Did AI Just End Human Made Music? Ft. Rick Beato

Throughout history, creating a complete piece of music has always been a human process. There have been attempts to compose and render songs using computers before, but frankly they weren't great.

Today, that all changes with two AI music platforms. Udio and Suno. In this episode, we'll take a look at both and talk to experts like Rick Beato to see what this means for the future of the music industry.

ColdFusion Podcast:

Track at the end of the video made from 'classical' AI sample:

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Special thanks to Dave Wiskus
Producer: Dagogo Altraide
Writers: Tawsif Akkas, Dagogo Altraide
Editors: Brayden Laffrey

[Dexter]

"This is all backwards. AI was supposed to do my chores while I enjoy doing what I like. It was not supposed to do what I like so that I can focus on the chores."
- A comment I saw some time ago.

[ealdie]

Perfect! AI can code, write music, make art while we humans only have to worry about hard labor and getting stuck in an office cubicle, slaving off our debts

[ABC-bmkl]

As a music professional who has scored a lot of TV series that were (are) very well known, I can say that sampling technology absolutely impacted the live recording scene significantly in Los Angeles. My first two Disney series in the late 90s were with live players, anywhere from 15 to 46. By 2001 the sampling technology had progressed to the point where Disney stopped using orchestras for their TV series. Even so the technology was such that Orchestration for live players and Synthestration for samples in a MIDI studio were two different ‘arts’ or processes. That started to change when VSL came in the scene and you could, to a large extent, orchestrate for samples the way that you orchestrated for a live ensemble. Today sampling technology is so good that even when live orchestras are used in film, the samples often remain in the final mix. So the drum machine story that Rick (who is awesome) mentioned is much more complex than the simple, ‘drummers started playing like drum machines and their jobs were safe’ narrative. Having written that, I have no plans to buy a T-shirt of my favorite AI musician. The human act of creating art will always matter for the simple reason that we ourselves are not machines.

[stoneagedjp]

Considering how low the bar is now for a no. 1 Billboard hit, it's not too surprising that AI will be able to compete.

[rumplstiltztinkerstein]

So ironic how "art" was the main subject people said that Robots would never be able to replicate. We ended up getting AI art even before commercial humanoid robots.

Edit: That's some spicy comment section right there 🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶

[robertdascoli]

"I can't wait till computer take over all the terrible jobs so that humans can spend their time doing creative things"
'Oh, turns out the creative things are actually way easier for the computers to do. Looks like you'll have to keep the terrible jobs going'

[LukeFaulkner]

I asked Udio to create a track in the style of Chopin and got a message saying "We do not generate artist likeness without permission, we have replaced Chopin with: romanticism, western classical music..."

Then it proceeded to write something that within 2 seconds reminded me of the Nocturne Op. 62 No. 2.

Incredibly impressive, but that text doesn't seem to mean a lot.

[stevegoody]

I think an underappreciated aspect or why we enjoy music is the knowledge that a *person* achieved it. It's connecting to another person's message. A.I has taken the freedom to wonder what a musicians inspirations were without doubting it's even human at all. One of the biggest ways to communicate emotionally through the ages will no longer be supported by the industry.

It's certainly freeing for people who don't know how to write music, but you're not expressing yourself if you just prompt an AI to twist other people's work.
Part of a musician's journey is discovering and honing their sound, and expressing themselves with it. If you're not made for your passion, your passion will make you.
If you're not passionate about your craft, your output will be low effort and soulless. All AI will do is allow those creations to drown out truly passionate artists and cut their wages.

[turdferguson]

Now Skynet will be singing 2000s R&B while murdering us

[kabongpope]

So as far as I can see, all these GenAI/LLM applications are for exactly one thing: getting creative work without paying an artist to do it, while also using millions of examples of actual artists' work to train the machine, also without paying them. GG.

[MagikarpMan]

Video game music is gonna be 99% ai generated in the future

[romanhollow]

I quit putting my music up online for sales. I quit all social media to sell my music. When sites were requiring using my music to train their AI models, i got off those sites and pulled my music. I was training my own replacement.

[shortymcsteve]

You know, there’s something that wasn’t mentioned here that’s going to be a real issue. The judge ruled that AI art can’t be copyrighted, but you absolutely know there’s going to be artists out there who will generate an entire song with AI and re-record it themselves to get around this. Lots of major artists have song writing teams behind them.. but I can see those people getting replaced pretty quickly.

I work in this industry and it’s just depressing really. Never would’ve thought I’d be questioning if my favourite artists have generated a song or wrote it themselves without any AI assistance.

[Yoctopory]

Whenever someone says "Now, everybody can create music / drawings / art", I shiver. It doesn't have anything to do with "creating". It's writing a prompt and clicking a button - it's basically just downloading from an infinite library.

[walpoleandworcester]

Whoa! This is a crossover I hadn’t expected.

[puddletowntom]

Real Intelligence = Vertical innovation: uses present and future patterns,
Artificial Intelligence = Horizontal innovation: uses past patterns which results in generic outcomes

Note the importance of the P in GPT, does what it says on the tin: Generative PRE trained Transformer.

[grubmg]

I am a non-professional musician for 30 years.
When my brother who is a sound technician sent me a link to Udio a month ago I was blown away.
It was a feeling I couldn't quite cope with - it was awe, amazement, shock and sorrow all at the same time.
That's not to say I didn't enjoy immediately playing around with it and creating some crazy tracks (like a heavy metal version of a Sandra Boynton kids book, or a british space odyssey of Vogon poetry)

It is very impressive and very scary.

[Davethreshold]

This happened FIFTEEN YEARS AGO: I played drums for ten years. I went over to my friend's place and his Son was in the basement writing a song with synth, including a separated drum machine. I told him the drum track sounded a bit too perfect, or artificial. He turned what might be called the slop knob, and that drum track sounded PERFECT, with TINY imperfections that drummers have. You could hear some 1/2 notes from the Snare Drum, hit dead center, and a few hitting slightly off center! I couldn't believe it! Like I say, that was fifteen years ago.

[phoenix]

I'm not surprised. People claim they want something new, but all they really want is a variation / derivative of something they already know and want. AI is amazing at that.

[baldricdeathbow]

I personally think every social media app you log onto should show the option to block AI content such as images, video and music right off the bat, and people should be forced to tag all their AI creations appropriately or risk getting their accounts removed.