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Ty it don’t think peasants were listening t to Bach, do you? Only the extraordinarily wealthy could afford to have music as anything like an every day thing.
This does not augment the music making process in any way, it simply replaces it with what might as well be a gacha game. There's no low-level experimentation, no knowledge acquisition, no growth, and you can't even truly say you made whatever comes out.
It's not a tool for music creators, it's a tool for people who want slop that's "good enough".
Making an activity in which the primary limiting factors for most people are the time, knowledge, and effort required (as opposed to expensive tools) into an effortless slot machine pull is enfeebling to human creativity and agency. Who will spend the hours of making bad music to get to the point where they become good if they can just rely on something else to generate music that's "good enough"?
There's something to be said about all this which is related to AI generated images that I rarely see brought up: people with specific skills play roles within groups, so AI making their hobby that they dedicated so much time to more easily accessible makes them lose social value, which might make them quit altogether.
The common response that "people should make art because they love it, not for attention" is a prescriptive statement that supposes there are more or less "pure" forms of performing an activity and also ignores that art is a form of communication.
I agree that the slot machine pull of current models is tedious and boring. I look forward to models/systems which better facilitate more creative control, directed exploration and iterative refinement.
Accurate value judgements in this case.
Creation is a human activity, charged with emotions, efforts, which are their own rewards, as much as the end-product, which is invested of this human (sometimes collective and not instant) effort and intention and creative loopbacks. Let's call that some kind of history (because the process did happen).
Generation short-circuits that entirely, as it happens at non-human speeds, and non-human scales. It's something _else_ entirely. You do get an end-product. It may be fun and useful for some; it sometimes is. However, you don't get the process, the collaboration and the inner transformation it comes with.
Adding: with two different end-products, the issue is then how they are perceived, received, appreciated and valued by those not "in the know" of how they were made. And that is both an artistic, aesthetic and economic problem. Generating soulless shit that isn't invested with a human sentiment miseducates people and destroys taste.
Models that are oriented around one-shot, text-only direction are pretty limiting in creative flow. This will hopefully continue to improve.
Bullshit. These "tools" replace the creator, who now has no meaningful input to what gets created.
The composer is the AI. Not the person who spent 10 seconds typing a prompt.
In the same sense that a music producer telling an artist to "make me a new song" or a new album is creation of music on the part of the producer.
It's not what most people think of when they hear "creating music".
We've done these things ourselves for hundreds of thousands of years. As we are increasingly convinced to buy them for convenience we loose the very things that make us know our connectedness.
So ya, there are real problems caused by the convenience of technology
> People that never considered the value of artistic process until it was the topic du jour unilaterally decided that it was inefficient, oppressive, complex, frivolous, and unfairly inaccessible to those that hadn't put any sustained effort into developing theirs.
This is eerily reminiscent of what's happening inside the USA government & administration today...
For sure! After all, what could be more democratic than a monthly subscription that could get snatched away at any moment - and clearly there's nothing more creative than pressing a button and waiting for 20 seconds!
> People that never considered the value of artistic process
One certainly learns of crazy things on HackerNews. Apparently people have never considered the value of artistic process, and not only that, but you also happen know that exactly.
> the topic du jour unilaterally decided
You're literally in this thread disagreeing.
> it was inefficient, oppressive, complex, frivolous, and unfairly inaccessible
Very interesting claims, too bad they were only stated in your imagination. That being said, your imagination I think is surprisingly close to my opinions! Let's discuss each point:
- it is very time-intensive to produce creative works of any kind, and indeed to perform any kind of mental work at all
- it does get pretty complex too, and because of this, some mental efforts are even shot down for being too frivolous (such as that bit of automation that is not worth making because it would never pay itself off)
- oppressive is a bit of an odd one, but if I think hard enough, I guess I can see how having to use the output of e.g. my work (software) can be oppressive
- same for unfairly inaccessible - lately there's been a trend where various services would only be available online, and the only contact you'd get is a self-service form or two. Maaaybe you'd get an AI chatbot to chat with. Certainly, to those with minimal to no tech literacy, this will be inaccessible and it will feel unfair.
> was merely the natural progression of artistic praxis
If only there was a way to disagree with this without being a dickhead!
> these tools have democratized creativity
How does one democratize an innate property of people? Surely you mean that they have democratized the production of creative works rather, and even of those only the less high-art ones, which I'm sure you never fail to point out when shown one?
> they're now broadly available to anyone willing to pay money for a subscription service that will obviously soon be a hell of a lot more expensive, or shell out a few thousands dollars for a top-tier video card that you almost certainly already have in your gaming rig, anyway.
And what happens after that? Artists will be like "oh gee, well I'm not doing this again!"?
> This is silicon valley progress
And also Hangzhou and Shenzen, China.
> and if you don't like it, you're a communist
Are you? You seem to be more of a raging idiot than anything to me at least.
Granted, many people are benefiting from these tools (myself included) but at some point a lot of us are going to have to find a new job (assuming the progression continues unabated), and I'm not sure what new jobs are going to exist when LLM coders replace many or most of us.
These API composers perform a task many humans want to do. And there are roughly zero consumers of music saying "you know what's missing from the music market? music made with no human input."
This strictly serves capital. The goal is to destroy more artists livelihood to marginally increase the wealth of already wealthy people.
By the same logic synthesizers shouldn't have been invented that allowed people to make advanced sounds without tediously learning an instrument first, consumers should remain priced out of microphones and editing software, etc.
Like I said, I am not trying to feign ignorance on the drawbacks of the tech which is very real and far from negligible. I am not a tech bro AI maximalist. I just do believe that hyperbole will not put the djinn back into the bottle, and pretending like there isn't a real market between nothing and paying or being a composer isn't adding anything to the conversation.
Tell me one example how music gen in any way benefits anybody to the level that is worth putting out of business the last few artists that make ends meet?
We would be better off if the other 99.9% didn't have worry about making ends meet, than if we do whatever it takes to keep the status quo of the 0.1% intact. That does not only go for artists.
Check how many ai songs are uploaded daily to spotify and any other platform.
And show me a few of those artists that hate making music and welcome ai.
If you don't enjoy composing music, just don't do it, and give it to someone who does, and has the experience/knowledge/culture/practice/gut to do it.
It's just that.. you can't master something you don't practice and understand. It's true in every single thing in life you do, sports, literature, maths, music, cuisine, kindness, etc.
If you don't like to compose music, why suffer this and even submit to the randomness of some computer program, rather than giving the opportunity to another fellow human to open your ears and your mind to what they appreciate doing?
You can generate your music if you like. It just cannot compare to something a human really did on her own, and invested of her desire, time, practice, research, even a beginner.
It's not a matter of being professional or not. The best musicians I know are not professionals, they all have a day job.
For every famous star for one given instrument, you have 10s of undiscovered/local better musicians that just are carpenters, cooks, painters, drivers, factory workers.
I think "stop not enjoying it" is a better line to take. Like with AI illustrations (where I'd much rather see a blog author's crappy biro drawings instead), terrible amateur efforts with some online 808 emulator or whatever would be more entertaining and interesting than AI output.
"Giving it someone who does" is also an opportunity to socialise and grow a mutual understanding of said music desire. That's sometimes even how collaborations start. But that's not on short notice...
Perhaps generators could be also seen as some kind of introductory instruments to wet the appetite of becoming musicians?
This supposes that the music is the end goal, and the very point of my comment is that it doesn't always have to be, and in those cases "just don't do it" also means not doing whatever comes after.
Just as you state below, this doesn't replace creating music for the creation's sake. I don't believe it will, or should. It merely replaces having nothing at all, or having the 100,000th video with the same upbeat stock sound.
Well it has the benefit of being true.
We've created machines to replace humans doing things humans enjoy doing. Leaving the drudgery machines were supposed to eliminate to be done by humans.
There's at least an order of magnitude more people who enjoy making music than there are people with the actual skill/talent to make music. Music generation AI is an absolute blessing to the untalented among us who'd love to make a song in a certain style or with certain lyrics but lack the time, talent or ability to do it ourselves.
But don't mistake one thing for the other: how is it different than, say, being Emperor Joseph II asking Mozart in Vienna to write an opera for him?
Mozart wrote the music, not Joseph.
Similarly, you can hike across France, from South to Britain for several days. Or you can take the train. Or a car, alone, or with a driver. Or a plane, in the pilot or the passenger seat.
You'll get in the same place in the end. The experience will be totally, fundamentally different for you, as well as for others.
I'm a musician myself, but I sadly suspect that most music made today "benefits humanity" very little... Is music making always a net positive? If nothing else, these tools will allow more music will be made.
Yes because the act of making music, even not very good music, is what has value. Music generated without human input has no discernible value.
> If nothing else, these tools will allow more music will be made.
By machines that, as far as we can tell, take no enjoyment from making it. And eliminates any possibility of emotional connection between the artist and the listener. Which is the entire source of music's value.
Doesn't seem like much you could actually tweak beyond the short style queue and lyrics. To really be customizable you'd need a method to tweak the generation to inform the tone, inflection, and flow of the music at any given point to satisfy what you wanted to pair it with.
Songs have lulls and swells to go with the tone and emotion you're trying to create/communicate these are just strings of lyrics over boring barely connecting backing tracks.