Google's advanced music generation model and two new AI experiments(deepmind.google) |
Google's advanced music generation model and two new AI experiments(deepmind.google) |
The problem though is that fewer and fewer people are interested in this sort of thing and more interested in generic electronic garbage background music, as others have said. Classical concerts are getting less attendance over time, there are less acoustic or live performances, etc. People altogether seem to no longer buy traditional art because they can buy prints that look good on the wall. The point of buying traditional art isn't just it looking good, because like musicians, the character of the artist and their personality comes through in the paint strokes, color choices, design, composition, etc. Which is why people close to the artist often appreciate the work even more than a stranger would (ie: your 4-old child's school drawing), because the way it's created reminds you of that person and their soul/spirit.
AI music is not a continuation of the degrading of music away from the "one true music" that is classical. All types of music up until AI music have required skill to create. Being able to have a digital audio workspace on your laptop with a few presets did make it a little easier to make trash, sure. But most electronic music requires massive technical expertise in so many more fields than playing the guitar does. I know because I've learnt both.
Electronic music production requires you to master software, multiple pieces of hardware, understand the physics of waveforms deeply, understand music theory, be a composer of an entire symphony and the performer of every part of that symphony at the same time, understand sound design (which is a whole job on its own), and then learn to dj if you hope to promote your music.
Also people go to rock gigs all the time that are performed on live guitars etc so I dunno what you're on about.
That still doesn't change some drawbacks, which is what you lose when you do that. It's mostly an economics thing. There's value to having artisanal products over industrial ones because of the craftsmanship involved. The artist or craftsman's personal touch ends up as part of the piece. That used to be common but now it's just a high end product for rich people to afford. There's a downside to these kinds of technologies, even if they bring benefits.
Also, as I understand you must be able to sing properly to use this tool, so it is only for talented kids, and ordinary kids still have to use a keyboard?
So I'm not sure your projection is valid.
But quality has always been a very important aspect of popularity in art as well as in music (see: Renaissance sculptors & painters, Baroque and Classical composers, etc.)
Great art is when a unique, profound emotion or insight is expressed with great execution.
AI helps with the last part; real artists should still provide the emotional seed.
Music may already have been turned into a commodity selected by traits other than quality, but tools like this bring the effect up to a whole new level, a whole new order of magnitude.
Previously it was also a way of showing it to others in a way of a filter, also it was so crazy creating new 'styles'.
But this time is over.
We are in a Post art discovery face. I have not really seen (at least not regular) something totally/complelty/utterly new in art.
But thats good. The search space is much deeper now, art is much more accessable.
Maybe punk music was partly a consequence of mass media pop and rock music for these reasons too.
Huge trend back to 90s CCD digital cameras, film, polaroid etc.
Imagine the talent AI assisted music programs will unlock. I think it will be a new instrument people learn to play.
IF we assume that:
1. "Beautiful" (nice "looking" / "sounding" / "moving" things) things will be easy to create.
2. "Meaningful" things are, and will continue to be, harder to create.[A]
Then it seems that the only thing that could differentiate you is the quality of your ideas, and the meaning you are transmitting.
Put another way -- if everyone can create "Beautiful" things by default (in the world of static art, we live here now!) then why choose one piece of art over another?
This is my intuition about it, at least.
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[A]: I think this is just a fundamental property of "meaningful" things. They require more computation, which means more scarcity.
I really hope it's not google that drives the future of AI in music.
Google continues to live in the darkest timeline when it comes to ai and ml.
In one interview I watched, Yo-Yo said he strived to play pieces perfect until his 20s when in the middle of a concert he realized he was playing perfectly and it was boring. From that moment he decided to dedicate his musical performances to making a connection with the audience. His concert was incredible to experience a room of 1000 people all having their seats shaken by a human being bowing a string without any electronics involved. People were getting drawn in, then jumping back, and getting transported outside the physical. Hard to describe.
And that was when i realized that no matter how perfect a computer plays, humans will always want to hear other humans play. We have had player pianos for over a century and not to mention a long history of sculptures that play music and even now you can get a virtually unlimited amount of extremely high quality near perfect replication recording of the best performances out there.
But still, I just went to buy tickets to a classical music event on a monday night to a solo concert by a not-famous player that each seat cost around $100 and they were sold out.
For me personally, learning an instrument has been a tremendous experience. Even the interaction with my teacher gives me weekly human contact that has become scarce in the post-covid world filled with remote work.
Spending months of practice just to play a song poorly is actually an incredibly freeing and humbling experience. I had my recital with a bunch of people watching me, where I messed up, I played out of tune, but it was an incredible flood of human connection that i never really had prior.
I think worrying about AI taking over music is overblown. Unless the music is going to be generated to manipulate people somehow, but the reality is that in 100 years people will still crave live performances. Just like for the past 100 years, paradoxically, the access and lowered barriers of entry, has actually increased accessed to classical and live performances. People complaining that people today don’t like “music with passion” anymore are living in some fairytale land where they imagine every single person 200 years ago was skipping down to the opera house. The reality was that 200 years ago access to music was incredibly limited and most people only experienced it in church context. If that (rural churches had a lot less going on musically).
People will always crave to see other humans’ accomplishments. Music, paintings, etc are not just an end product, but the more you understand the difficulties and journey of the person producing it, the deeper your appreciation becomes.
The human being was not created to be deprived of the right to express his feelings through fine arts. From the moment you deprive me of the right to express myself as I feel through external as well as internal stimuli and you want to replace me with an insensitive mechanism that neither feels nor has judgment like a human being, then everyone will become cynical and unsmiling and all they will lose their meaning.
> The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the distance, a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.
Part of me worries that I am just gatekeeping.
However to me, the point of music was that its meant to put across something personal, human and emotional. Even when its a cover. Whether its a protest song, or shouting about taking someone to a gay bar. To automate that away, what does that do to us culturally?
So much of our identity comes from shared art. Emos liked emo music (you know with the shouty backing singer), goths went for death metal or the cure. Indie twats waxed lyrical about how heroine was great for the libertines.
All of that shared (mostly bullshit) memory is going to disappear, so what will bring us together, unite groups of kids with a shared like of x? Will it matter?
I worry that all the things I enjoy doing are being automated away. Perhaps this is what the weavers felt like when they were replaced with powered looms. Or cabinet makers felt when they saw steam powered power tools that sparked the arts and crafts movement[1]
I also frankly worry about how my kids are going to make money.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_and_Crafts_movement#Criti...
What is the purpose of marking AI content? I don't really understand. Should we mark content edited in GIMP or Audacity as well?
I see a future where we all make our own music and share it freely with family and friends. This means less listening to manufactured pop songs written by suits with the sole aim of making a profit. This will still happen of course but at least we'll have another option.
I've learned far quicker playing chess against an AI than I would have playing against humans. And yet I still really enjoy playing against humans too. In fact the experience playing against humans is richer thanks to a deeper understanding of the game that came from AI.
Your argument is along the same lines as arguing electric guitar is lifeless when compared to the non-machine acoustic version. When what really matters is who is operating the machine. AI is just another tool. It will be used in insensitive mechanical ways and in ways that deeply enrich our lives.
Now imagine in a group of people you share a hand-crafted song but one of your friends who isn't as interested in producing music takes your song as inspiration and creates something that sounds better. Imagine they aren't even trying to do this to intentionally one-up you; they think of it as the same kind of sharing and creation. You may disagree but their definition of self-expression differs, and it's difficult to change people. But this happens consistently and the bar is raised ever higher each time.
How well someone handles this kind of scenario depends on mindset. Is the joy in being better than others, or pursuing the craft and learning things, or sharing in the experience in consumption? People will have different values. But I think the bias in AI is for people to focus on the end result without needing to put in a lot of effort.
It's the entire selling point of these products - taking out the effort in getting a high-quality result. Yet the effort spent on human art isn't wasted effort. The effort doesn't just go towards the finished price, but to the satisfaction of the artist themselves. It stimulates their neurobiology. And in a lot of tutorials for hand-crafted art, the mindset taught is to focus on the process and not the end result. Generative art contradicts that bit of knowledge, and it could cause dissonance.
In Stanisław Lem's story about the electronic bard, the existence of the impeccable poetry-generating robot does not directly deprive the poets of their ability to create their own poems. Instead, after perceiving the generated work to be higher quality than anything they're capable of writing, the poets become depressed and commit suicide.
You could say the poets didn't have the right mindset of how to approach life, but I think it raises a good point. It's the mental state of people who create and how society views these tools that matters. You will always have the ability to put pencil to paper regardless of what big technology does, but will you want to if you think the rest of the world has moved on without you?
I think maybe in modern times the effect will be closer to: artists scale back or give up their craft because the potential audiences vote with their wallets and attention spans for people who rent server farms. It's the despair at seeing the public valuing the end-result over the human element in a broader cultural sense. It's feeling as if a piece of yourself is being lost in an eternal void.
And it's the idea that generative models could become a fundamental part of society. Billboards are generated because those cause the most successful ad campaigns. People hold massive music festivals exclusively made of generative synth lines because they attract the crowds. The taste of your drink is algorithmically modeled with ingredients adjusted for the best product-market fit possible.
What stops these people in their tracks is perceiving the world as one that values the machine over the human, and even if you value the human, you still have to get in line with the machine - everyone else is doing it. Generative models could retrain our value systems.
It's not so much what generative models take away than how they change the public's perception of art itself. It is the depression and mindset changes that come with knowing the poetry-robot will be there for all eternity.
Older forms of thinking become outdated, some which may be considered virtuous or delicately intertwined with the human spirit, and this causes anguish and despair at the state of things, and the ever-improving army of poetry robots that sees no end in sight. Because we haven't put an end state on improving technology, and I think deep down some of us believe there was never meant to be such an end state in the future. We would have to spin terms like degrowth and Luddism into something more palatable to have any chance of creating one.
If you want to be competitive in music production industry you have to be somewhat economically effective as in any industry and AI will raise economical effectiveness to the whole new level.
Using the "journey metaphor", for some people what matters is the destination; for others what matters is the journey itself; for others what matters is the person doing it; and for others any combination of those.
The target audience for most generative stuff is mostly people who are looking at "the destination".
Then seriously start thinking about which politicians are going to support a future where fewer and fewer jobs are being done by humans. UBI, healthcare for everyone, access to housing etc are all things that can and should be done already. The more that work is automated away, the more crucial these become.
We should be striving for a “Jetsons future” where complaining about a long work day means being in the office for two hours.
It also makes me wonder about agriculture.
It's difficult to envision a post-scarcity future where food production is still manual-intensive. Mandatory picking service, as a civic obligation? And there are a lot of food types that require manual picking.
UBI would therefore effectively end production of those types of food. (E.g. more grain, less fruit)
Also, the inter-national implications of some UBI countries while others aren't...
This is going to require taxation. Maybe a wealth tax ? Maybe fed-level Georgism ?
Previous musicians said the same things, electric guitars are not musical instruments, synthesizers have no soul, music made on computer DAWs is artificial and of no value, ....
The kids will embrace 100% AI generated music, the parents will be "they don't make music like they used to", forgetting that their parents said the same things about their music.
1. The people who think AI won't really work (at least in some fundamental way - it might make some stochastic melody but it won't have any creative spark to it).
2. The people who think AI will be able to do everything better than humans (in every possible way, at least as far as a mere human can tell) and that this will be great.
3. The people who think AI will be able to do everything better than humans (in every possible way, at least as far as a mere human can tell) and that this will be terrible.
Of course, because, just like in advertising, they are the main target.
One really has to love those companies protecting children. Marquis de Sade would have been proud of those companies.
But more and more, I’m finding I don’t enjoy newer music, not because it scares me or I find it to be racket, like earlier generations said of mine.
Instead, I find newer music to be boring and devoid of life. Zero dynamics. Hearing the same few guitar and drum plugins. Rigidly mechanical tempos and tone correction. It’s just dull and boring.
A lot of this is poor execution. Maybe some of it is changes in how we listen to music. A lot, not all, of new music feels like content instead of art, mashed through a template for ease of production. Yes - that’s something that’s been done through the history of recorded music. But the uniformity gives everything a generic feel that used to be reserved for the most bubblegum of pop music.
Watching the music scene over my 50+ years has taught me that music is often as much a reaction to current music scenes as much as it is anything else.
I think it's just as likely the kids will go zydeco or jug band — start finding the equivalent of washtubs and washboards to make music.
Hence my worry that I am gatekeeping.
For example in 2007, making good sounding music required at least a studio. If you wanted to record 4 microphones at the same time, you needed expensive hardware.
Doing any kind of music editing required a huge machine and expensive software with expensive plugins.
Now I can mix and apply effects in real time to 24 tracks and have a video reference. With this I can add a track by humming out a line.
I'm less worried about "music like they used too" modern music has always, and will always be shit, according to old people.
Added to my article on economics of LLM's: https://open.substack.com/pub/rakkhi/p/economics-of-large-la...
The abhorrence of "gatekeeping" may be my least favorite cultural trends of the last decade. Gatekeeping is often desirable. Expertise is a good thing. Specialization is a good thing. Communities based around shared interests and values are a good thing.
> Expertise is a good thing. Specialization is a good thing
yes! that's a standard of quality. To be a good x you need to pass this quality bar. I don't think that's really gatekeeping. Gatekeeping, well the way I see it, is someone dismissing someone else based on parameters unrelated to the matter at hand. "you can't understand x if you didn't do y" Hence why me dismissing AI generated backing tracks not being "real music" because its not made by "real musicians" could be read as gatekeeping.
> Communities based around shared interests and values are a good thing.
Also yes! But thats not a reason to be hostile to newcomers.
What gets lost in this short-circuited process is the physical involvement with an instrument, a sort of embodied cognition. I suppose profound and/or interesting musical ideas could spring from someone without such experience, I’m skeptical.
The part about privilege: a lot to unpack. I’m a professional musician in classical music. There are a lot of paths to learning one’s craft. In my own experience, privilege - at least as defined by access to resources of finance and influence wasn’t part of my training. Still there’s much to be done to broaden access in my field.
I'm not being funny but this is a poor take when the excellent guitarist Mdou Moctar learned on a guitar he built himself using the brake cables from a bike for strings. The guitar at least is not an inaccessible instrument.
You can learn to play the guitar, and buy a guitar, but it's very hard and expensive to also learn the 3-4 other instruments you need to make a full song. (my brother learned both the guitar and percussions; this took a lot of time and was quite expensive, if he had a tool like this he would probably focus on the guitar and just rely on this to generate a background track)
let us side step the binary "privileged" argument which is disruptive here.
The issue for us now is given that level of talent, would Hendrix, Johnson or anyone else be able to make a career in 2028? Or will it be the preserve of people with free time and money?
There are a million things you _wanted_ to do that you'll never get to do. And that's unfair.
What will it mean to "make music" when the amount of necessary skill, experience and insight approaches zero?
> This means less listening to manufactured pop songs written by suits with the sole aim of making a profit
Unfortunately, unless we replace capitalism, this is exactly what you can expect. The veil of false corporate authenticity grows every day, you can see it in the opening sentence of this press release:
"From jazz to heavy metal, techno to opera, music is a much loved form of creative expression."
The statement, while true on the surface, takes on a different tone when you remember who the speaker is, who the audience is, and what their ultimate goal is.
I am excited as a musician to explore this coming age, and I am also deeply saddened and fearful of how things will shake out.
A lot of people point to Garageband (released 2004) as having a big democratizing effect on digital audio production. I think v2 in 2005 supported recording 8 tracks simultaneously. Not an especially sophisticated tool (and arguably responsible for the built-in loops being heard in way too many popular songs), but a big change at a time when the alternative might have been a computer with ProTools and dedicated PCI cards.
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/apple-garageband-m...
Arguably not that expensive, considering that you probably already had a computer and you could split the audio hardware costs between the 4 band members (otherwise why 4 microphones)
Software and plugins were indeed expensive, but there were plenty of free alternatives of decent quality. Reaper, FruityLoops were pretty cheap and quite good for the basics.
Learning something difficult is rewarding on several levels. To boil it down to just the intended outcome is a rather narrow view of the matter.
Like most things I read outside programming on this board, it is people talking out their ass about things they don't know much about but they think they do because they are well paid to write javascript.
The results certainly will not be better. They will be a hideous amalgam from a computer. Just listen to real music created by real people (preferably live) and you will know how hideous these results really are.
Everything, even EFFICIENCY, has its limits to how much we should have.
I've heard soulless music performed by highly trained musicians playing on great instruments. And soulful music played on crappy instruments by untrained musicians. On average, the great music comes from the more trained musicians on the better tools.
AI is just another tool. The vast majority of music is terrible. It will continue to be terrible. And a few geniuses will use AI the way Hendrix used the electric guitar. I'm excited to hear what that will sound like.
If people love paintings, they won't be replaced. But they will go to places photographs can't.
We're going to find out who loves music, and who loves manufactured crap. Wait, I think we already know.
Even with AI generation, I expect the most popular music will still have a human viewpoint behind it.
There is also dance music which arguably has no viewpoint (considering it has almost zero lyrics).
UBI [1] is a pre-industrial era concept. The world inflation-adjusted GDP has grown from basically 500B to 100T [2]; like it's a pretty hard sell that you can't get UBI (as envisioned pre-telephones) to work with a 200x increase.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income#16th_ce... [2]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-t...
Even if we introduced UBI today, this doesn't make much sense. It wouldn't mean everyone just gets more cash because tax would have to rise to compensate.
I think you're imagining that landlords would think, "oh everyone is getting an extra 100 zorkmids a month, so I can raise rents by 100 zorkmids". But it couldn't work like that because the cash has to come from somewhere; what would actually happen is that someone receiving 100 zorkmids in benefits now gets 100 zorkmids in UBI, and someone who was paying 100 zorkmids in tax now pays 200 zorkmids in tax and gets 100 zorkmids in UBI.
(Maybe it also has to do something with the lack of demand now, guitar music was still very popular in the 90ies.)
I think the big changes that caused prices to drop was online shopping and the move to East Asian manufacturing outside of Japan. There are "store-brands" like Harley Benton that target below $150 for some instruments, the Internet is awash with positive reviews.
I'm not sure if demand has changed. Guitar music is less popular but it's much easier to learn right now.
https://reverb-res.cloudinary.com/image/upload/v1457648516/C...
The trajectory of the last 10 years has been that the quality of the human experience will go down so the people at the top can make more money, and AI fits perfectly into this narrative.
I think the point is there is no technical "better" in arts. Otherwise painting wouldn't have moved past photorealism and in music we wouldn't have got punk, grunge, lo-fi, screamed vocals... Like I can literally go in tear listening to a singer going slightly out of tune due to the emotions of connecting with another human being. The point is transmitting emotions. AI will be better when you need something generic, consensual, in the current zeitgeist, and mass produced and consumed. It will never replace a human performing by definition.
It first resides in your own, personal, self appreciation: do you feel yourself legitimate to sing, to play, to say something, for yourself, or to present to others?
That's the only valid question.
The rest, all the rest, comes from that. And it does not require to be complicated or complex or clever music at this point.
Sure, you may start with the practice, with the education, the experimentation, if you have not answered for yourself that first question, you won't create/play music or songs, you'll just apply a rulebook.
Then, another totally different question may be, can you find a way to get a sufficient revenue from that activity. But that's another question still.
I've already done both. Generators are only good to produce specific ideas to integrate sometimes, at most.
It's exactly the same difference between writing your own novel, and getting it written by a text generator. You don't relate to the story, and to the characters, the same way. You may not even _explain_ them the same way.
const song = generateSong() const royalties = Spotify.Publish(song) Bank.getRoyalties(royalties)
You have to think of this like a typewriter or a word document. It is mostly used for profit. And profit always wins over anything else
hum a melody -> match in daw -> work on it creative
but hum -> AI generation -> work on it in daw is not?
But maybe someone will crack it! God knows it's worth enough money.
Shouldn't we aim for a future that is the exact opposite of this?
If we assume the above to be correct then the "cheap" guitar is an additional cost whereas the AI music model isn't. In addition, guitar lessons cost money and spending time practicing is harder for some people than others due to their circumstances.
Perhaps this idyllic post-scarcity future would include networks of community orchards, akin to the "p-patch" garden system we have in Seattle.
Much of international industrial farming seems geared towards "anything, anytime."
Not being able to get fruit in spring, but retaining access during seasonally appropriate periods, wouldn't be the worst outcome.
The point of UBI is that via automation and reduction in cheap energy, opportunities for useful economic activity will be harder to find. In the best case, most people would have a mixture of reliable but marginal income (gardening) and high-potential but risky activity (inventing) with UBI allowing enough security to make crime a bad proposition.
Why is that the best case? In my “best case”, all of everyone’s needs are met, people pick and grow more intense crops because they want to, artists just enjoy making art, and “income” from work just isn’t really a thing anymore. My best case is everyone has what they need and can access what they want.
keeping these things going when people lose interest will be a challenge.
Also I'm not claiming you can learn quicker by exclusively using AI. I'm claiming you can learn quicker by adding it to your set of tools. Human coaches and books are other tools you can or should use.
Even the some of the best chess players in the world are now using AI opponents to explore new ideas.
Regarding openings - the best place to learn are books/studies/even Wikipedia articles that explain the ideas behind the major moves and variations, which chess engines don’t do. Also, a human can explain which opening are good to play at your skill level and which are not.
Regarding free coaches, playing with a friend/relative over the board and discussing the game afterwards has a similar effect.
I gave a list of reasons why a chess engine is good for learning. Refute those as a start.
Here's another reason: an AI engine will point out illegal moves, and patiently over hundreds of games in your home. A free coach isn't going to come to your house and do that.
Neither will most friends or relatives. People get bored and move on.
I’d be more inclined to agree if everyone learned the same way, but we don’t. What works for you may not work as well for others.
For me and music, for example, I learn best by hearing and playing by ear. If I want to learn a song, it’s usually a good bit of time with me playing and rewinding, pausing, playing, pausing, rewinding, etc. I can read sheet music, but the process is woefully slow and not fun for my brain. I could watch someone teach me each part, but that also sounds boring, and I feel I learn better through my own method of trial and error because my brain has to work out the nuances - “was that a hammer-on? Was there a slide transition there? That sounds like a permutation of an earlier chord instead of a direct reuse of it! Etc”
Being able to play against AI may be just as valuable for person A to learn as playing against a human would be for person B. To suggest one is strictly superior to the other, in all cases, is very black and white thinking that doesn’t fit how people work.
On a walk -> Idea -> hum melody into website -> listen if that is something that floats your goat. And then you can follow the traditional way of midi keyboard + daw or however you produce.
Just because people were wrong in the past doesn’t mean they are wrong now.
> AI is just another tool
Not all tools are the same. A tool that changes how sound is amplified (like an electric guitar) is vastly different than a tool that can theoretically replace the human in the loop entirely.
Someone playing a piano and someone playing an electric piano are much, much closer to each other than someone pressing the start button on a player piano is to either of them.
Distortion was just another tool, and first rejected as highly undesirable. It's literally "just" putting an electric guitar through a tube amp and turning up the knob. And it revolutionized music. It sounds amazing in the right hands.
The more important point that I already made is the not all musicians are the same. Give a piano or a player piano to the vast majority of musicians and the output will be common and familiar. Give either to a musical genius like Hendrix and they'll manage to get something beautiful and new out of it. I'm looking forward to what the handful of geniuses out there will get out of AI. It's going to be fun.
Case: I create a painting with a prompt and when it's done I say: "yes, this represents how I feel, and I want to share it."
What's the difference?
What I always emphasize is that if the input and output are sufficiently divergent then your sense of accomplishment at the resulting creation should be proportionally diminished. But what do I know? People use ChatGPT to write a story and midjourney to illustrate it, then make a viral post with the caption "I just wrote a book in under 24 hours."
The difference is clearly massive.
If someone feels these tools help them express what they want, if they are satisfied, I would call that a form of self-expression. I mean, who am I to deny them that feeling?
Oh, maybe because watching live music is a different experience. Maybe because being the best is not as important as simply doing something most people can't do.
Funny thing is, when you go to shows of people who are not yet professional musicians but might be studying, might be in a band with their friends and so on... most of the people who attend these shows are their friends and also other musicians. Most musicians are not professional musicians.
But there still are people making art with older techniques. There is a greater variety of art being made today than ever before in history. The development of new techniques has made art richer rather than poorer. Yes, the most commercially focused art chooses techniques based on price (far cheaper for a single person to stack synths than to pay a full orchestra) but that's okay.
Hip hop and electronic music have been creating totally new things for decades without ever touching a physical instrument. Music didn't die, it flourished.
I'm worried we're going to go into a dark age where society forgets how to make truly creative new art due to lack of incentives, and the AIs won't make anything new due to lack of anything creative to train on. We'll just regurgitate the pre-AI stuff forever.
This is not a slippery slope; new art will be created regardless of incentives and skilled people who learn to augment their craft with AI will probably create better works of art.
There are even artists who don't actually make anything: they formulate an idea and then commission craftsmen to produce what they imagined. While the resulting oeuvre involves some degree of effort by someone, that someone isn't the artist themselves; this is quite similar to AI.
Now, there's something to be said for scarcity. If producing something becomes so easy that anyone can output anything, then sure it may become a problem.
Yet the history of the arts is in many ways a history of explosion, and the number of things produced did not kill art. Often, it invented new art forms.
Baudelaire had this to say about photography in 1865:
> As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. (…) it is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy, and that the confusion of their several functions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled. Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place. If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.
I think he was dead wrong.
Photography may have influenced painting and force it into non-figurative territories (or it may have gone there by itself), but 1/ painting in general, even figurative painting, survived, 2/ photography became a new art form, and 3/ if abundance of photography did in fact, eventually, devalue the work of professional photographers, it didn't block the existence of great photographic art.
Photography is interesting because it has very subtle parallels with for instance painting. One of the more interesting ones to me is that it ranges the gamut from 'technical documentation' through 'personal memento' all the way up to very high end art. The big thing missing in photography is spirituality, which arguably was the driver (and often the patron in a financial sense) of lots of great art in paint.
A videogame AI[1] (the AI itself; we're not talking about its developers here) in a FPS being invincible with omniscience and perfect accuracy, at most makes me think "nice".
But a flawed meaty human with enough skill to be the best human at that same game, makes me think "wtf is this witchcraft", with full respect and acknowledgment, and I'll have way more interest in them than in the perfect omniscient flawless AI.
[1]: Yes, I know here "AI" is not used in the same sense as in the article. The point still stands.
I as an artist can come up with an idea want to archive and then use AI tools to reach it or an artist is completely cut out of the loop.
I don't believe that the later can be called an art or even a creation. It is just a patterned noise and more of it is produced the more noisy our environment becomes.
You have to care to put in effort, but effort isn't the core of art.
So what if humans make a lot of not especially interesting art. More art is good! You can choose what you connect with.
And you need to define great execution.
And you need to explain why intentionally having poor execution couldn't express a unique, profound emotion. On Radiohead's biggest hit Creep "That's the sound of Jonny trying to fuck the song up. He really didn't like it the first time we played it, so he tried spoiling it. And it made the song."
At the end of the day it's always going to seem all subjective and a matter of opinion. Because it's too hard to pinpoint the objective part of what we are doing when we decide what's great and what's garbage. If there even is an objective part.
[0] https://www.theringer.com/2021/11/17/22785868/radiohead-cree...
But what is quality? I used to think it was just degree of goodness, then I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and now I have no idea what it is (or what it isn’t).
Emphasis on unique
In a heavily AI-oriented future, why wouldn't that be done by the floor-cleaning robot?
Though I suspect on a long enough timeline, that job will be automated too and UBI will become a "here's a [weekly|monthly] stipend to live life on, but it's not too much to act truly foolish with."
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38298670, but we merged the comments hither)
Stuff like mixing, equalizing, sidechaining and eternal sample hunts all take a lot of time as well... It's why making music is one of the hobbies I had to let go.
Can't wait to get my hands on an AI powered DAW that skips all the tedious stuff!
Am I still the one making the music? Well, I'd argue the 300+ hours I'll probably sink into finetuning all the other stuff will say yes.
(until: smartphone companies generate personalized musicians and directors and writers for you, and then even Disney gets sunk)
Creative people will find creative ways to use new creative tools.
There is even still amazing marble sculpture being made today but we are not going back to ancient Rome in terms of the importance of sculpture as a popular artistic medium of the day.
There will be cool, new electronic music genres from these AI tools and that sound might eventually make its way to whatever cultural icons of the day are making music. Mostly though no one will listen to these genres just like they don't listen to them today. Music just isn't that culturally important anymore overall.
The real big deal is AI video because video is the dominant artistic medium of right now by several orders of magnitude. This is all just a dress rehearsal for AI video at mass scale.
To each their own (I mean that) but I do wonder sometimes…At some point, what’s the point?
Can you imagine if the GraphCast article were like that? "Revolutionizing the future of weather".
I'm sure this music thing is cool but I have no idea what was built.
[1]: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/graphcast-ai-model-for...
Lyria is for operators, Graphcast is for engineers. The former care about what something does, the latter care about how something does.
The problem with these new BigTech companies is that they are accustomed to subjugating everyone. They deal with users and content, not with artists and creations. This is starkly different from the past. Yamaha and other synth makers would go out of their way to satisfy capricious artists, now it's the other way around, the tech dictates to artists what is possible, including the limits of what they are allowed to make/say and sell.
Not the HN audience. Luckily in the background there will be a machine or a even better, a company that can be worshipped!
Not even audience, since few care for music with any real passion anymore among the masses (not even teens).
It became a niche, or something you put in the background. As for "popular" concerts and festivals, they are more like country fairs...
I tried riffusion and sang 10 seconds of "the house of the rising sun" [0]
It produced... this...
https://www.riffusion.com/riffs/d0464fb4-a53a-4ad8-a765-0a64...
which, by some measure, is impressive (perfect recognition of lyrics, for one), but is also... a musical abomination?
So IDK. Let's see where this goes.
"I've never seen a diamond in the flesh" from Lorde, sung into Riffusion: "I've:0.72-0.96 never:0.96-1.20 seen:1.20-1.48 a:1.48-1.64 diamond:1.64-2.32 in:2.32-2.76 the:2.76-3.02 flesh:3.02-3.86"
With the timestamps being second-annotations. The Google model takes the whole melody and phrasing as input as well.
Why not output MIDI instead, and let the artist manipulate that?
I for one would gladly buy a VST instrument that would generate a constant stream of MIDI ideas, chordings, voicings, variations, from a few seconds of singing or whistling or clapping.
It seems the technology is here to build it, yet (AFAIK) it doesn't exist. Why?
> Each participating artist has partnered with us and will have a hand in helping us test and learn to shape the future of AI in music.
Let me correct that: each participating artist has been given a wad of dirty cash in return for their help in training replacements for mass music. Notice that I said "mass music" -- people will always be able to create by hand, but it's clear that the ultimate goal is to create a system whereby people pay for AI generated music (either with money or with ad views) and no longer need human-created music for commercial purposes.
> Our music AI experiments have been designed in line with YouTube’s AI principles, which aim to enable creative expression while protecting music artists and the integrity of their work.
This is hardly a protection. It only protects existing, secure artists. It does not protect new artists from being outcompeted by AI. (Music composed by humans could still be better but AI will compete simply because it is cheap and widely available.)
This article written by Google is a testament to the true nature of Google, which is the nature of being a leech and parasite. OF COURSE, at first, this tool MIGHT be interesting and provide new ways of creating music, but we have to remember that it will mainly function in the context of YouTube, which is about superficial consumption and advertising. The addictiveness and widespread usage of YouTube is becoming a societal problem, and this technology will standardize AI music into becoming mainstream.
Many people think that AI is just a tool to aid in music creation. It is for now, but what it actually does is three things:
(1) It creates a new standard where music is no longer about human expression but about creating a basic layer of entertainment to go along with advertising.
(2) It changes the minds of human beings to think more like machines.
(3) At some point, it will be so advanced that it will hardly need anyone to create it, and Google and other big tech companies can use it to be an alternative to traditional musicians, who will not be able to compete and therefore will not be able to do what they love to survive.
Remember, technology at first is an optional curiosity but successful technologies ALWAYS become entrenched in society and modify it significantly, and in this case, for the worse.
Shame on Google for this and I truly despise them.
Doesn't matter if it is music, drawing or scientific discoveries.
What an Artist does is pushing the boundaries.
Having tools like ths allows much more people to push and not 'just' the artists who mastered certain skills.
I can write very good software, do i care if my family suddenly can also write softwre thanks to ai? Honestly no. My goal was never to write code but always to create something which adds value to my life or to others.
I would not have thought that we will achieve this level so fast but yes writing code and using certain tools will be not necessary in the near future.
But hopefully we will have more time to learn all of those skills for the sake of having fun learning them.
I have a very good sense of what music sounds good to me and what art looks good to me. Should i be not allowed to create my own art even if its through tools like SD, Midjourney and co?
don't be that type of person
#oxford comma blues.
Maybe music creation via tools like this will be like using a camera to create images. We don’t think of photographs as shitty paintings, right? It’s a different kind of thing.
Yes, in the sense that most people don’t know how to take photos and they look like crap even with heavy AI retouching
It would also already work very well for creating background music without bothering artists to do so.
Concentration background music etc.
"Imagine singing a melody to create a horn line, transforming chords from a MIDI keyboard into a realistic vocal choir, or adding an instrumental accompaniment to a vocal track."
This is what composers do! It's not hard, it requires a journeyman level of skill and training. I guess it will change how non-musicians create really bad music though?
I'm not saying it's not a game changer - the crappy library music world is running on borrowed time. But positioning this as revolutionizing music production is just bizarre. It's not solving the problems that one faces trying to write good music - it's just making the simplest steps faster. And only significantly faster for the untrained.
This has nothing more to do with democratizing music production then audio to text has to do with democratizing writing a novel!
> Within the experiment, a limited set of creators will be able to use Dream Track for producing a unique soundtrack with the AI-generated voice and musical style of artists including Alec Benjamin, Charlie Puth, Charli XCX, Demi Lovato, John Legend, Sia, T-Pain, Troye Sivan, and Papoose*.
So... we're watching you and we'll know if you so much as sample one bar to create something of your own. But our preferred creators are having so much fun using AI exclusively to make the entire composition, directly ripping off the personal style of these artists who said it's OK!
I also found it hilarious that they claim the idea of embedding a watermark in the audio by adding the image to the 2d spectrogram is a "novel method ... unlike anything that exists today, especially in the context of audio." Considering Aphex Twin did it in 1999...
* Apparently it was removed from the game, and his Wikipedia doesn't even mention it, but, yes, Papoose, of the "You just mad cuz I'm stylin' on ya!" track from GTA IV.
Nothing more trustworthy than a multi billion corporation trying to destroy the internet as we know it to get more billions out of ads convinces a bunch of washed up artists that their new project is benign and even are so good that they use the hashtag "Social Responsibility".
This is very totally not just a plan to try to get others on board, wonder what's the catch here? try to do a FOMO where only the first few get to get rights for their voice being used? playing a very long con getting voice exclusivity rights? or what exactly?
One thing I know is that whatever Google says is a lie.
Is this a unique or boolean watermark (==ai_generated)? Sounds like it would be amazing to have for regular YouTube uploads to prove authorship and deal with reuploads/content theft.
Here's my guess: I think that this stuff will continue to iterate until it's to the point where the amount of control people have over it as well as the quality of handling edge cases is sufficient to allow people with fairly unsophisticated tools to create things that look fairly high quality. And once this happens, people armed with amazing tools but no better taste than they had before, will flood the Internet with a bunch of tasteless garbage at rates never before seen. It hasn't happened yet, but I think this is partly an accessibility issue (not everyone has datacenter GPU access, there's still limitations in open models, and many hosted offerings are pretty limited compared to what local models can do right now in terms of tooling) but also it will make a big difference if we hit the point where it's really genuinely just not possible to reliably distinguish AI generated images and sound. Then, even if people wanted to ignore AI generated media, it would probably quickly become pretty difficult, and many people will probably not be honest if it limits their reach and potential.
What’s it matter, if the mind can’t tell either from aether. Samsara, no Abraham’s Sara, abra-cadabra, open sesame, oh well, stuck in the loop, but who cares, we’re in this together so I’ll take either. Some say Samuel paved the way, eat the apple, it’ll be fine they say.
The widespread availability of DAWs, streaming services, and music distribution services has greatly enabled people to create and publish their music online. Not to mention services like Splice which enable the purchase and curation of ready-made musical loops. It's never been easier to make a record, render it, and distribute it.
Of course the problem then becomes one of sifting through the endless pool of releases. There's a lower ratio of quality signal to noise. So be it. I still get the majority of my recommendations from people who I trust to have good taste.
I happen to think this enabling of creation is a net positive because it breaks down barriers for people to be creative and I consider that to be an intrinsically rewarding activity. At the end of the day creators still need to have good taste and discipline to see their vision realized or succeed, but the act of creating itself is beneficial to people on a personal level. Even if their creation is objectively hot trash.
Hard to predict, but I'm sure we'll get something new out of it. Imagine a talented singer just freewheeling with an AI band backing the vocals. A few prompt nudges before you start ("something in the style of Aphex Twin with bagpipes"), some buttons to make live adjustments, with labels like "darker / brighter", "more pop / more alternative" or "activate cowbell".
I guess the main thing to solve is reproducible output, but we almost have the technology to do this.
You don't have to be a singer either. Practicing an instrument could be so much more fun when a complete song in the style of your favorite band is generated along with whatever you are doing.
You are saying "I love watching the skill of the painter, I couldn't care less about the final product"
And that's without even going into voice tuning. We've crossed into that world long time ago and the line is only going to get more blurry.
Perhaps what will happen is that we will have more time to play/watch more?
And second, you express yourself, you said it. If a generator produces something, it's not _your_ expression, per definition. You may still have "constrained" it among myriad of possibilities through your prompt, it is still the production of the generator, not yours.
Example: when I play something on a Mellotron, I cannot claim that I played the flutes or violins recorded there. Those are definitely not mine. What I do play with it, what I sing above it, yes, maybe because I produce/play those, with what I understood of my previous musical education/experience.
That's, fundamentally different.
Regarding whether it is "my" expression or not, I consider expression as a way of making my feelings or thoughts known. This grants me an additional way of making my feelings or thoughts known. Perhaps of lower fidelity than if I learn to play an instrument but maybe that will improve with time. Either way, since I now have an additional choice of expressing my thoughts and _I_ decide if it's "good enough" to publish, I consider it as allowing me to express more.
I think the negativity comes from the fact that our economic reality isn't currently structured to handle the consequences.
In an idyllic society, this might be all one needs to say about generative AI: "how wonderful, a new way to express ourselves!" I think the backlash stems from the fact that we do not live in such a society. Many people already barely scratch out a meagre existence through self-expression. Now major companies that posses far more power than individuals, that take people's work and data without doing due diligence or asking, that effectively impose the shape of the technical landscape from top down, are introducing tools that threaten the ability of people to survive.
It's kind of hard to paint a completely rosy picture when that's the way these tools are being developed and introduced.
[0] https://ai.meta.com/blog/generative-ai-text-images-cm3leon/
> As such, and as described in our paper, we’ve trained CM3leon using a licensed dataset.
Besides, the reason why the power law distribution here is exceptionally skewed is precisely BECAUSE of technology like the internet. If you read about the history of music, in the past before technology, all musicians made less but at least there were places for local musicians to play in a strong community such as in local pubs and such.
TECHNOLOGY created the problem of the extreme power law and now it's disguising itself as a solution. But like the devil, a company like Google does not offer anyhting for free.
The barrier of entry is a business one, not a talent or skill one. Every country in the world has virtuoso musicians who don't earn money. Many/most of the hugely successful musicians released music that could be recreated pretty convincingly by amateurs with a few years of experience (vocals are probably the only exception as we strongly associate them with individuals).
Moments where music is truly important in one's life will never be replaced by meaningless bit fiddling.
I cannot imagine people caring about books, music, art created by bit fiddling. They will always care about things created by other people. We do not watch chess engines playing together, even though the level of play is "godlike". AlphaZero didn't make human chess less popular. Chess is extremely popular now and it is mostly due to personalities participating in it and the ease of access (streaming videos...).
I find the demo where a random song from an artist you like is created very weird. Who would want to do that? And why would anyone connect to that? Will these people save these random creations and relisten them? Will they remember these moments by remembering these random silly unique tracks? I cannot imagine that at all.
But think about it, people used to watch the same movies in DVD. The movies they loved. Now people watch and infinity of short random videos (tik tok, instagram)...
Technology changes the habits of people, specially in young people. Think about it, one friend sends a song auto-generated from some text, it is "a song made by someone", at least that will be their perception...
This has similar energy to the writer’s strike - save money by removing the first layer of human effort. For some things (like the backing music in a commercial) this is sufficient, and for others you can have AI generate the base and then have a human “punch it up” with their vocals or by performing it on live instruments.
I don’t think we risk losing music production in general, but I do think there’s a legitimate concern that many many smaller, less publicly visible music jobs will be lost.
What is your definition of "traditional" here - historically, both music and art were not full time jobs for most. It was a thing people with a passion for did as a side gig, with some (but not a lot) of people eventually sustaining themselves full time with art. Or it was done by already rich people who did not need to work and could afford to be people of leisure.
That was true even of organized things like orchestras, etc. Doing these as a full time job is a relatively recent thing, and even there, "surviving" has been limited to a remarkable few.
Even a decade ago, 30% of musicians had a second job. The 70% was not mostly "bands" but,again, permanent things like orchestras, etc.
Trying to forcefully keep jobs alive that don't need to exist is insanity, and rightfully gets pointed out as such in other contexts. This would be no different in this case.
Here, it's also totally non-obvious that if these things go back to "people pursue it as a side gig because they love it" we will be any worse off than we were in terms of quality of art/music, happiness, you name it.
Because that was the way of the past and art/music were not just fine, but most people even consider it better!
You have to know the change is real, of course, but once you do, we've ended up with insane results when we try to fight it.
It _is_ just a tool, a new instrument essentially, one that is easier to play than most. People being angry that there is now a new instrument that is much easier to play than the one they spent years to learn come across as entitled brats to me. This will enable me to express myself in a way I couldn't before, how is that not about human expression?
It's a accessibility thing as well. Expressing oneself through music has always been nearly impossible to the tone-deaf among us. Now that may change, and you want to stop that because it might maybe potentially affect how much money you can earn from playing music?
Glory to Google for enabling the musically impaired to express themselves through music!
...
Then they came for the Indie Game Devs. And there was nobody left to speak for them.
It's not the same as a new instrument that is easier to play, because with an instrument, you have to determine entirely what comes out of it. With this "tool", you only determine part of the output, a skeleton, and a machine determines the basic musicality.
I 100% do not buy the accessibility argument. Of course, everyone plays that card. But the overall gross societal effects of AI are not worth it, even if it does help some people.
Imagine a new nuclear technology that cures all cancer, but simultaneously allows anyone to create an atomic bomb in their backyard. Would you think this worth it? We have to consider the costs and benefits, not just the benefits like most technophiles think.
You may create something with this tool for your game, but I certainly won't buy your game if AI has been used in its creation.
I'd only add that the sort of music they're aiming at is already pretty much at your end state. Muzak (and its slightly more advanced cousin Library Music) isn't about human expression, but about a background noise to convey a loose mood. God forbid we should just listen to what someone has to say - it always needs a distracting background interference to go with it.
But, like it or not, creating this drivel does put the food in the mouths of a great number of professional musicians. Even big-name recording studios aren't busy full time with wonderful new creative experiments, it's jingles and library music that keep their doors open. But even this work has been declining sharply for decades, and this new wave of tools will just continue that decline.
If anything, it's going to entrench the music profession for the privileged as there'll be an even smaller pot of work available and so only those that can afford the massive time investment and comfortable with the risk of being without work will survive.
And all this because the people building and paying for these tools are themselves musically illiterate - they don't know what makes good music, or why muzak is utterly devoid of the thing they profess to love and democratise.
This is the next iteration of music. First we had only live concerts, then we had recordings, and finally auto-generated music.
I hope some old dudes with long beards will like to hang out and jam with me when I'll be old.
This is not the next generation of music. It is one possible future that we can oppose if only we were not so convinced that technology is completely deterministic and can't be opposed.
Why would anyone owe the musicians a job just because they enjoy doing it? I don’t expect anyone to defend my love of coding when I’m replaced by a future iteration of an LLM.
> Music composed by humans could still be better but AI will compete simply because it is cheap and widely available
If it’s truly better, the market for manmade music will still exist. If bland/poor quality art is no longer produced by humans, what’s the loss?
> It changes the minds of human beings to think more like machines
Not sure how this works, or why it’s so bad.
That is definitely not true. There are other things that determine what is sold besides quality: ability to mass produce, economies of scale, bullying tactics, etc.
> Not sure how this works, or why it’s so bad.
Because thinking like machines means that we are locked into the cycle of optimizing resource usage to expand and grow forever and not be stewards of the environment. Thinking like a machine means being a human cog in the consumerist machine of selfishness. Thinking like a machine means facilitating the endless growth of technology that furthers us from connecting genuinely with other people in a small community.
Because even artists often produce bland/poor stuff, sometimes even some that sells well? (or that is recognised several decades/centuries, to be actually great work)
The goal is to create background music for youtube videos without paying artists anymore at all. Youtube videos feel sterile because they lack music with emotion and are all recycling the same audio library tracks. It's a way to allow some pop culture to youtubers who are scared to death of copyright claims.
And who owns copyright for these songs? Of course not the user. If one of the 1 000 000 00 songs becomes a hit, it's a bank for the google owners.
The most music we (humans collectively, not you and me specifically) hear are made for one single purpose: profit.
It's not an AI problem. It's nothing new. Actually it's older than you and me.
Imagine a burglar who robs houses. He might rob 1-2 per month. Now imagine the same burglar being given a technology that allows him to rob 1000 houses a month. Wouldn't you say that's much worse, even though it essentially arises from the same problem?
Maybe something similar will happen with AI-powered music creation?
Let's be frank, gen AI projects are ultimately about companies wanting make money by putting small-scale professionals out of work for good. In other words, they want to capture a significant portion of all that capital that currently flows across small companies and projects (even if small scale operations continue a large percentage of their production will require funneling money to Gen AI subscriptions instead of skilled human workers)
This is not true at all, it all started with generating MIDI, and even the very link I shared is of a system that generates MIDI.
I mostly use it as a database of chord progressions, but it can do quite a bit more.
This musical world where we generate random stuff that will be consumed equivalently to current music just does not feel real. What will probably happen is that people just won't listen to music or get passionate about it at all. That might already be happening because gaming is something what music was for the generation when pull of the games was not as strong.
Young people today will probably never care about Beatles or Bob Dylan or contemporary bands. The music is just not the main interest.
Just imagine AI making games and everyone in the industry losing their job. It just does not work that way. Product is not the end. Music does not work that way. Music is more than the product.
Any creative history is focused on a group of people and their audience, not on the songs/books/poems in general, but the whole experience of creativity and its outputs.
I do not know if mastering engineers who worked with analog equipment started complaining about losing jobs to digital programs, making their experience obsolete. Did they? I don't think any AI product will be able to separate itself from the human will. Anything we humans do is by humans for humans and all of these places where software would steal our music experience is just hard for me to imagine.
This was already somewhat accomplished by synths and music production software. Take any keyboardist with knowledge of composition and you can get a very realistic sounding orchestra, played by one person. Synths make air/string instruments sound extremely realistic even when played on a keyboard.
Sounds like that kind of work is almost equivalent to clerical work, yet maybe requires a bit more training effort. Although, do you really need to be a violin maestro to play for a movie soundtrack in an orchestra, are your skills being used at their limits?
So I guess we can just see what happened with clerical work and how the society responds. I guess clerks just didn't have enough "voting power".
You could call it "taste", though it doesn't exactly matter what you call it. You know it when you see it. Every so often, someone sells me on why something is awesome and suddenly it 'clicks' for me in a way that it hasn't, and now I'm enjoying something on another level. Thanks to curation and filtering by picky people, you get to experience a lot of things that would be hard to discern on your own. In general, you still have to rely on your own untrained senses to judge things, so curation can be very helpful to find the best stuff. Sometimes you don't know why something is better, but that doesn't mean you can't tell.
So then, a problem with generative AI is that it will mainly be optimized to mimic the appealing end results and then probably also tuned to prefer things that people respond positively to. That's cool and it can definitely produce results that people like, but I think it misses a lot of dimensions of artistic endeavors. Stable Diffusion today isn't drawing; it's forming pictures out of noise that look like they were drawn. No reason, imo, to believe an AI model won't some day actually be drawing; it's just not what's going on today. But because Stable Diffusion skips all of the details, it does things that don't make stylistic sense at all, like putting vastly overly photo-realistic details/rendering onto a cartoon drawing and other such bizarre things. On one hand, this is probably something that can be fixed, but I also think that fixing it is patching around the fact that it's generating images rather than creating them the way a person would. (To me, diffusion models feel like they could be the "imagination" of some AI agent that draws; but, ultimately, I have no idea what the future will hold.) The other thing that's awkward about the way this works is that it's a bit deceptive: looking at the end results, you can see things that are extremely impressive at times, but no doubt part of the problem is that it's difficult for us to actually evaluate it. For any of these very impressive generative models, I think that a surprising ability of being able to produce novel things has been demonstrated in many cases, but the truth is that even some less novel things tend to still be hard. Kind of like how you can generate a pig with a cowboy hat in space using one of these generative models, but ask it to generate two people holding hands and you may be treated with man-made horrors beyond our comprehension. (Or maybe it will work, but either way, the failure mode of these models is very interesting.)
OK, so I droned on a bit there. But what I'm trying to say is, I think these generative AIs are basically all going to be tuned to be as appealing as possible to the average person. Because of that, they will short-circuit our dumb ape brains into thinking "Wow! This is surprisingly good!" even though they are often lacking much substance and a closer inspection may show plenty of issues and general strangeness.
I think that more advanced AI agents might some day overcome this on a fundamental level, by simply not skipping "the hard part" and going right to the end result. That would help limit a lot of weirdness that just fundamentally does not make sense. Even when that happens, though, I suspect the domain of AI stuff will wind up being more limited than it initially appears, as the generative models will prove to have unintuitive limitations, and as a result of that, we may see floods of very same-y garbage stuff.
I'd be glad to be very wrong here. In the past, the availability of powerful tools definitely did what you said: it raises the bar. I mean, seeing what kids are doing in Blender and Inkscape feels like proof of this. AI does change some variables in a way that is scary, though: it produces things effectively infinitely fast and infinitely voluminous compared to humans, and at least by my measure it often achieves superficially good results, and the flaws may not be apparent quickly and maybe not at all to the untrained senses.
So maybe we're in for a flood of same-y garbage. Or maybe not. Guess we'll see.
But that's how life works. Someone invents something. Some people love it and others hate it.
It's like forums. There ara people who hate forums and prefer good old books. There are people who hate books and love forums. There ara people who love both
Some people like watching plays. Others like cinema. And some play videogames.
But be sure this will hurt professional musicians. Not pop musicians, I mean professional musicians that earn a humble living.
I don't know why it makes you so angry that I want the best tools imaginable to make music, for my games and otherwise?
I promise you won't be inundated by the music I create, and no-one will force you to listen to it.
The mindset that you have the right to dictate what tools I can and cannot use to express myself via music is downright dystopian and extremely autocratic. If me creating some tunes for my own benefit in my basement scares you, I think you might need to revise your world view, or all that anxiety is gonna have a detrimental effect on your health sooner or later.
As humans, the fundamental way we derive meaning from life is creation. The purpose of automation has always been to allow for humans to have more space to be creative, as this is really what we excel at and enjoy. If we insist on replacing our creative functions with machines, we will make ourselves obsolete, apart from the few CEOs who own the massive servers that nobody else can afford to own and closed source super-powerful AI systems. Even if you think these ghoul-like assholes would actually care to help the destitute masses whose jobs have rapidly become obsolete on an unprecedented scale that our economy cannot handle, humans require meaning and goals to survive. If we have to all just be kept alive by server owners because our passions are made irrelevant by mass producing robots, humans will die out just from the psychological stress. This is a real thing, one of the top indicators of long lifespan is older people retaining passions, goals and some level of work.
This is of course all worst case scenario stuff I'm talking about here. But I struggle to see an argument for how allowing AI to take over every aspect of our society would not lead to plenty of horrible consequences.
Your convenience is not worth it, I'm sorry.
You realise that this is a problematic situation created by technology, that was designed as such first, right?
> This grants me an additional way of making my feelings or thoughts known.
Not really. Because again, this is a generator: what it outputs according to your prompt may _please_ you, or seem like it matches what you think you wanted, but this is still an output determined hugely by all the biases and sum of data it ingested before you even decided to use it.
It is vastly, it is even, again, fundamentally different that putting in the effort of expressing yourself, by formulating your own words, trying to express something on your own, and not being content of it, reflecting about why, trying a different formula or perspective, etc. before finally saying "ok, this is all I can say about it at this point, let's try".
The "your" is critically important here, both for correct attribution (from the perspective of others; this may or may not have financial or legal consequences), and foremost for your own self-esteem/understanding (devoid from an automated, biased generator, whose understanding is beyond yourself).
I'm saying this technology is a net positive for me. Sure, problems can arise from applying this net-positive technology but even considering them, they're a net positive. Especially in this case where we already have solutions for large amounts of crap content created by humans today. I think they'll scale well to crap content created by AI tomorrow (eg: Recommendation systems, p2p sharing etc).
Regarding your second point. I think we just have different perspectives on this. I see this technology as allowing me to do "strictly more" than I could before. You say that it's not "my expression" but I say it is because I'm able to bring forth what's in my mind (according to me!). You say it's not what I had in mind but compare against this scenario: I have an idea for a song and use a musical instrument. The output that I produce is quite far from my intent as I'm untrained. With this model, I can get a lot closer to my intent compared to using an instrument since I'm untrained. I still have the option of later learning an instrument if I'm unsatisfied.
Overall, I lose nothing and gain a nice power and still retain the option to learn an instrument if I wish. Thus it's a clear net positive for me that allows me to express more right now.
Electronic music production is not easy. If you really just throw some samples in a daw, it will sound like a 10 year old made it and it will probably break people's speakers because it's not mixed and mastered properly. Electronic music is a mature enough genre (that incidentally even in its inception was originated by people who were also traditional musicians) that fans don't accept a macaroni collage of a song that once again probably would break their speakers.
The barrier to entry was significantly lowered through electronics. I was making music on Fruity loops when I was 12 years old. It was shit, but I had everything I needed in a single program. Becoming a producer however is extremely difficult.
The same will happen with AI. The barrier of entry to making something nice will be even lower. But mastering the AI tools, and really using it and combining it with musical knowledge will be extremely hard.
And those people will rise to the top of creating new musical genres, with the inclusion of AI.
There’s tons of amazing, wonderful music being made all the time, to a degree that is staggeringly incomprehensible, and nothing about AI generated music is going to stop people from making beautiful art “by hand”
> I hear you're buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real. You want to make a Yaz record.
> I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables.
> I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.
I don't doubt that's achievable. What I do very much doubt is that software will ever capable of auto-generating something with the beauty, passion and originality of a Beethoven symphony, as performed by the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of von Karajan. I don't believe that an algorithm will ever be able to compose and render a new song in the style of Nick Drake, that has even 1% of his soulfulness.
Machines can be programmed to imitate patterns of musical notes, or even the timbre of a voice. That's nothing. Lived experience and human emotion are prerequisites for the creation of great art.
That leaves me with 2 options: hire an orchestra and a choir, along with a composer to make the sound I want, which would cost me a lot more than my games ever sell for, or pick a sound that's never quite, or usually even close to, what I had in mind.
With this tool, I'm hoping even someone as musically untalented as me could take the music that's playing in my head, and get it(or something very similar to it) playing on some speakers. It probably won't win me any musical awards, I don't expect this to to magically take me from zero to Vivaldi, but if I can make a tune that sounds like what I imagined, it'll be a win for me.
I'll add here that I really for the life of me cannot see the harm in that, even though you didn't really imply there would be, but others in this thread have been screaming it pretty loudly, so it appears to be a concern among fellow hn'ers
I'm trying to understand it but so far all I can see is gatekeeping saying that my music isn't music if I used AI to create it. Judging by the comment paraphrasing pastor Niemöller I'm apparently a Nazi sympathiser for wanting to use this tool.
What in the world is up with that?
Financially, well I'd expect people as an aggregate would keep spending about the same amount of money, so I don't think the proverbial pie would get any smaller, though it might change who gets a piece and how large that piece is.
Guess what, such is life! Even if we, for the sake of argument, imagine that the existence of such an AI is 100% guaranteed to render me personally unable to make any money whatsoever from making games, that's a price I would be willing to pay! I'd have to work with something less fun but I'd keep making games in my spare time just for fun anyway.
It's not like making a living from our passions is some god given right, It's a privilege! And if that privilege is the cost for making my passion more accessible to everyone, that's a price I'd pay in a heartbeat. I can't wait to make reality out of all my ideas, and I can't wait to see what others are going to make with it either!
It's already one of my bigger regrets that I don't contribute more to open source resources that would make game development easier for others, I just can't find enough time and energy for it.
From the consumers perspective, I expect there'd be a lot more to choose from. I imagine the quality of indie games would rise immensely. Heck gamers could even just use the AI to make a custom game tailored for their own tastes from home, how sweet would that be? Might that make the pie smaller for pro Devs? Sure, it might, but who cares! It also might not! Who knows?
The one thing that is guaranteed from such an AI is that awesomeness goes up. I want it!
I am a creative type that became a commercial SE to actually fund my lifestyle. I don't expect to just make money from creative hobbies just because I want to, so I have gone for a job that is in high demand. But AI will eventually learn to code well enough. Then there will be no demand for software engineering, one of the few job markets that even has this level of demand and high employment. So what's the next avenue for us when that job becomes obsolete.
I've worked hard to be where I am too, but if you, like me, were able to land a software engineer job, you'll be able to pick up whatever new skill will be needed in the future without much trouble! I have no doubt you'll manage, so I don't worry about it!
If AI leads to ALL jobs being automated well guess what, we're ready for Luxury Gay Space-Communism as described in Iain M Banks' The Culture. My personal favourite sci-fi utopia!
I wouldn't hold my breath for that though, seems about as likely as running in to Jesus Christ in the supermarket. And I say that as an atheist.
