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Comment by ein0p | Hacker News Reader

Spotify is already filled with “10 million of functionally identical songs” made by people “looking to scrape off a few cents”. The state of the art, such as it is, could hardly be any worse.

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Automating slop will absolutely increase its volume multiple orders of magnitude. At least human made music, however terrible, stands the chance of accidentally being interesting.

When everyone can produce “slop” in seconds the value of slop rapidly approaches zero and you have to do something the machine can’t do, which is produce original, superior material. You also get to use generations as a starting point and improve upon them. I think if anything this will only improve the human SOTA.

The value of slop does approach zero, but as the time and money required to produce slop also approaches zero it takes very little incentive for people to keep churning out infinite amounts of slop. If it costs 2 cents to make an AI generated song and the EV on its Spotify revenue is 3 cents then it's worth doing if you can automate it. Meanwhile everyone making an actual effort, using AI or not, gets buried under an ocean of shit that nobody has the patience to wade through.

This is the principle behind AI-generated SEO blogs, the content is garbage that nobody wants, but they are profitable nonetheless.

I think that's naive - good luck finding the "superior" material when the marketplace is flooded with garbage. Amazon users are facing this exact issue at the moment with chatGPT generated 'books'. Users and site operators cannot scale up to filter out the low quality sludge being generated by AI.

But we already have to do that. The marketplace is already flooded with garbage. People who do original things will still float to the top. People who already produce poorly made crap will have to do something else

Why would they float to the top? Marketing budgets will push garbage to the top like what happens now in music. No real change. Leaving the audio tune era into the AI era isn't going to change anything.

> The state of the art, such as it is, could hardly be any worse.

That seems highly unlikely to be true.

The AI actually makes better music than most of the amateurs on spotify

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