10 ms·

I'm a musician, but am also pretty amused by this anti ai wave. There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff

I'm a musician, but am also pretty amused by this anti ai wave. There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own. Even if its just creative prompting, or perhaps custom trained models, someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai. I'd pay for some app which allows be to dump all my ableton files into, train some transformer on it, just to synthesize new stuff out of my unfinished body of work. It will happen and all lines will get blurred again, as usual.

greygoo222 9mo ago
[flagged]
- arjie 9mo ago
  The various lo-fi channels are also likely carrying heavily AI-generated music and it's actually kind of fine. The 'pieces' seem like undifferentiated background music of a certain mood, which is often what I'm looking for while I'm doing something else. Previously, search was such a big problem. For instance, I'm not big on hip-hop and so on but I like songs like Worst Comes To Worst by Dilated Peoples. I've searched in all sorts of ways for other songs like that and come up with a handful of examples. Likewise, I want the vibe of Thick As A Brick by Jethro Tull during various parts. It's hard to find this kind of stuff. But Suno.ai can generate that boom-bap vibe pretty easily and it's not the kind of thing where I'm going to put the same song on all the time like I do with the Dilated Peoples one, but it's good enough to listen to while I'm working.
jplusequalt 9mo ago
>someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai And in the mean time, AI will continue to clutter creative spaces and drown out actual hardworking artists, and people like you will co-opt what it means to be an artist by using tools that were trained on their work without consent.
- anthonypasq 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - roywiggins 9mo ago
    Can artists compete with algorithms that push AI slop because it costs less to license?
    - anthonypasq 9mo ago
      can craft breweries compete with light beer slop because it costs less to produce? if the product is better people will pay more for it. yet lots of people love Bud Light
  - miyoji 9mo ago
    > you sound like someone from the 1800's shouting about how photography should be banned and not allowed to crowd out hard working painters. I'm saying that you shouldn't call photographs paintings because they aren't paintings. I don't particularly care if people make AI "music" or "art" and I don't particularly care if they consume it (people have been consuming awful media for the entire history of humanity, they aren't going to stop because I say so), but if you give me a ham sandwich and call it a hamburger I am going to be annoyed and tell you that it isn't a hamburger and to stop calling it that because you're misleading people who actually appreciate hamburgers. AI "art" isn't art. I don't care whether you like it. It's like fractals or rock formations or birdsong - it may be aesthetically appealing to some people, but that isn't the definition of art.
    - roywiggins 9mo ago
      Similarly, people keep posting articles to HN that get upvoted which are substantially AI edited. They're never labeled as such, and it's unpleasant to find myself reading unlabeled ChatGPTese again. There's a Show HN up now that has an entirely generated readme, which is just... fine, I guess. I just don't want to engage with it. Ed: two Show HNs that are substantially AI generated readmes, now
ToucanLoucan 9mo ago
The main differentiator I've noticed is: how much work is the tool doing, and how much work is the artist doing? And that's not to say that strictly more effort on the part of the artist is a good thing, it just has to be a notable amount to, IMHO, be an interesting thing. This is the primary failure of all of the AI creative tooling, not even necessarily that it does too much, but that the effort of the artist doesn't correlate to good output. Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful. Any other toolset I can become familiar and better equipped to use. AI-based tools are uniquely unpredictable and so I haven't really found any places beyond base concepting work where I'm comfortable making them a permanent component. And more generally, to your nod that some day artists will use AI: I mean, it's not impossible. That being said, as an artist, I'm not comfortable chaining my output to anything as liquid and ever-changing and unreliable as anything currently out there. I don't want to put myself in a situation where my ability to create hinges on paying a digital landlord for access to a product that can change at any time. I got out of Adobe for the same reason: I was sick of having my workflows frustrated by arbitrary changes to the tooling I didn't ask for, while actual issues went unsolved for years. Edit: I would also add the caveat that, the more work the tool does, the less room the artist has to actually be creative. That's my main beef with AI imagery: it literally all looks the same. I can clock AI stuff incredibly well because it has a lot of the same characteristics: things are too shiny is weirdly the biggest giveaway, I'm not sure why AI's think everything is wet at all times, but it's very consistent. It also over-populates scenes; more shit in the frame isn't necessarily a good thing that contributes to a work, and AI has no concept at all of negative space. And if a human artist has no space to be creative in the tool... well they're going to struggle pretty hard to have any kind of recognizable style.
- TheOtherHobbes 9mo ago
  > Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful. That's normal for any kind of creative work. Some days it just happens quickly, other days you keep trying and trying and nothing works. I spent some of the 90s and 00s making digital art. There was a lot of hostility to Photoshop then, and a lot of "That's not really art." But I found that if I allowed myself to experiment, the output still had a unique personality and flavour which wasn't defined by the tool. AI is the same. The requirement for interesting art is producing something that's unique. AI makes that harder, but there's a lot of hand-made art - especially on fan sites like Deviant Art - which has some basic craft skill but scores very low on original imagination, unusual mood, or unique personality. The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique. AI-made art mechanises the mash-up, but it's still up to the creator to steer the process to somewhere interesting. Some people are better at that than others, and more willing to dig deep into the medium and not take it at face value.
criddell 9mo ago
> demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own I'm pretty sure the people at Bandcamp agree with you and that's why they mention future "updates to the policy as the rapidly changing generative AI space develops".
tiborsaas 9mo ago
[flagged]
drittich 9mo ago
Also a musician and I don't think it's that amusing. IMO this isn't an "AI can't be art" discussion. It's about the fact that AI can be used to extract value from other artists' work without consent, and then out-compete them on volume by flooding the marketplace.
- anthonypasq 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - lotsofpulp 9mo ago
    A sufficient proportion of junk can cause a market to fail, taking down "legitimate" or "quality" purveyors.
  - Ritewut 9mo ago
    This is actually the definition of competition. You are just being drowned by AI music so no one can discover your music. Steam had the same issue years ago with asset flips drowning out the discoverability of actual titles and they implemented many curating tools to help resolve the issue. Acting like AI music isn't having a similar effort on genuine musicians is just playing dumb.
    - anthonypasq 9mo ago
      if no one wants the slop, then its not competition. the problem is that people do actually want the slop and artists are mad about it.
      - Ritewut 9mo ago
        That's not how discoverability works. If it becomes too much of a chore to sort through the swamp people will often just opt for whatever is popular.
        nomel 9mo ago
nartho 9mo ago
The issue is not so much an artist that will use it as a tool, even though there is much to say about it, it's the hundred of thousands of people with no interest in music whatsoever, that will flood the platforms in order to make a quick buck.
- pousada 9mo ago
  People who won’t invest anything and just want to make a quick buck won’t be successful with AI generated content/music. You still need to invest significant time and effort to make it work.
  - kazinator 9mo ago
    They will be successful in drowning out the artists. Not individually so, but collectively.
  - Gigachad 9mo ago
    They are though by sheer volume. Finding anything half good will be a needle in a planet sized haystack of slop.
    - pousada 9mo ago
      This has already been the case way before AI was a thing. As a new artist you have to compete against 60+ years of music history - much of it really good music too.
      - Gigachad 9mo ago
        As a listener this is a good thing. Too much good music. Now it’s that the listener has to compete with 60x absolute slop to find something good.
        pousada 9mo ago
        I personally don’t have that problem. I can find new good music easily on soundcloud/bandcamp/youtube - much more than I have time to consume. Maybe this 60x absolute slop thing is a problem if you use services like Spotify - which arguably are a much bigger plight upon artists than AI generated slop
throw_m239339 9mo ago
> its just creative prompting, Sure, you just can't upload the resulting track directly on Bandcamp, but you're free to "creatively prompt" on SUNO all you want, they'll even host your "music". It's also a matter of resources. People uploading gigabites of AI generated slop a day isn't really what Bandcamp is about.
beepbooptheory 9mo ago
Cf. Holly Herndon's album Proto. This is something people spent a lot of time on, is trained lovingly on only their own stuff, and makes for some great music. It's "AI" but in an almost unrecognizable way to us now: its not attached to some product, and its not about doing special prompting. It is definitely pop/electronic music, but it follows from a tradition of experimentation between what we can control and what we can't, which is here their bespoke stochastic program. https://youtu.be/sc9OjL6Mjqo https://youtu.be/sc9OjL6Mjqo It is not about how the computer or the model enables us, which is so silly. (As if art is simply about being able to do something or not!) Its about doing something with the pieces you have that only those pieces can do.
- SideburnsOfDoom 9mo ago
  Holly Herndon's music is original and creative. Unlike most LLM-generated pastiche text, picture or music. And since it's from 2019, it's not quite the same thing. I like it, unlike the current wave of unwanted LLM slop. It's original. Of course if 1000 people were doing the same with minimal creative effort and passing it off as something else, that would ruin it.
  - beepbooptheory 9mo ago
    Gotcha thanks!
    - SideburnsOfDoom 9mo ago
      For instance Frontier (1) or Eternal (2) I get Kate Bush and Dead Can Dance vibes, filtered through a mechanical chorus with a bit of glitched breakbeats. It's empathically not the forgettable, bland averaged pastiches that LLMS emit on lazy command. Even if it's not your favourite, I'm sure that it's something. 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvNqNgHAEys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvNqNgHAEys 2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4sROgbaeOs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4sROgbaeOs
codexon 9mo ago
I find it interesting that there's so much pushback against ai generated art and music while there seems to be very little for ai generated code.
- ffsm8 9mo ago
  What??? Every thread on HN that touches on the topic has countless people talking about how LLM generated code is always bad, buggy and people that utilize them are inexperienced juniors that don't understand anything. And they're not completely wrong. If you don't know what you're doing, you'll absolutely create dumster fires instead of software
  - codexon 9mo ago
    Sure, I am one of the people who will say that. But where are the people calling for it to be banned? Where are the stores and websites that are banning AI generated software?
    - input_sh 9mo ago
      There's one popular platform that requires disclosing whether and how AI was used (Steam), and if you search anything about it, all you can find is like a sea of articles opposing it.
      - codexon 9mo ago
        Yes and it was probably only done because of people complaining about AI art, not AI code.
      - codexon 9mo ago
        Recent update proving my point https://www.notebookcheck.net/Steam-updates-AI-disclosure-form-requiring-developers-to-report-visible-and-in-game-AI-but-not-background-tools.1206103.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Steam-updates-AI-disclosure-fo...
    - jesterswilde 9mo ago
yellowapple 9mo ago
Along the same lines, the anti-AI attitude among musicians today reminds me quite a bit of the anti-synthesizer attitude of the 60's and 70's, down to the same exact talking points: fears of “real” musicians being replaced by nerds pushing buttons on machines that can imitate those musicians. I think the fears were understandable then, and are understandable now. I also think that, just as the fears around synthesizers didn't come to fruition, neither will the fears around AI come to fruition. Synthesizers didn't, and generative AI won't, replace musicians; rather, musicians did and will add these new technologies into their toolsets and use them to push music beyond what was previously understood to be possible. Synthesizers didn't catch on by just imitating other instruments, but by being understood and exploited as instruments in their own right; so will generative AI catch on not by just imitating other instruments, but by being understood and exploited as an instrument in its own right. The core problem right now is that AI (even beyond just music) ain't being marketed as a means of augmenting one's creativity and skills, but as a means of replacing them. That'll always be misguided, both in the practical sense of producing worse outputs and in the philosophical sense of atrophying that same creativity and skills. AI doesn't have to produce slop, but it will inevitably produce slop when it's packaged and sold and marketed in a way that actively encourages slop — much like taking one of those cheap electric keyboards with built-in beats and songs and advertising it as able to replace a whole band. Yeah, it's cool that keyboards can play songs on their own and AI can generate songs on their own, but that output will always be subpar compared to what someone with even the slightest bit of creativity and skill can pull out of those exact same tools.
- rambojohnson 9mo ago
  > generative AI catch on not by just imitating other instruments, but generative AI didn’t catch on by "imitating instruments." It caught on by imitating artists, which streaming platforms and record labels then repackage and outsell you with. false analogy.
  - astrange 9mo ago
    This argument won't get you anywhere because "imitating artists" and "outselling artists" aren't actually the same thing. i.e. complaining about training on copyrighted material and getting it banned is not sufficient to prevent creating a model that can create music that outsells you. Because training isn't about copying the training material, it's just a way to find the Platonic latent space of music, and you can get there other ways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers https://phillipi.github.io/prh/ https://phillipi.github.io/prh/
deng 9mo ago
> I'm a musician, but am also pretty amused by this anti ai wave. Let me guess: you're an amateur musician. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it makes it much easier to be amused about this topic. > There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own. What are you talking about? Which "tech kit" got demonized by whom? Of course, there were always controversies around techniques like sampling or whatever, or conservatives in the UK demonizing rave culture, but otherwise, I have no idea what you're referring to.
- rpdillon 9mo ago
  He's talking about the demonization of synthesizers, sampling, and digital audio workstations when each were respectively released.
  - deng 9mo ago
    There was no "demonization" about these things even remotely comparable to what we are witnessing now w.r.t. AI generated music (and I'm old enough to remember most of these things). Of course there was intense dislike from certain groups representing the "old-school" around new styles of music and new techniques. However, at the same time, you also had the "new-wave" which loved it and made it successful. For instance, a ton of people hated Disco music, at the same time, you had a ton of people who genuinely loved it. Same with practically any kind of electronic music. This simply does not exist with GenAI music. People listen to GenAI music because they either don't care, or don't know, not because they genuinely prefer it. There's absolutely nothing new about GenAI music that would make it exciting.
sapphicsnail 9mo ago
There are plenty of places to publish AI generated music. Why should a platform allow music it's users clearly don't want.
casey2 9mo ago
People don't listen to music because it sounds good, most music sounds downright awful, they listen to it for the human stories and connection. 99% of the music I listen Nobody listens to techno - Eminem AI needs to make music that sells. The same way Scorsese and Brando sell the Godfather. until it can do that literally nobody will care.
rambojohnson 9mo ago
AI takes all of that old school idm and electronic music and repackages it without a human story to tell, ripping off actual musicians in the process. AI didn’t magically ‘make old IDM its own.’ It scraped decades of artists’ work, stripped out the context and intent, and reassembled the surface features. There’s no human arc, no lived constraint, no risk and no culture. What’s being repackaged isn’t a new instrument, it’s other people’s careers. I’m not sure what part of that is supposed to be amusing.
- astrange 9mo ago
  I know a few EDM producers and the culture seems to consist of doing the most drugs of anyone you've ever met. Which is quite risky, true.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - rambojohnson 9mo ago
    [flagged]
- CapsAdmin 9mo ago
  I'm honestly not getting the human story thing when it comes to music and maybe art in general. I mean I get what it means, but I don't think it describes why people enjoy art. To me, it seems more like people place their own meaning in art. A particular song might remind one individual of the good times they had in their teens, while the actual meaning of the song is completely different. Bachs 5th symphony (or whatever) might be extremely annoying to someone because they had to listen to it every day at work. And what exactly is the meaning of jazz fusion? I really like a good solo, but a lot of people hate it, they need to hear a voice. (though I don't particularly like the signature Suno or Udio solo..) I found this ai track on Spotify that I unironically enjoyed. I listened to it every day while working on reviving an old passion project, which became its meaning to me. The tune, a long with its album with random disparate suno generations was taken down. I'm not sure if I have a point here, but something is off with the story thing in art to me from a consumers point of view. Maybe from other artists as consumers point of view?
gnramires 9mo ago
This is not a super well thought out position, but I've been leaning towards really disliking AI art in general (without having an opinion on any strong policy action yet). First, art is, I think, one of the most enjoyable activities we have. One evidence is a lot of people forego higher salaries to choose an art job (although being a job carries additional responsibilities and some inconveniences compared to doing it as a hobby). It's a shame to see it diminished, when I believe we should be diverting efforts to automate other stuff. Second, most AI art I've seen has been quite substandard compared to human art. We still don't know very well what human emotions are, the origin of sentience and qualia, etc.. But I think humans still lead here in having and probably understanding emotions. While for other tasks most implementation detail is irrelevant (e.g. in code, that it works tends to be most important, vs. minute choices in style), in art every detail is particularly relevant. Knowing this, it bothers me usually when I see this art that it doesn't carry the same knowledge of context and nuance a human would have. Third, There's also the effect of making me question whether each piece of artwork was made by a human or AI, that didn't exist before. It does carry a bit of a magical feeling I think knowing a real person made every piece of artwork prior to 2018 or so (I think algorithmic art[1] is fine in this regard, because it tends to be more clearly algorithmic, and the involvement of the artist in coding is significant), that is now gone or at risk. Even the thought of imagining say their work day or what they had for lunch or talked to coworkers or friends is pleasant to me (at the risk of romanticizing it too much). I suppose if AI art actually understood human nature, and specially the specific context of each art piece, better than us some of my arguments might be diminished. But the negatives so far seem to outweigh the positives, and I would like to e.g. give preference to content that doesn't use AI art. (It is, admittedly, also the case that we lost a similar amount of craftsmanship when the industrial revolution happened, and in return we were able to support a larger population, and greater material conditions for most people. Every object now isn't carefully handcrafted. I think it's different because well, now material conditions are relatively abundant, and second there's no such insatiable, significant and irreplaceable demand for art as there were to common industrialized objects (take shoes for example), at least not to the same extent or vital significance. That is, the ability to have a shoe at all far outweighs it being carefully handcrafted, I believe; while experiencing a poorly made AI movie or artwork might be actually worse than none at all (or simply an older human made movie), and it also gets more cumbersome to evaluate for ourselves whether AI was employed or not. Also, while say shoes only last a limited time and need to be constantly produced, good artwork can last indefinitely (using digital storage), and even if you account for cultural change and relevance, can still last a really long time, motivating investing more into it.) I'm quite sure that if we're still around in 500 or so years, we'll still be enjoying say Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh (probably as a digital reproduction). Current AI art will probably be largely discarded, so seems largely an unwise investment. Actually this kind of applies to code as well. It seems plausible Linux could still be used in 500 years from now (see how we still value finding Unix v4 50 years after), or at least of some interest. Those durable intellectual goods don't seem like wise places to invest anything but the best of us :) (at least in the cases it's not disposable) The arguments above also don't seem to apply say in concept stages, or say for bland corporate diagrams that will be disposed of in 1 day, and which a huge quantity is needed. I think the main criteria I would evaluate is (1) Was it enjoyable to produce (for the artist(s))?; (2) Will it have a significant (artistic) impact on who is experiencing it?; (3) Will it last a long time? [1] W.r.t. algorithmic art (and digital in general) (take bytebeat[2] for example), which is a field I really love, I am not any kind of absolutist about it. I know there tends to be extremely more degrees of freedom for human expression in a manual piece than in an algorithmic piece, so I see it more as a complement and not a substitute for more conventional art. I'd never give up ever hearing human musician player music for bytebeat, just bytebeat is a lovely experimental other dimension of expression. Writing a prompt seems a too few degrees of freedom and context, and too much of an uniform context that is less rich than humans can provide. [2] https://dollchan.net/bytebeat/ https://dollchan.net/bytebeat/
modzu 9mo ago
nobody demonized afx or idm bro. autotune, yes. but that's different. damn autotune to hell
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
andai 9mo ago
>someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai Always has been :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpUj9zpOiP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpUj9zpOiP0 (And honorary mention) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYKAOPj_uts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYKAOPj_uts
- oscaracso 9mo ago
  Lobotomywave
qmmmur 9mo ago
You can already do this, but the platformised generative AI is sloppy by comparison and not that interesting. https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE
nonethewiser 9mo ago
It's like the reverse of the product that advertises itself as "AI driven." As if that's supposed to be a selling point. OK, it's AI driven, but is it good? There may be short term emotional strings to pull. "AI driven!" or "AI free!" But ultimately, no one will care if it's AI or not if it's good.
camillomiller 9mo ago
So you just want to be lazy and subsidize to the parrot machine the very essence of what it means to be creative. I am utterly baffled by this recurring comparison between past electronic tools, which actually have a pretty harsh learning curve to be mastered, and a software contraption that overtakes your creative agency. I see it everywhere, like comparing Midjourney to the shift to digital photography. What are y’all blokes on? How is it possible that even fine minds just lazily accept such a flawed parallel between two completely different technological paradigms?
GenericDev 9mo ago
[dead]
NoteyComplexity 9mo ago
I don’t think this is an AI issue, but the amount of effort, the thought process and the story telling about the track they made. Before generative AI, there were already a swarm of people who aimed at maximising the number of track they made within a short time, with abusing marketing. It is not wrong that they can pump up 100 tracks in a year, with a template and a specialised workflow and correct marketing techniques but… what is the story to these music? For many tracks, I only heard the story of: > I am the most productive person and I can make most of the money because of that. Quantity wise, for sure, they wins, but quality wise, I failed to imagine a more complex story than things above although they are good to hype the dance floor or a concert. These days, I mostly listen to music I have bought, or made by specific music communities because of their story behind their track despite not as perfect. Same reasons why don’t I watch many movies since Ironman 3, most of the blockbusters follow the same winning formula rather than trying something new and in depth or unexpected, CGI and product placements all over the place instead of a good story. AI just emphasised this problem even more since commercial “art” has been testing majorities’ newest lows. There are differences between using a tool to create art or use it to spam.
deng 9mo ago
> Even if its just creative prompting, or perhaps custom trained models, someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai. We've now had this technology for 2 years. Show me one, just ONE track that is purely(!) made by AI you find honestly exciting. Not "commercially successful", mind you, something you, a musician, personally think is actually great. You are referencing Aphex Twin there, and I'm old enough to remember when I first heard "Digeridoo", so, you know, something where you just go "Wow, that's a banger". If you're DJing: something you would actually put on in a club and the crowd would go wild. Let's cut the crap: there is none. All GenAI is good for is generating stupid memes, shitposting, ads, and generic background music. There is ZERO creative value in purely generative AI. Yes, there are tools leveraging AI models which can help musicians create tracks - entirely different thing. This is also not what Bandcamp is banning here. Most people will freely admit that AI tooling can be used creatively, like what De Staat did with the "Running backwards into the future" music video - that's all fine, really nobody is disputing that fact, although that "look" is now well established and people are mostly bored and annoyed by it, but that's just how it goes.
prmoustache 9mo ago
AI as tool is included inside almost every daw (or can be through VST) and there is no way bandcamp could enforce a strict "non AI has been used in the process" policy. I think it is sane to separate cases where a record is entirely generated by a single prompt vs AI used as instruments/tools.
- larodi 9mo ago
  Precisely - every reverb is impulse response, lots of other effects are effectively some sort of convolution with neural networks that we otherwise call AI. Arpegiattors are AI and the random jumps between patterns in Ableton are a Markov Chain. What does Bandcamp really mean? Perhaps sampling others voices and music is barred, not these mini-AIs that are everywhere ?
  - huimang 9mo ago
    Please stop being intentionally obtuse. Convolution, arpeggiators, impulse responses are not at all comparable to output from generative AI / LLMs.
    - larodi 9mo ago
      Yeah, and oscillators ringing together in an FFT choir based on notes from a diffused image is absolutely, totally not an AI, just algorithms. Really, why be so rude, given you understand the math behind it? Obtuse is not a nice word, not something I would say to people at random. Because, you see, back in the day generative grammars were called AI, so were so many other discreet structures which are employed in music generation, sorry production, on an everyday basis. Algorithmic progression generation IS IN USE for years, sorry you didn't mention, or perhaps you don't listen that much to everyday radio. Markov chains, constraint solvers, and rule-based harmony live in many VSTs... the fact there are so many "experimentors" out dare winding knobs to match a pleasurable pattern, does not change the fact they be 100% ignorant about the 'deux ex machina'. I'm surrounded by producers having absolutely no clue about the vast amount of actual AI and actual probabilistic algorithms that make their "unique" sounds possible. And all of them are 100% ignorant of what AI means when they say it, because they don't mean a specific thing. How is this not AI? Or one needs an transformer-based model to call it AI? This whole story did not start an year or two ago, you may be late for history class though. The fact there's been this moving marketing concept of what "AI" actually is, does not change the reality of most modern music (including acoustic) at some point of the production process getting artificially enhanced by honestly super-complex systems that are intelligent enough to do what otherwise would take 20x more effort to get right.
dev_hugepages 9mo ago
I’m more hopeful that MIDI completion/in-filling models will be easier for musicians to control and use. But right now, the most popular tools are things like Suno, where you barely have any control and it spits out an entire, possibly mediocre song. It’s the same vein as ChatGPT image generation vs. Stable Diffusion, where you can do much more controllable inpaints with the latter.
davidgerard 9mo ago
"greetings, fellow musicians" - genAI and quant guy
interludead 9mo ago
Electronic music history is basically a graveyard of "this isn't real music" takes that aged badly
sph 9mo ago
There is a difference between Richard D. James hand-training an LLM on foley sounds he recorded himself to put in his latest IDM track, and the script kiddie spamming out 50 AI-generated mixes per day to get that sweet ad revenue on Youtube. No one is complaining about the first case, because they are outnumbered by the second 100,000 to 1. RDJ isn't gonna use suno.ai no matter how pro-LLM he is. Note: this is for sake of argument, I am not aware of RDJ using LLMs in any shape or form.
johnnyanmac 9mo ago
Well that's the issue. We're not seeing "artists" coming along and applying it to their years/decades of creative knowledge. We're seeing the equivalent of some cushy heir to a fortune come in with a drill and say "I can outdo these teams of diggers! We don't need diggers anymore!" And on the surface the drill is better. But this heir is assuming that all diggers do is diplace dirt. Not thinking about where to dig, how to dig safely,, what to dig for, and where brute force is needed vs a subtle touch (because even in 2025, miners keep shovels with them). That's all going out the window for "hey I made a hole, mission accomplished!". Instead of working with diggers to enhace their mining, they want to pretend they can dig themselves. That's why no one in the creative space is confident in this.

greygoo222 9mo ago

[flagged]

arjie 9mo ago
The various lo-fi channels are also likely carrying heavily AI-generated music and it's actually kind of fine. The 'pieces' seem like undifferentiated background music of a certain mood, which is often what I'm looking for while I'm doing something else. Previously, search was such a big problem. For instance, I'm not big on hip-hop and so on but I like songs like Worst Comes To Worst by Dilated Peoples. I've searched in all sorts of ways for other songs like that and come up with a handful of examples. Likewise, I want the vibe of Thick As A Brick by Jethro Tull during various parts. It's hard to find this kind of stuff. But Suno.ai can generate that boom-bap vibe pretty easily and it's not the kind of thing where I'm going to put the same song on all the time like I do with the Dilated Peoples one, but it's good enough to listen to while I'm working.

jplusequalt 9mo ago

>someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai And in the mean time, AI will continue to clutter creative spaces and drown out actual hardworking artists, and people like you will co-opt what it means to be an artist by using tools that were trained on their work without consent.

anthonypasq 9mo ago
[flagged]
- roywiggins 9mo ago
  Can artists compete with algorithms that push AI slop because it costs less to license?
  - anthonypasq 9mo ago
    can craft breweries compete with light beer slop because it costs less to produce? if the product is better people will pay more for it. yet lots of people love Bud Light
- miyoji 9mo ago
  > you sound like someone from the 1800's shouting about how photography should be banned and not allowed to crowd out hard working painters. I'm saying that you shouldn't call photographs paintings because they aren't paintings. I don't particularly care if people make AI "music" or "art" and I don't particularly care if they consume it (people have been consuming awful media for the entire history of humanity, they aren't going to stop because I say so), but if you give me a ham sandwich and call it a hamburger I am going to be annoyed and tell you that it isn't a hamburger and to stop calling it that because you're misleading people who actually appreciate hamburgers. AI "art" isn't art. I don't care whether you like it. It's like fractals or rock formations or birdsong - it may be aesthetically appealing to some people, but that isn't the definition of art.
  - roywiggins 9mo ago
    Similarly, people keep posting articles to HN that get upvoted which are substantially AI edited. They're never labeled as such, and it's unpleasant to find myself reading unlabeled ChatGPTese again. There's a Show HN up now that has an entirely generated readme, which is just... fine, I guess. I just don't want to engage with it. Ed: two Show HNs that are substantially AI generated readmes, now

ToucanLoucan 9mo ago

The main differentiator I've noticed is: how much work is the tool doing, and how much work is the artist doing? And that's not to say that strictly more effort on the part of the artist is a good thing, it just has to be a notable amount to, IMHO, be an interesting thing. This is the primary failure of all of the AI creative tooling, not even necessarily that it does too much, but that the effort of the artist doesn't correlate to good output. Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful. Any other toolset I can become familiar and better equipped to use. AI-based tools are uniquely unpredictable and so I haven't really found any places beyond base concepting work where I'm comfortable making them a permanent component. And more generally, to your nod that some day artists will use AI: I mean, it's not impossible. That being said, as an artist, I'm not comfortable chaining my output to anything as liquid and ever-changing and unreliable as anything currently out there. I don't want to put myself in a situation where my ability to create hinges on paying a digital landlord for access to a product that can change at any time. I got out of Adobe for the same reason: I was sick of having my workflows frustrated by arbitrary changes to the tooling I didn't ask for, while actual issues went unsolved for years. Edit: I would also add the caveat that, the more work the tool does, the less room the artist has to actually be creative. That's my main beef with AI imagery: it literally all looks the same. I can clock AI stuff incredibly well because it has a lot of the same characteristics: things are too shiny is weirdly the biggest giveaway, I'm not sure why AI's think everything is wet at all times, but it's very consistent. It also over-populates scenes; more shit in the frame isn't necessarily a good thing that contributes to a work, and AI has no concept at all of negative space. And if a human artist has no space to be creative in the tool... well they're going to struggle pretty hard to have any kind of recognizable style.

TheOtherHobbes 9mo ago
> Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful. That's normal for any kind of creative work. Some days it just happens quickly, other days you keep trying and trying and nothing works. I spent some of the 90s and 00s making digital art. There was a lot of hostility to Photoshop then, and a lot of "That's not really art." But I found that if I allowed myself to experiment, the output still had a unique personality and flavour which wasn't defined by the tool. AI is the same. The requirement for interesting art is producing something that's unique. AI makes that harder, but there's a lot of hand-made art - especially on fan sites like Deviant Art - which has some basic craft skill but scores very low on original imagination, unusual mood, or unique personality. The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique. AI-made art mechanises the mash-up, but it's still up to the creator to steer the process to somewhere interesting. Some people are better at that than others, and more willing to dig deep into the medium and not take it at face value.

criddell 9mo ago

> demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own I'm pretty sure the people at Bandcamp agree with you and that's why they mention future "updates to the policy as the rapidly changing generative AI space develops".

tiborsaas 9mo ago

[flagged]

drittich 9mo ago

Also a musician and I don't think it's that amusing. IMO this isn't an "AI can't be art" discussion. It's about the fact that AI can be used to extract value from other artists' work without consent, and then out-compete them on volume by flooding the marketplace.

anthonypasq 9mo ago
[flagged]
- lotsofpulp 9mo ago
  A sufficient proportion of junk can cause a market to fail, taking down "legitimate" or "quality" purveyors.
- Ritewut 9mo ago
  This is actually the definition of competition. You are just being drowned by AI music so no one can discover your music. Steam had the same issue years ago with asset flips drowning out the discoverability of actual titles and they implemented many curating tools to help resolve the issue. Acting like AI music isn't having a similar effort on genuine musicians is just playing dumb.
  - anthonypasq 9mo ago
    if no one wants the slop, then its not competition. the problem is that people do actually want the slop and artists are mad about it.
    - Ritewut 9mo ago
      That's not how discoverability works. If it becomes too much of a chore to sort through the swamp people will often just opt for whatever is popular.
      - nomel 9mo ago

nartho 9mo ago

The issue is not so much an artist that will use it as a tool, even though there is much to say about it, it's the hundred of thousands of people with no interest in music whatsoever, that will flood the platforms in order to make a quick buck.

pousada 9mo ago
People who won’t invest anything and just want to make a quick buck won’t be successful with AI generated content/music. You still need to invest significant time and effort to make it work.
- kazinator 9mo ago
  They will be successful in drowning out the artists. Not individually so, but collectively.
- Gigachad 9mo ago
  They are though by sheer volume. Finding anything half good will be a needle in a planet sized haystack of slop.
  - pousada 9mo ago
    This has already been the case way before AI was a thing. As a new artist you have to compete against 60+ years of music history - much of it really good music too.
    - Gigachad 9mo ago
      As a listener this is a good thing. Too much good music. Now it’s that the listener has to compete with 60x absolute slop to find something good.
      - pousada 9mo ago
        I personally don’t have that problem. I can find new good music easily on soundcloud/bandcamp/youtube - much more than I have time to consume. Maybe this 60x absolute slop thing is a problem if you use services like Spotify - which arguably are a much bigger plight upon artists than AI generated slop

throw_m239339 9mo ago

> its just creative prompting, Sure, you just can't upload the resulting track directly on Bandcamp, but you're free to "creatively prompt" on SUNO all you want, they'll even host your "music". It's also a matter of resources. People uploading gigabites of AI generated slop a day isn't really what Bandcamp is about.

beepbooptheory 9mo ago

Cf. Holly Herndon's album Proto. This is something people spent a lot of time on, is trained lovingly on only their own stuff, and makes for some great music. It's "AI" but in an almost unrecognizable way to us now: its not attached to some product, and its not about doing special prompting. It is definitely pop/electronic music, but it follows from a tradition of experimentation between what we can control and what we can't, which is here their bespoke stochastic program. https://youtu.be/sc9OjL6Mjqo https://youtu.be/sc9OjL6Mjqo It is not about how the computer or the model enables us, which is so silly. (As if art is simply about being able to do something or not!) Its about doing something with the pieces you have that only those pieces can do.

SideburnsOfDoom 9mo ago
Holly Herndon's music is original and creative. Unlike most LLM-generated pastiche text, picture or music. And since it's from 2019, it's not quite the same thing. I like it, unlike the current wave of unwanted LLM slop. It's original. Of course if 1000 people were doing the same with minimal creative effort and passing it off as something else, that would ruin it.
- beepbooptheory 9mo ago
  Gotcha thanks!
  - SideburnsOfDoom 9mo ago
    For instance Frontier (1) or Eternal (2) I get Kate Bush and Dead Can Dance vibes, filtered through a mechanical chorus with a bit of glitched breakbeats. It's empathically not the forgettable, bland averaged pastiches that LLMS emit on lazy command. Even if it's not your favourite, I'm sure that it's something. 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvNqNgHAEys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvNqNgHAEys 2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4sROgbaeOs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4sROgbaeOs

codexon 9mo ago

I find it interesting that there's so much pushback against ai generated art and music while there seems to be very little for ai generated code.

ffsm8 9mo ago
What??? Every thread on HN that touches on the topic has countless people talking about how LLM generated code is always bad, buggy and people that utilize them are inexperienced juniors that don't understand anything. And they're not completely wrong. If you don't know what you're doing, you'll absolutely create dumster fires instead of software
- codexon 9mo ago
  Sure, I am one of the people who will say that. But where are the people calling for it to be banned? Where are the stores and websites that are banning AI generated software?
  - input_sh 9mo ago
    There's one popular platform that requires disclosing whether and how AI was used (Steam), and if you search anything about it, all you can find is like a sea of articles opposing it.
    - codexon 9mo ago
      Yes and it was probably only done because of people complaining about AI art, not AI code.
    - codexon 9mo ago
      Recent update proving my point https://www.notebookcheck.net/Steam-updates-AI-disclosure-form-requiring-developers-to-report-visible-and-in-game-AI-but-not-background-tools.1206103.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Steam-updates-AI-disclosure-fo...
  - jesterswilde 9mo ago

yellowapple 9mo ago

Along the same lines, the anti-AI attitude among musicians today reminds me quite a bit of the anti-synthesizer attitude of the 60's and 70's, down to the same exact talking points: fears of “real” musicians being replaced by nerds pushing buttons on machines that can imitate those musicians. I think the fears were understandable then, and are understandable now. I also think that, just as the fears around synthesizers didn't come to fruition, neither will the fears around AI come to fruition. Synthesizers didn't, and generative AI won't, replace musicians; rather, musicians did and will add these new technologies into their toolsets and use them to push music beyond what was previously understood to be possible. Synthesizers didn't catch on by just imitating other instruments, but by being understood and exploited as instruments in their own right; so will generative AI catch on not by just imitating other instruments, but by being understood and exploited as an instrument in its own right. The core problem right now is that AI (even beyond just music) ain't being marketed as a means of augmenting one's creativity and skills, but as a means of replacing them. That'll always be misguided, both in the practical sense of producing worse outputs and in the philosophical sense of atrophying that same creativity and skills. AI doesn't have to produce slop, but it will inevitably produce slop when it's packaged and sold and marketed in a way that actively encourages slop — much like taking one of those cheap electric keyboards with built-in beats and songs and advertising it as able to replace a whole band. Yeah, it's cool that keyboards can play songs on their own and AI can generate songs on their own, but that output will always be subpar compared to what someone with even the slightest bit of creativity and skill can pull out of those exact same tools.

rambojohnson 9mo ago
> generative AI catch on not by just imitating other instruments, but generative AI didn’t catch on by "imitating instruments." It caught on by imitating artists, which streaming platforms and record labels then repackage and outsell you with. false analogy.
- astrange 9mo ago
  This argument won't get you anywhere because "imitating artists" and "outselling artists" aren't actually the same thing. i.e. complaining about training on copyrighted material and getting it banned is not sufficient to prevent creating a model that can create music that outsells you. Because training isn't about copying the training material, it's just a way to find the Platonic latent space of music, and you can get there other ways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers https://phillipi.github.io/prh/ https://phillipi.github.io/prh/

deng 9mo ago

> I'm a musician, but am also pretty amused by this anti ai wave. Let me guess: you're an amateur musician. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it makes it much easier to be amused about this topic. > There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own. What are you talking about? Which "tech kit" got demonized by whom? Of course, there were always controversies around techniques like sampling or whatever, or conservatives in the UK demonizing rave culture, but otherwise, I have no idea what you're referring to.

rpdillon 9mo ago
He's talking about the demonization of synthesizers, sampling, and digital audio workstations when each were respectively released.
- deng 9mo ago
  There was no "demonization" about these things even remotely comparable to what we are witnessing now w.r.t. AI generated music (and I'm old enough to remember most of these things). Of course there was intense dislike from certain groups representing the "old-school" around new styles of music and new techniques. However, at the same time, you also had the "new-wave" which loved it and made it successful. For instance, a ton of people hated Disco music, at the same time, you had a ton of people who genuinely loved it. Same with practically any kind of electronic music. This simply does not exist with GenAI music. People listen to GenAI music because they either don't care, or don't know, not because they genuinely prefer it. There's absolutely nothing new about GenAI music that would make it exciting.

sapphicsnail 9mo ago

There are plenty of places to publish AI generated music. Why should a platform allow music it's users clearly don't want.

casey2 9mo ago

People don't listen to music because it sounds good, most music sounds downright awful, they listen to it for the human stories and connection. 99% of the music I listen Nobody listens to techno - Eminem AI needs to make music that sells. The same way Scorsese and Brando sell the Godfather. until it can do that literally nobody will care.

rambojohnson 9mo ago

AI takes all of that old school idm and electronic music and repackages it without a human story to tell, ripping off actual musicians in the process. AI didn’t magically ‘make old IDM its own.’ It scraped decades of artists’ work, stripped out the context and intent, and reassembled the surface features. There’s no human arc, no lived constraint, no risk and no culture. What’s being repackaged isn’t a new instrument, it’s other people’s careers. I’m not sure what part of that is supposed to be amusing.

astrange 9mo ago
I know a few EDM producers and the culture seems to consist of doing the most drugs of anyone you've ever met. Which is quite risky, true.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- rambojohnson 9mo ago
  [flagged]
CapsAdmin 9mo ago
I'm honestly not getting the human story thing when it comes to music and maybe art in general. I mean I get what it means, but I don't think it describes why people enjoy art. To me, it seems more like people place their own meaning in art. A particular song might remind one individual of the good times they had in their teens, while the actual meaning of the song is completely different. Bachs 5th symphony (or whatever) might be extremely annoying to someone because they had to listen to it every day at work. And what exactly is the meaning of jazz fusion? I really like a good solo, but a lot of people hate it, they need to hear a voice. (though I don't particularly like the signature Suno or Udio solo..) I found this ai track on Spotify that I unironically enjoyed. I listened to it every day while working on reviving an old passion project, which became its meaning to me. The tune, a long with its album with random disparate suno generations was taken down. I'm not sure if I have a point here, but something is off with the story thing in art to me from a consumers point of view. Maybe from other artists as consumers point of view?

gnramires 9mo ago

This is not a super well thought out position, but I've been leaning towards really disliking AI art in general (without having an opinion on any strong policy action yet). First, art is, I think, one of the most enjoyable activities we have. One evidence is a lot of people forego higher salaries to choose an art job (although being a job carries additional responsibilities and some inconveniences compared to doing it as a hobby). It's a shame to see it diminished, when I believe we should be diverting efforts to automate other stuff. Second, most AI art I've seen has been quite substandard compared to human art. We still don't know very well what human emotions are, the origin of sentience and qualia, etc.. But I think humans still lead here in having and probably understanding emotions. While for other tasks most implementation detail is irrelevant (e.g. in code, that it works tends to be most important, vs. minute choices in style), in art every detail is particularly relevant. Knowing this, it bothers me usually when I see this art that it doesn't carry the same knowledge of context and nuance a human would have. Third, There's also the effect of making me question whether each piece of artwork was made by a human or AI, that didn't exist before. It does carry a bit of a magical feeling I think knowing a real person made every piece of artwork prior to 2018 or so (I think algorithmic art[1] is fine in this regard, because it tends to be more clearly algorithmic, and the involvement of the artist in coding is significant), that is now gone or at risk. Even the thought of imagining say their work day or what they had for lunch or talked to coworkers or friends is pleasant to me (at the risk of romanticizing it too much). I suppose if AI art actually understood human nature, and specially the specific context of each art piece, better than us some of my arguments might be diminished. But the negatives so far seem to outweigh the positives, and I would like to e.g. give preference to content that doesn't use AI art. (It is, admittedly, also the case that we lost a similar amount of craftsmanship when the industrial revolution happened, and in return we were able to support a larger population, and greater material conditions for most people. Every object now isn't carefully handcrafted. I think it's different because well, now material conditions are relatively abundant, and second there's no such insatiable, significant and irreplaceable demand for art as there were to common industrialized objects (take shoes for example), at least not to the same extent or vital significance. That is, the ability to have a shoe at all far outweighs it being carefully handcrafted, I believe; while experiencing a poorly made AI movie or artwork might be actually worse than none at all (or simply an older human made movie), and it also gets more cumbersome to evaluate for ourselves whether AI was employed or not. Also, while say shoes only last a limited time and need to be constantly produced, good artwork can last indefinitely (using digital storage), and even if you account for cultural change and relevance, can still last a really long time, motivating investing more into it.) I'm quite sure that if we're still around in 500 or so years, we'll still be enjoying say Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh (probably as a digital reproduction). Current AI art will probably be largely discarded, so seems largely an unwise investment. Actually this kind of applies to code as well. It seems plausible Linux could still be used in 500 years from now (see how we still value finding Unix v4 50 years after), or at least of some interest. Those durable intellectual goods don't seem like wise places to invest anything but the best of us :) (at least in the cases it's not disposable) The arguments above also don't seem to apply say in concept stages, or say for bland corporate diagrams that will be disposed of in 1 day, and which a huge quantity is needed. I think the main criteria I would evaluate is (1) Was it enjoyable to produce (for the artist(s))?; (2) Will it have a significant (artistic) impact on who is experiencing it?; (3) Will it last a long time? [1] W.r.t. algorithmic art (and digital in general) (take bytebeat[2] for example), which is a field I really love, I am not any kind of absolutist about it. I know there tends to be extremely more degrees of freedom for human expression in a manual piece than in an algorithmic piece, so I see it more as a complement and not a substitute for more conventional art. I'd never give up ever hearing human musician player music for bytebeat, just bytebeat is a lovely experimental other dimension of expression. Writing a prompt seems a too few degrees of freedom and context, and too much of an uniform context that is less rich than humans can provide. [2] https://dollchan.net/bytebeat/ https://dollchan.net/bytebeat/

modzu 9mo ago

nobody demonized afx or idm bro. autotune, yes. but that's different. damn autotune to hell

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

andai 9mo ago

>someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai Always has been :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpUj9zpOiP0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpUj9zpOiP0 (And honorary mention) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYKAOPj_uts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYKAOPj_uts

oscaracso 9mo ago
Lobotomywave

qmmmur 9mo ago

You can already do this, but the platformised generative AI is sloppy by comparison and not that interesting. https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE

nonethewiser 9mo ago

It's like the reverse of the product that advertises itself as "AI driven." As if that's supposed to be a selling point. OK, it's AI driven, but is it good? There may be short term emotional strings to pull. "AI driven!" or "AI free!" But ultimately, no one will care if it's AI or not if it's good.

camillomiller 9mo ago

So you just want to be lazy and subsidize to the parrot machine the very essence of what it means to be creative. I am utterly baffled by this recurring comparison between past electronic tools, which actually have a pretty harsh learning curve to be mastered, and a software contraption that overtakes your creative agency. I see it everywhere, like comparing Midjourney to the shift to digital photography. What are y’all blokes on? How is it possible that even fine minds just lazily accept such a flawed parallel between two completely different technological paradigms?

GenericDev 9mo ago

[dead]

NoteyComplexity 9mo ago

I don’t think this is an AI issue, but the amount of effort, the thought process and the story telling about the track they made. Before generative AI, there were already a swarm of people who aimed at maximising the number of track they made within a short time, with abusing marketing. It is not wrong that they can pump up 100 tracks in a year, with a template and a specialised workflow and correct marketing techniques but… what is the story to these music? For many tracks, I only heard the story of: > I am the most productive person and I can make most of the money because of that. Quantity wise, for sure, they wins, but quality wise, I failed to imagine a more complex story than things above although they are good to hype the dance floor or a concert. These days, I mostly listen to music I have bought, or made by specific music communities because of their story behind their track despite not as perfect. Same reasons why don’t I watch many movies since Ironman 3, most of the blockbusters follow the same winning formula rather than trying something new and in depth or unexpected, CGI and product placements all over the place instead of a good story. AI just emphasised this problem even more since commercial “art” has been testing majorities’ newest lows. There are differences between using a tool to create art or use it to spam.

deng 9mo ago

> Even if its just creative prompting, or perhaps custom trained models, someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai. We've now had this technology for 2 years. Show me one, just ONE track that is purely(!) made by AI you find honestly exciting. Not "commercially successful", mind you, something you, a musician, personally think is actually great. You are referencing Aphex Twin there, and I'm old enough to remember when I first heard "Digeridoo", so, you know, something where you just go "Wow, that's a banger". If you're DJing: something you would actually put on in a club and the crowd would go wild. Let's cut the crap: there is none. All GenAI is good for is generating stupid memes, shitposting, ads, and generic background music. There is ZERO creative value in purely generative AI. Yes, there are tools leveraging AI models which can help musicians create tracks - entirely different thing. This is also not what Bandcamp is banning here. Most people will freely admit that AI tooling can be used creatively, like what De Staat did with the "Running backwards into the future" music video - that's all fine, really nobody is disputing that fact, although that "look" is now well established and people are mostly bored and annoyed by it, but that's just how it goes.

prmoustache 9mo ago

AI as tool is included inside almost every daw (or can be through VST) and there is no way bandcamp could enforce a strict "non AI has been used in the process" policy. I think it is sane to separate cases where a record is entirely generated by a single prompt vs AI used as instruments/tools.

larodi 9mo ago
Precisely - every reverb is impulse response, lots of other effects are effectively some sort of convolution with neural networks that we otherwise call AI. Arpegiattors are AI and the random jumps between patterns in Ableton are a Markov Chain. What does Bandcamp really mean? Perhaps sampling others voices and music is barred, not these mini-AIs that are everywhere ?
- huimang 9mo ago
  Please stop being intentionally obtuse. Convolution, arpeggiators, impulse responses are not at all comparable to output from generative AI / LLMs.
  - larodi 9mo ago
    Yeah, and oscillators ringing together in an FFT choir based on notes from a diffused image is absolutely, totally not an AI, just algorithms. Really, why be so rude, given you understand the math behind it? Obtuse is not a nice word, not something I would say to people at random. Because, you see, back in the day generative grammars were called AI, so were so many other discreet structures which are employed in music generation, sorry production, on an everyday basis. Algorithmic progression generation IS IN USE for years, sorry you didn't mention, or perhaps you don't listen that much to everyday radio. Markov chains, constraint solvers, and rule-based harmony live in many VSTs... the fact there are so many "experimentors" out dare winding knobs to match a pleasurable pattern, does not change the fact they be 100% ignorant about the 'deux ex machina'. I'm surrounded by producers having absolutely no clue about the vast amount of actual AI and actual probabilistic algorithms that make their "unique" sounds possible. And all of them are 100% ignorant of what AI means when they say it, because they don't mean a specific thing. How is this not AI? Or one needs an transformer-based model to call it AI? This whole story did not start an year or two ago, you may be late for history class though. The fact there's been this moving marketing concept of what "AI" actually is, does not change the reality of most modern music (including acoustic) at some point of the production process getting artificially enhanced by honestly super-complex systems that are intelligent enough to do what otherwise would take 20x more effort to get right.

dev_hugepages 9mo ago

I’m more hopeful that MIDI completion/in-filling models will be easier for musicians to control and use. But right now, the most popular tools are things like Suno, where you barely have any control and it spits out an entire, possibly mediocre song. It’s the same vein as ChatGPT image generation vs. Stable Diffusion, where you can do much more controllable inpaints with the latter.

davidgerard 9mo ago

"greetings, fellow musicians" - genAI and quant guy

interludead 9mo ago

Electronic music history is basically a graveyard of "this isn't real music" takes that aged badly

sph 9mo ago

There is a difference between Richard D. James hand-training an LLM on foley sounds he recorded himself to put in his latest IDM track, and the script kiddie spamming out 50 AI-generated mixes per day to get that sweet ad revenue on Youtube. No one is complaining about the first case, because they are outnumbered by the second 100,000 to 1. RDJ isn't gonna use suno.ai no matter how pro-LLM he is. Note: this is for sake of argument, I am not aware of RDJ using LLMs in any shape or form.

johnnyanmac 9mo ago

Well that's the issue. We're not seeing "artists" coming along and applying it to their years/decades of creative knowledge. We're seeing the equivalent of some cushy heir to a fortune come in with a drill and say "I can outdo these teams of diggers! We don't need diggers anymore!" And on the surface the drill is better. But this heir is assuming that all diggers do is diplace dirt. Not thinking about where to dig, how to dig safely,, what to dig for, and where brute force is needed vs a subtle touch (because even in 2025, miners keep shovels with them). That's all going out the window for "hey I made a hole, mission accomplished!". Instead of working with diggers to enhace their mining, they want to pretend they can dig themselves. That's why no one in the creative space is confident in this.