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Comment by fumblebee | Hacker News Reader

Unbelievably cool. Great job.

Tangentially — apologies if this is the wrong thread for this —, I know this is distinct to AI generated music (the melody here is a one-to-one mapping between the input song and output piano), but I’m curious when folks here think when the first totally generated artist will go mainstream with chart hits and millions of “followers”. With both an AI generated avatar and AI generated music. And no, not like Gorillaz who simply had fake cartoon personas.

If you believe the argument floating around that content we consume in the future will be hyper individualised to the point music/tv will be generated just for us, then maybe never. IMO that runs counter to shared idolatry that people seem to crave, seems to me just a matter of time.

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I think the answer is "never", but mostly because the target is both vague and impossibly strict.

Let's take Hatsune Miku. You could argue that "she" fits the bill (3D character, algorithmic voice, lots of followers), but of course there are humans writing those songs and music. If you automated that away (AI lyrics, AI music) you would still have humans checking that the music fits "her" style, that the lyrics make sense, and that the result is not just a racist tirade due to 4chan training data. And as long as those humans are there you can't really say it's 100% AI, can you?

One could argue (wrongly, IMHO) that doing the selection and filtering is not the same as making music, but that criteria would then classify DJs as "not musicians" and I know they hate that.

> And as long as those humans are there you can't really say it's 100% AI, can you?

I don't know how real artists do things, but I suspect that at least some of them rely on other people opinions about their new piece of work before going public with it. Basically for the same reasons. It is hard to objectively judge your own creative work. Especially because your fans do not judge your works objectively. You need to listen some voice of sanity to not loose your connection with reality.

If it doesn't work as an argument, I can propose a thought experiment. Let's imagine a human artist with a mental disability who sometimes allow himself to do some really strange things. To protect him from big mistakes there is a small group of mentally healthy and competent people to filter his works. The question is: can we say that our disabled artist's works are not his works? Or not 100% his works?

> And as long as those humans are there you can't really say it's 100% AI, can you?

I believe it depends. How much of filtering those humans do?

That's just not how it works. If anything the opposite is true. Music is full of big egos, ie, this is my band, we do it my way or the highway.

What you're saying might be true for boy bands and pop trash, but actual artists are extremely headstrong.

Let a million Mikus bloom unfiltered. The ones that spew out racist tirades or subpar music-noises would presumably be rejected by the consumers (although you never know these days).

Well, DJs are not musicians. They hate it because deep down, they know it's true.

I think you will see an approach like mine with a heavy use of AI assistants in creating various elements of the songs first (I will compare 10 melodies I've created with an AI assistant I made to human hit melodies: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoCzMRqh5SkFPG0-RIAR8..., https://osf.io/9nd6x). Most existing tools support this approach, and doing a whole song at once does not seem necessary and it would be much less flexible.

I believe there is a potential market where contemporary celebrity laden media is personalized with automated actor replacement. Fans can have the fantasy of being in the media: in the fantasy, sci-fi, superhero and pop music media they already consume. Side by side with their idols, plus further personalizing treatments such as localization and product placements. This may sound Orwellian, but it is also wildly open ended and a creative uncharted territory for narrative story telling. The potential for education is profound.

I've been working on fully automated actor replacement for over a decade now, exploring the aspects and potential of such personalization. I think it has the potential of being an entire recognized separate medium from traditional story telling.

Not until the AI has some degree of agency. So long as it's a human selecting the AI, and pushing the "run" button (and deciding when) to push the button, that generation machinery is just a tool of the human. Pretty much by definition, to be totally generated, it's got to have the agency to determine what, when, and even if, it should generate.

does agency equate to volition here? when humans exercise agency, is this more than a mechanical phenomenon?

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