Comment by vintermann
5 hours ago
It's not that simple, I think. Music, literature, even photos and software sometimes, are interesting for their context - someone made them, for you, and they wanted to tell you something. They're interesting because we care about the person on the other end. But if there is no person on the other end, why should I care?
We can argue about this if you want. Long chain of comments back and forth. But ask yourself, if we did that, and it turned out I'd actually not read anything you wrote, instead just turned the whole thing over to a chatbot to argue for me - would it make a difference to you? I think it would.
The text on the screen might well be indistinguishable from whether I did it myself. Just as AI generated music might be indistinguishable one day, if not already. But just as you probably wouldn't want to argue with me if I don't even bother to read what you wrote, why should you listen to my music if I didn't even care to listen to it myself?
AI writing, music, art is still extremely derivative. Unless that changes we will still need humans that provide the interesting aspects. If AI facilitates certain things the way that more powerful DAWs or raster graphics programs do then it's fundamentally no different
this whole notion of not listening or reading yourself as an artist is rather silly. anyone who is serious about their craft whether AI or not is going to be constantly dogfooding
But if there is no person on the other end, why should I care?
There are countless people "on the other end" --- everyone who contributed training data, and of course the one who prompted the AI to generate the result. It's odd that this debate always ends up with one side thinking there's a machine autonomously generating music, when in fact AI-generated music comes from humans using AI to create what they want.
Suppose I ask my tattoo artist for a dragon. Would you agree that I created the tattoo?
If not, why then would asking the AI qualify as creation?
There is absolutely some form of creation there. The most basic models now are just prompts but somebody has to prompt them, there is a human being there prompting the song and then deciding to share it (a form of curation).
I'd imagine these will get more and more granular to where you're not just prompting but you are gradually building up songs and at that point I'd be surprised if people were still making this argument.
These things don't exist without human interventio.n
People on both sides (which of course are not monoliths) are liable to imply that the AI was the artist.
Really what you get is a sort of conceptual art.
People generally listen to music because they enjoy it. Is it because somebody is on the other end? I mean it's possible, but I think just liking the song is just as much if not more important.
You pretty regularly see comments by people that say they enjoy a song until they find out it was generated. That tells me it's not about the music but about something they believe about generated music.
Why do you suggest that people generating music aren't listening to it?
Natural beauty doesn't need a person on the other end to be appreciated, as one counterexample.
I think there's a difference between music that people will cherish for decades to come, and music that will sell in the short-term. This isn't even me being an "old man yelling at cloud," you can look at what was charting in the 80s-90s and recognize some songs, but others just got lost to time. They were fine, but they weren't special.
AI music will fill the gap. The "song of the summer," the latest TikTok trend, and music that plays for department store ads, will be produced and distributed by labels, without the need of a particular artist whose image they have to worry about. How many times have labels, who invested a lot of time and money into artists, had to deal with the artist having an episode or scandal? AI eliminates that risk.
I think trying to avoid AI music will be like trying to avoid auto-tune, or digital instruments, or people mixing tracks in ways that are impossible to replicate with real-world instruments in real-time. It'll be common at first, harder later, and impossible/silly in the future.
> The "song of the summer," the latest TikTok trend
These are 2 cases where you absolutely need a personality to go along with the song. Department store ads are probably already AI.