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AI-generated music just around the corner: How do you feel about it?

TR909sample said:
I think that AI is cool and interesting.
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In general I can understand that fascination. But I have trouble understanding how creatives can say that sentence without the utter horror of soon being made redundant on multiple levels overshadowing the joy of the novelty.

I mean... you proceed to describe how you didn't want to spend time looking for a human that could do a very specific human thing for you, because you could get an AI to the same thing in minutes and the result was good enough for you. How is that not nightmare fuel that makes you question your future career or worse - the meaning of your creative life's work - past and future?

I truly get the desire not to interact with other people when it comes to creating things, I really do! But that's exactly why I fear that on lower stakes projects a large volume of creative jobs will get wiped out by AI. There are too many people who feel negatively about hiring freelance creatives and would rather "do it themselves" with the "help from AI". They'll have fun doing it because it's novel and quick and has slotmachine-like qualities in its workflow, and they will be prouder of the result than if any other human was involved. This is all really bad news for us!
 
MartinH. said:
In general I can understand that fascination. But I have trouble understanding how creatives can say that sentence without the utter horror of soon being made redundant on multiple levels overshadowing the joy of the novelty.

I mean... you proceed to describe how you didn't want to spend time looking for a human that could do a very specific human thing for you, because you could get an AI to the same thing in minutes and the result was good enough for you. How is that not nightmare fuel that makes you question your future career or worse - the meaning of your creative life's work - past and future?

I truly get the desire not to interact with other people when it comes to creating things, I really do! But that's exactly why I fear that on lower stakes projects a large volume of creative jobs will get wiped out by AI. There are too many people who feel negatively about hiring freelance creatives and would rather "do it themselves" with the "help from AI". They'll have fun doing it because it's novel and quick and has slotmachine-like qualities in its workflow, and they will be prouder of the result than if any other human was involved. This is all really bad news for us!
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I can definitely see the other side of the argument too, and maybe AI and robots etc. will put some humans out of work eventually, but I'm not sure if that is necessarily a bad thing.

In the case I was describing though, the reality is that it was just a personal project for myself, and I wouldn't have taken the time or made the effort to go out and try to find a human voice, as the budget was basically zero. So AI helped me out in that particular case. I feel that I was using the AI in a creative way, and the AI didn't create anything for me in that particular case. It made something possible that I wouldn't otherwise have done. I was the master and the AI was my slave.
 
I think the Endgame is the AI becomes more efficient at pretty much everything, writing music, etc, etc. When we get there, I wonder if we, the audience, will still value consuming stuff created by other human beings or will instead be completely hooked to the unimaginable stuff created by AI, and custom-made just for us.

I wonder how many of us would go to more live concerts and support local musicians if computers and recordings haven't been invented.

In the meantime, I think we have to make the best of what we currently have and surf the wave. The genie is out of the bottle.
 
MartinH. said:
In general I can understand that fascination. But I have trouble understanding how creatives can say that sentence without the utter horror of soon being made redundant on multiple levels overshadowing the joy of the novelty.

I mean... you proceed to describe how you didn't want to spend time looking for a human that could do a very specific human thing for you, because you could get an AI to the same thing in minutes and the result was good enough for you. How is that not nightmare fuel that makes you question your future career or worse - the meaning of your creative life's work - past and future?

I truly get the desire not to interact with other people when it comes to creating things, I really do! But that's exactly why I fear that on lower stakes projects a large volume of creative jobs will get wiped out by AI. There are too many people who feel negatively about hiring freelance creatives and would rather "do it themselves" with the "help from AI". They'll have fun doing it because it's novel and quick and has slotmachine-like qualities in its workflow, and they will be prouder of the result than if any other human was involved. This is all really bad news for us!
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But every VI we buy has been to replace a player or a need to master an instrument, negatively impacting some industries. It's just not practical. Ideally, we'd all live in an art-filled world where people could collaborate on grand works, but realistically, our aims are often far beyond our resources for time and money. So the workaround has been technology that made our greatest ideas closer to becoming reality.

I still maintain that the ideal of AI, is that we don't consume general AI that gives us cookie-cutter results from the entirety of its knowledge base. Ideally, we'd all tune our own AI's to our tastes, needs, and ideas, so it helps us better express ourselves and our ideas. Instead of using an AI that has the knowledge of all music, trying to tell me what the most general expression of that knowledge is, I'd rather have an AI that knows my music in and out and can speed up my processes, or challenge me to try something new.

In the meantime, this AI-driven existential crisis that's hit humanity only seems like people finally realizing the mediocre things they thought make them unique and special, actually don't, and now we're challenged with really trying to understand what humanity is all about.
 
I believe AI-driven music will be a potential replacement for the library music industry but not at all a threat to the talented composers of today and yesterday. My reasoning for this is based on the purpose of AI--to learn patterns by aggregating from the many inputs to form a solution that generally fits the pattern it learns. What this means is that what you get from AI is a result that is designed to replicate the average, on average. In other words mediocrity. Which, in the world of music, is already in abundant oversupply.

I do see, though, the library music industry being potentially impacted. Say if it would be more affordable and efficient for a blogger to generate music using an AI tool versus paying for a library music subscription it would be feasible for AI generated music to have a foothold in the library music industry.

And, another potential benefit to AI-driven music could be the accessibility for anyone to create "music" which I can see could be satisfying for the non-musical types to experience. At the end, the venerable composers of our day and of yesterday will have no threats made to their greatness by AI. What is threatened, however, is those of us who are half-rated composers who can't get our compositions out to the general public! :emoji_blush:

The test of time will ultimately be what reveals how all this turns out.
 
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Human creativity and creative AI exist for two completely different purposes.

Human creativity exists because of our need for self-expression, which will never go away or be diminished by AI or anything else.

Creative AI in its most banal form is essentially an amusing toy, but in its most fully realized version, represents an unending river of cash for those who control the tech.

Music AI is not being developed to help us composers make music better and quicker. We are a far too small and specialized audience to make that a worthwhile venture. The big pot of gold for AI developers lies with the masses. Basically, to enable those who don't know how to make music to suddenly have the power to "create" music.

Unfortunately for music professionals, this does threaten to obviate many revenue-generating opportunities that have traditionally sustained musicians and composers. Why pay a composer, musicians, studio time, etc. when you can use AI to generate an endless number of musical ideas at the click of a button?

At this point, someone usually pipes up with, "AI will never be able to score a film." Well, maybe not today, but in the words of Tom Petty, the future is wide open. Technological advances in creative AI continue to surprise and amaze us on an almost a weekly basis. I wouldn't bet against AI's potential at this point.

The fact is, music AI is still in its infancy. All these little examples of AI-generated music, voices, etc. are just initial probes into new territory. With each iteration the capabilities improve and the range of possibilities expand.

For individuals who create music to express themselves, AI is of little consequence and might possibly even help them achieve better results, as long as they're comfortable handing over a portion of creative responsibility to AI. But for music professionals, the landscape is about to change.
 
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NekujaK said:
Basically, to enable those who don't know how to make music to suddenly have the power to "create" music.
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absolutely. Geniuses and talented people WANT to create ALL elements of their music. If they can´r do it, then try to have so much influence over their materials as possible. Stupids, however, want something to generate the music for them, but later appear as the creators. They are the primary consumers of short cuts.


Like the question os loop and samples, geniuses and talented composers will make the given material sound unique. So unique as a neapolitan chord by Chopin sounds nothing like one by Vivaldi.


But art is about technique, and technique is about creating the most effective short-cut , so it is quite impossible to exclude AI, so much I i don´t exclude Logic Pro, and so much as many composers composed different things over the same given bass line or melody.

The question will be how great composers create their signature with AI. This will have a lot to do with this statement by Hegel:

artists and philosophers are those who have the best intuition about the near future to come.


In this sense, there are things in your head that are still absent in the AI programming, and that may communicate deeper to other people.


What, however, complicated the situation, is that music industry creates a musical taste based on already fake and not authentic things. In this sense, it is very hard for this system to not give the chance of any stupid ignorant to rise to the top, if he masters marketing ,networking, and hiring the right ghost-writers on Upwork. Since the masses are already used to music that sounds like any other, and with standards that are based on the bottom of the skill hierarychy, it is easy to just anulate any chance of meritocracy, and principally, any chance of true commmunication between reality and audience by the means of great works of art - because this is what works of art do.




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I personally think AI will not be as big of a deal as many claim it will be. I wouldn’t plan on making any changes to things I do musically based on AI. This trend will all pass quickly enough.
 
MartinH. said:
In general I can understand that fascination. But I have trouble understanding how creatives can say that sentence without the utter horror of soon being made redundant on multiple levels overshadowing the joy of the novelty.

I mean... you proceed to describe how you didn't want to spend time looking for a human that could do a very specific human thing for you, because you could get an AI to the same thing in minutes and the result was good enough for you. How is that not nightmare fuel that makes you question your future career or worse - the meaning of your creative life's work - past and future?

I truly get the desire not to interact with other people when it comes to creating things, I really do! But that's exactly why I fear that on lower stakes projects a large volume of creative jobs will get wiped out by AI. There are too many people who feel negatively about hiring freelance creatives and would rather "do it themselves" with the "help from AI". They'll have fun doing it because it's novel and quick and has slotmachine-like qualities in its workflow, and they will be prouder of the result than if any other human was involved. This is all really bad news for us!
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I 100% concur.

However, I temper it with this sobering fact:

Most composers will be made redundant soon. If not ChatGPT5 then 6, or 7, and they seem to come out every few months.

I say, enjoy the honeymoon period while you can, while it is still fun, because soon, it won't be.
 
I think there is some music that is so bad and formulaic that it *should* be created by AI, instead of human beings trying to write what a computer would write if it could. Happy clappy uke and orch bells music? Pitz ‘dramady’ music? All of the stock hackneyed emotional buttons we composers are supposed to push (sad? Minor second; wonder? Raised 4th, etc. etc.). All the cliches that aren’t to be deviated from, not even a little. It’s kind of perverted for humans to keep manufacturing dreck like that - esp after all these years of, in many cases, being done to death. I mean, the happy clappy stuff is, at least in the US, a trend that is not passing! Must have been 15 or 20 years that’s been going on! Ad companies and editors still think it’s a fresh idea.

I think we take the phrase ‘artificial intelligence’ a little too literally. It’s not intelligence in the human sense. In AI it’s a metaphor or marketing term, like ‘smart water’. It is not truly generative. Human intelligence is about imagination, making seemingly disparate connections between things; it is not simply modeling from a massive input.

Anyway, maybe AI can get good enough to poop out music that is good enough for some very low grade purposes, but if so, a.) that ‘music‘ probably shouldn’t exist in the first place, and b.) if it does, why would any human want to write it? On the other hand, maybe it will never be as good as a person trying (and failing) to be a robot (as it were).
 
AI shouldn't quit it's day job.

Seems many want to believe in AI capabilities so hard, but it is essentially a fast internet browser which can gather and arrange the collected information for you. It's not what it's cracked up to be imo. What I hear is the midi-synth music that everyone hated back in the 1990s.

Back then, that was really the main reason media started to pay big money for being able to use real music in their productions. With AI in this stage, seems we have to relive that horrible midi sound again for a decade or two.

If they use this, I believe media will throw their popularity overboard in no time, and end at rock bottom where music is now. Give the newborn kids real instruments, make them learn how to play, and in two decades the demand will hit the roof, because no-one can stand this crap by then.

I think the impact will be that low budget productions will try this (and ruin their stuff), which means the penny business for indie musicians goes away (Hipgnosis and the likes will take over the sync business). It will create a big leap between low budget and elite productions, which will still use real music, but only from top names.
 
Epic Wonder said:
AI shouldn't quit it's day job.

Seems many want to believe in AI capabilities so hard, but it is essentially a fast internet browser which can gather and arrange the collected information for you. It's not what it's cracked up to be imo. What I hear is the midi-synth music that everyone hated back in the 1990s.

Back then, that was really the main reason media started to pay big money for being able to use real music in their productions. With AI in this stage, seems we have to relive that horrible midi sound again for a decade or two.

If they use this, I believe media will throw their popularity overboard in no time, and end at rock bottom where music is now. Give the newborn kids real instruments, make them learn how to play, and in two decades the demand will hit the roof, because no-one can stand this crap by then.

I think the impact will be that low budget productions will try this (and ruin their stuff), which means the penny business for indie musicians goes away (Hipgnosis and the likes will take over the sync business). It will create a big leap between low budget and elite productions, which will still use real music, but only from top names.
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Do you not get how fast this is evolving?

It’s massively more than a “fast internet browser.”

This is the beginning of the beginning of the beginning. We ain’t seen nothing yet,
 
Thundercat said:
Do you not get how fast this is evolving?

It’s massively more than a “fast internet browser.”

This is the beginning of the beginning of the beginning. We ain’t seen nothing yet,
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I'm using AI tools pretty much all day now, and I'm in awe of what's been helping me do, ChatGPT and Synth V are some such tools, maybe Noteperformer 4 will join to that list soon.

I think most people who are saying it's a circus trick haven't fully tested the potential of what's already available, not even mention what's to come.

The more I use it, the more fascinated and terrified I'm by it.
 
AI generated music may not have copyright protection according to the US Copyright Office - which could render it worthless and unusable for many film/game producers. Getty Images currently has a lawsuit against an "AI generator that was suspected of using unlicensed Getty Images photos to create AI images". The same could and probably would apply to AI generated music.
 
ka00 said:
If the generative model making the music is trained on a library of licensed content, then the producers will need only be subscribers of the service that owns that model
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Isn't it the case that the AI generated content still remains without copyright though - regardless of how it is trained? Copyrighted material can be used to train AI, but AI generated content will still be without copyright under current laws. There needs to be some element of human authorship for copyright to apply.
 
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