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Comment by werber | Hacker News Reader

Spotify being listed as one of the brands doing AI right is jarring to me. It’s the only one of the companies mentioned where I’ve had multiple conversations with non tech people about how much they hate their AI usage. Specifically in their case the drift to AI produced and performed music in the playlists that are not explicitly labeled as AI. And there seems to be a nuance to what uses people are ok with, large language models for personal use, ok, generative ai in any creative capacity, offensive. Obviously anecdotal, but this article was very far from the reality I’m experiencing

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Same with the 'doing AI right' Netflix example for me. Showing me the same exact recommendations in each tray but in a different order isn't helping.

That is how netflix was before ai too.

Now, personally I want AI to disappear, but music is one of the few areas where AI COULD be potentially useful. The reason I say this is because for music, the criterium should be whether the music is good or bad, not who made it. I still think humans are better than AI, but there were audio tracks fully AI generated which was not bad. It does not convince me into one of those humans who fell for the skynet trap and embraced AI, but I also can not say that all of AI is totally useless - just 99.9%.

I feel that "good" music has some emotional resonance with me, at some level. In my opinion AI won't ever be able generate what I'm looking for, it always strikes me as somewhat bland or seems too much like another track.

Background music in distracting environments, where the listening is maybe the third or fourth thing I'm doing, maybe AI will be acceptable.

https://www.audible.ca/fr_CA/pd/What-Could-Go-Wrong-Livre-Au... , this podcast (which I guess is now only available as a book) was really interesting, about 3/4 of the way through they tackle the emotional resonance bit, with one of the people from Broken Social Scene, and the artist kinda breaks down because the AI model they were experimenting with was able to replicate the "humanness" of music that loved. All in all it was a really interesting program, but the music section was probably the most fascinating.

The humanness of the music I listen to is given by actual humans composing and playing it. I don't mean little mistakes or whatever signal, but knowing it's made by humans. Otherwise I can't be arsed to listen to it, because probably I only care so much about the music itself. Because why would I? But yeah some people choose a virtual girlfriend too, so I'm probably just not in the right target group for AI productions.

PS: of course they can lie to me. Until I find out.

> The reason I say this is because for music, the criterium should be whether the music is good or bad, not who made it

The first thing I do when I find a nice track is to lookup the album and the artist. I may not like all the tracks on the album, or all the albums of the artists. But the album vision and the artist motivation and skills is why an album (I listen by album) get added to my collection. That collection is meaningful for me, not for the quality of the tracks (which is fairly subjective) but the emotional resonance I have with it. Kinda like the house I grew up vs a random penthouse. An AI produce piece may be nice, but it won’t have the emotional depth to anchor it for me.

How is this different from any other use of AI? Of course the criteria for everything should be good or bad not who made it.

I just can't see myself ever going to a venue to see an AI artist perform. Would it just involve watching a video?

But then why stop at music and not apply it to all art like movies and books as well. The criterium to judge should be the same for them.

But I feel you are underestimating how much people care about the artist as well. Could AI get that level of support from people knowing its not a real human being? I don't think so. I mean most artist stories are also fabricated but if you explictly tell people hey this is like not real at all and fully ai but its a rapper from this particular city who grew up struggling with this particular issue so people from that city and facing those issues could relate to him probably, dont think it will work because people will still know its a bot pretending to be from their city and facing their particular issue.

Lastly i also generally public likes authenticity and the idea of an algorithm just spamming music is not very inspiring in that regard. Maybe in a blind test, they wouldn't even be able to tell which track is ai and which is not but the moment you tell them which one it is, they will likely think its bad, because who made the art completely changes the prespective of the consumer

> the criterium should be whether the music is good or bad, not who made it.

Setting aside how simplistic a simple good/bad scale for any art is, who made a piece of music and what they were expressing with it is absolutely part of the quality consideration.

A big part of music is being able to share it with friends at a party, sing it at Karaoke, see the performer live, follow their story etc. so that I can be a part of some kind of culture.

I’m not looking for an emotional painkiller to keep me subdued and isolated.

> not who made it

I’m not going to get the wow of “how did they perform that phrase/melody/rhythm” the same way from music that wasn’t actually performed (ack this doesn’t apply to all genres obviously)

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