The music industry has a stellar record of fighting against generational trends - mp3s, youtube videos, streaming, now AI songs
You can say yes to streaming and no to AI songs.
Nobody is impeding that.
So we should start awarding Michelin stars to McDonald's?
Commercial music isn't the only way to make music, but it pays people that want to professionally work as musicians.
- Not all musicians are in the field because it pays, some of them haven't earned a cent
- There are talented people who would like to create music but are forced to work long hours, which leaves them drained. Perhaps in the future, humans won't have to work that much, which will allow them to pursue creative hobbies such as music making
- Artists will be able to continue performing live, which will act as a huge filter for the AI-generated content and keep paying them.
Aside from that I agree, though musicians just one of many groups disrupted by AI and I wouldn't say they'll be the ones hurt most by it, mostly because they can continue to "exist" outside of the Internet, and experiencing music live could become more popular because of it. A lot of assumptions here, I know
I think that this is the fairytale part that I have trouble accepting.
Coming from a country that has a very limited social welfare system I don't believe that the political or social climate is adapted to take such steps in a future where a lot of things are automated.
It goes against everything that we've seen in the last 150 years.
> Artists will be able to continue performing live, which will act as a huge filter for the AI-generated content and keep paying them.
Or AI "musicians" will play live events as holograms.
> Aside from that I agree, though musicians just one of many groups disrupted by AI and I wouldn't say they'll be the ones hurt most by it, mostly because they can continue to "exist" outside of the Internet, and experiencing music live could become more popular behind it.
Sure, they might not be the most affected by AI, but they would still be affected which is the reason I'm not a fan of AI in music. This pushback doesn't need to be reserved to the most impacted activities.
I don't disagree that these things exist, but I do believe that these are mostly propped up by dynamics that will soon no longer exist.
If that is your way of saying that AI will remove the possibility for humans to create music full time due to there being no money anymore in music then sure.
> I don't disagree that these things exist, but I do believe that these are mostly propped up by dynamics that will soon no longer exist.
Which are?
I can see a similar thing playing out with music. There will still be some token demand, but people will not pay the same when they can have a magic, infinitely producing on-demand, tailored-to-their-taste music machine, at vanishingly small marginal costs.
Good for consumers is highly debatable since we'd lose one more social connection in life. Something we are running a very high debt tab for already.
We would also lose musical knowledge since all the full-time musicians would have to stop playing. Only amateur musicians would remain.
And the "desired lifestyle" / "desired status" would be transferred to the already very, very rich and powerful AI company CEOs. Such an improvement ...
agriculture is made by tractors now. should we ban them and return to the plow?
Music is art and musicians don't lack in efficiency.
For AI music it would be the same. You could find it online on some shifty third-party websites or use some illegal model on your own hardware but in the end it will always represent a minority use case.
A lot of people complaining are doing it just for the sake of complaining, because anti-AI virtue signaling nets them clout, meanwhile they will happily scroll entire timelines of edited photos, movies which are nothing else than fake reality "slop".
People generally have nuanced opinions not represented solely by whatever Tweets are popular, and this is true of basically every single topic.
There is a difference between an AI critic who dislikes the AI output based on their sense of taste/aesthetic/soullessness and someone who likes something until they learn that there's 0.0001% of AI content in it, which suddenly turns it into abomination. I agree that the latter tends to be the louder group, but it is a group nonetheless and I clearly did not invent jumping on a bandwagon.
Actually, they were fighting people taking something without paying. Not fighting a "trend".
When you "take" an mp3, it's still where it started.
Edit: There's a whole lot of replies trying to sell the idea that AI Slop and pop music is the same. It isn't. You can dislike pop music all you want, you can think it's low effort all you want, but it's not AI Slop. This is a false equivalency.
Personally? I dream of a future where everything is McDonald's. Software, books, articles, artwork, movies, podcasts, music, and basically anything that makes life enjoyable.
Everything will be slop, nothing will be spared. 90% of everything is garbage? That's underachieving, let's improve our slop KPIs next quarter and make Sturgeon's law 100% of everything.
I'm being pedantic AF because most people refer to AI slop as "low-quality or careless work". And AI is just a tool so it's possible to spend a lot of time making something of high quality with it. I get the outrage with respect to copyright and artist rights, but it certainly doesn't look like slop to me.
AI slop, Human slop - who cares if people are enjoying it.
Many people do care in fact.
This is obvious, though. This part of human nature will never change, and there is no argument that can confront it, and no reason to want to formulate one unless:
A. It makes you money.
B. It appears to have dividing lines that match a larger culture war in which you have emotional stock.
Your definition of "slop" seems to be "is popular with the mainstream." That isn't the definition used when applied to AI generated music. Spice Girls and Coldplay are leagues beyond anything an AI can currently produce in terms of artistic quality. Yes, there is artistic quality to popular culture.
And to most people it matters that human beings produce it. It may not matter to you - you may only consider music or any other form of art to be nothing more than a means of producing stimuli intended to create a pleasing endorphine response, but most people don't want to process art the way a machine processes data.
speaking of tired memes.
How about 1920: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.
But what makes us think R.U.R. is still about robots is that the play is explicit that the robots are assembled, not grown:
> His robots resemble more modern conceptions of man-made life forms, such as the Replicants in Blade Runner, the "hosts" in the Westworld TV series and the humanoid Cylons in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, but in Čapek's time there was no conception of modern genetic engineering (DNA's role in heredity was not confirmed until 1952). There are descriptions of kneading-troughs for robot skin, great vats for liver and brains, and a factory for producing bones. Nerve fibers, arteries, and intestines are spun on factory bobbins, while the robots themselves are assembled like automobiles. Čapek's robots are living biological beings, but they are still assembled, as opposed to grown or born.
If these tracks are so (organically) popular why are they restricted to Spotify, why aren’t they on other services?
To get these of the ground there are lots of fake comments and fake views but after a while these videos gain traction and then the algos pick them up for organic views.
Search youtube for "female vocal blues" or "female country songs" and it is all AI and it is really good - good in a sense that you don't realise it immediately. But they garner millions of views. They are not McDonald's but fine dining cooked with convenience products.
I am quite split about algorithmically generated music but I have to admit that I have fallen once into the trap. And only when I searched for the artist I figured out it is AI. Though once you know it you immediately hear it.
Edit: I went to one of the websites offering this as a service and in 5 minutes it creates a very decent song including lyrics. I forgot which but remember it was something like $20 for 1000 songs. Not a surprise that youtube gets swamped with it - it costs next to nothing to produce, neither time nor money.
No serious label does this as there's no benefit from those drive-by listens other than making the number go up, but you can bet that nearly every artist without a label that somehow reaches over a million listens on their first release does.
Editorial playlists on the other hand actually require you to do good in some of the niche ones before you get "promoted" to the bigger ones.
It's incredibly naive to think you can stop AI use by banning it. Banning AI just means banning admitting you used AI.
Are not music charts a list of songs people are expected to like, or else?
That said, it shouldn't be illegal to like trash, or to make money off of trash if people want to buy it. It's trivial for a human musician with moderate talent and experience to make better music than this. The musicians who are afraid this is going to replace them are probably not doing much original or creative in the first place.
Nobody is suggesting this.
>or to make money off of trash if people want to buy it
The article is about a chart, not a distribution platform. Regardless, we make laws controlling the ability to make money off of things people want to buy all the time - laws protect humans (idealistically) and our economy/incentives (realistically).
>The musicians who are afraid this is going to replace them are probably not doing much original or creative in the first place.
This is a lie. People of all creativity/originality levels are justified in believing that AI will improve.
I think the end product is what matters, not what tools were used to make it. I don't see a principled argument for drawing the line at AI tools but not other software tools like DAWs or plugins that generate chord progressions and melodies using techniques other than machine learning.
No one is stopping people from listening at all, it's just someone's rule for their thing, nothing else.
ironbound•3w ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1942%E2%80%931944_musicians%27...