Comment by analogpixel

As one who isn't a musician but loves listening to music, the emergence of passable genAI-generated music means that I can't trust new music anymore.

The only new music I'm willing to buy is music that I've seen the artists perform live, or is from established artists that I know and trust are keeping it human.

I have no idea how rare or common my perspective on this is, but it's not impossible that the music industry may see a decline as a result.

"jazz is music; swing is business" - Duke Ellington

So the music industry could go hard into AI or whatever the business folks deem appropriate, with various consequences, while the musicians will continue to music and who knows maybe the rent will be covered.

The most jarring thing for me is that artists tend to be the most "communally oriented, socially forward" group of people. I've definitely spent my fair time around them.

As soon as tools came about that socialized their skill, opened it to everyone, they immediately and violently opposed it. Which is totally understandable, except when your core ideology you have been pushing for your whole life is to socialize everything.

The hypocrisy is so suffocating that it was like a 9.0 earthquake in my moral landscape.

And yes, before you come at my throat, free local image generation tools get no hatred exemption.

> - people don't actually like music like you, and just want content; non-stop content.

This is the big thing that artists are going through right now.

They're realizing that most consumers of art don't care about the process or the artist. They just want music as background noise, or an aesthetically pleasing picture on their wall.

I wanted to listen to heavy metal songs about office life. I'm not going to spend years learning how to play guitar in order to record it, not to mention that I have a voice fit for old school silent movies. I'm certainly not going to spend money on commissioning a song. But 5 minutes in ChatGPT to write and refine some lyrics, followed by 15 minutes in Suno playing with various prompts, and eventually I got "Per My Last Email"[0], and I was happy.

Let the musicians rage against my shortcut. I don't care. Let them rage against some notion of "quality" and how AI doesn't provide it. Don't care, it's good enough for me.

[0] https://youtu.be/ZVia46yAoMU

Music was already worthless. Here's Deadmau5 giving advice to aspiring producers in 2012:

> You need to make a world. So you have a rollercoaster in your backyard. And it’ll be the hot thing in the neighborhood for about a week. But once everyone’s had a go… they’ll lose interest, go home n play Sega instead. What you need then, is a fuckin’ theme park… and you AND your music are the theme. People come into your theme park…..check out all this shit… buncha rides, no 2 the same, some merch here and there, special events, dolphins through hoops and all that whack shit. You want people to come to your theme park and feel like they’re a part of this world of yours.

Franz Lizst was a rockstar in 1840 because he could write and play the piano really well. But culture and technology has progressed.

A popstar today can usually sing, dance, write, produce, act. They're business people with a marketing vision and gimmicks to go with it. Polymath performers, creators, and multi-instrumentalists. Technology marches forward and the next generation of artists will be those who adapt the tools available.

We're certainly losing something culturally. Just like this guy[1], who spent 1906 lamenting that the mechanical music machine (phonograph) will ruin music, was somewhat right in his prediction that fewer and fewer people would learn instruments and sing well.

"Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? ... When a mother can turn on the phonograph with the same ease that she applies to the electric light, will she croon her baby to slumber with sweet lullabys, or will the infant be put to sleep by machinery? Children are naturally imitative, and if, in their infancy, they hear only phonographs, will they not sing, if they sing at all, in imitation and finally become simply human phonographs -- without soul or expression?"

When I was a really young kid, I used to hum to myself with a buzzing sound to try and copy the early EDM sounds I grew up listening to. I went on to do electronic music production myself. (And that love of electronic music was the fuel that kept me interested in learning classical piano, jazz, music history and more, and why I still have a piano next to my desk now).

Personally, I'm excited to see what the next generation art and artists end up looking like.

[1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/21m-380-music-and-technology-con...

Yep. In theory, labor saving innovation (or handing jobs off overseas) should be a joyous occasional all. It could be a joyous occasion for all. But we have structured it so that, the moment it happens, 200% of the benefits go to capital and -100% go to labor -- and the consolation prize for labor is that maybe some of the 200% will trickle down into a different job later, or willingness to spend on overpriced haircuts, or something.

There's an argument to be made that this is a necessary component of an economy that can reinvent itself. Maybe. But even if we accept this convenient and self-serving and suspicious premise, there can then be no concession on the point that structuring it this way creates an obligation on the part of the person receiving 200% to "spread it around" and that attempts to dodge this obligation are morally repugnant, socially unacceptable, and ought to be met with harsh political backpressure.

For the last while, that hasn't been the thinking. Instead we have gone for "blame mexicans and let's see if we can't make it 300%!" The response of the kids gives me hope that people might be coming back to their senses on the matter.

Somehow, wages tend to go up, though:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Innovation can make specific skills obsolete; but only if the output of the process actually gets cheaper or better...

It results in the output becoming available to people at a lower price point.

It's not some artificial social system like unions guilds or cartels, it's a tangible thing that actually produces more output with less (or different) workers.

> It's not like your gradual transition from sequencing with gels to using supercomputers over the long course of a career.

this. I don't understand why people here are pretending like its not a big deal.

You're right. Ali Alkhatib believes that AI is a political project intended to shift power and agency away from individuals and organizations and toward centralized power structures. Now, ordinary people must figure out a way forward, because they have fewer and fewer cards to play.

> AI represents the ultimate dream of the capitalist: the elimination of the need of human labor entirely

Decreasing human toil for the same level of production should be the dream of _everyone_. If it's only capitalists in favor then that's a massive indictment of the non-capitalists.

This reminds me of the famous Bastiat quote: "If, then, the utility of any branch of industry is to be estimated not by the amount of satisfactions it is fitted to procure us with a determinate amount of labour, but, on the contrary, by the amount of labour which it exacts in order to yield us a determinate amount of satisfactions, what we ought evidently to desire is, that each acre of land should yield less corn, and each grain of corn less nourishment…"

The misunderstanding that labor and not production is the basis of prosperity leads to some pretty silly conclusions.

Do you seriously think everybody is a programmer now that we have AI? Or that we don't need programmers anymore?

The tools are just changing. But everything is always changing.

Again: Sure they have much to boo about, but AI? Gen AI can run on your own machine even, you can fully own the means to your production. How is this wasting the time they spent studying? You still need knowledge and understanding of a field to be active in it. When the tools change your internal "world model" is not suddenly corrupt. I hope these kids were taught how to think, not what to think.

It helps that research assignments have a certain amount of people-power available, to which amplifiers increase the work done. Many businesses have a certain amount of work to be done, so amplifiers reduce the people needed.

That's not even accounting for AI's unique ability to trick CEOs.