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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 ma
by tumult 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y agoExcept to say, poorly I suppose since the point didn't come across, Get Used To It. This is nothing new, your examples are great ones too, the benefits we got are, lots more art for everybody. To take the side of the composer/performer/artist is natural I suppose, but that's such a tiny fraction of humanity. To ignore the clear and positive upside, even claim it doesn't exist, is disingenuous? To criticise AI music for being the same as human music, is a curious thing to say if one doesn't want to distinguish the two somehow? I missed that point entirely I guess. I don't know why that sentence was there at all then.
- tumult 3y ago> To criticise AI music for being the same as human music, is a curious thing to say if one doesn't want to distinguish the two somehow? I missed that point entirely I guess. I don't know why that sentence was there at all then. This is still not relevant. You don’t need to bring it up again. I wasn’t criticizing it for that. As for the rest of your comment, you didn’t state any upsides for AI generated music, but you did spend time to attack me, so I think we’re done here.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoYikes! I criticised arguments. The only time I mentioned you, was to compliment your examples. It's important to distinguish these things.