Comment by Rodeoclash
11 hours ago
AI generated music has started to ruin most music on YouTube for me. My feed is starting to get crammed with artists and DJ sets of things like "1 Hour of Cowboy Western Songs to Listen to While Traveling Through the Frontier".
Is it real music? Probably not because the thumbnail is plastered with Pepe memes and other rubbish. We starting to get to the point where music is like Low-background steel - as in it existed before the advent of AI slop.
And before someone asks "bUt iT dOeSn'T mAtTeR hOw iT's mAdE, iT's aLl aBuOt wHaT tHe eNd rEsUlT iS"
Yes, it does matter to me. Making art to me is about all the small decisions taken along the way to arrive at the final piece. When it hasn't gone through that process then I feel nothing when I listen or view it. Actually, I don't feel nothing, I feel deceived.
Opposing viewpoint: discovered AI music without even realising it was AI, and now pleased with getting effectively infinite free entertainment. Just like human-made music, there's a lot of bad and mediocre, but occasionally great music. It's not like humans were creating in a void either --- everything is a derivative work.
Legitimately curious, do you have some examples of great AI music ?
After getting bombarded with it in public spaces (namely cafés), I’ve come to see it as a worse copyright-free replacement for muzak. I’ve even subconsciously begun avoiding these places. When my brain randomly decides it wants to pay attention to the music, the whole shtick sounds grating in an uncanny valley kind of way that’s almost impossible to un-hear.
Trying Lyria 2 after that ordeal might’ve also amplified my bias against it, as everything I prompted ended up sounding like a robotic top 50 pastiche.
Maybe there’s a parallel to made with LLM prose here ?
(disclaimer: while not a musician I do enjoy listening to human-made less-mainstream music)
I thought this one was pretty good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rr3Pz_a0oIs
1 reply →
The bottleneck has not been the amount of music. You had effectively infinite music before
So, when you have infinite music, you then have to look to qualitative differentiating factors. Like, say, the artist themselves. And if they're AI.
Another opposing viewpoint: there is already so much human made music on YouTube you already had “effectively infinite free entertainment”.
You are paying money to YouTube (or watching ads) for work nobody put any effort into. I would rather pay a human artist.
I can't imagine music as just its surface product. It would feel so much emptier without the added subtext of the artist and creation.
I have no clue why you were getting voted down, but I agree. AI generated music isn't art. There's no soul in that, no experience.