9 ms·

GenAI Art Is the Least Imaginative Use of AI Imaginable

44 points by chaosprint 2y ago

dutchbookmaker 2y ago
I have been a musician at this point for 35+ years. The quote from the Suno CEO is beyond absurd. I have spent quite a number of hours with MusicLM in AI test kitchen. To me, that is actually a new form of music synthesis. Synthesis in the context of FM, subtractive, etc. I suspect MusicLM had some tracks removed from the training data because it use to make absolutely wildly creative psytrance clips and now it just doesn't. Suno on the other hand to me has basically been a complete joke. The training data is just not wide enough to do anything interesting and new. I think the only way to really use these tools creatively would be to produce your own trained model with AudioLM. The creative use then is in the musical output and not selling the model as yet another SaaS for $x.99 a month. Of course, you could use Suno to create loops and sample material. The way midjourney is the greatest thing possible for digital collage in Krita/Photoshop. GenAI art though on its own be it midjourney, stable diffusion, Suno, MusicLM, whatever already jumped the shark for me a year ago. The problem ultimately is the output is just so very limited.
- chaosprint 2y ago
  Technically, I feel that the current diffusion angle always has to fight against sound quality. But maybe this angle can find its own "Retina" moment, and Suno's v4 is closer. But the hard flaw (almost unsolvable) of this angle is editing. I have been exploring methods based on DRL( https://github.com/chaosprint/RaveForce https://github.com/chaosprint/RaveForce), but I think there is still a long way to go.
- gedy 2y ago
  > Suno on the other hand to me has basically been a complete joke. The training data is just not wide enough to do anything interesting and new. Hard disagree, Suno is terrific, but likely depends on what you define as "new". Of course AI models can't explore outside the data they are trained on, but they can effectively generate within the parameter space, including areas unexplored directly by the content it was trained on. Have done some really interesting mashups of styles that people aren't doing and the results are great imho. If you are trying to make it do very specific things like you would another instrument, it's not the right tool.
  - teucris 2y ago
    I would love to hear them. Would you share a link or two?
sandspar 2y ago
Amusing to see a Stanford student complain about capitalism. Attending Stanford costs $70,000 a year. The bastardized John Adams quote: "I must study war so my sons can study business. My sons must study business so their sons can complain about capitalism."
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  Of all the billions of dollars in the world wasted on disturbing excess, aren't you thankful that some of it goes towards something worth more than what money can buy?
- kennyloginz 2y ago
  Very amusing to read this comment which has nothing to do with the article. The writer is a professor, and the article provides a lot of insight. I guess your father’s quote would be “I must read an article so my sons can skip it and make comments.”
  - sandspar 2y ago
    Did you read the full article?
- sureglymop 2y ago
  Can you explain your logic here? Why couldn't the student complain about capitalism while being enrolled at Stanford? I would have rather assumed that the high semester fee may perhaps contribute to them having that opinion. I pay a measly $700 semester fee to study at a good university here in Switzerland.
  - sandspar 2y ago
    "Looks don't matter" - good looking people "Money doesn't matter" - rich people The reason he's in a position to complain about capitalism is because he's rich. It's funny because it's predictable.
    - 2y ago
gibbitz 2y ago
>when we work at our favorite activities — cooking, gaming, hiking, music-making, writing (to name a few) — the process is often not easy or pleasant or smooth. This gets to the heart of what bothers me about using LLM to emulate Art. This is the justification people make for using it, but no Artists I know finds making Art consistently unpleasant. Sure, there are times you're blocked or tired but generally in the end you are satisfied or have leaned something helpful from the experience. This is all of life. This is why there is Art. If you just want a pleasant time, you're looking for entertainment, not creative endeavor. Just put on a VR headset and leave making Art to the real Artists. Art is like anything. If you want to get good at it you need to discover how to get dopamine from it and exploit that to habit and mastery. This is how you get in shape, it's how you improve your golf game, how you develop software, raise kids. Yet for some reason humanity wants a cheat code for all of this. Pills to make you skinny, video golf to give you an advantage at the links, top-tier schools to make your kids awesome. We're hellbent on dumping the baby out with the bathwater because we think the point is putting the tub away.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
lowsong 2y ago
It's nice to see someone that gets it, and can explain why all of these generative-AI tools are completely pointless so well.
robertlagrant 2y ago
This sort of thing keeps getting written. You will still be able to art, even if AI art becomes better. I can still, to this day, still go for a walk even though cars exist. Not because I need to get somewhere, necessarily, but for the love of walking. This is only being litigated in this way I think because art people never thought automation would come their way, and they're thinking about this stuff for the first time. A silly comment from some GenAI exec is not much justification for such an article. People know that writing and making music is fun. Said exec is just paid to say the opposite.
- Robingoodfellow 2y ago
  >You will still be able to art, even if AI art becomes better. I don't know, maybe all the artists, musicians, and poets will be too tired from doing whatever menial labor bullshit jobs are left post AI to create great art. Why not direct our efforts into enabling more people to devote their lives to creating art instead of fewer? Wouldn't it be amazing if everyone was able to spend their time creating because the machines were doing the work we actually didn't want to do?
  - BoorishBears 2y ago
    I think it's interesting how this always gets framed as reducing the number of creators. I run an AI storytelling site with thousands of users and by most measures I wouldn't say it writes better than a practiced human, but what it does do is allow would-be consumers to become their own creators. Some users spend $100+ dollars a month, not because it writes 10x better content than what a $10 Kindle unlimited subscription offers, but because even at 50% the quality they'd rather have the story they wanted to tell but didn't exist elsewhere. For me AI art is not about replacing creators: it's about letting users go from passively consuming content made by people who have skills, time, and/or resources they lack to actively creating what they want to see in the world. I'm not sure how compatible being against the democratization of creation really is with the narrative of defending the arts.
    - BoredPositron 2y ago
unraveller 2y ago
AI songs present as a refined end-product but you don't have to treat them as anything more than killing time or B-grade inspiration for something else. Instrument skills will surely be preserved somewhere due to nostalgia, it's the industry gatekeeping that is coming to an unharmonious end along with all the silly status games if AI songs ever take off. For instance, why does an indy band need an AI-free backstory but a popstar can outsource all their imagination to the producer who may or may not use autotune or AI riffs?
- shortrounddev2 2y ago
  Because the kind of people who listen to indie music are not thr same as those listening to pop music. Indie artists are valued for their originality or authenticity. Pop music is valued for the spectacle it puts on, not just the sound waves that come out of your earphones. Personally I don't see any point in listening to AI generated music. It's not something I'll ever be interested in, certainly not something I'd be willing to spend money on
  - unraveller 2y ago
    I have been moved by the rare piece of AI genre music. Admittedly, most of Gen AI that gets updooted is repulsive though. This emerging field is not for the faint hearted and has terrible curation chops.
- cwmoore 2y ago
  "Instrument skills will surely be preserved..." Citation needed.
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    are you kidding? AI will make live performance more valuable, not less. The human connection is what we want. Citation: the magic feeling my instrument makes when it vibrates in my hands when I play. AI isn't going to take that away you soulless gremlin. CITATION NEEDED, INDEED!
Robingoodfellow 2y ago
I really enjoyed the perspective of this author and the article's contemplative tone. I think an important perspective is that these are tools for consumers, not creators. While we are all obviously both to a degree, the current economic model makes a clear distinction. When it comes to monetary exchange, we are either artists or consumers. AI art has the potential to create a massive imbalance between these two fields, reducing the friction of being a consumer, and greatly reducing the number of people who are able to support themselves as artists. If you view yourself chiefly as a consumer this might (very narrowly) be viewed as a positive. The social cost however is creating a society that favors consumption over creation, and weights incentives accordingly
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  > The social cost however is creating a society that favors consumption over creation, and weights incentives accordingly We've been heading this way progressively for the last century. If you look back at the early days of broadcast television, for example, there were only 3 channels. 72h of programming at most in any 24h time period. This deeply favored the creator (or perhaps more accurately, the owner of the channel of distribution). Now we have YT and Netflix, both of which are biased towards consumption. Is it all bad? In some ways; we have to wade through more to find the good stuff. But in other ways, we have more to choose from and more people can be creators.
metalman 2y ago
A gigging musician I know, who is involved in many projects, including leading an on again, off again BiG BanD, recently had another aquaintence, play a recording to him of the soul song that this person had "written" with ai help. I am struggling with comming to terms with the idea of artificial music. Some people like it, so it will stay around, and I cant begrudge them, at least for now, as ai will probably end up spawning new generas ,that would likely not come into bieng without it, which I suspect, the whole point will be inflicting there "art" on anyone they can. This artificial art, has no back story, no sweat, no triumph, and will never have a voice or style it's own, it's only and explisitly derivitive, but there are those who are in some strange way comforted by that, a bieger shade of ecru, free from angst and any possibility of it showing anybody up. Though all in all, I think it's, orrible, right nasty, and I imagine that it will end up banned like a lot of other artificial things, that prove to be bad, for everybody they touch. edit:synthetic creativity
tivert 2y ago
> AI music company Suno’s CEO was quoted as saying “I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music” in what sounds like yet another justification of Suno’s prompt-based (and very popular) generative AI music service... > Such systems offer the promise of skipping the labor by bypassing the creative process and, yes, the difficulties, confusion, and frustration inherent in such endeavors, but… The true purpose of AI is to free humans from creative and engaging work, so we can spend more time doing drudgery (like monitoring AI output). > Statements like Suno’s perfectly captures the prevailing public mindset about AI: that Artificial Intelligence is little more than a labor-saving optimization tool. This mindset tends to be good for #Capitalism, but betrays not only a lack of understanding of why people make music, but also a profound lack of imagination regarding how we could, or would want to live with our technologies in our lives. The true goal of Capitalism is the elimination of anything that isn't Capitalism, so it can be replaced with more Capitalism, until everything is Capitalism and nothing else remains.

44 points by chaosprint 2y ago

I have been a musician at this point for 35+ years. The quote from the Suno CEO is beyond absurd. I have spent quite a number of hours with MusicLM in AI test kitchen. To me, that is actually a new form of music synthesis. Synthesis in the context of FM, subtractive, etc. I suspect MusicLM had some tracks removed from the training data because it use to make absolutely wildly creative psytrance clips and now it just doesn't. Suno on the other hand to me has basically been a complete joke. The training data is just not wide enough to do anything interesting and new. I think the only way to really use these tools creatively would be to produce your own trained model with AudioLM. The creative use then is in the musical output and not selling the model as yet another SaaS for $x.99 a month. Of course, you could use Suno to create loops and sample material. The way midjourney is the greatest thing possible for digital collage in Krita/Photoshop. GenAI art though on its own be it midjourney, stable diffusion, Suno, MusicLM, whatever already jumped the shark for me a year ago. The problem ultimately is the output is just so very limited.

chaosprint 2y ago
Technically, I feel that the current diffusion angle always has to fight against sound quality. But maybe this angle can find its own "Retina" moment, and Suno's v4 is closer. But the hard flaw (almost unsolvable) of this angle is editing. I have been exploring methods based on DRL( https://github.com/chaosprint/RaveForce https://github.com/chaosprint/RaveForce), but I think there is still a long way to go.
gedy 2y ago
> Suno on the other hand to me has basically been a complete joke. The training data is just not wide enough to do anything interesting and new. Hard disagree, Suno is terrific, but likely depends on what you define as "new". Of course AI models can't explore outside the data they are trained on, but they can effectively generate within the parameter space, including areas unexplored directly by the content it was trained on. Have done some really interesting mashups of styles that people aren't doing and the results are great imho. If you are trying to make it do very specific things like you would another instrument, it's not the right tool.
- teucris 2y ago
  I would love to hear them. Would you share a link or two?

sandspar 2y ago

Amusing to see a Stanford student complain about capitalism. Attending Stanford costs $70,000 a year. The bastardized John Adams quote: "I must study war so my sons can study business. My sons must study business so their sons can complain about capitalism."

DiscourseFan 2y ago
Of all the billions of dollars in the world wasted on disturbing excess, aren't you thankful that some of it goes towards something worth more than what money can buy?
kennyloginz 2y ago
Very amusing to read this comment which has nothing to do with the article. The writer is a professor, and the article provides a lot of insight. I guess your father’s quote would be “I must read an article so my sons can skip it and make comments.”
- sandspar 2y ago
  Did you read the full article?
sureglymop 2y ago
Can you explain your logic here? Why couldn't the student complain about capitalism while being enrolled at Stanford? I would have rather assumed that the high semester fee may perhaps contribute to them having that opinion. I pay a measly $700 semester fee to study at a good university here in Switzerland.
- sandspar 2y ago
  "Looks don't matter" - good looking people "Money doesn't matter" - rich people The reason he's in a position to complain about capitalism is because he's rich. It's funny because it's predictable.
  - 2y ago

gibbitz 2y ago

>when we work at our favorite activities — cooking, gaming, hiking, music-making, writing (to name a few) — the process is often not easy or pleasant or smooth. This gets to the heart of what bothers me about using LLM to emulate Art. This is the justification people make for using it, but no Artists I know finds making Art consistently unpleasant. Sure, there are times you're blocked or tired but generally in the end you are satisfied or have leaned something helpful from the experience. This is all of life. This is why there is Art. If you just want a pleasant time, you're looking for entertainment, not creative endeavor. Just put on a VR headset and leave making Art to the real Artists. Art is like anything. If you want to get good at it you need to discover how to get dopamine from it and exploit that to habit and mastery. This is how you get in shape, it's how you improve your golf game, how you develop software, raise kids. Yet for some reason humanity wants a cheat code for all of this. Pills to make you skinny, video golf to give you an advantage at the links, top-tier schools to make your kids awesome. We're hellbent on dumping the baby out with the bathwater because we think the point is putting the tub away.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

lowsong 2y ago

It's nice to see someone that gets it, and can explain why all of these generative-AI tools are completely pointless so well.

robertlagrant 2y ago

This sort of thing keeps getting written. You will still be able to art, even if AI art becomes better. I can still, to this day, still go for a walk even though cars exist. Not because I need to get somewhere, necessarily, but for the love of walking. This is only being litigated in this way I think because art people never thought automation would come their way, and they're thinking about this stuff for the first time. A silly comment from some GenAI exec is not much justification for such an article. People know that writing and making music is fun. Said exec is just paid to say the opposite.

Robingoodfellow 2y ago
>You will still be able to art, even if AI art becomes better. I don't know, maybe all the artists, musicians, and poets will be too tired from doing whatever menial labor bullshit jobs are left post AI to create great art. Why not direct our efforts into enabling more people to devote their lives to creating art instead of fewer? Wouldn't it be amazing if everyone was able to spend their time creating because the machines were doing the work we actually didn't want to do?
- BoorishBears 2y ago
  I think it's interesting how this always gets framed as reducing the number of creators. I run an AI storytelling site with thousands of users and by most measures I wouldn't say it writes better than a practiced human, but what it does do is allow would-be consumers to become their own creators. Some users spend $100+ dollars a month, not because it writes 10x better content than what a $10 Kindle unlimited subscription offers, but because even at 50% the quality they'd rather have the story they wanted to tell but didn't exist elsewhere. For me AI art is not about replacing creators: it's about letting users go from passively consuming content made by people who have skills, time, and/or resources they lack to actively creating what they want to see in the world. I'm not sure how compatible being against the democratization of creation really is with the narrative of defending the arts.
  - BoredPositron 2y ago

unraveller 2y ago

AI songs present as a refined end-product but you don't have to treat them as anything more than killing time or B-grade inspiration for something else. Instrument skills will surely be preserved somewhere due to nostalgia, it's the industry gatekeeping that is coming to an unharmonious end along with all the silly status games if AI songs ever take off. For instance, why does an indy band need an AI-free backstory but a popstar can outsource all their imagination to the producer who may or may not use autotune or AI riffs?

shortrounddev2 2y ago
Because the kind of people who listen to indie music are not thr same as those listening to pop music. Indie artists are valued for their originality or authenticity. Pop music is valued for the spectacle it puts on, not just the sound waves that come out of your earphones. Personally I don't see any point in listening to AI generated music. It's not something I'll ever be interested in, certainly not something I'd be willing to spend money on
- unraveller 2y ago
  I have been moved by the rare piece of AI genre music. Admittedly, most of Gen AI that gets updooted is repulsive though. This emerging field is not for the faint hearted and has terrible curation chops.
cwmoore 2y ago
"Instrument skills will surely be preserved..." Citation needed.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  are you kidding? AI will make live performance more valuable, not less. The human connection is what we want. Citation: the magic feeling my instrument makes when it vibrates in my hands when I play. AI isn't going to take that away you soulless gremlin. CITATION NEEDED, INDEED!

Robingoodfellow 2y ago

I really enjoyed the perspective of this author and the article's contemplative tone. I think an important perspective is that these are tools for consumers, not creators. While we are all obviously both to a degree, the current economic model makes a clear distinction. When it comes to monetary exchange, we are either artists or consumers. AI art has the potential to create a massive imbalance between these two fields, reducing the friction of being a consumer, and greatly reducing the number of people who are able to support themselves as artists. If you view yourself chiefly as a consumer this might (very narrowly) be viewed as a positive. The social cost however is creating a society that favors consumption over creation, and weights incentives accordingly

CharlieDigital 2y ago
> The social cost however is creating a society that favors consumption over creation, and weights incentives accordingly We've been heading this way progressively for the last century. If you look back at the early days of broadcast television, for example, there were only 3 channels. 72h of programming at most in any 24h time period. This deeply favored the creator (or perhaps more accurately, the owner of the channel of distribution). Now we have YT and Netflix, both of which are biased towards consumption. Is it all bad? In some ways; we have to wade through more to find the good stuff. But in other ways, we have more to choose from and more people can be creators.

metalman 2y ago

A gigging musician I know, who is involved in many projects, including leading an on again, off again BiG BanD, recently had another aquaintence, play a recording to him of the soul song that this person had "written" with ai help. I am struggling with comming to terms with the idea of artificial music. Some people like it, so it will stay around, and I cant begrudge them, at least for now, as ai will probably end up spawning new generas ,that would likely not come into bieng without it, which I suspect, the whole point will be inflicting there "art" on anyone they can. This artificial art, has no back story, no sweat, no triumph, and will never have a voice or style it's own, it's only and explisitly derivitive, but there are those who are in some strange way comforted by that, a bieger shade of ecru, free from angst and any possibility of it showing anybody up. Though all in all, I think it's, orrible, right nasty, and I imagine that it will end up banned like a lot of other artificial things, that prove to be bad, for everybody they touch. edit:synthetic creativity

tivert 2y ago

> AI music company Suno’s CEO was quoted as saying “I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music” in what sounds like yet another justification of Suno’s prompt-based (and very popular) generative AI music service... > Such systems offer the promise of skipping the labor by bypassing the creative process and, yes, the difficulties, confusion, and frustration inherent in such endeavors, but… The true purpose of AI is to free humans from creative and engaging work, so we can spend more time doing drudgery (like monitoring AI output). > Statements like Suno’s perfectly captures the prevailing public mindset about AI: that Artificial Intelligence is little more than a labor-saving optimization tool. This mindset tends to be good for #Capitalism, but betrays not only a lack of understanding of why people make music, but also a profound lack of imagination regarding how we could, or would want to live with our technologies in our lives. The true goal of Capitalism is the elimination of anything that isn't Capitalism, so it can be replaced with more Capitalism, until everything is Capitalism and nothing else remains.