The Future of AI Music

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[ileutur]

I don't care if creative individuals have fun with AI, let them. What concerns me is how big companies will use it to screw over working musicians, like they always do. Remember when we all laughed at Metallica for making a big deal about Napster and then made fun of bands eho shunned streaming? Now people are getting paid pennies for millions of streams on Spotify.

Every time a cheaper way to do something is invented, the greedy pigs on top eat it up and make everything worse.

Let AI be the funky seasoning, not the main course.

[LON]

Don't lie to yourself, because the reason Ai was made and is now being pushed by many corporations is simple: make more money. Cut corners. Generate "art" without having to deal with an artist. And many people don't care, they only want more and more content to consume.

[peteranderson]

Machine learning algorithms can be useful tools and assistants, but putting it on autopilot and letting it take control unsupervised will always lead to serious issues. It's going to be interesting to see what happens to those companies who are now embracing machine learning algorithms too early, too quickly, and too completely.

[MattAngiono]

The reason people say this is killing art is not about thy aesthetics, but rather the economics.
If Ai can make art that is indistinguishable and costs far less time or money, it will play the capitalist game better than human beings.

Artists will become even more stratified in an already stratified society.

There will simply be no viable way to make a living as an artist, even worse that it already has become.

If we want to really keep art alive and keep MEANINGFUL art flowing from people who spend a lifetime mastering their craft, then we must ditch capitalism for something far less insane.

Ai isn't going to get worse.
But our ability to keep up will

[BryceRogers_]

Nothing will compare to watching a hard-working musician perform their art live and raw. I’ll take that to the grave

[jessdrawz]

As an artist, I'm pretty disappointed how you completely glossed over how artists and musicians will financially survive in an environment taken over by AI art and music. Big record labels and media corporations that are completely money hungry will do anything to not pay us. Also, there's a lot of us that have a massive issue with how these models are trained. A lot is taken without our permission- even Adobe has been in hot water lately (I wanted to bring that up since you said you used them). idk. If I saw an artist outsourced their songwriting to a genAI text model, I would absolutely lose all respect for them. What is the point of art if it's not human. Just bc a certain tech is new and shiny, doesn't mean it's the next big leap forward for the medium.

[GizzyDillespee]

Generative AI music is a very granular collage which doesn't want to admit that fact, for copyright reasons. I'm okay with that - personally, I don't use restrictive copyrights - but I can see how it upsets people who make their income due to restrictive copyright law (i.e. commercial musicians).

It would be like if they developed an AI that makes artistically accurate Polyphonic videos. You'd wonder how it learned how to do that, and you might be a little bit miffed... especially if its videos were just barely good enough, and yet viewers seemed not to notice any difference, or care.

[amellialovesmusic]

This could be a really cool idea if it werent for the devastating consequences ai will have on small artists like myself. I don't stand a chance to follow my dream if a corporation can get a robot to do it for free.

[DefDre]

it's all well and good to say that generative AI will "remove the shackles" and "give artists a boost to their own potential", but lets be real. If you can just make top 40 hit after top 40 hit with only a couple prompts, labels are going to do that. e.g. With K-pop being the notorious performer mill it is, what's stopping major labels just making a "certified hit" and saving money by cutting out artists. If an executive sees the chart numbers be good enough to make comfortable profits with AI slop, that's what they're going to do. The main differences with samplers is an engineer HAS to mess around with said sample to make a good beat, a photographer HAS to look for that perfect photo to take, YOU mister polyphonic HAVE to research the topics for your essays and HAVE to look for subjects in your collages. RIP Nebula if I can just AI gen an essay on Pink Floyd.

[italyball]

I have to disagree with you here: the main problems with AI "art" or "music" is not that they shouldn't be used in art production, but what use a person that thinks only about profit will make of it: people lose jobs because it's cheaper to just ask an AI to do a background image... Or sing for them. This means that big corporations won't give a damn about stealing your data for ai training, suppressing the work of independent artists who want to be paid, polluting through servers ever more and so on. It's true that we have always doubted of new technologies, but this is different, since the electric guitar or the use of samples never really showed a way to be abused for one's own gain. The beauty of a capitalist society, amirite...

[yogurt]

Just saying dude, this comment section is really sharing the truth. For all the fun and creatively that can come from using AI, it comes at a horrible cost to many and unless there are fundamental changes we may be looking at much bleaker future
(and this is coming from someone that has been trying to champion AI as a helpful “tool” for the past couple of years… but I’m less and less idealistic as time passes)

[yaei]

i would love to look forward to the future creative uses of ai, but before i do some fundamental changes need to happen that i just don't see coming to pass. if ai can train and generate without killing the planet at an unfathomable rate, not provide giant companies with access to personal information, and not financially reward corporations more than/instead of individual creators, ill be happy. but the scale required to produce consumer ready ai incentivizes the opposite of all those things...i do really hope it can change though. the way those lyrics were written or the old beatles song being revived are really cool! i just want it to be sustainable

[ObjectivelyL]

Even if some will use it in a creative way, AI is not used by most companies in that way. To compare AI to remix culture is simply an insult

[FeltNokia]

16:50 "Is this the death of art?"

It's not the death of art, but it is the death of the artist. As you say, we'll always make art, but in a capitalistic system where a human costs money & an AI essentially doesn't, human art is obsolete. We'll always make art, we'll always be creative, but artist will no longer be a viable career.

[bocopaladin]

I really appreciate hearing a different perspective on Gen-AI and art. I also find some of the more creative explorations intriguing. I’m not sure the value of Gen-AI as a tool outweighs the costs though; literally or figuratively. When it’s used as a smaller tool, it doesn’t really provide anything new or meaningful. People can already create more or less the same art without Gen-AI prompts or bases. When it’s used as the only tool, there’s little to no human input and it spits out a meaningless mess of stolen content. Neither scenario currently excites me, inspires me, or motivates me to think about or interact with the art in question.

I guess I’m not convinced yet that Gen-AI is actually art by any meaningful definition. And even when it’s relegated to being a tool, like a sampler, the environmental and social costs are way too high. It’s possible I’m missing something, but I don’t see the appeal or the value. I can see how it might save someone time brainstorming or experimenting, but isn’t that part of the fun? It’s not truly a convenience like being able to record or sample. It’s providing an idea or developing an idea; and I don’t see the benefit of removing that from the creative process.

I hope that Gen-AI as it currently exists isn’t here to stay. But if it is? Then I hope it stays relegated to being a small tool to save time and that we find ways to make it less detrimental to both nature and humanity. I don’t believe it will ever be as meaningful or transformative as previous technologies though. It’s a dumb and expensive machine using stolen assets to create profit for a small group of people who aren’t even artists and don’t care about or support art. It’s hard to be excited about that or anything that’s created using it.

[olivergiggins]

The difference between this piece of technology and previous ones is big though and that's the corporate element. The invention of the electric guitar didn't the music industry could phase out guitarists, and while subsequent developments have attacked different jobs (who needs a drummer? Every instrument can be played on a keyboard) and basically made the producer the only vital job, AI can even dispense with that, with the job whose only core attributes are knowledge and vision.
Will it destroy music? No. Will some fringe people find interesting ways to use it? Of course.
But the fact that mainstream music uses fewer instruments, structures, chords and sounds from decade to decade shows exactly what happens when you lose the individual player, and this technology just advances that. A time when "a beat" and "a song" are interchangeable terms.

[zyrkugilgamesh]

The argument of comparing any previous technology and it's advancement, in music or otherwise, is not really valid, since GenAi works in a completely different way from any other advancement that came before

[nmlss]

I'd like you to have a word with the thousands of digital artists that lost their jobs in companies that later hired "AI specialists" to do their job. I personally know more than one and more than two and more than three of those cases.

[paulhiggins]

As a visual artist I can already see a problem with AI as a tool of artistic creation- it replaces artistic intent with a kind of creative ennui. What I mean is that unlike the iteration that characterises human creativity, which is guided by intuition and is in that sense goal directed, the iterations of AI are mindless. As a result an AI image is never really complete- it's always possible to tweak the prompt one more time, to generate one more randomly different interation of that image- a process that is theoretically infinite.

The point being that human creativity is an emergent process- the Artist does not sit down before the blank canvas with an already completed image in mind that he then simply translates onto that canvas- that is not how it works. In reality art is born incrementaly as the process of it's creation unfolds- more simply put you cannot seperate the process of creation from the end result- they are one and the same.

But with AI there is no such process- each iteration of an image emerges from the black box of the AI fully formed and complete. Yes you can 'roll again' as the AI artists put it- you can tweak the prompt and the machine will generate a new variation of the image- but this new variation does not organically extend out from the first- it too is a fully formed and complete thing.

Humans misunderstand probability- we tend to think that if you toss a coin the results are cumulative- that if you got heads last time you have a greater chance of getting tails the next time- this is not so- every time you toss that coin the chances of either heads or tails remain exactly the same- randomness does not 'accumulate' that is why it's random.

So it's important to understand that trying to use AI to engage in creative iteration is futile because these machines are probability engines in which each iteration they produce is unique and in no way influenced by the iteration that came before- so you cannot in fact use AI to engage in creative iteration, that is not how it works.

To be an AI 'Artist' is to engage in a process of self deception in which artistic intent does not preceed creation but is subsequent to it- the work of the AI Artist is complete when his patience is exhausted and whatever random interation he has currently generated he then nominates as the intended result. He points to this image and says 'That is exaclty what I meant'.

In place of intuitively guided creative iteration we get a potentially infinite number of atomised discrete outcomes none of which really build on that which came before because they are the output of machines that operate in the realm of probability, a realm that is by it's very nature antithetical to the subtle incremantal process that we call Art.

[tatemcilwain]

I find AI art to be disgusting in a way that is hard to put into words. It’s like the fabric of reality being distorted. Like humanity is being pulled even further from its self. It’s deeply haunting and I find it very hard to find anything the be hopeful about with AI art. It just makes me sad. I feel like the only thing it’s good for is showing you how fucked up and twisted the world is becoming, I already knew about that I don’t need to see it more, I want something to smile about.