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Comment by hypersoar | Hacker News Reader

I mentioned this in another comment thread, recently, but I value art, including music, for the fact that another human being(s) created it to express something. I have zero interest in it if it's AI-generated. The thought of endless content created from the void for me to gorge on like oreos fills me with nothing but despair.

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I think AI will raise the bar for all kinds of artistic mediums. There’s already more music, literature, film etc than you can possibly consume - if you can easily make middling art with a prompt then it’s going to be swamped by all the other stuff, the really good, unique, fresh art will rise to the top. Perhaps they’ll use AI but it’ll still be the same amount of work put into and the quality will be better. I think nobody is going to get rich and famous from low-effort promoting.

> I think nobody is going to get rich and famous from low-effort promoting.

Hopefully not, but there will be a lot of people trying, which is the problem. That alone will drown out a lot of human made music and muddy the waters.

>if you can easily make middling art with a prompt then it’s going to be swamped by all the other stuff, the really good, unique, fresh art will rise to the top

No it'll be buried under slop. This was a huge issue before AI-generated art and I can only see it getting worse.

Exactly. Mass-market music is not good. It takes effort to find the good stuff, especially if you want to find new good stuff. The last 20 years has seen a shift toward the most bland, formulaic, autotuned music. All the weird, quirky, interesting qualities have been ironed out. AI does not make mistakes, and more importantly, does not make any demands of its owners, unlike an actual rock star.

Fortunately there are still many talented (but struggling) musicians out there. I worry that the flood of passable AI generated content will finally finish them off.

The last 20 years have been an explosion of new music as barriers to making it have gone down. More musicians are making more music and there's more good stuff than ever.

Angine de Poitrine is the perfect example of that, something current AI would have a hard time replicating but I'm not saying it's not possible.

Why on earth would I pick something someone made with no intention - because they didn’t actually make anything just described and crossed their fingers - over something made by a real that actually expresses something meaningful and personal?

You can't call it “your writing” or “your music” if you’re using the same tool millions of others are using that boils your idea down to the same reduction as everyone else’s made with the exact same (stolen) ingredients.

Remember how people treated auto-tune?

« Raising the bar » makes literally no sense, but only if you consider a tiny segment of activities within the arts that’s about consumption, promotion and purchase.

A lot of music is not art. It's a content factory that uses humans.

Content factories that use AI will hopefully force humans to up their game.

Personally I feel humans are capable of so much more than pop music has become over the last 50 to 60 years.

A lot of today's music is so overproduced and formulaic.

I would love to see an arms race between humans and AI where humans are forced to continually adapt and get better.

The only thing about AI generated music that makes me sad is, I worry musical tastes will fragment even more and none of us will recognize the music our neighbors, classmates, or colleagues are listening to because we actively tailor our music to our personal tastes.

I use Suno and I've already noticed this.

A friend sends me a song they generated and I want to tweak it a bit to my personal preference. When we all can create music to our personal taste, we lose a little bit of the joy of all listening to the same song or album release.

As an aspiring musician I agree, however there are two sides of the coin here. Yes, 100% AI generated music is a no from me as well, but using AI as an assistant enables solo people like me create music that is on the level with high end productions. Just think about what entails making your average record solo - you need to do everything yourself - vocals, learn/play/record all the instruments, be proficient in DAW, mixing, mastering, all the hardware and the list goes on - any one of those points can take years if not decades for a single person to master, and you have to do it all by yourself. Which is why most people give up before they even try. This is where AI comes in - just like in coding it can do the heavy lifting for you.

I'm not necessarily opposed to any AI assistance in the creative process, though it's a complicated question. But there's investment out there in generating content purely for indulgence, and to that I say no fucking thank you. "Here's what it would've sounded like if Rachmaninoff had written a 5th piano concerto!" He died 80 years ago. I'll just keep listening to No. 2 and otherwise move on with my life, like a healthy human being.

With AI it’s very easy to create generic, common Pop or any other formulaic garbage music. It might be a good thing for the music industry, most of the low effort might just vanish in the sea of AI gen. This may actially raise the bar for music in general while at the same lowering the bar to simply prompting which is just a stage that will go away.

Where is the line though?

If I write the song lyrics myself, does it become valid art then?

If I listen to it and then use that feedback to adjust the song structure, because it’s not giving me the feeling that I want to convey to others, is it art?

If I then repeat that multiple times, is it art?

What if I then record my own guitar parts or vocals, what then?

I don’t necessarily think these things can have an answer but I outright disagree that “if AI is used then the thing that’s made is categorically not art”.

Survivorship bias. You can't tell at some point. You probably already are listening to AI songs, and looking at AI images. You can only tell what you know. Given the amount generated daily its more probable than improbable.

anything wrong with that? there is probably rat poison in your food already, why not eat rat poison directly

Do you not put thought into what you listen to? I don't just passively have music forced down my throat like I'm a duck being fattened for foie gras, I actively choose what I listen to and I know the artists involve don't use AI.

There are plenty people that just turn on the radio or Spotify to have some random Muzak in the background.

Yeah I disdain them

i know with 100% certainty that im not listening to ai songs. how are you listening to music that you know nothing at all about it?

I'm happy to meet the one guy on earth who can identify who used ai when making art and who didn't.

Unless you exclusively listen to old music color me skeptical

Most songs on digital platforms are upsampled to higher waveform qualities using AI, do you only listen to physical media?

Whether or not the AI can "fool" me is totally irrelevant to my point. Yes, one-shot prompts will be able to make content I can't distinguish from something made by a human, if they can't do so already. Some of it will probably sneak its way in to my media diet (though the fact that most of the music I listen to was composed over 100 years ago makes it less likely for me than most). But if I were halfway through a novel that was absolutely blowing my mind when I learned it was created by a publisher punching "write me a book that'll sell good" into ChatGPT 8, I would instantly lose all interest. I would also have unbounded fury at said publisher for dishonestly marketing such a book to me. The point of art is not just to indulge my own sensibilities. It is to connect me to other people.

What if it was an author punching that in, and then refining it to make it sound less like AI? Or an author structuring their chapters with the help of AI? Or an author fixing their spelling using AI? Or rewording sentences using AI? Or an author brainstorming with an AI to create the idea of the book,and then writing it themselves? Or an author writing half the book, and then asking an AI to finish the other half using the initial style?

If you start living in some kind of idealist world where you say that you will drop the book upon the understanding of the process over the outcome, you inevitably have to start to deal with the definitions like this.

> have zero interest in it if it's AI-generated.

Someone is using AI to make songs for ads on YouTube. Maybe it's not a new thing, but I just started seeing them recently, and they're so fucking bad. They're these dull, rambling things telling a boring story badly, with equally bland AI animations to accompany it. They just go on, and on, and on, and suck the entire time.

Absolutely agreed. Art made by humans is interesting not just because it sounds it looks novel, but because it reveals something about the artist.

This video is the perfect answer to your concern: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/R6c_yJZYEQ4

if/when music gen gets to the point of being able to convincingly emulate given source material, it would be genuinely amazing. I don't really care whether it's manmade or not if it's the only way to get more of the thing I like. nihao ChinaGPT, listen to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and generate 100 more songs like that. if it's >= 90% as good as the source, I'll consoom it.

This is not a pro ai comment, I hope some bios bug bricks all the nvidia rtx gpus in the planet.

With that said... ai generated music, the same can be said about software... but compilers are basically ai, there is no way a for loop on extremely high level abstraction that then open connections to some service, generates jtokens, validates, and apply math non stop from a couple of lines is anything but alien to the 99% of us (yes I know you can write assembly for all your programs and you are better than the compiler)

What if you say, if humans where not involved and a phisically non electric instrument where involved and done with only humans, it's AI assited? because again you don't understand ALL the relationships, how it's designed every single thing, all the things in a music studio to master a song, ALL the related mechanisms used in the promotion, distribution and live execution of those songs... and yes, again there is some of you who can build all those things from sand and pumped from the ground with a tool you designed bare petroleum and program, design and execute EVERY SINGLE THING required to get a record of music you like...

So if a group of 20 people spends 20 weeks working with AI tools to get you a song, then you don't care I guess right?

Did you know that Enya for this song recorded thousand something times voices to make a chorus until it had a particular form... does that mixing of thousands of executions and the tools to analyze and give it the form wanted qualify as AI?

If you move sliders and push buttons and you don't understand the math behind it, are you vibe mixing a song?

Yes, if it is a "give me a catchy song with lyrics that talk about big butts" and then publish... yes this is crap.

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