AI music is objectively good and getting even better and that's a good thing for me as a music consumer.
I have a very pragmatic view on music: all I care about is whether it sounds good or not. That's it. That's literally it. And from that standpoint the advent of AI music has been a major net positive for me.
You can choose to ignore that and come tell me about the ethics of using AI or how you care about the story behind the song and so on and that's all fine but just note that you're no longer addressing what I'm actually saying here.
I'm also not claiming it's great - only that it's good. I've yet to discover an AI song that I go back to like I do with many human-made songs but if I want to put on a playlist playing in the background then one consisting of entirely AI-made music reliably provides me well above average track after another whereas with organic music I need to sift through a ton of absolute crap to stumble upon the occasional good track that still rarely exceeds what AI is able to output. I can go on YouTube and put on a 2 hour playlist of Jazz House or similar and I don't get the urge to skip a single track.
Currently I feel like where AI still trips is lyrics - they still are only plausible sounding nonsense once you actually start paying attention to it but especially for instrumental music it has far exceeded the level of a good average human artist.
Few examples of what I'm refering to: with vocals and without.
234 replies
Initial response:
Hahahahahahahaha hahahahahahahaha hahahahahaha hahahahahah
Additional response:
You just took a shit on human creativity and posed it as a discussion about whether human creativity should be shit on.
Wow. Horrible take. Unpopular for a reason. Upvoted.
Man this is the worst fucking take I've heard all week
Have my upvote
Asserting a point of view about art — an inherently subjective medium — all while claiming that it's objective is probably one of the most blatantly idiotic things a person can possibly say and stand behind. And that's not even mentioning how you're literally on a community all about opinions.
Regardless you definitely posted this in the right place so credit where credit's due I suppose. Enjoy your algorithmically-generated slop. A poorly-made piece of art with real human soul and intent behind it will always be infinitely better than even the best possible "creation" of the product of automated theft and assembly of human knowledge and creation.
This is a very good unpopular opinion. It's actually unpopular and outs the user as an AI bro who wouldn't know how to make a decent beat to save their life.
That is true and also completely unrelated to the discussion.
It is related to the discussion because appreciation of media comes from a basic understanding of it. Not saying expertise here, but knowing what it takes to make something allows you to appreciate it.
In addition, it kind of cements the belief that people who like AI art and consider it the same as non-AI art tend to be devoid of artistic appreciation.
If that's the cartoon image that helps you to fit me into your "AI bro" category then by all means. Nothing for me to gain here even trying to convince you otherwise. I just don't see what you're hoping to achieve with this.
Not all posts here are discussions or arguments, they can just be a simple statement.
Your first sentence was a simple statement. Calling someone an AI bro who wouldn't know how to make a decent beat to save their life, to me at least, is an insult.
OP seems to think it's just a simple statement too. If they were an accomplished musician being told they can't make a beat to save their life then sure, it would be an insult, but as OP readily admits across the thread they really do have no experience with or knowledge of music.
And do you? Something can be true and still be an insult. You're also reasoning in the opposite direction because OP didn't say he hasn't had any musical training when that comment was made.
I would've been offended when someone made that remark to me as well, even if I didn't play the piano. Because those two things aren't related.
Feels more like insults - I just don't see the point.
That for sure is an unpopular opinion and I also strongly disagree.
So, take my upvote ;-)
Apart from that, In my experience there is such an incredibly large pool of great music I haven't even heard yet, that the avalanche of AI generated music does not even improve the useful quantity for an individual in a significant way, not even talking about the quality.
This is also true but it's a separate point. If someone was able to come up with a tool that could find all that music for me to listen to then I'd be all for it but currently the only way to discover that is what I stated above: sift through a mountain of junk to find the few gems hidden in between. Sometimes I just want to listen to good music instead of just remaining perpetually on the hunt for it.
Have your tried listening to the radio? There are millions of radio stations on the internet, and hundreds around you locally with FM radio. They curate music so they find the gems for you
Lmao. Do you like rock iHeart radio. How about some hip hop iHeart radio. No maybe a little country iHeart radio
I have and I stopped for a reason. Well over 90% of what I hear there I'm not into. I don't think I have a single human-curated playlist on my music library as I've yet to discover one that's worth listening through in its entirety. This AI can do far better. And like I said: this isn't for finding gems but only to have something to put on when I just want to listen to good music.
Someone pointed me to FIP (Radio France) recently, and it's been great.
I cherish the hunt. Sometimes something I’ll pick up and listen to for three minutes to test, I’ll find it to be unlistenable nonsense, and then I come back to it again and again.
Anyway, that’s how I have both of Angine de Poitrine’s albums on vinyl now.
The hunt! YES! It makes finding something great even better!
Also, I've found that most music that sticks with me, that I keep coming back to again and again, I will have an almost kneejerk dislike of. But like you said, there's something there that plants a seed in your brain, and calls you back to explore it deeper.
There's websites like Music Map where you can put in a band you like and it'll show bands that are similar in sound. It uses positioning and links to show similarities.
It's not perfect but I've found a lot of bands that I didn't know existed that sound great that I'd never heard of.
Just another tool in the box for you.
The thing is that there are very few bands that I like. I like individual tracks from multiple bands but rarely I stumble upon one that has more than one good song. If I randomly pick 1000 songs from my playlists there's probably well over 900 individual artists there.
YouTube does a half decent job at recommending me music I like - much better than Spotify at least, but even then it constantly reguires me to get up and go change a track which is exactly the thing I don't want to do when I put up music playing in the background while doing something else.
what are the bands that you like?
I already mentioned it here.
That is true. I found a solid to find people on last.fm that were very adjacent to my eclectic taste and see what they hear what I don't. Having scrobbled every song I heard in the last decade, the algorithm is pretty efficient.
Bandcamp works fine too for that. "XYZ bought new music", then I go check what they bought and often buy it too.
But I never listen to music "in the background". I either listen or I don't. So maybe I grew more picky with every passing decade 😁
Hey, I get it, you just have zero respect for the effort, creativity, imagination, or sacrifice that an artist has to put in to create a work thats any good. To you, art is merely a product. Who cares who made it, how it was made, or what it even means, or if there was any meaning at all.
I totally understand. I went to the store yesterday and they had this hand crafted chair made of high quality wood for sale for like $300. Fuck that! I'll just go buy a cheap plastic piece of garbage chair pumped out by the thousands in a Chinese factory. I mean it's just a chair, right? It has one job, who cares what it's made of. "Quality, Shmality!" I say.
I just wish more people would understand this, like I entered this fighting game tournament last month. But I'm really ass at Street Fighter, so instead I wrote this bot that would play the game for me so I'd win with double perfect every time. Can you belive they kicked me out for cheating? CHEATING! What kind of shit is that? I just used a helpful tool to totally do all the work for me as my only contribution was giving broad parameters while the computer program makes literally every other decision. The audacity of these people! Don't they understand this makes me a champion gamer?
I wouldn't really use quality as the differentiating factor but more meaning. Which fits more with the effort, creativity, and sacrifice you're mentioning. Something can be mass produced and still be of a fine quality, but it usually won't have much of a story behind it, nor does it usually have sentimental value.
That's an interesting cartoon caricature you crafted there. I just don't have any clue what it has to do with the topic at hand.
Or is it "BOOO!" that you're just trying to say here?
I'm just saying I agree with you 100%, and I wish more people would get it.
Like I went to this museum because I heard this painting (The Bona Pisa? Lona Misa? Idk, something like that) was worth like two billion dollars or some shit. But you know, I'm an artist too! So I had Chat GPT create the same image and printed it out, then went down to the museum. I mean if they like the first one so much then they should pay top dollar for a percise copy, right?
But Noooooo! They told me it was garbage and to gtfo! Can you believe that shit? I mean my painting was a pixel perfect copy of the original, so it makes sense that it should be the exact same thing, amirite? It's the end product that matters, right? I mean it looks exactly the same! I should be getting millions of dollars for this painting! What kind of bullshit this is that?
Fucking Luddites, right? I feel ya.
jesus man, music - art - is about feeling something. what the fuck
Unsettling is a feeling of sorts
that is insightful.
contempt for copyright holders is a feeling
like, you dislike paying for people's work so fuck the entire category?
I mean, yarr matey, sail them seas and all yo ho ho, but is the solution to expensive publishing really to go whole hog on clanker bleep as a music genre?
There's no difference whatsoever between how a good AI song and a good organic one makes me feel. None.
This should be the test for having a soul. If there's no difference there for you, we know there's nothing like a soul in you.
make out with an atm machine? what, it's got slots....
Do you have a point or are you just here to act like a smug jerk?
My point is, your taste sucks and you need better standards.
If you're even a human, at this point I'm sure there's lots of astroturfing by bots about bots for bot 'art', imho the only way to enjoy this garbage is if you're a machine too.
You're quite self aware in your assessment, you just don't realize that being "pragmatic" about music is like being "efficient" about sex; you're doing it wrong.
This is an incredible comment
I can’t believe nobody’s called you out on not knowing what “objectively” means yet.
I just think people understand modern colloquial use, even if OP below erroneously declares it was intentional. In the same way we can parse "I could literally eat a horse right now" as, in fact not literal, we can likewise parse the colloquial use of "objective" in this case.
No. It's not the same as "literal/figurative". At least not yet. And it's important that we don't allow that to happen to these words as well.
Language directly informs our thoughts. Like literally, we think in our respective language, and controlling/molding that is an extremely powerful tool of control and oppression. Perhaps the most powerful. Read 1984 if you want someone to explain it much better than I ever could.
We cannot allow words like "objective" and "subjective" to colloquially mean the same thing. It will just continue making it more and more difficult for people to grasp what's real and what is not.
I just don't think that's how it works, man.
The ministries of truth, peace, etc. didn't control people's thoughts by confusing the dictionary, they controlled them with social pressure. The point of twisting language the way they did was to goad people into following along: the idea being that the more people pretend to believe something like 2+2=5, the more they will actually believe it—or, the less their belief or not even matters. Because it's safer to agree. Nobody wants to be abnormal. And it is "normal" to believe the war is for peace.
What's another example of this...
I don't like the way that AI people insist that AI is a tool. Not that I disagree with them; there's no twist of language. AI is, technically, an object which a person can manipulate toward some end.
I don't like it because that's not what they mean. When they say "tool," they mean "not a disaster." "No side-effects." "To be used responsibly," and that "the irresponsible get what they deserve." Their insistance on the word "tool" is to close their ears and maintain the arrogant posturing that AI is our slave and we are its master. It is to imply shame or stupidity or incompetence for not agreeing with them.
But I can't get any of that from the word "tool" alone. A tool is, like, a wrench. What does a wrench mean to me?
When was the last time it read the book? The entire point of Newspeak was to shape how people thought, and it worked like gangbusters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
You can't grasp the concept of personal identity, let alone internalize it and actually have one, if the concept for it doesn't exist in the language.
Orwell could not be more clear about this stuff. To the point where my teenage (before witnessing it first hand in the US) self found those parts to be boring and far fetched. Boy was I wrong.
From the book:
I haven't read the book in a while, no. But I'm not above disagreeing with Orwell.
I just do not believe it works this way.
Think about the implications of this: how does our language have this concept of identity now when it didn't used to?
What I see Orwell gesturing at in these paragraphs you've shown me is an intentionally poor education. A poor vocabulary would be a component of that, an important vector, but it's not of the same kind as the colloquial usage of 'literally'.
What you're suggesting (charitably, I think) is that the corrosion of 'objective' and 'subjective' leads to a person's inability to distinguish lies, not to be able to rediscover the concept—and rediscover it quite easily, I might add—which I find ridiculous. You don't need the word 'lies' to identify that something that was said is not something that was, even if you have trouble expressing it.
Or more to the point, people who believe that freedom is slavery do not believe so because they think those words mean the same thing. Either, they have never been taught what freedom is and don't care to invent it, or they have been convinced that freedom is only the power to choose sin intentionally, which is a sentimental lesson, not a linguistic one.
The only thing that bothers me is the idea that words carry this moralistic baggage themselves, or the vague suggestion that a person unaware of the Orwellian state could still be led by the phrase "freedom is slavery" into the same lobotimized world view that its people have.
I mean you can think what you want, or even write a dissertation about it and have it published. But what I'm saying is established fact among people who dedicate their lives to this.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/379404191_The_Semiotics_of_Newspeak_Language_Power_and_Thought_Control_in_Orwell's_1984
https://journal.ijarms.org/index.php/ijarms/article/view/757
https://www.academia.edu/721095/Orwell_and_the_Power_of_Language
And here's Orwell himself defending his use of language as a means of control in the novel:
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/
This last one is actually really interesting, I recommend reading the entire thing.
Oh, it's that essay. I love that essay.
However, Orwell does not actually make the case for this in it:
He certainly makes the case for a lack of intellectual hygiene, like having bad posture, leading to a lack of critical thinking, or clarity, but that's not something I disagree with.
Think of it like this, okay: We haven't invented wave-particle duality yet and I think, like a stupid person, that light is only a wave. How do you explain to me that a person, tragically, does not know what "literally" means, and so also cannot differentiate embellishments? Like, how does that process happen in the mind?
When a mom tells her daughter she was so hungry she ate "literally 50 cheeseburgers," what is stopping this person from knowing about exaggerations? Do they forget? Do they never learn it? What is the actual mechanism?
In 1984, the answer I'm looking for would be the police.
1984 did feature people afraid to use their imagination for anything, but that was not solely the product of language. Some of it was the electric chair.
I just don't like the confusion of Orwell's ideas here—and he might disagree with me, smack me with a ruler and scold me for my lack of 'gerunds'—this confusion of Orwell's ideas with the very normal tides of our linguistic ocean. "Literally" has not actually gone anywhere.
I object to the death of literal, as well. These things only happen if we collectively allow it, and I’d rather not. Especially with the declining literacy rate.
You're welcome to do so, honestly probably even right to, but know that unfortunately to the majority who have integrated the colloquial use you're probably going to come off similar to the guy who insists on using the "Þ" instead of "th."
I'm quite careful with my choice of words and that was a deliberate one.
Humans are just as good at detecting AI music as we're at detecting toupees: the bad ones stand out and the rest go undetected. Most of AI-made music is indistinguishable from organic ones purely based on the sound of it and the claim that a track is shit is often only applied retroactively after people learn it was made with AI. It's an emotional reaction and thus not an objective one.
My problem with it is that there is no objectively good music. The whole premise was bad from the start.
I can recognize something as good even if I don't personally like it. I'm not claiming that everyone will like all of the AI music in existence - I'm claiming that it has everything going for it that we expect from good music. Pretending that it's all bad just because it's made with AI as many people do is disingenuous.
How did you validate your ability to recognize objectively good music?
My best friend's band is objectively the best hardcore show you've never been to yet. :)
I mean if it's the only one it IS objectively true... I need to stop typing "is" in italics.
That’s not really the issue. Your opinion is that AI music is subjectively good. Objective things aren’t opinions.
I don't think "not technically bad" necessarily means objectively good. The artistry is in the intent just as much as the execution, so I think my post hoc disappointment at learning something was made with AI is regret at the time spent considering what is literally random noise with all of the "bad" parts taken out.
Actually objectively, rampant AI use is harming us more than it's helping right now.
What do you expect from good music? What is good music? What are you rating? The effort? The chords? The meaning? More than half don't even work with AI...
Buddy, no
What are you even saying? You arguing against my subjective experience as if you could possibly know better?
I think you couldn't find good music if someone stuck it up your nose and gave it a good twist
I have no idea what you are you hoping to achieve by coming here trying to insult me other than to advertise to everyone what a mean jerk you are.
I'm sorry that you're in pain but I'm not the cause for it nor does hurting others make you feel any better.
Lmfao sure. Have fun with your AI. Hope it fries your brains.
Unpopular, yes, but also an objectively wrong use of objectively. Subjectively you find that music enjoyable, but objectively it's a statistical average of the bog standard crap you can find on on basically any radio station. Nobody can stop you from enjoying that, but don't think it makes your personal taste anything other than statistically average.
Quality can be recognized without personally liking it. I don't mean good as in enjoyable to everyone but rather up to the standard that we expect from good music.
"Art is paintings of horses"-ass statement. Good music is a gestalt, not a simple sum of its parts. There are plenty of technically skilled musicians who make shit music, and plenty of shit musicians that make good music. There are musicians of dubious ability who make great shit music, or possibly shit great music, but either way do it with a purpose that elevates it above just being noise. There is no standard to be held to because art is not standardised - look at how The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, or Wire changed the face of music with art that was initially critically panned. Look at how the hip-hop and punk scenes dragged people who had never touched an instrument before into the limelight.
It is entirely possible for a theoretical person to recognise quality without liking it, but you don't understand what makes music good, so you personally are not able to.
I must upvote, your opinion is more revolting than surstromming.
Please don’t neglect humans in your musical choices. Were it not for human artists, your stolen-music copy-pasting Frankenstein-maker won’t work. :)
Just sucks the ai learned it by stealing. Valid take though, I guess. It feels a lot like saying, "factory farming is great for me. All I care about is meat that tastes decent. That's it."
What actually sucks, imho, is that the only way to reach the target is to steal the stuff and (most importantly) not get caught until your product is too big to fail. Then later you can just throw some hundreds of investor millions at a lawsuit and continue business as usual.
Systems that guide towards stealing and buying off the courts are not great.
Factory farming isn't a bad analogue as it's the only morally indefensible behaviour I knowingly partake in. Though personally I'm unconvinced about the unethicality of AI, but that's not what this thread is about.
You're unconvinced that accelerating climate change is unethical. Yowza you're really starved for attention aren't ya?
Well, we've got a truly unpopular one, kudos for that
The fun thing about this being tightly bound to the subjective is there's not really any golden argument that can be made; some people are going to keep ordering pizza hut and saying they love it, even if literally any option is better from everyone else's perspective.
In your choice of using it for background music, I personally would always choose an actual curated list, ideally mixed by an actual DJ. There's a lifetime of that content on YouTube already, so I never have to have the same one on twice, and usually if you like the vibe at the start of the mix, the DJ carries it through. Also a great way to discover new music that you can then go and look into the artist and find more stuff, maybe even go and see a show.
With an AI playlist, that's it, there's nothing further that can happen, it's literally just filling the space. Which is fine, but I guess I just see that as a wasted opportunity if anything
Well yes, but this AI music scenario is more like if people loved Regurgo-Hut™ rather than Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut at least have humans making their pizzas.
Regurgo-Hut™ is the hot new pizza franchise, backed by all of your favourite investment bankers, that strives to eliminate food waste by taking every scrap of uneaten (and sometimes lightly eaten and/or stolen) pizza from any source we can find around the world. We then form it into 8"-30" discs and re-bake for Hot Flavory Goodness™ delivered to the vicinity of your door.
I see you don't consider pop tarts or anything you buy in a box or a bag or a wrapper to be food.
All things that are good once in awhile but you probably shouldn't make a diet out of.
To again improve an analogy: imagine making Pringles exclusively out of potatoes stolen from people's gardens and pantries, using all of those people's water supply to process them, then going "but why don't you like my Pringles?"
You'd have been better served to pick something like Nutella with the palm oil, I think. Huge destruction of natural resources including orangutan habitats. You've moved the goalposts here from your original argument that "people don't make it", but fine. More aptly for the analogy, people still like it even if you object, and the appeal to nature argument of it is fairly strong even though odds are low that it actually directly affects you.
The pantry raiding falls flat because, as everyone sailing the high seas will tell you, it's not stealing if you still have your potatoes at the end, right?
Ok so let's call it Nutella, exactly like it is now except there are tiny bits of shit mixed in (percieveable to the eye, nose and tongue) and we also shoot 10 orangutans every time you buy a jar. But this time "we are providing jobs to prop up the economy", so if you let our company fail the stock market tanks and we cause the next great depression. People could only be happy about that product, otherwise they must be trolls.
That imaginary Nutella is starting to sound a lot like this thread as you crash out. OP has provided a reasonable use and also true unpopular opinion.
If you think AI sucks for every application, good for you; I would disagree and different opinions are allowed. If you think the way AI has come about and been served up to us is morally questionable as well as outrageous in comparison to resources involved (water, money, electricity) I agree.
If you're going to argue "they stole our shit" I'm going to laugh at you for expecting privacy on the Internet, and then point to every argument anyone on Reddit or Lemmy has ever used before installing the arr suite.
Your opinion is well established, you don't need to take every comment to double down on it: OP likes background music nobody explicitly made, and I like not writing my own SQL queries 🤷.
I feel like you missed all the nuance, because my top notch analogies seem to be "crashing out", so let me break it down for you:
Ok so this is the delicious base, created by humans for humans. Artisanal, words, sounds and images that you can consume every day.
This is the AI part where it has mashed a bunch if existing stuff together based only on patterns and made something music-ish, with whatever it could scrape from wherever.
This is the part where you're right about stealing shit being totally fine, like Nestlé selling peoples drinking water (that I can only assume you are all for). Commerical LLMs both take people's private resources and also damage the resources of the rest of the planet, whatever you use them for. So maybe I should have said 100 orangutans to be more accurate.
This is a little joke I threw in about capitalism where big companies always say this to make any shitty thing they do seem worthwhile.
This is an evidence based assertion based on previous examples of forced bailouts for shitty businesses because they were propping up whole economies with their inflated values. Which can be directly compared to the current state of the AI bubble.
This is a little commentary on you and your "different opinions". You can't be ok with AI while recognising the impact. It's not actually like Nutella, which is a calorie dense and cheap food which people ignore the environmental impact of because it's a cheap and delicious product and they need to eat to live. Yeah you probably need it specifically but I can forgive people buying cheap food. Generative AI is not a necessity. It's a luxury product that provides literally nothing to keep anyone alive or advance anything of value.
And comparing piracy to LLM training is also a weak take. You can see with Disney strong arming companies that this is doing nothing to impact copyright law and you, as a private citizen, will still be arrested if you download books and try to sell them on as a new product. All it does is shift all of the wealth from individual creators to large corporations.
But you already know all this and I don't need to keep doubling down. I forgot.
That's what I've done so far. If those were able to provide me with the same consistent high quality tracks then I wouldn't have had the need to switch. However they don't. With AI music it's like a pizza buffet: it's not the best food there is but all of it is good.
Is a pizza buffet universally good? I'd say if you were having a pizza buffet every day, it's going to leave you pretty malnourished before long
We happened upon a pretty nice allegory here
Izzy’s pizza buffet no longer exists.
Music doesn't carry utility beyond how it makes you feel in the moment so the analogy falls apart when you start discussing the nutritional content of it - it's all about taste.
Bro I think you just don't like music.
"this machine kills facists"
I question the claim that music "has made" anyone. Nobody can take credit for the kind of taste they have in music. A metalhead might credit the music for having become who they are but I would argue the opposite: that's who they were all along and being that way is what made them gravitate towards this specific genre of music. They picked the music - not the other way around.
do you believe in free will?
No. Not in the sense that you could have acted otherwise.
Well that's not really true, music has a lot of utility beyond brain chemicals.
I mean there's what I already mentioned in it just giving more options for stuff to do. If you find a new artist you like, there's generally shows you can go to, at those shows you might meet some like minded people and maybe even gain some new friends. That whole life experience is impossible with AI music.
Following from that there's the general broadening of horizons, music is very often a window into other lives & cultures. It might not be overt in any given piece, but brains love to notice patterns, so over time even tiny glimpses add up. You can make the anthropological case that cultures that share music historically end up growing closer. There's no other culture you're really getting exposed to via AI music.
Then broader than that, and admittedly the most dubious part of argument, there's the vanilla-isation of music this causes. If this becomes a popular view, we're just going to be flooded with beige. This stuff is zero effort to create, so there's not really going to be anything to stop people from creating infinite copies of the same thing. For business and commercial folk, it's cheaper to cut humans out, especially if hypothetically most people are happy enough with the pizza hut buffet. It's not hard to see how this will drown out the actual artists and choke them out of the industry entirely. Pizza Hut every day whether you like it or not.
Downvoting not for the unpopular opinion, but for not knowing what "objective" means
I can't wrap my mind around this at all. Music is the result of people making music. If there is no artist, no perspective or feelings it's just sounds.
Sure I can't sing, so what I as an average person make could not even charitably be called music either, but that is not the point - I want to go to concerts and see bands play music, and want computers to do grunt work that people don't want to do, so that more of us can do better things.
Using an AI to make musical sound just undermines all that. Tech in music being wielded by humans, yes that is music (DJs) and if machines ever develop sentience I will call their sounds music, but not before.
Have my upvote.
"it's just sounds"
So, straying from the conversation about AI music being good or whatever. This is the part of AI music that perplexes me the most. So like... Audio is a wave. You can take a sine wave, and a square wave and layer them on top and you get a sine wave with some square edges because it's both sounds. Different frequencies for different pitches, all of that.
When AI makes music, is it just drawing that wave? If so, that's fucking crazy. Like I could understand if it used some ingested music theory to write chords and a melody, then turn them into MIDI, then run those through a synth plugin. But AI doesn't have a synth plugn. It just knows what a synth plugin sounds like through analasys of sound waves, right? Like AI can't "hear" music. It doesn't know what a cello sounds like. It just knows what the sample point values of a waveform of a cello sounds like. But then if you tell the AI to add an instrument. Let's say an electric guitar. It knows how to re-draw that wave to actually make that sound. To add reverb? To add compression? Then more instruments?
If that's how it actually works, that blows my god damned mind. No human could ever write a song by drawing a line on paper and scanning it in. I suppose they could, but it would be some avant garde experimental thing, not something that sounds like actual instruments. Like I don't think a human could ever figure out how to draw the sound of fingers sliding down the frets of an acoustic guitar between the actually strumming of a guitar.
It's fucking bonkers.
Not even waves just ones & zeros, creating a map. Yeah it's crazy.
I do wonder if the visual representation of music sounds like that would look like art.
See music notes as letters and different type of sound (trumpet, piano, guitar, etc) as a style of writing.
LLMs being good at processing text, music is adjacent to this. Music styles tend to have common elements between them and the LLMs can be trained on the similarities and to predict them, just like text prediction.
When I say music I mean sounds that are intended to sound musical, or melodic or whatever. A kid banging bottoms of pots and kettles with wooden spoons counts as music in this definition. I'm describing a kind of sound.
The sounds AI is able to produce are in some cases such that I enjoy listening to. I'm not a music connoisseur, I'm just a person who likes hearing some sounds more than others. You likely define music differently as well as consume it on a whole different level and that's fine. I'm simply not that into music. I relate to food in a similar manner. It's fuel - if it also tastes good, let alone is healthy, then that's a bonus.
I simply view the gatekeeping and hating a bit silly.
Yeah I don't think AI has intent yet.
Of course you should listen to whatever you like, that's not in question. I like to hear the waves at the beach, thunder, rain. None are music but are lovely sounds.
I know, right? Wtf is wrong with these people. It's the PRODUCT that matters when it comes to music, not the meaning, message, artist or intent, right? Who cares who created the song, or what instruments the song was made with, or even what the song is about. All I crave is acoustic tones arranged in a pleasing manner. Message? Morals? Emotion? Bah, who needs that shit? If Hitler made a banger I'd still listen to it. I'm so glad you think the same!
Wow! I also just shovel whatever disgusting shit someone places in front of my face directly into my mouth without regard for what it is, where it came from, or how it tastes! It's so awesome to finally meet another human being who just mindlessly consumes whatever stupid bullshit that gets thrown in front of him without thinking just like me! Man we are so much alike it's scary.
Congrats, you have an average taste in music?
AI are statistical algorithms. The current design means they can only ever be average.
Well yes but not really. I am not gonna act like I know much from this but I think there is some randomness in the results, that's why you just don't get the same thing every time. And there are also prompts, which is just them guessing the output based on your input and they were trained on input before blah blah blah.
In any case it would be kinda average but not really. Also the average of all music would probs sound terrible, just like when you mesh a bunch of pics together they make no sense.
I would guess it is average in a group or subgroup tho?
That's how I understand it. I mean I don't think the opinion is good, I hate it but uhhhh yea
Its a fuzzy statistical average based on your input, you have deviation from a pure average, as well as induced randomness that still stays near that average within preset values.
I suppose the question arises as to whether AI slop is better than Nickleback.
Yes that's basically what I said in other words. kinda.
You don’t like music, you like Muzak, and you have garbage taste.
I like both. You don't know what all different kinds of music I listen to and you're being mean.
You also don’t respect music or art. You’re a consumer, no more, no less.
I'm a real person with real feelings who's done nothing to you to deserve being talked to like this. Absolutely nothing.
People like you are why the internet is such a horrible place to be.
So are people who make real music and art. Your whole take is an active and thorough disrespect, you’re spitting In people’s faces.
You’re mindlessly consuming and advocating for universally detrimental trash, you are a consumer. You are actively harming music, musicians, art, and artists, because you simply don’t care what others think. Why should I give any positive consideration as to what you think?
I hate every sentence I just read. Take the upvote. AI music is the music for people who say they like all kinds of music. Music with no taste. Its like saying you could cook a potato a million ways but your favorite is raw.
Edit: since the music you posted is a pale imitation of trip hop please listen to something with some artistic value that might make you feel something.
I don't like all kinds of music. I don't even like most AI-generated music. I'm extremely picky about what I listen to. The thing with AI, however, is that if it can create one song in the style I like, it can then create a 2-hour playlist of songs just like that and they're all good. This is virtually never the case with human artists. When I find a good organic track and then go listen to other songs from that artist I usually don't like any of the other ones.
It violates my sense of decency that you think a communicative medium can be replaced by something that can't communicate.
... You get a upvote but I'll be mad the entire time doing it
All music is just melodic noise. None of it communicates anythin to me whether it's organic or AI made.
You might have a condition called Musical anhedonia. Because music is definitely meant to communicate a LOT to you. If you can listen to "Wish you were here" by Pink Floyd and not feel the emotion they are expressing I feel bad for you..
Well that particular song doesn't make me feel anything since I just don't like that kind of music but there are plenty songs that make me feel strong emotions and sometimes even gives me chills. Like this or this or this.
If it was about musical anhedonia then I don't think I'd be listening to music at all but that's not the case. I'm just not a musical connoisseur. I can't name artists or tell anything about the songs I like. I just go by ear - either it touches me or it doesn't. I don't analyze it further.
Humans are just cycling proteins too, but there's a difference between a living breathing person and a loose slurry in a puddle on the ground.
I upvoted this, but now I need to go take a walk and cool off for a bit. 😡
Imagine bragging about being a mindless consumer.
I don't think you like music. Or even understand music.
That's ok, you don't have to, but you do not know what you're talking about.
Out of curiosity, can you tell me a human artist or band that you really like?
Maribou State, Emancipator, Bonobo, Parov Stelar, Wintergatan, Seven Beats, Nigel Stanford ..
There aren't that many artists that I know more than one good song from. My playlists are filled with individual tracks from artists whose name I can't even remember. The ones I listed are the exceptions that came to mind.
Maribou State reminds me of Blonde Redhead. If you want to give them a try, don't start with Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons (which is popular thanks to the track "For the Damaged Coda" becoming a meme. I do like it a lot but it's probably too indie rock for your tastes), try 23 or Sit Down for Dinner. (The production style on the album reminds me of In Rainbows by Radiohead but 1. you've probably tried that already 2. the music writing style is very different)
I had a hard time pinning down Bonobo because my goodness there's so much variety in what he makes (IMO). What sides of his music are you most fond of?
Parov Stelar is electro-swing. I don't know much about it since it's not a genre I'm fond of … Apparently the usual recommendation is Caravan Palace.
Seven Beats seems like shoegaze without guitar. I could be very wrong about this. Try perhaps Cigarettes After Sex?
Here's some stretches that are somewhat adjacent to these genres but I'm only including because I really like them instead of because they're similar to what you listen to. Ordered from slightly more likely to much less likely, I'll put what it's tangentially adjacent to (in parentheses):
Gross
There's a time I may have agreed with you but there's too much good music out there, and other fans of the same artists that there isn't a need for AI music imo. Also I hate the idea of using AI for art
Congrats. I hate this opinion, so it fits!
This is definitely an unpopular opinion.
I tend to listen to music for how it feels, not just how it sounds, and if I even suspect a track is AI made I feel like someones trying to shovel dog shit into my mouth.
I guess you could equate it to you eating food just for the taste, but I eat food for the taste, smell and nutritional value.
There’s this artist out there called Fhalomir. I remember listening to their IMPACT album and thinking “man this sounds really good, but the instruments are muddy enough to be AI, and this dude is turning out like an album a month which is kinda suspicious.”
So I did the deep dive.
Found out he stays at home and just makes music all the time, and posts videos of his loops being played through (i think) Ableton on tiktok.
I hate that I have to scrutinize music (and let’s be real, everything) in such an in-depth way in the Year of Pedophiles and Ketamine, but hey, here we are.
Ethics aside, can you not hear the noise and artifacts in the vocals? The repeptitive overuse of the same reverb? The heavy handed compression?
AI music keeps showing up in my "stations" and I have to instantly skip. It's just awful and they cannot fix it because they trained the models with highly compressed music from Spotify and it "learned" that compression nouse artifacts are a natural part of music, so now it reproduces and exaggerates them every time.
A parenthetical/quite off-topic aside, because it has not exactly to do with AI music: some songs deliberately have noise and artifacts in order for the listener to achieve specific mental and spiritual states.
For example, in "Zed Aliz Zed" from "David MLLR", or (it's a quite old song, way before ChatGPT were a thing) "The Stream" from Tanuki Project (also known as the soundtrack from that "I Pet Goat II" video), or "Lilith Enn Meditation Chant" from Satania, among many other ritualistic or ritualistic-sounding songs I'm used to listen to when I'm trying to seek daemonic channeling, they all have arrhythmic noises and artifacts on top of repetitive humming or vocals.
It's been a long while since I stopped seeking new music, because I got an offline archive of thousands of MP3 files (some I've been carrying with me since the Windows XP times), but I always choose to listen to the same ritualistic ones because I'm not very adept of listening to music for entertainment, also because I stopped doing YouTube altogether (I've been boycotting YouTube for two years and counting).
[email protected]
No. Just like I can't tell the difference between 1080p and 4K. It also has no effect on my enjoyment of the movie.
I do detect the empty vocals but I prefer instrumental anyway. Also, this is the worst it'll ever be and it's already this good.
Fair enough, although to me a better comparison is DVD (480p) vs Blu-Ray (1080p). Not a big deal if you watch on a phone, but pretty bad if you try it on your living room 4k TV.
Lol 4k tv. That right there is your problem. 90% of people dont even have the equipment necessary to detect what youre talking about. Nor do they care
In the car or on the radio, you probably won't hear the difference. Heavy compression and reverb are pretty much standard in modern music production. For a lot of people, music is just background noise, so it won't matter to the large majority.
Oh I get it, hence my phone vs TV example.
It’s IP theft.
"Police, help, someone stole all the intangible thoughts that were inside my head and ran with 'em all, now I'm thoughtless and my mind is floating away!"
When I see someone having a thought being taken from inside their head like a soul leaving its physical body, I'll believe in "intellectual property" and its "stealability". I'm yet to see such a horrendous phenomenon, though. I mean, it must be pretty scary, I guess? Does it ache when someone grabs my thoughts and pulls 'em from inside my noodles? I won't think too much, lest someone appears out of nowhere to snatch my thoughts on it!
[email protected]
Someone save the record companies before it's too late
"all I care"
no. you do not care. you clearly state you would never put ai slop in your favourites, you just want one big play button to generate background noise.
No I didn't.
"I don't care about anyone but me or anything except for what I want"
You sound selfish and insufferable.
Your made-up cartoon image of me does.
There are several uses for music. For some of them, AI music like you pasted works well -- like if those were playing as background music in a restaurant there's no problem. You're not there to listen to the music.
But if you want to really listen to the music... you usually want to listen to old songs or then something totally new and interesting. Your links were none of those. It was sophisticated elevator music.
Then again, I don't see any reason why AI couldn't some day be able to compose something new and interesting. A lot of the music humans create is derivative. The spigot of really new stuff has been kinda dry since the 90s it seems to me.
🖕
What do you hope to achieve by coming here trying to insult me other than to advertise your mean nature to everyone?
I think they were trying to tell you to go fuck yourself. Which I would say that they achieved.
This is an interesting take, tbh. I tried to ask myself how you got here, and in doing so I had to ask "what are you getting out of AI music?" And I think I surprised myself a bit with the answer.
Ultimately I think the rise of generative AI is going to make the line between art and kitsch clearer.
Back to my question, I personally get so much out of art - so many songs have brought me to tears, or changed my perspective on a topic, or related to me when I felt alone.... But I've also bobbed my head along to plenty of soulless low-effort club tracks and what not. I'm finding it hard to argue to myself that the four-on-the-floor generic beat shitted out in 5 minutes in Acid Loops or Cakewalk is any less soulless than a similarly prompted AI track.
But ultimately I would consider both to be kitsch. I've said similar before and it's ruffled some feathers, so let me try again to clarify: Kitsch is not bad. Kitsch is good and kitsch has a place. But kitsch is not art.
I think generative AI is a toy. It's a like one of those automated child's pianos. You can absolutely have a silly good time goofing around on an automated child's piano for an hour, and if anyone told you that you were wrong for enjoying your time they'd be an idiot.
But you didn't really make art.
So enjoy your AI kitsch, and do it guilt free. If you're just looking for shit to bob your head to, it's really hard for me to argue that AI music can't accomplish that goal.
I'm fine with that. Just don't start calling it art.
I never called it art. I don't feel like arguing about that as there's no resolution for that argument. There's no agreed upon definition for what art even is so people can infinitely move the goalposts there to exclude anything AI generated.
I always use photography as an example as it's something I do that people widely recognize as art. I find it amusing when I present a picture I took and people start interpreting it as if there's some deep meaning behind it whereas in reality I took 300 pictures and this is one of the handful ones that I liked. It's not that far from prompting AI in practice. I can't produce another one on-demand as producing the first one was essentially an accident. There was no meaning behind it. Whatever meaning people see there is imagined and imposed on top of it in the minds of the viewer. For me as a photographer all I care about is what it looks like. There's no hidden meaning to any of it.
Yeah sorry, if it sounded like I was suggesting that you were arguing AI music is art - I wasn't trying to suggest that.
But this going back to my point about making the distinction between kitsch and art clearer. Photography absolutely can be an art, but every photograph is not automatically. Art and kitsch can both entertain or amaze, but art speaks to the human condition. Sometimes that speech is unintentional, but it's still present. So yeah, when you take 300 pictures with no more forethought than "looks great," that's super cool, but it's not art. It doesn't sound like you're into photography for the sake of art, that's okay.
Humans love kitsch. We fill our lives with it, it has tons of value. It's okay that your interest in photography is kitsch, just like it's okay to enjoy your kitsch AI music.
And since you weren't trying to suggest or claim that is art, I don't think there's anything you need to reconcile, reconsider, whatever.
You're good and I think your stance is solid.
What’s your take on AI-generated “photography”? Since it’s something you actually do (unlike music which you consider yourself just a consumer), what’s your opinion about someone for example posting THEIR exhibit of photos they created with a prompt and not actually took with a camera?
Well they're by definition not photographs but pictures/images. A photograph is something you produce with a camera similar to how painting is done with a brush. I would rather place AI-generated images under the category of digital art.
I've got no issue with it as long as people disclose the origin of it. The issue arises when deception enters the picture. Presenting AI-generated images made to resemble a photograph and then taking part in a photography exhibit with it is dishonest.
In that case, AI-generated music isn’t music, just notes an algorithm put together, because it wasn’t produced by a musical instrument (software instruments included). A lot of AI-generated music is being passed off as original music on streaming (profit motive), so they are technically being dishonest about it.
So to parallel photography with music, someone who says they don’t care a photography exhibit was AI-generated (even if they didn’t know) as long as the photos look great, would have a similar opinion as yours with music.
No, I disagree. In the case of photography the definition is very clear. If camera was not involved then it's not a photograph - it really is as simple as that.
Music on the other hand is a broad, unspecific term just like the term "image" is. It doesn't specify how it was produced.
Paintings, photographs, drawing and digital illustration are all images but they're not all photographs. Similarly to how rap is not rock but they're both music.
Notes and sounds, not music, are the equivalent of images, the most basic form. Music is the result of the combination and arrangement of notes turned into art, same as how photography is how you turn an image into art.
Rock and rap are genres of music, the equivalent to a type of visual art (painting, photography, digital illustration, etc.). And subgenres of music like prog rock, classic rock, stoner rock, etc. are the equivalent of different types of photography (nature, portraits, etc.).
Painting and photography are different kinds of visual mediums, but both are visual arts. The same way rock and rap are different kinds of genres, but both are art (music) all the same.
You are essentially bringing down music to the level of your definition of an image, the most basic form, when it is not.
So, you do not view music as art.
I enjoyed Mr. Krabs singing Stronger.
Kevin Macleod already shared this sentiment and published AI generated and AI assisted tracks as well.
Kind of interesting considering he's the king of modern royalty free music.
i’ll take that muzak/“average radio slop” isn’t bad. but is the energy involved really worth it, to just get muzak out of it?
I don't create it - I just consume.
Same here! I also just buy whatever stupid bullshit that somebody puts in front of my face. Why bother thinking about the content I consume? Fuck that, who has time? That mental energy is better put towards important shit like deciding which celebrity I'm gonna have Grok make naked pics of next, right?
I'm so glad there's someone else who understands!
Unpopular opinion checks out.
I don't think "this thing is good" while ignoring the before and after context is a good policy. Presumably if there were very comfortable shoes made of baby skin and manufactured by child slaves, you would not wear them. (Or maybe you would!)
That's a very hyperbolic example, but my point remains that for everyone there is a line somewhere. For you, the AI stuff is on the acceptable side.
So, right. It's a big thing you're ignoring. AI probably can make competent music and, if research continues, will probably improve. But the ethics and surrounding stuff still exist. People often don't want to just ignore that.
Baby skin shoes could be both the best shoes in the world and the most unethical ones. Those things aren't in conflict with one another. There I would equally call people out for pretending that they're in fact bad shoes simply because they're morally against them.
The difference here is that I remain unconvinced about the unethicality of using AI whereas with baby skin I don't have that.
There might be some ambiguity in the word "bad" there. Some people might use it to mean "uncomfortable" and others to mean "unacceptable". Sort of like a boolean AND - for some people, for something to be good it must be functional AND ethically acceptable. If it fails either check, they're "bad". Humans are notoriously imprecise with their language. Some people might split apart the different components of good/bad, and acknowledge that the hypothetical horror shoes are comfortable, but that's moot because they wouldn't willingly wear them.
As I said, the line is in a different place for everyone. You're entitled to hold that belief. I'm glad we're on the same page about the baby skin shoes, though.
this is a great post, upvoted cause I definitely don't like AI music
It doesn't make sense how someone can enjoy art that doesnt have some sort of connection with you, as its literally a bot manipulating your emotions, but I cannot and will not judge! life is too short lol
I strongly disagree, but I also think the type of production-by-committee that is the current state of pop music is sufficiently soulless that I can understand how people arrive at this conclusion.
If you just want to be distracted and have happy ears then this seems a reasonable take.
I guess it’s a bit like burger chains - lowest common denominator for the largest market share. The thing is, the real food lovers will always be at the artisanal meat patty stand instead.
I though you'd say they won't eat burgers and will go to steak house or seafood restaurant.
Your argument sounds more like you find AI reliably good at creating Muzak, but not music. I could see that argument.
I don't think AI is definitionally capable of creating music that matters and has a soul. I don't mean that religiously, but in the sense of imbuing sound with the expression of meaning and intent. It doesn't have to be deep or fancy. However, art is human expression on some level. Perhaps a very collaborative version of AI could help a person accomplish that, but nothing that just spits out an entire song or section on its own.
We are not so devoid of available music (the opposite) for it to be necessary. Art is also one of the things we should have more time for if AI delivers on its promises.
Have you just not spent any time making a playlist of good human made songs you can put on to listen to on the background?
I have but my playlists only consist of absolute bangers and I savour those. Those are the songs I listen to when I just want to listen to a good song. I don't want to overlisten them by casually playing them on the background.
You should be ashamed of yourself and embarrassed that you understand art so little that you enjoy music slop.
Which one of your likes did you personally pick?
None of them, but none of my likes are as shameful or embarrassing as this one. And if they were, I wouldn't try and justify them to strangers on the internet.
Embarrassing to who? I'm not embarrassed.
Yeah, but you should be.
I've been told the same thing about homosexuality but I'm not feeling that either. Sorry.
...? What?
People urging me to feel bad about liking the wrong thing despite it not affecting their lives whatsoever.
People will also tell you that it's bad to enslave people. You gonna be a contrarian and go against that one as well? Or are you going to be a thoughtful person and evaluate each argument on its own merits?
I'm not liking AI music because I want to be a contrarian. I'm specifically evaluating it on it's own merit rather than blindly accepting the popular narrative.
Human music.
Nice
Well, there's no accounting for taste, I guess.
For those who are not already lost, here's a better option: https://somafm.com/home.html
Don't be a clanker lover.
very unpopular. enjoy your slop. you can have mine, too.
With that jazz beat no vocals one how do you know you're not just listening to a baseline ripped from another song and normalized to remove the ebbs and flows that made it interesting? A common thing I see with AI music is its very static, it keeps the exact same pace the whole song unless its being put together by a human producer whos mixing and matching different AI clips but thats different than an AI generated song IMO.
CONSIDERING SOUND: Well, we are of completely different modes of listening, but I'm of opinion it hurts your bottom line too and puts music into stasis. LLMs are specifically disallowed of going out of their's way to deliver something risky (potentially bad) and they lack intention, e.g. they won't produce the next trend setter. In the world, where LLMs came in the 90s, you won't hear wob-wob dubstep sounds going mainstream because it took experimentations to arrive there in the 00s and influence pop music going onward. And the pioneers of wobbing were a part of their scene as a natural biosphere, and we can't predict how it would go if all it's pop sector would be replaced - like with killing the species we find annoying in our world without understanding their role and interconnection with other species. We can't reliably say if e.g. Aphex Twin would have favourable enough conditions to appear, if there is no scene of other artists in place, no club culture he can troll.
And, on the other hand, if right after release of his Druqs, every AI could've started to mimick his style in the volumes well above what the real scene can produce, would he be able to establish his career as an artist?
The way the music industry works right now sucks ass, we can talk about it until dawn, but what I want to focus on, just in the music department, that this equation have functioned in some way, and LLM music puts it onto it's head. Maybe it's even for good, but what I hate about it, is that we tell ourselves "AI is here and is there to be", absolving ourselves of any need to analyze what we collectively put into this world just 5 years ago, and we don't even know how it would affect certain industries, and our own use of them, especially if bubble pops - what can happen to AI music then? No idea. We can replace 50% of pop music with it right now, but we don't even now if it would be availiable in 2030s. We just go with it.
CONSIDERING LYRICS: I do suspect there's also cognitive damage to factor in, at least from being exposed to said lyrics, with random rambling establishing fake logic connections from one side, to teaching awkward pronounciation and wrecked grammatics from the other, and also just echoing but not conveying the training material brain gets from listening to diverse works of spoken poetry. For non-english listeners english-first LLMs would teach them the google translate version of their language, depraved of succint niche words, nuanced usage, context-aware translation and with a mutilated sentence structure uncommon in their native language. I've watched a youtube essay about M&Ms where every second time autotranlsator called them Eminem, that's hell of a brainrot, lol. Also, all native lyrical traditions go out of the window as well, eradicating them and doing mini-imperialism-like standartization. This happens at the will of a few american-based corporations, the likes of Meta that fueled conflict in Myanmar by not having anyone capable of speaking burmese and thus hosting the flow of genocidal rhetorics on their platform. These are not bodies I would trust in influencing the world of spoken word internationally.
Ah, and while we are at it, music generated by AI is policed by the same corpos. It means they can censor words they don't like, e.g. you won't usually hear Bob Vylan alike songs produced by them, or anything critical of Altman&co, but at the same time their control mechanisms are predictably shit, so the next hymn for KKK would be eventually fished out of it with enough effort as we saw with reddit's cowards clownworld flewing under regex radar for a long time.
FINAL POV: I won't argue with you why you shouldn't as an end-consumer listen to LLM gen music as it's provided to you, but I myself has a lot of concerns about the impact of that new invention that makes me stick with alternatives.
It's about the implications rather than the satisfaction imo
I listen a lot to deep house and similar kinds of music. Sometimes artists make tracks that are easily 10+ minutes long. And DJs create mixes that are hours long. Each track and mix is like a story, it has a beginning, middle and end and takes me on a journey. I feel like I'm on vacation and the DJ is my tour guide. Tickling my brain with different rhythms and instruments, here is this one, now it's gone, here is another one, now it's gone, here is the first one again and in comes the second one. I feel the layers of the track inside of me, letting me feel like floating in the ocean, till the drop comes and the DJ pulls me into the deep water, taking me on a ride. Till I pop out the other end and we calm down again, slowly sliding into the end of the song.
That's what music is to me, emotion, experience. It's one soul telling a story to another soul, using our limited communication methods. I've heard people who are into for example classical music describe the same thing.
But I also feel like there is a huge difference between actually listening to and enjoying music for music sake and having something on in the background while doing some construction work, or having a casual pool party/bbq or something like that. In those cases it's usually just some random pop slop and to be fair with today's pop music I would not be able to tell you if it's AI generated (except for obvious tells like nonsense lyrics, but when I'm doing other stuff I might not even hear the lyrics fully). That said, I still think AI music is really really bad, I just feel modern pop music is bad as well (with notable exception obv and personal opinion is a thing, no shade on pop enjoyers)
The only artist that I've ever heard that makes anything close to good with AI is Skyebrows and, according to their socials, they still write the lyrics and make the AI use those. So its not 100% generated and the only part I find unique is written by a human, the rest sounds like straight slop.
I'm a big fan of Holly Herndon. She uses AI as a tool/instrument, not as a substitute for writing or creativity. Generative filters and effects she applies to instruments and voices. Trained her own small speech model on a choir whom she paid and credited for their work. Released her own voice clone, Holly+, for free under the stipulation that it must be credited. She's a vocal advocate for AI ethics, attribution, and protection of actual creators.
I think you're right that AI music can be good, not great, but often good or comparable to what's already available.
I think another factor is that a lot of mainstream musicians are forced to follow an algorithm already by the major music labels that tell artists what to create, limiting their creativity and ability to create great music at a higher risk to the label.
The algorithmic nature to how most mainstream music is created is problematic in itself, and similar to the controversy of AI music itself.
I don’t fully disagree with you, because I think AI music sounds okay, but I intentionally don’t listen to it. I get disappointed when I find out a song I enjoyed is AI, because I don’t want to support that type of music production.
I do have pretty unselective taste though: I can get into almost anything if it has the right tempo, is sad enough, or employs powerful vocals. My old department once played a team-building game where everyone sent in their favorite song and we had to guess which was whose, and my boss afterwards asked me if I was just fucking around or if it was a reference to something. It was just my favorite song.
I think music fulfills multiple roles. I listen to music as:
It makes sense to me that AI would more easily fulfill the earlier ones and that the later ones might therefore become more valuable. The earlier ones are about being inoffensive, while the later put a premium on being surprising, risky and bold.
I think that we will adapt what we find valuable, in the same way as artists now make most of their income from touring, whereas in the past it was flipped and most income would come from CDs, while the tours would be for promotion.
God you are good at this.
For me music is more about expression and complexity in a way. The music I have gotten most excited about have been expressive about whats been happening in the world. ai could maybe ape that but its the connection with the artist who is living with it as you live with it that is what I like.
Our sense of beauty exists for a reason. It evolved to guide us towards good choices. We find nutritious food yummy. We find people with healthy genes attractive. We're disgusted by animals that carry disease. We think babies are cute so that we'll nurture them. It's all for a good reason. Our sense of beauty has a few bugs in it, like the fact that we like sugar too much. But the point is to help us.
I have a very strong moral sense, and a very close relationship with My subconscious. When something aligns with My morals, I find it more beautiful. When I morally disagree with it, that triggers a disgust reaction. I take an active part in shaping My sense of beauty as a tool to help Me make better decisions. It's called perceptual responsibility. I use My perceptions for good, I don't let My perceptions use Me.
AI generated art disgusts Me because I disagree with it. The music I like is woke. I like punk, and leftist metal. I like Bloodywood and System of a Down and Baker Boy. And Nazi punks can fuck right off. I used to like Riot V, but I dropped them from My library after being disgusted by an anti-romani slur in one of their songs too many times. It spoiled the rest of the music.
I don't really know what AI generated music sounds like, because I tend to follow artists I listen to very closely. I learn a little of their story, often before I play the music. I haven't heard enough AI music to get a sense for it. But if I did develop a sense of what AI music sounded like, it would start to sound gross. Like a cockroach.
I kinda agree with these one. But as you said, to get to the level of the real good music, the music that's really an art, it's got a long way to go yet. Maybe it's not getting there ever, since to make art (at least by my preferred definitions) it has to provoke, to transmit and evoke some emotion or mood on the recipient. And there's no formula to achieve that, artists just try and try until they 'find it' in a particular piece.
Now for mainstream, commercial music, yes it absolutely can take over it, and nothing of value will be lost. I don't even feel sad for these 'artists', they're all quite hot and aren't gonna have any trouble finding another job to exploit their beauty. It might even waste less water, energy, and other resources than the traditional pop artist pipeline, idk.
I don't personally see any inherent reason why the next AI song I hear couldn't be the best song I've ever heard. It just hasn't happened yet. It's not something like 3D printing where you have physical limitations about the resolution you're able to achieve and thus the highest-detail plastic objects are always going to be injection molded. Everything needed for a phenomenal track is already there - it just needs to now be assembled in the right order.
I agree. But for every riff, phrase, vocal arrangement, structure, harmony, sentence... in the 'best song you've ever heard' so far, the artist(s) have tried hundreds or thousands of variations until they found the one that's really touching. So even if, technically, the AI can generate each of the millions of permutations in this search, the actual choosing based on the emotion, mood, feeling... is not there. So the probability of finding that needle in the massive slop haystack is extremely low. Unless they somehow can reproduce human feelings within their models, which I don't think is the path any of these companies want to follow.
The reason is that in order to spit out anything music-sounding at all, all those AIs have their temperature set quite low and generate very similar music glop, averaged from millions of hours of similar music glop produced by commercial "artists". It is statistically improbable for an AI to generate something way above average, because it is trained on a lot of music and its output trends towards the mean of that just by the way genAI works.
And honestly I don't think AI music is bad - aurally speaking at least - it's just kinda... boring and unimaginative. Which, to be fair, a lot of human-made music also is. I'm sure it will replace "supermarket music" soon, and not much of value would be lost.
Wow this is truly an unpopular opinion :D
I find ai music an interesting topic, so for example there is an artist ThebardicDM that writes the lyrics and uses AI to create music. This is music for a niche area that wouldnt get made if not for AI and I enjoy some of the songs.
Also I am not sure there the moral difference between techno etc is to AI music, using prerecorded drums also skip human artists
Upvoted for unpopularity. Objectively speaking, based on the foundation of how AI models work, their output tends to the mean (average). If the music in the example is considered "good", then objectively the standard has moved downward a lot. I'll start with visual AI as analogous to make my point:
Various people and businesses, big and small, have decided that AI generated images fit their needed purpose. I see a few places downtown that have made their store logos AI slop. Is it objectively well drawn image? In a sense that maybe they make fewer mistakes than before, but besides that, "average" is a more objective moniker for it than "good" on a factual basis. Subjectively you can decide whether you like it, I can judge you for it but the decision is yours to make.
Back to AI genned audio, even before it became widespread, people were making Muzak for elevators, phones, commercial jingles etc. It was fit for purpose to keep you occupied in the background. AI soundtracks seem to fit that niche for you and that's fine. It may be "good enough" for you, but it's not "good" and I doubt will ever be if judged objectively as music.
I listened to the instrumental track, and sure it is coherent at a very basic level, but the harmonies just keep going back to the same, any semblance of a musical idea or fluorish ends or is replaced with another entirely different one within 4 bars. That's the reason why I don't think any song is memorable, without any fundamental changes to the underlying tech I doubt any will. AI generated songs like "We are Charlie Kirk" are memes because they are monuments to conservative tastelessness.
People will tell you not to listen to or support that, I won't stop you but I'd agree in the sense because I think of it as supporting an industry for elevator and phone hold muzak over real musical artists, that also sucks power and water and pollutes a lot. I personally don't care about your tastes, you can like it, but calling it "objectively good music" is an affront to art.
I think there are two suitable uses of it: generating a cover or pastiche of two unrelated artists that would never have made something (Frank Sinatra sings "Rock the Casbah"), or completely filler music. Which if the second is meeting your needs, great, but that doesn't make it objectively good. Perhaps good for Muzak consumers to have a flourishing industry but not for music consumers.
I would claim that much of AI-generated imagery is as well objectively good because much of it is such that we would describe it as good had it been made by a human. However, since AI often has quite a distinctive style, the output of it is usually very recognizable and it gives people the ick. Even for me - for example AI-generated thumbnails on YouTube videos are like a red flag for me despite me not being against the use of AI on principle. I just think there's a time and place for it and in this case it feels misleading and dishonest.
When it comes to AI-generated music I (and I argue the vast majority of people) simply can't tell the difference in most cases by the sound of it alone. The only difference between a solid track made by AI and an organic equivalent is the knowledge that one was made by AI and the other wasn't. In many cases I could present a track made by a human but claim it was done by AI and people would absolutely hate it. That's what my point here essentially is: they're not hating the actual thing but the story they tell themselves about it. It does not suck simply because it was made by AI. One can choose to actively try and avoid it for ethical reasons or such and that's fair but also a different thing. It's like saying meat tastes bad when in reality they're just morally opposed to how it's produced and the taste plays little to no role in that.
I did study both computer neural networks and music so I can tell you pretty definitively that what AI has gotten good at is imitating human artistry.
The problem is that AI style is that it doesn't have unique repeatable style, it's kinda just averaging of a bunch of styles, so it will only ever be an imitation, in its current form.
So yeah, I've been "tricked" by AI before, thinking it is a real song, and probably you could trick me in the other direction too. However, just like a lawyer would be checking a hallucinated citation, I checked my facts. After I found one cover that happened to autoplay into slightly intriguing enough to want to hear more of the covering artist's discography, but I wouldn't be able to because this artist doesn't exist. I did feel empty and disappointed after that. The variations to the original song I thought to myself tended towards the mean, well before I had any suspicion it could be AI.
I have only listened to AI music on YouTube a couple of times and always because of misleading titles. I listen to a lot of mixes of various artists in one long (usually multi-hout) video where the titles will list a couple of the artists included. The AI music did the same but tacked "inspired" at the end. The music would be something I would expect from the genre of music I selected but an hour in I realize that the music is extremely repetitive and seems to be on the first song.
Lemmy showing again it can't handle any diverging opinions on ai, and moreover completely missing the point of this community.
While I don't personally share your opinion, I don't fault You for it. And I certainly agree that the output is getting better, just as it is for other generative areas like images and video. There will come a time when it will be impossible to distinguish unless explicitly stated by the creator. It's inevitable.
Once again, the general populace can't handle someone saying that not ALL genocides are bad!! Eventually, everyone will be participating in genocides! It's inevitable!
AI is objectively terrible in every way for society. There are basically 2 redeeming qualities that only marginally improve on what we already have. Everything else is IRREDEEMABLY EVIL.
i will not entertain arguments otherwise because those people are objectively STUPID.
Whatever helps you cope. Be well.
Ahh yes, we must accept every view point and opinion that goes against our rational thinking because someone thinks it's valid. I love when people argue that X is a hive mind when they show more instances of blindly believing what they're told.
He never told you to accept them though. You can not agree with someone and still be civil about it.
Yup. I don't agree with his AI music take either. But Unpopular Opinions of all communities should be one where people are civil about, you know, unpopular opinions. If anything, saying it's "objectively good" is the thing worth criticizing here, because that makes it seem like a claim, rather than an opinion.
yep, ai generated music has uses such as elevator music that never repeats and has no end
Found a video featuring OP!
Rather pig than a bully.
It doesn't work as well as in Porco Rosso, since it's being made by de-facto fascists...
I mean you like jazz house so yeah it's slop anyway ..
It remains unclear to me what utility does coming here just to insult my taste in music carry. Does it feel good to you to make others feel bad?
Are you not expecting your opinion to be unpopular?
They're not even addressing my opinion but simply ridiculing me for liking House Jazz which is both off-topic and mean.
Your opinion is that you like AI generated jazz house, and I'm saying there's a reason for that, the original music is not easily differentiated from the AI slop that mimics it. Good work on having a very unpopular opinion.
Shitty opinion in this case being liking House Jazz.
That's shitty enough that it justifies bullying me for it and feeling good about it?
Bullies and their mental gymnastics is something else..
No, because you listen to music that a computer farted out. House jazz is fine if it's made by a person.
Nobody is bullying you, you asked for your opinion to be examined and here is the examination.
Check the comment I replied to. They're ridiculing my taste in House Jazz music. Whether it's AI generated or not wasn't part of the insult.
If making fun of someone for listening to the wrong genre of music isn't a form of bullying then I don't know what is.
You're opinion is house jazz is good. Their opinion is house jazz is bad.
Do you often find yourself putting on the victim hat?
As in neurodivergent? Yes.