look at the end result in isolation? 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.
xcv123 2y ago
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.
- arrowsmith 2y ago
  You must live under the world's largest rock if you don't think that there's a commercial audience for corny, generic, cringeworthy and shitty music.
  - xcv123 2y ago
    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.
    - ryandrake 2y ago
      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.
TheCapeGreek 2y ago
Agreed. 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!
- tumult 2y ago
  It will let you express yourself in precisely the same amount as giving those instructions to a person to create a song for you. Very little.
  - oblio 2y ago
    Memes, memes everywhere! :-) > as giving those instructions to a person to create a song for you Most people don't have access to such a person.
    - tumult 2y ago
      I know. I was saying it’s not expressive. I didn’t say that everyone has people to make music for them.
      - oblio 2y ago
        My point is that just like with meme generators, many people are able to express themselves through "rudimentary" artistic means. A tool like this will open up a lot of possibilities. No, they won't turn into the next Hans Zimmer.
        tumult 2y ago
        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.
moritzwarhier 2y ago
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.
- rendall 2y ago
  > 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.
  - acureau 2y ago
    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.
    - rendall 2y ago
      > The two are fundamentally incomparable 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.
GeoAtreides 2y ago
> 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)
- z7 2y ago
  Not the parent but here's one article: >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. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/musicians-wage-war-against-evil-robots-92702721/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/musicians-wage-war-ag...
  - GeoAtreides 2y ago
    well: > live musicians who played in movie theaters and it wasn't about recorded music, but mechanical pianos
    - z7 2y ago
      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.
tumult 2y ago
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.
- JoeAltmaier 2y ago
  "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.
  - tumult 2y ago
    > "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.
JoeAltmaier 2y ago
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?

by Max-q 2y ago

piva00 2y ago

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").

The_Colonel 2y ago
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.
- vasco 2y ago
  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).
  - The_Colonel 2y ago
    > AI can easily write prompts 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).
    - vasco 2y ago
      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.
      - The_Colonel 2y ago
        And your brain also has way more training data (all the knowledge you gained, all the art you've seen) than what you yourself produce as "art".
        skydhash 2y ago
        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.
        The_Colonel 2y ago
        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.
berkes 2y ago
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.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
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.
- criddell 2y ago
  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.
IanCal 2y ago
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.
- dagw 2y ago
  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.
  - IanCal 2y ago
    Why look at the end result in isolation? Isn't that just ignoring the human element then complaining there isn't one?
    - dagw 2y ago
      Why look at the end result in isolation? 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.

xcv123 2y ago

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.

arrowsmith 2y ago
You must live under the world's largest rock if you don't think that there's a commercial audience for corny, generic, cringeworthy and shitty music.
- xcv123 2y ago
  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.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    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.

TheCapeGreek 2y ago

Agreed. 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!

tumult 2y ago
It will let you express yourself in precisely the same amount as giving those instructions to a person to create a song for you. Very little.
- oblio 2y ago
  Memes, memes everywhere! :-) > as giving those instructions to a person to create a song for you Most people don't have access to such a person.
  - tumult 2y ago
    I know. I was saying it’s not expressive. I didn’t say that everyone has people to make music for them.
    - oblio 2y ago
      My point is that just like with meme generators, many people are able to express themselves through "rudimentary" artistic means. A tool like this will open up a lot of possibilities. No, they won't turn into the next Hans Zimmer.
      - tumult 2y ago
        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.

moritzwarhier 2y ago

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.

rendall 2y ago
> 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.
- acureau 2y ago
  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.
  - rendall 2y ago
    > The two are fundamentally incomparable 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.

GeoAtreides 2y ago

> 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)

z7 2y ago
Not the parent but here's one article: >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. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/musicians-wage-war-against-evil-robots-92702721/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/musicians-wage-war-ag...
- GeoAtreides 2y ago
  well: > live musicians who played in movie theaters and it wasn't about recorded music, but mechanical pianos
  - z7 2y ago
    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.

tumult 2y ago

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.

JoeAltmaier 2y ago
"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.
- tumult 2y ago
  > "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.

JoeAltmaier 2y ago

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?