Comment by stevage
9 hours ago
It's really depressing that I have gotten into music composition right when this is happening.
All of these projects are basically just destroying entire fields of human creativity.
It doesn't seem so bad at first when the quality is mediocre, but as soon as they get good, then any human composition will be completely devalued, despite the enormous amount of knowledge, skill and effort that goes into producing one.
A composer who writes a piece of music themselves, instead of being recognised and admired basically becomes the equivalent of someone who bakes their own sourdough instead of going to the supermarket: a curiosity, someone who does things the hard way for their own amusement.
Graphic artists and bloggers were the first to suffer this, but it feels like it's just going to happen to basically every type of creative expression that can be represented digitally. It's just a question of how many months until that happens.
> but as soon as they get good, then any human composition will be completely devalued
I think it will take many more years until an AI is able to compose like e.g. John Williams and play a score and sound like e.g. the London Symphony Orchestra. So there is room left for human contribution. On the other hand, the majority of humans even before AI was not able to value good vs. bad musical composition and performance, and instead satisfied with the commercial slop the market was flooded over the last thirty years. Studies of e.g. Spotify consumer behaviour demonstrated for many years before AI that more and more people consume anonymous playlists never caring who composed or played the music, just using music for its functional purpose like a commodity. It's depressing, but that's how society develops.
> a curiosity, someone who does things the hard way for their own amusement
That development already started long ago. In the eighties and nineties, music schools florished and children wanted to learn instruments and play in bands or orchestras. That completely changed over the last thirty years. Musical instruments will be a curiosity in a decade or two people are going to watch in a museum, wondering why anyone would have learned these skills in the past.
I'm also saddened by the impact of tech on creative industries. But art always was something you do for yourself and to share with others, for some fundamentally human experience. Could an AI pray for you or ride your bike? I don't know anyone in my personal life who wants to listen to AI music, view AI art, or read AI books. I wish art careers were easier, but I don't think a career alone is the right reason to make art.
> Could an AI pray for you
Prayer for external effects has long been mechanized [1]. But praying for your inner effect is a different thing. Similarly, production of songs for external consumption is being mechanized. But what you feel when you sing cannot be mechanized. Sing for yourself, play for yourself and for those immediately around you in the moment. It's as valuable as ever.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_wheel
Much like the restaurant industry, creative industries will probably bifurcate. Cheap (AI, drivethrough, takeout) for daily and most use cases, experiential (vinyl records, concerts, upscale restaurants) for special occasions, connoisseurs.
Yeah and for those of us who can't afford the "upscale" experiences, this sucks: our pleasantly diverse and human-crafted middle class lives replaced by the machine.
Who cares? The world is being handed an infinite creation machine that conjures entire worlds into existence, radically reshaping the future of the species and what our descendants will be able to do, and your reply is ~"they took our jobs!"
Figure out how to stand on the shoulders of giants like any of your predecessors of note.
> The world is being handed an infinite creation machine that conjures entire worlds into existence, radically reshaping the future of the species and what our descendants will be able to do, and your reply is ~"they took our jobs!"
I didn't even mention anything about economic impacts, jobs, money. It's truer to say my reply is "they destroyed what it is to be human".
Does this really not bother you at all?
Engineers understand that every technology represents inherent tradeoffs.
They’re talking about creative expression, not jobs
You are free to perform create expression, I love writing blogs, my friends like reading and talking about the blogs with me, I dont care if Claude or GPT can write much better blogs. In the same way if it was just about creative expression, there would actually be 0 problems with AI-generated music, you would keep on making and listening to music you like, and you wouldn't care, but usually its not it, its people who want to make money, get famous, tie their value to the product that complain about this.
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But is it stopping creative expression?
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Have you observed the sheer monotony of this avalanche of AI-generated "creative" expression at all?
You have people pumping out an entire album in a few days simply because they can, repeatedly, and then they flood streaming services with their garbage. I forget which network it was but as of a few months ago, AI-generated submissions were at least half of all submissions.
Yeah, and yet for a lot of people apparently this "garbage" is...good enough...so the human-crafted stuff can hardly compete.
I recently heard an anecdote about a family that finally found a podcast that they all enjoyed listening to on road trips...and only realised when they tried to find out more about the hosts that the whole thing was AI generated. Bam, another field of creative expression (and income!) destroyed.
It's being handed an infinite slop machine, drowning out genuinely good content and making it harder than ever to discover. As it becomes harder to discover, fewer talented creatives are able to make a living. We are destroying our own culture with a machine that enforces regression to the mean on creativity.
Check it out: As millions of people have recognized, we have a new discoverability problem! How about, out of the 9 billion people on Earth, we figure out how to get a few dozen of them motivated to work on that instead of sitting and moping for the rest of our lives about the end of human creativity?