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clicking on a button until you like what you hear is not "making music". I have nothing against these tools, but the hubris of the people using them is insane

protocolture 1y ago
Refining a request that generates music, is "making music" however you slice it.
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago
  If so, then twiddling the radio knob is also "making music".
  - visarga 1y ago
    You probably never prompted an AI model until you got something good from it.
  - protocolture 1y ago
    Not really. The output of the radio knob has far less opportunity to create an original work.
    - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
      Literally nothing the AI outputs is an original work.
      - protocolture 1y ago
        That's a testable hypothesis. Go sample every AI output until you find one that doesn't have a previously created 1:1 analogue. Unless of course you mean "original" as in, some kind of wishy washy untargetable goal that's really some appeal to humanity, where any piece of information that disagrees with your hypothesis is discarded because it is unfalsifiable. Original might as well mean "Made by a human and that's it" which isn't useful at all. Whereas I use it to mean new or different.
        otabdeveloper4 1y ago
        > Whereas I use it to mean new or different. Literally nothing AI outputs is new or different.
        I-M-S 1y ago
        That's like saying nothing that comes out of people's mouths is new or different because it's all been uttered before.
- throwaway422432 1y ago
  I messed around with Udio when it first cam out, and it wasn't just writing a prompt, and there's your song. You got 30 seconds, of which there might have been a hook that was interesting. So you would crop the hook and re-generate to get another 30 seconds before or after that, and so on. I would liken it more as being the producer stitching together the sessions a band have recorded to produce a song.
- southernplaces7 1y ago
  Trying to convince some tech people about how artistic creation works, and why it's more than just the right amount of "optimization" of bits for rapid results, is about as pointless as trying to make a chimpanzee understand the intricacies of Bach. The reductiveness of some of you is amusing, but also grotesque in the context of what art should mean for human experience.
  - frozenseven 1y ago
    There's no magical line between "tech people" and "art people". The gatekeeping here is getting desperate as hell when you're now forced to cite Bach.
    - tummler 1y ago
      Skill is nature's way of gatekeeping. If you're too lazy to put effort into learning how to create an art so you can adequately express yourself, why should some technology do all the work for you, and why should anyone want to hear what "you" (ie: the machine) have to say? This is exactly how we end up with endless slop, which doesn't provide a unique perspective, just a homogenized regurgitation of inputs.
      - frozenseven 1y ago
        >skill >too lazy Again, I wholly reject the idea that there's a line between 'tech people' and 'art people'. You can have an interest in both art and tech. You can do both 'traditional art' and AI art. I also reject the idea that AI tools require no skill, that's clearly not the case. >nature This can so easily be thrown back at you. >why should anyone want to hear what "you" (ie: the machine) have to say? So why are we having this discussion in the first place? Right, hundreds of millions are interested in exploring and creating with AI. You are not fighting against a small contingent who are trying to covet the meaning of "artist" or whatever. No, it's a mass movement of people being creative in a way that you don't like.
        tummler 1y ago
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  When I commission a painting and tell the artist what I want painted, am I in fact the artist?
  - protocolture 1y ago
    Depends. This is a very old argument within artistic communities. In cinema, authorship has resoundingly been awarded to the director. A lot of film directors go deep in many creative silos, but at its core the process is commissioning a lot of artists to do art at the same time. You dont have to be able to do those things. Famously some anime directors have just been hired off the street. In comics things went the other way. Editors have been trying to extract credit for creative work for a long time. A lot of them have significant input in the creative process, but have no contractual basis for demanding credit for that input. It frustrates them. They can also just commission work, or they can have various levels of input in to the creative process, up to and including defining characters entirely. Really then, in your example, theres clearly a point where you have had enough of a creative input in the creation to be part of the artistic endeavor. One judge in china ruled in favour of the artist after they proved that they had completed 20 odd revisions of the artwork, before watermarking it. That is of course, assuming we only follow your strict, reductionist argument. Even for AI art, most generators these days take more than text input. You can mask areas, provide hand drawn precursor art and a lot of other things. And that also assumes no post processing. Not all AI generated items will be art. But what I find offensive, is the judgement that as a class nothing touched by AI could be considered art. Mostly because I lived through "Digital Art is not Art" and "Computer Games are not Art" proponents of both got overtaken by history and rightly shamed.
    - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
      I never claimed you can't use AI tools. I never claimed Digital art is not art. Don't imply I should feel shame for questioning the world around me. You can stop with the trying to silence your critics and position yourself as superior. If I ask a comics guy their favorite comic artist they aren't giving me back editors names. They will have favorite editors, or even editor artist pairs, but the artist remains distinct from that. I simply posited that commissioning a piece of work does not make you an artist. Having art generated for you to your taste is not 'making art'. Hiring an interior decorator to decorate my house does not mean I decorated. Ordering off a menu and requesting extra cheese does not make you part chef. A better blurring for your argument would be the use of session musicians. If I say I love The Beach Boys, how much of what I love is session musicians work versus Brian Wilson's? Is he the artist that I enjoy? But that gets back to it, doesn't it. We as humans want to connect art with it's creator. Why? Because art is some reflection of something. Art is 'life is a shared experience'. AI 'art' is not part of that shared experience. I want to connect with Brian Wilson. But I don't connect with some music critic who writes about Brian Wilson's music even though we both connected with the same artistic work, even if I learned about the work though the critic making my relationship to them just as important (I wouldn't know it without them). There being an artist in the middle improves/transforms it/means something (what it means is what is up for discussion). A pretty crystal is just as pretty as a piece of art, but it is not a piece of art. AI art might be more like the crystal. It might contain beauty/interest/capture attention. But it's not connecting with someone's creation, with intention. I have a local museum and I love exhibits that a specific curator there has focused on more than ones they didn't touch. But that doesn't make them an artist. AI 'artists' fall into that category.
survirtual 1y ago
Dumping money into a company until desired results is not "building a company". I have nothing against capital, but the hubris of the people investing is insane. /s Look, sarcasm aside, for you and the many people who agree with you, I would encourage opening your minds a bit. There was a time where even eating food was an intense struggle of intellect, skill, and patience. Now you walk into a building and grab anything you desire in exchange for money. You can model this as a sort of "manifestation delta." The delta time & effort for acquiring food was once large, now it is small. This was once true for nearly everything. Many things are now much much easier. I know it is difficult to cope with, because many held a false belief that the arts were some kind of untouchable holy grail of pure humanness, never to be remotely approached by technology. But here we are, it didn't actually take much to make even that easier. The idea that this was somehow "the thing" that so many pegged their souls to, I would actually call THAT hubris. Turns out, everyone needs to dig a bit deeper to learn who we really are. This generative AI stuff is just another phase of a long line of evolution via technology for humanity. It means that more people can get what they want easier. They can go from thought to manifestation faster. This is a good thing. The artists will still make art, just like blacksmiths still exist, or bow hunters still exist, or all the myriad of "old ways" still exist. They just won't be needed. They will be wanted, but they won't be needed. The less middlemen to creation, the better. And when someone desires a thing created, and they put in the money, compute time, and prompting to thusly do so, then they ARE the creator. Without them, the manifestation would stay in a realm of unrealized dreams. The act itself of shifting idea to reality is the act of creation. It doesn't matter how easy it is or becomes. Your struggle to create is irrelevant to the energy of creation.
- j4coh 1y ago
  It doesn’t even have to be art. If someone told me they were a chef and cooked some food but in reality had ordered it I’d think they were a bit of a moron for equating these things or thinking that by giving someone money or a request for something they were a creator, not a consumer. It may be nice for society that ordering food is possible, but it doesn’t make one a chef to have done so.
  - 1y ago
bobxmax 1y ago
No, the hubris of people deciding they can define what music is is insane Banging two sticks together is music. Get off your high horse.
- Applejinx 1y ago
  I have claves, which are literally two sticks. I've also got a couple egg shakers, a couple tambourines. Do you have ANY IDEA how hard these things are to play well. I don't care if haphazard bashing of sticks with intent to make noise counts as 'music'. I do care if this whole line of discussion fundamentally equates any such bashing with, say, Jack Ashford. I would be surprised if the name meant anything to you, as he's more obscure than he should be: the percussionist and tambourine player for the great days of Motown. Some of you folks don't know why that is special.
  - visarga 1y ago
    Maybe you need to refresh the context - 99.99% of AI generated music, images or text is seen/heard only Once, by the AI user. It's a private affair. The rest of the world are not invited. If I write a song about my kid and cat it's funny for me and my wife. I don't expect anyone else to hear or like it. It has value to me because I set the topic. It doesn't even need to be perfect musically to be fun for a few minutes.
  - bobxmax 1y ago
    You seem to be the one who doesn't understand how special it is if you think good music is so simple that AI can zero shot it. People are mixing and matching these songs and layering their own vocals etc to create novel music. This is barely different from sampling or papier mache or making collages. People made the same reductionist arguments you're making about electronic music in the early days. Or digital art.
visarga 1y ago
What button? Again with the vending machine idea. No, it's language prompting, language has unbounded semantic space. It's not one choice out of 20, it's one choice out of countless possibilities. I give my idea to the model, the model gives me new ideas, I iterate. After enough rounds I get some place where I would never have gotten on my own, or the model gotten there without me. I am not the sole creator, neither is the model, credit belongs to the Process.
- codedokode 1y ago
  > language has unbounded semantic space So if I have a melody in my head, how do I make AI render it using language? Even simpler, if I can beatbox a beat (like "pts-ts-ks-ts"), how do I describe it using language? I don't feel like I can make anything useful by prompting.
  - GenerocUsername 1y ago
    You record yourself whistling it and out it in as an input. I've been recording myself on guitar and using suno to turn it into professional quality recordings with full backing band. And I'm not trying to sell it, I just like hearing the ideas in my head turned into fully fleshed music of higher quality than I could produce with 100x more time to invest into it
    - codedokode 1y ago
      This is more closer to actually creating rather than generating music. However this cannot be done with a text prompt, which the comment above claimed, is expressive enough. Actually having an "autotune" AI that turns out-of-key poor singing into a beautiful melody while keeping the voice timbre, would be not bad.
      - GenerocUsername 1y ago
        Well then I have news for you... That's what Suno is. You can generate from simple text prompt, you can describe timings and chord progressions and song structure. You can get very detailed, even providing recordings Yes the barrier for entry is low, but there is a very high ceiling as well
httpsoverdns 1y ago
I just tried it out because of the discussions on this thread, and I got to say I land squarely on the side of this is neat, but it is not artistry. Every little thing I generated sounded like things I've heard before. I was trying hard to get it to create something unique, using obscure language or ideas. It didn't even get close to something interesting in my opinion, every single output was like if you combined every top 40 song ever made and then only distilled out the parts relevant to certain keywords in a prompt. These tools will probably be great for making music for commercials. But if you want to make something interesting, unique, or experimental, I don't think these are quite suited for it. It seems to be a very similar limitation to text-based llms. They are great at synthesizing the most likely response to your input. But never very good at coming up with something unique or unlikely.

protocolture 1y ago

Refining a request that generates music, is "making music" however you slice it.

otabdeveloper4 1y ago
If so, then twiddling the radio knob is also "making music".
- visarga 1y ago
  You probably never prompted an AI model until you got something good from it.
- protocolture 1y ago
  Not really. The output of the radio knob has far less opportunity to create an original work.
  - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
    Literally nothing the AI outputs is an original work.
    - protocolture 1y ago
      That's a testable hypothesis. Go sample every AI output until you find one that doesn't have a previously created 1:1 analogue. Unless of course you mean "original" as in, some kind of wishy washy untargetable goal that's really some appeal to humanity, where any piece of information that disagrees with your hypothesis is discarded because it is unfalsifiable. Original might as well mean "Made by a human and that's it" which isn't useful at all. Whereas I use it to mean new or different.
      - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
        > Whereas I use it to mean new or different. Literally nothing AI outputs is new or different.
        I-M-S 1y ago
        That's like saying nothing that comes out of people's mouths is new or different because it's all been uttered before.
throwaway422432 1y ago
I messed around with Udio when it first cam out, and it wasn't just writing a prompt, and there's your song. You got 30 seconds, of which there might have been a hook that was interesting. So you would crop the hook and re-generate to get another 30 seconds before or after that, and so on. I would liken it more as being the producer stitching together the sessions a band have recorded to produce a song.
southernplaces7 1y ago
Trying to convince some tech people about how artistic creation works, and why it's more than just the right amount of "optimization" of bits for rapid results, is about as pointless as trying to make a chimpanzee understand the intricacies of Bach. The reductiveness of some of you is amusing, but also grotesque in the context of what art should mean for human experience.
- frozenseven 1y ago
  There's no magical line between "tech people" and "art people". The gatekeeping here is getting desperate as hell when you're now forced to cite Bach.
  - tummler 1y ago
    Skill is nature's way of gatekeeping. If you're too lazy to put effort into learning how to create an art so you can adequately express yourself, why should some technology do all the work for you, and why should anyone want to hear what "you" (ie: the machine) have to say? This is exactly how we end up with endless slop, which doesn't provide a unique perspective, just a homogenized regurgitation of inputs.
    - frozenseven 1y ago
      >skill >too lazy Again, I wholly reject the idea that there's a line between 'tech people' and 'art people'. You can have an interest in both art and tech. You can do both 'traditional art' and AI art. I also reject the idea that AI tools require no skill, that's clearly not the case. >nature This can so easily be thrown back at you. >why should anyone want to hear what "you" (ie: the machine) have to say? So why are we having this discussion in the first place? Right, hundreds of millions are interested in exploring and creating with AI. You are not fighting against a small contingent who are trying to covet the meaning of "artist" or whatever. No, it's a mass movement of people being creative in a way that you don't like.
      - tummler 1y ago
_DeadFred_ 1y ago
When I commission a painting and tell the artist what I want painted, am I in fact the artist?
- protocolture 1y ago
  Depends. This is a very old argument within artistic communities. In cinema, authorship has resoundingly been awarded to the director. A lot of film directors go deep in many creative silos, but at its core the process is commissioning a lot of artists to do art at the same time. You dont have to be able to do those things. Famously some anime directors have just been hired off the street. In comics things went the other way. Editors have been trying to extract credit for creative work for a long time. A lot of them have significant input in the creative process, but have no contractual basis for demanding credit for that input. It frustrates them. They can also just commission work, or they can have various levels of input in to the creative process, up to and including defining characters entirely. Really then, in your example, theres clearly a point where you have had enough of a creative input in the creation to be part of the artistic endeavor. One judge in china ruled in favour of the artist after they proved that they had completed 20 odd revisions of the artwork, before watermarking it. That is of course, assuming we only follow your strict, reductionist argument. Even for AI art, most generators these days take more than text input. You can mask areas, provide hand drawn precursor art and a lot of other things. And that also assumes no post processing. Not all AI generated items will be art. But what I find offensive, is the judgement that as a class nothing touched by AI could be considered art. Mostly because I lived through "Digital Art is not Art" and "Computer Games are not Art" proponents of both got overtaken by history and rightly shamed.
  - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
    I never claimed you can't use AI tools. I never claimed Digital art is not art. Don't imply I should feel shame for questioning the world around me. You can stop with the trying to silence your critics and position yourself as superior. If I ask a comics guy their favorite comic artist they aren't giving me back editors names. They will have favorite editors, or even editor artist pairs, but the artist remains distinct from that. I simply posited that commissioning a piece of work does not make you an artist. Having art generated for you to your taste is not 'making art'. Hiring an interior decorator to decorate my house does not mean I decorated. Ordering off a menu and requesting extra cheese does not make you part chef. A better blurring for your argument would be the use of session musicians. If I say I love The Beach Boys, how much of what I love is session musicians work versus Brian Wilson's? Is he the artist that I enjoy? But that gets back to it, doesn't it. We as humans want to connect art with it's creator. Why? Because art is some reflection of something. Art is 'life is a shared experience'. AI 'art' is not part of that shared experience. I want to connect with Brian Wilson. But I don't connect with some music critic who writes about Brian Wilson's music even though we both connected with the same artistic work, even if I learned about the work though the critic making my relationship to them just as important (I wouldn't know it without them). There being an artist in the middle improves/transforms it/means something (what it means is what is up for discussion). A pretty crystal is just as pretty as a piece of art, but it is not a piece of art. AI art might be more like the crystal. It might contain beauty/interest/capture attention. But it's not connecting with someone's creation, with intention. I have a local museum and I love exhibits that a specific curator there has focused on more than ones they didn't touch. But that doesn't make them an artist. AI 'artists' fall into that category.

survirtual 1y ago

Dumping money into a company until desired results is not "building a company". I have nothing against capital, but the hubris of the people investing is insane. /s Look, sarcasm aside, for you and the many people who agree with you, I would encourage opening your minds a bit. There was a time where even eating food was an intense struggle of intellect, skill, and patience. Now you walk into a building and grab anything you desire in exchange for money. You can model this as a sort of "manifestation delta." The delta time & effort for acquiring food was once large, now it is small. This was once true for nearly everything. Many things are now much much easier. I know it is difficult to cope with, because many held a false belief that the arts were some kind of untouchable holy grail of pure humanness, never to be remotely approached by technology. But here we are, it didn't actually take much to make even that easier. The idea that this was somehow "the thing" that so many pegged their souls to, I would actually call THAT hubris. Turns out, everyone needs to dig a bit deeper to learn who we really are. This generative AI stuff is just another phase of a long line of evolution via technology for humanity. It means that more people can get what they want easier. They can go from thought to manifestation faster. This is a good thing. The artists will still make art, just like blacksmiths still exist, or bow hunters still exist, or all the myriad of "old ways" still exist. They just won't be needed. They will be wanted, but they won't be needed. The less middlemen to creation, the better. And when someone desires a thing created, and they put in the money, compute time, and prompting to thusly do so, then they ARE the creator. Without them, the manifestation would stay in a realm of unrealized dreams. The act itself of shifting idea to reality is the act of creation. It doesn't matter how easy it is or becomes. Your struggle to create is irrelevant to the energy of creation.

j4coh 1y ago
It doesn’t even have to be art. If someone told me they were a chef and cooked some food but in reality had ordered it I’d think they were a bit of a moron for equating these things or thinking that by giving someone money or a request for something they were a creator, not a consumer. It may be nice for society that ordering food is possible, but it doesn’t make one a chef to have done so.
- 1y ago

bobxmax 1y ago

No, the hubris of people deciding they can define what music is is insane Banging two sticks together is music. Get off your high horse.

Applejinx 1y ago
I have claves, which are literally two sticks. I've also got a couple egg shakers, a couple tambourines. Do you have ANY IDEA how hard these things are to play well. I don't care if haphazard bashing of sticks with intent to make noise counts as 'music'. I do care if this whole line of discussion fundamentally equates any such bashing with, say, Jack Ashford. I would be surprised if the name meant anything to you, as he's more obscure than he should be: the percussionist and tambourine player for the great days of Motown. Some of you folks don't know why that is special.
- visarga 1y ago
  Maybe you need to refresh the context - 99.99% of AI generated music, images or text is seen/heard only Once, by the AI user. It's a private affair. The rest of the world are not invited. If I write a song about my kid and cat it's funny for me and my wife. I don't expect anyone else to hear or like it. It has value to me because I set the topic. It doesn't even need to be perfect musically to be fun for a few minutes.
- bobxmax 1y ago
  You seem to be the one who doesn't understand how special it is if you think good music is so simple that AI can zero shot it. People are mixing and matching these songs and layering their own vocals etc to create novel music. This is barely different from sampling or papier mache or making collages. People made the same reductionist arguments you're making about electronic music in the early days. Or digital art.

visarga 1y ago

What button? Again with the vending machine idea. No, it's language prompting, language has unbounded semantic space. It's not one choice out of 20, it's one choice out of countless possibilities. I give my idea to the model, the model gives me new ideas, I iterate. After enough rounds I get some place where I would never have gotten on my own, or the model gotten there without me. I am not the sole creator, neither is the model, credit belongs to the Process.

codedokode 1y ago
> language has unbounded semantic space So if I have a melody in my head, how do I make AI render it using language? Even simpler, if I can beatbox a beat (like "pts-ts-ks-ts"), how do I describe it using language? I don't feel like I can make anything useful by prompting.
- GenerocUsername 1y ago
  You record yourself whistling it and out it in as an input. I've been recording myself on guitar and using suno to turn it into professional quality recordings with full backing band. And I'm not trying to sell it, I just like hearing the ideas in my head turned into fully fleshed music of higher quality than I could produce with 100x more time to invest into it
  - codedokode 1y ago
    This is more closer to actually creating rather than generating music. However this cannot be done with a text prompt, which the comment above claimed, is expressive enough. Actually having an "autotune" AI that turns out-of-key poor singing into a beautiful melody while keeping the voice timbre, would be not bad.
    - GenerocUsername 1y ago
      Well then I have news for you... That's what Suno is. You can generate from simple text prompt, you can describe timings and chord progressions and song structure. You can get very detailed, even providing recordings Yes the barrier for entry is low, but there is a very high ceiling as well

httpsoverdns 1y ago

I just tried it out because of the discussions on this thread, and I got to say I land squarely on the side of this is neat, but it is not artistry. Every little thing I generated sounded like things I've heard before. I was trying hard to get it to create something unique, using obscure language or ideas. It didn't even get close to something interesting in my opinion, every single output was like if you combined every top 40 song ever made and then only distilled out the parts relevant to certain keywords in a prompt. These tools will probably be great for making music for commercials. But if you want to make something interesting, unique, or experimental, I don't think these are quite suited for it. It seems to be a very similar limitation to text-based llms. They are great at synthesizing the most likely response to your input. But never very good at coming up with something unique or unlikely.