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I find the production and consumption of AI music to be uniquely... anti-human. You can make utilitarian arguments for most other uses of AI. For example, the c
by chromacity 6mo ago
I find the production and consumption of AI music to be uniquely... anti-human. You can make utilitarian arguments for most other uses of AI. For example, the code you're generating didn't exist before, and it would take serious time or money to write it. So, I get it, the economic argument is compelling enough.
But music? There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing. Millions upon millions of them, in every conceivable style, for every conceivable mood. There's nothing you gain by listening to AI music day-to-day, so what's the argument for it - other than utmost indifference to human creativity?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- simmonmt 6mo agoIf you consider say elevator music - music that's just there to fill space, rather than to be listened too - then I don't think there's that much difference between using AI to produce it and using AI to produce clip art or boilerplate code.
- chromacity 6mo agoWell, code and visual art is more differentiated, so the thing you need probably doesn't exist and it would take effort & money to procure it. Not always, but often enough to make rational people default to AI. With music... if there's a style you like, no matter how eclectic, there are probably thousands matching human-recorded tracks you can listen to today.
- yellowapple 6mo agoFinding those thousands of matching human-recorded tracks and curating them into playlists seems like a benign use of music-aware ML models.
- marcus_holmes 6mo agoMusic as wallpaper vs music as artistic paintings. We are fine with mass-producing wallpaper with machines. People buy this every day, no problem. We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art". Both hang on the wall as decoration. Essentially the same purpose. But we have very different feelings about them and hold them to very different standards. Music is the same. We have muzak - background music that isn't supposed to be listened to, it's just wallpaper. I don't think many people object to this being machine-made in bulk. And then we have music that is art and is supposed to be listened to explicitly. We hold this to a higher standard and expect it to be the product of human creative urges.
- Ferret7446 6mo ago> We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art". Uhh... Cheap, basically AI generated art for home decor definitely exists. > And then we have music that is art and is supposed to be listened to explicitly Just like how most people are not sommeliers, most people just listen to pop music "slop"
- TOMDM 6mo agoI have the sudden urge to frame some wallpaper.
- TiredOfLife 6mo ago> We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art". China is full of factories where exactly this is being done and people are fine with this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15742507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15742507
- aethertron 6mo agoSeems a bit silly, though. More economical to paint (or draw, or cut-and-paste, or whatever) one original, scan it, then print many copies.
- Nasrudith 6mo agoIt depends entirely upon who the "we" is in question. There has long been an aristocratic tantrum against affordable decoration in the art and architecture world, dating back to men's formal wear going mostly monochromatic as soon as colors became widely affordable instead of reserved for the gentry. There were similar ones against ornamentation with Brutalism (mixed with dadaist 'the world doesn't deserve art!' post WWI despair memes). The cynical would dismiss the whole distinction between mass produced and unique art as arbitrary. Or worse, just as a racket to create artificial scarcity, a social kabuki show to create the pretension of high culture, or for the purpose of some sort of criminal scheme like money laundering.
- smallerfish 6mo agoIs formulaic pop music produced by a corporate label that's designed to push all the right buttons more "human" than the average track you find published on Suno? I wouldn't say so. Pop music was already to some extent a commodity.
- gilrain 6mo ago> Pop music was already to some extent a commodity. And as everyone knows, some commodification of some thing means we must go ahead and totally commodify all the things.
- lotyrin 6mo agoAlso, a lot of the people who hate and resist AI slop also hate and resist corpo slop, we're just outnumbered.
- smallerfish 6mo agoThat's disingenuous. The point is that "human" isn't a particularly good dividing line if you want to distinguish music with value vs music without.
- w00ds 6mo agoActually, it is more human, because there are humans involved at each level. Doesn't matter if you think the music sucks, it's definitionally more human than AI music.
- SoftTalker 6mo agoIt is sort of a blend now. Beats and rhythm tracks are often generated. Vocals are auto-tuned. There's still some humanity in it, but it's not what it used to be.
- userbinator 6mo agoAI music is generated from the result of training on far more human-made music than any human could ever consume in their lifetime, so there are even more humans involved in its creation.
- Gagarin1917 6mo ago>But music? There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing. Isn’t this an argument against all new music, even human made? Either we have it all already, or there’s room for new things that we haven’t heard before.
- echelon 6mo ago[flagged]
- kranner 6mo ago> As far as I'm concerned we're content scarce and I don't care what makes the music - humans, robots, netherworld demons - I just want good music. Presumably you've already listened to every piece of music ever recorded? Otherwise it seems it would be more efficient to do that first than wait for AI to generate it and you chancing upon it.
- echelon 6mo ago[flagged]
- gizajob 6mo agoYou’re not a machine. I’m also tired of hearing that ontological take spouted by AI enthusiasts.
- mckn1ght 6mo agoI think humans are machines, they are just vastly more advanced than any machine invented by humans. This is something I thought long before the current AI hype cycle. What do you think are some important differences between machines and humans?
- polyamid23 6mo ago
- jMyles 6mo ago> I find the production and consumption of AI music to be uniquely... anti-human. I mean, I'm a professional musician - not sure if that gives me more credibility or less - but I don't feel slighted by folks listening to music made by others (whether those others are other humans, or birds, or whales, or AI). As you point out, music has an infinite edge; one can spend a lifetime exploring either its niches or its closures and still have an infinity of each to continue discovering. As moat identification goes, I do feel slightly secure in the sense that AI music (and the information age generally) seems to stoke a hunger for dirty traditionals played well on thick steel strings, and it's going to be a minute before robots can pick 'em like we can.
- SoftTalker 6mo ago> what's the argument for it Record companies can sell it and don't have to pay any royalties. They only pay the artists pennies as it is, but that's too much for them.
- throwaway27448 6mo agoThat's a dangerous game to play, though—the only value record companies have is their intellectual property, especially if they are no longer financing recording new material. Convincing people to listen to slop is a great way to completely obsolete yourself.
- safety1st 6mo agoNot only that, but music generated by AI is not copyrightable. If it's truly 100% AI generated, you can redistribute it to your heart's content without infringement. (IANAL) Someone will surely attempt some kind of end-run around this, perhaps through ToS alterations at the service you obtain the music from, but it's undoubtedly a problem for the labels. In the meantime they have a strong incentive to keep human creativity in the loop. To me the anti-AI crowd is looking at this through the wrong lens, it's now possible to generate an infinite library of music that isn't copyrighted, and can be freely shared, some of which is quite good. There is a pathway all the way from conception to mass distribution that doesn't require the major labels. Whatever else happens that seems like a silver lining at least.
- userbinator 6mo agoit's now possible to generate an infinite library of music that isn't copyrighted, and can be freely shared, some of which is quite good. Many YouTube channels started using AI music because they were getting sick of copyright strikes, and I agree some of it is actually very good.
- zarzavat 6mo agoElectronic music exists but has limited commercial scope because most people don't see the point of music if they can't form an emotional connection with the artist through the music. Popular music has an intense focus on the artist. AI "music" has the same issues as electronic music but worse: because it's trying to imitate humans rather than be its own thing like electronic music, it's not only emotionally unavailable but also creepy. Can you imagine listening to an AI "musician" laughing, for instance? It makes my skin crawl even thinking about it.
- userbinator 6mo agoThere's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing You train an AI on that, in order to create something that combines all of the best parts that you want. If anything, I think AI music is the natural progression of innate human desire to leverage and "stand on the shoulders of giants" to create something bigger from smaller pieces.
- rebolek 6mo agoWhich is of course nonsense because LLM is from definition unable to bring in something new. It's not standing on shoulders of giants, it's just making endless copies of them.
- Nasrudith 6mo agoThat is trivially untrue, even if we ignore the misnomer of trying to use a language model for non-linguistic audio file outputs. I can assure you there was no reference material of say Sam Altman getting arrested when he is getting caught stealing GPUs from a shelf of a BestBuy. (One of the uses of SORA.)
- madaxe_again 6mo agoIt isn’t indifference, it’s obliviousness. My mother keeps on listening to AI music, and I’ll be like “why are you listening to this slop” and she’ll then argue back that it isn’t AI, it’s actually really very good and I’m just jealous, as the synthetic voice continues to warble nonsenses like a fucking arcade machine full of snakes in the background. It’s an even more uncomfortable truth: your average Joe cannot tell the difference between human made music or AI generations, just as they also really think that that 8 year old African boy with a huge beard and no hands built a helicopter out of old bottles, or that that cat walked into a hairdresser wearing a suit and had its whiskers curled. So there’s no argument for it apart from “people will buy the product because they can’t tell that it isn’t real”.
- rauljordan2020 6mo agoSometimes you can't even tell. I was in an uber drive where the driver had this incredible playlist of Brazilian bossa nova. It was sublime and some of the best tracks I ever heard. He even said he loves the singer but cannot find their name anywhere. It turns out it's a youtube playlist that is fully AI generated and genuinely some of the best bossa nova you can imagine. I still hear that playlist daily tbh. Moreover, imagine if you are an independent musician, have a good voice, know how to play instruments...you could ask AI to generate hit tracks for you and then you can play them at concerts or shows and claim them for yourself
- dadoomer 6mo agoWhat's the playlist? Curious as a bossa enjoyer.
- rauljordan2020 6mo agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3pD7b08VII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3pD7b08VII
- deterministic 6mo agoWhat's the name of the youtube channel?
- SirMaster 6mo agoBut what if you like to listen to a specific genre? Say electo-swing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro_swing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro_swing) There isn't that much good electro-swing made by humans, and not much new coming out. One can easily consume it all and want to hear some new tunes in that genre, and maybe AI can help with that.
- gizajob 6mo ago[flagged]
- stephbook 6mo agoMany people just play music as background noise. Having a bland, generic, vanilla AI music playlist is a bonus.
- dolebirchwood 6mo agoI think that's probably the crux of where there's conflict here. There was a time in my life where I definitely much more emotionally invested in the music listened to. I thought I'd definitely kill myself if I ever went deaf. But these days, I really just have it for background noise when I'm working, exercising, doing chores. And it's all just electronic stuff – I don't like vocals (unless they're sufficiently unintelligible so they don't become a distraction to my thinking). At the end of the day, it's just some beats to me. AI or not.
- 9dev 6mo agoI can recommend you to spend some free time to really listen to music again, Beethoven, Hendrix, Gorillaz, Slayer, Sub Focus, whatever floats your boats your boat. Your brain is wired to remember and sing along to music around a campfire, and will pump you full of exquisite drugs if you really give into it, ideally together with other people. Alleviates stress and makes you happy. Music demoted to just background noise is unrelated to the social concept of music, which is so ingrained in our nature that we all can’t escape it. And that to me is also why I agree with OP—AI-generated music is fundamentally treason to our species.
- brokegrammer 6mo agoBecause human singers will usually sing about what they like. They will use their own life experience and imagination to write and sing songs. Other people may or may not like them. AI will only sing songs that other people like, so AI singers will naturally attract more listeners.
- userbinator 6mo agoAI will only sing songs that someone wanted sung, and that someone might not be a particularly good singer at all.
- 0xbadcafebee 6mo agoHave you heard of dubstep? It sounds like robots falling down stairs, and humans made it and love it. If AI can make music less crappy, I'm all for it.
- yellowapple 6mo agoNot to mention vaporwave, which typically boils down to “take song, reduce bass, slow down”. Or vaporwave's inverse, nightcore, which typically boils down to ”take song, increase bass, speed up”.
- dfxm12 6mo agoIt's not that people want to listen to AI music, per se. According to the article, this artist charting was part of an April fools gag. It's about ego, or maybe hubris. People think their idea for a record is good, but don't want to learn musical composition. Instead, they put blind faith in AI generation. Gen AI is more for the idea men unwilling to put in the effort than the consumers.
- gizajob 6mo agoYou’ve hit upon a bit of a paradox inherent in music - the average listener really gives next to no shits about human creativity or the artistry and hard work that goes into being a musician capable of releasing music. They can’t even comprehend, so don’t. Music is something that comes out of a speaker same as water is something that comes out of a tap.
- fooker 6mo agoYou can repeat your argument with photos, poems, code??, and just about anything else that humans produce. Not that you're wrong, but human creativity doesn't mean what it used to.
- rob74 6mo agoI guess using AI is just the logical continuation of what mainstream pop already did before that: reduce music to the lowest common denominator so it can appeal to as many listeners as possible. AI only speeds up that process.
- leptons 6mo agoI remember when Apple got ridiculed for running a commercial where they crushed a bunch of musical instruments and artist supplies into the shape of an iPad. I guess if AI companies did the same, they would be crushing people into the shape of an input prompt.
- gnarlouse 6mo agoUsed Suno to reimagine a handful of my old demos late last year, and honestly the results floored me. I could never release those tracks though, purely out of shame. But it seems pretty practical to study the AI remixes to understand what I like about them, and use these as a practice tool for music production.
- burnerRhodov2 6mo agoits changed the way I DJ.... I can be much more expressive.
- JCharante 6mo agowhile I don't like AI music, "Millions upon millions of them, in every conceivable style, for every conceivable mood." is something that's not true. There very often is a gap which forces me to open up Ableton and make edits
- jatora 6mo agoWhat an insane take. You dont have any songs you like that there arent many others like it and that you can generate an endless supply of with AI? Come on. I sure do love the dying thrashes of human-creativity chauvanists. AI art, AI video, and AI music will eclipse most humans and there is absolutely nothing that will stop it. And you will use it and appreciate it more too. Once you open your eyes that is.
- maplethorpe 6mo agoHaving AI create music frees us up to do other things with our time.
- yellowapple 6mo agoIndeed, like toiling in factories and mines and farms.
- BoxOfRain 6mo agoThis sounds a tad misanthropic, if I had the choice to opt out of working full time making music is one of the primary things I'd spend my time doing. I like software but at the end of the day to me it's the most creative job I can do while still putting bread on my table reliably. The reasons I don't do music full time are purely economic ones, far from wanting to 'free up' my time to do other things with AI music I'd rather have more of my time occupied by working on music. I want AI to automate the things I don't want to do, I want it to automate the mindless drudgery that is required to exist in a society. Automating art so that I have more time to work is a philistine position in my view, and one which reveals a somewhat dystopian vision of humanity's relationship with both art and work.
- joks 6mo agoThis is a mind boggling argument to make about creative work.
- johanvts 6mo agohttps://theonion.com/humanity-still-producing-new-art-as-though-megadeth-s-1819578062/ https://theonion.com/humanity-still-producing-new-art-as-tho...