It is clearly plain to anyone who is a musician or hangs out with a lot of musicians that the independent music world is livid about this stuff. Everyone I’ve talked to, from acoustic songwriters to metal singers to circuit-bending pedalheads are united in their absolute hatred of this technology.
(Yes, follow-up commenter, I’ve seen the Timbaland interview)
They should not be worried if they aren't generic sounding independent musicians already.
Lastly, and a historical case in point, this whole conversation is a repetition of the anti-Sampler movement of the 80s and 90s. Look what that techno-leap brought us.
A new technology brings new sounds, if we all stopped treating a megalithic search engine as a personality, we'll move forwards with a lot less drama.
Needs significant human involvement to make it interesting.
How long that remains true is another question…
I could listen to music by real people being vulnerable and expressing themselves, or I could listen to a computer soullessly regurgitating a stock "blues" melody with inane lyrics about a trash can. Why would I ever pick the latter?
Me, I see the patterns too fast to even care for a second play of recorded music from a real human, only theme songs for nostalgia-inducing shows have enough of an emotional kick to get past that.
GenAI music has all the same problems as GenAI images (try asking Suno for "Just fox noises" to see what happens out of distribution), but collectively it has at least been a bit harder for me to spot the pattern behind them in aggregate, even if each song by itself still has the same problem for me as any other recording.
Borderline acceptable for elevator music is a long way from the paradigm shift you claim it is.
> For complex AI generated music, tools like Suno and Udio are obviously in a different league as they're trained specifically on audio and can produce genuinely impressive results. But that's not what this experiment was about.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=atcqMWqB3hw
From the author:
> The instrumental and vocals were both generated using Suno with a lot fiddling around with the prompts. The video was edited by a human in kdenlive :-)
what about DJing? all DJs are doing is replaying someone elses music and recombining it in creative ways. and that is considered art. isn't that similar to telling an AI what melodies or songs to use?
i'd agree that a fully AI generated song without any human input is not art, but i would not completely reject AI use either. there is a middle ground somewhere, where that is depends on the intention of the creator.
It's not just good at producing complete songs though, AI has made it trivial to take garbage and make it sound good.
I largely stopped making music because imo unless you're in the top 5% of musicians AI is probably able to write better music than you.
I guess it's the same with visual artists. Unless you're really, really good it's hard to understand why anyone would produce art by hand these days.
The idea that you'd stop trying to express yourself because you're comparing your own artistic voice to the output of an LLM and somehow seeing it as less valid, or less worthwhile, is just sad.
I don't mean that as an insult, I mean it's genuinely sad for you and for all of us as a species.
I do enjoy making music, and I don't do it "by hand". I use lots of tools (instruments, electronics, a computer for recording and mixing, the internet for distribution). As long as I'm the one directing the tools, it's still art and it's still my music.
Brian Eno set up a bunch of tape loops of different lengths with a few notes each and let them run until something interesting happened.
Washed Out slowed down some Italo disco and sang over it (Feel It All Around aka theme to Portlandia). Does that count? [0]
Artists gonna art.
[0] https://www.tiktok.com/@nardinyouryard/video/759472477690464...
It won't be long before this becomes:
> I largely stopped making _____ because imo unless you're in the top 5% of making _____ AI is probably able to make _____ better than you.
Especially where _____ is anything that can be created digitally.