I walked into a paint store recently and there was some interesting music playing on the PA. It was some sort of spanish-language 80s new wave I'd never heard before. It had a nice groove. I asked the guy at the counter about it and was surprised to find out it was AI.
So... was it as good as great music? No. But it beat the hell out of muzak. And it was genuinely novel in a way that pop music isn't. I will sacrifice a lot of pride for novelty.
For my part, I mostly dislike AI music. But if there was to be some AI music that I didn't already dislike for its content, then I would dislike it specifically for being AI. Call me close-minded if you will. Some people don't really like music at all. In general, I love music.
> And it was genuinely novel in a way that pop music isn't. I will sacrifice a lot of pride for novelty.
For one thing, "interesting" and "novel" are not particularly the point of art. An infinite TikTok feed of AI slop is in some sense infinitely interesting and novel.
But also, those concepts are subjective. Pop music has a ton of evolution and innovation if you break it down. Sure, not every hit is doing something clever, but plenty of them are. You might not find those features to be interesting but it takes ingenuity to stand out in an era where the barrier to entry is so low.
AI music is a complete waste of compute. It exists only to further enrich an already wealthy stakeholder, and we should all be ashamed to have ended up in a place where it even exists.
And I think it can be uniquely fun, because it allows for the very rare combination of truly off-beat ideas with excellent execution.
In real life, it very rarely happens that somebody will spend a lifetime learning, gather a band, and then record something extremely off-beat. Because there are risks to that. Destroying your image, having to find people that are on the same wavelength, having to justify the time and money it costs to record something weird and not marketable.
Sure, people make weird stuff once in a while, but very rarely, and generally it takes unique individuals that find some particular weird niche to work in, like Weird Al or Max Raabe. And even then they tend to pick something relatively tame and marketable and stick to that.
But AI can bypass all that, and that makes things interesting.
And often the weirdest artists are also the most prolific because they tend to like experimenting for experimenting's sake.
My jaw literally dropped. Do you really believe this?
I think you just don't spend much time around people who love music.
It makes sense that someone like you would like AI music, I guess. You are clueless.
Sure. It happens in every field. When you invest a lot into something, it becomes risky or unprofitable to do some things.
Tech often drives things in the opposite direction. As it gets easier/cheaper/faster to create something, doing something odd and risky becomes easier to justify because there's less invested into it and there's fewer people whose cooperation is needed.
I'm not saying nobody does anything risky traditionally of course. But there's barriers to it, which become lesser once tech trivializes a good part of the process.
> It makes sense that someone like you would like AI music, I guess. You are clueless.
I like music in general, and am fairly indifferent as to how the goose is cooked. I listen to almost everything. There's no reason to exclude AI music. If it sounds good, it's good.
Controversial take: AI shows that people simply don't give a shit and just confirms that mass culture is a mistake and the death of everything that is good and sacred.
Controversial take: For ages, it's been clear that most people have never given a shit, it just took AI for most to realize it.
>it was genuinely novel
Look, I don't know the song so I can't say how novel it is, but to me, it completely misses the point if its made by a music generation model. The point of music is not to make a bunch of novel sounds. Music is a means by which a human can express themselves, the whole _point_ of art is human expression.
Human expression with art can go both ways from producing and experiencing.
Bird's aren't making art when they sing, I still like listening to birds. Why can't the sounds AI make be in the same category.
I saw a live band last week (daft punk meets prince), they wrote a song about Ai and used an auto tuner for it
2. Call it slop
3. Claim victory
I don't know what to tell you, but me and my kid are having a blast writing ridiculous songs and plopping them with song descriptions and some of those make it to our drive playlists.