AI in music

[Dust2Dust]

Radio stations are using AI as DJs now

Australian radio station caught using an AI DJ | Digital Watch Observatory

CADA shocked listeners after it was revealed that DJ Thy, who hosted a popular show for months, was entirely AI-generated instead of being a real person.

dig.watch

 

[dbsfgyd1]

Hello guys
What is your feeling of using AI in music in U.S. ?
in France people have a bad feeling of it.
But sometime I think it will be useful
What do you think of?

I think we are all dinosaurs trudging to the tar pits. JMO.

 

[newfuture]

Giving AI a big nope across the board, until it can do my job and I still get paid.

 

[hrodbert696]

I suspect it’s already being used for lyrics. Not a fan of this practice myself, but I tried it, and it’s really REALLY good at it.

I mean you can literally tell it “write me 100 song lyrics about my cat, in the style of Pearl Jam” and it will bust out 100 lyrics that are as good as or better than anything Eddie Vedder could write, in about 30 seconds.

Yes, exactly - but this is what I'm talking about. It's too easy to be interesting. Not only can YOU tell it to produce 100 lyrics about cats, but billions of people around the world can ALL tell it to produce 100 lyrics about cats. What none of it will do is express how YOU feel about YOUR cat, or sense what the people of the world need to hear about cats. It will force a rethink about what we mean by a "good" lyric.

 

[Bluesrock]

My band mates and I participated in a game last week that involved creating lyrics from random storylines and unrelated subjects. Interestingly, AI generated coherent lyrics despite the nonsensical prompts. I have very mixed feelings.

 

[dmt]

AI is a slow motion disaster of our own creation. The end won’t be pretty

 

[majo57]

We will be surrounded by AI, hello man how are you, hum fine but i lost my job and like says my AI girlfriend, you should get a neuralink to be more efficient like your child.
Oops scary.

 

[JazznFunk]

I see it as a threat to people using genuine experiences to create vs. having something synthesized from whatever AI mashes together as a 'starting point.' I see people being so obsessed to create 'content' to post and be seen as relevant by the algorithm and their followers, that they'll stoop to using AI to create SOMETHING to post/share out of sheer pressure, artistic and personal.

As the late postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard lamented before AI was ever really a thing at all, it is accelerating the notion of a 'copy without an original.' In basic parlance though, it's garbage in/garbage out. AI is only as good as the source material it's being fed. What I have a real problem with is people creating 'music' using AI, never playing a single instrument on a recording utilizing it in any form, and then putting it up for consumption.... and getting streaming royalties for it.

The Matrix, iRobot, and countless other films warned us in an artistic realm about the realities of AI and why we should be very careful with it. As we're already seeing in many areas other than music, it's quickly shifting from novelty to threatening. I've never used ChatGPT or any other AI content generator, and I have zero plans to do so anytime soon. Succeed or fail on our own merits and our experiences, IMO.

 

[basslayer]

Do we count drum machines as AI?

 

[JazznFunk]

Do we count drum machines as AI?

No. Why would we? Do we count mechanical metronomes as AI?

 

[Prodigus Filius]

An AI generated painting is not Art.
An AI generated poem is not Poetry
An AI generated song is not Music

Replication via computation = zero inspiration.

That’s my 10 cents he he

 

[majo57]

The AI was just a tool for me, but i realize that the fact to use and say it the people doubt of my création part, for example some people think that the instruments and the construction was from the machine.
It s an effect that i could not imagine.

Some musicians around me probably felt attacked too.
With all the posts you made, i imagine my reaction if i was the listener.
That made me sad
But thanks all to make my eyes open.

 

[mambo4]

In a different forum about a different discipline, someone asked "what's the point, when AI will replace us"?
I wrote this:
--
I don’t care what AI can or might be able to do.
I want to learn it.
I want the skills.
I want the understanding.
I know others know more than me , and maybe AI will “know more”, But they are resources for me to learn from, not reasons for discouragement.
I’ll most likely die having not learned everything, but so what? I want to grasp as much of the process as I possibly can, for my own curiosity and satisfaction.

That’s why I bother trying, anyhow. YMMV.
--

So as far as using AI to make music: I'm not interested, because *I* want to make the music.

 

[Danny C]

A friend played me a new song he allegedly wrote. He put lyrics into an AI program, and it spit out a completed song. Vocals, instrumentation, everything in a country fashion which he wanted. I listened and I said, bullsh*t. He didn't write anything but a poem. It didn't sound anything like him or how he usually writes and plays. Used like that.... I have no use for it. But I've been around for a long while and I yell at clouds.

 

[Swamp_Ronin]

My experience is that a lot of musicians get super angry whenever ai is mentioned, in any context.

My experience/feelings/observations:

I now see it being used everywhere, by musicians of all levels, for album, song and poster art. I use it in that way as well.

I like its potential for Mastering, when doing your own mixes.

I suspect it’s already being used for lyrics. Not a fan of this practice myself, but I tried it, and it’s really REALLY good at it.

I mean you can literally tell it “write me 100 song lyrics about my cat, in the style of Pearl Jam” and it will bust out 100 lyrics that are as good as or better than anything Eddie Vedder could write, in about 30 seconds.

For industry producers and songwriters, where big $ is on the line, it seems like a no brainer they will all be using this.

For anyone thinking this is the end of musicians as we know them, a couple of thoughts.

1) Go in the other direction. People will buy ai music, yes, but some will undoubtably crave authenticity, and being able to “actually play live” could be a market differentiator.

2) Enjoy this period we are in right now, where ai tools are powerful enough to add immense capability to the average individual. EG musicians can now do their own awesome album art.

3) Learn how to use this stuff to create things that are new

Love it or hate it, it’s here to stay.

“Awesome album art?”

Ai “art” is based on theft, unethical scraping, copyright infringement and is often as cheesy as it is horrible. It won’t age well. It blows my mind how thoughtless musicians can be regarding their creative counterparts in the visual arts. All of this technology is about divorcing writers, musicians, and artists from their handiwork and funneling the money to Silicon Valley vampires.

This isn’t an attack on you, but I wish people would wake up a bit about what this stuff means. It’s a huge net bad for the well being of mankind.

There are a lot of things that are “here to stay” that are still wrong.

 

[ThinCrappyTone2]

“Awesome album art?”

Ai “art” is based on theft, unethical scraping, copyright infringement and is often as cheesy as it is horrible. It won’t age well. It blows my mind how thoughtless musicians can be regarding their creative counterparts in the visual arts. All of this technology is about divorcing writers, musicians, and artists from their handiwork and funneling the money to Silicon Valley vampires.

This isn’t an attack on you, but I wish people would wake up a bit about what this stuff means. It’s a huge net bad for the well being of mankind.

There are a lot of things that are “here to stay” that are still wrong.

Funnily enough, I am one of those "creative counterparts in the visual arts" you referenced, having been doing design professionally for 35 years. And my perspective is it's just another technology to be used or not. It's only cheesy and horrible if you make cheesy horrible stuff with it. Just like photoshop. People have been making visual abominations with it from it's inception, and also great art as well.

And the scraping and copyrights? I get it, it's stealing on some level. But guess what? Professional human designers and artists steal as a matter of practice. Literally if you go to work for a company as a designer, the first thing they will do is gather screenshots of all their competitors designs, then ask you to come up with some version that takes the best of what's out there and put your own spin on it. That's exactly what AI does, just much faster. Not saying it's right, but in conversations about AI, there seems to be in people's minds this imagined world where there are all these purist artist making unique art that is now being stolen. When reality is that's very rare, and people are just copying each other. Ai is just doing it at scale.

 

[Swamp_Ronin]

Funnily enough, I am one of those "creative counterparts in the visual arts" you referenced, having been doing design professionally for 35 years. And my perspective is it's just another technology to be used or not. It's only cheesy and horrible if you make cheesy horrible stuff with it. Just like photoshop. People have been making visual abominations with it from it's inception, and also great art as well.

And the scraping and copyrights? I get it, it's stealing on some level. But guess what? Professional human designers and artists steal as a matter of practice. Literally if you go to work for a company as a designer, the first thing they will do is gather screenshots of all their competitors designs, then ask you to come up with some version that takes the best of what's out there and put your own spin on it. That's exactly what AI does, just much faster. Not saying it's right, but in conversations about AI, there seems to be in people's minds this imagined world where there are all these purist artist making unique art that is now being stolen. When reality is that's very rare, and people are just copying each other. Ai is just doing it at scale.

Professional illustrator here (traditional) for 10 years.

Photoshop, the camera, and ellipse templates are tools. GenAi is a replacement technology. It’s not here to help you come up with the best idea, it’s here to put you in a breadline. Even worse, it’s here to separate us from one of the few reasons for living humanity has been able to hold onto- the journey of creativity. My main argument is phenomenological.

I concede to and understand your point about iteration, borrowing, and etcetera. The moral lines here have always been wide and blurry with creativity, Influence, borrowing, etc. Most of the pro-ai rhetoric I hear has been made AFTER the decision to get in bed with it. We’ve swam in the waters of progress/technology worship so long, we don’t even know we are wet. Can anything be done, probably not. I feel like people don’t count the cost though.

 

[basslayer]

No. Why would we? Do we count mechanical metronomes as AI?

Because some drum machines come with humanizing settings, that add articulations the user didn't include that are based off of a computerized analysis of people's playing. Does that meet the level of AI music? Do you think Band In A Box is AI music? What level of human input is enough for it to not be AI music?

 

[Prodigus Filius]

Funnily enough, I am one of those "creative counterparts in the visual arts" you referenced, having been doing design professionally for 35 years. And my perspective is it's just another technology to be used or not. It's only cheesy and horrible if you make cheesy horrible stuff with it. Just like photoshop. People have been making visual abominations with it from it's inception, and also great art as well.

And the scraping and copyrights? I get it, it's stealing on some level. But guess what? Professional human designers and artists steal as a matter of practice. Literally if you go to work for a company as a designer, the first thing they will do is gather screenshots of all their competitors designs, then ask you to come up with some version that takes the best of what's out there and put your own spin on it. That's exactly what AI does, just much faster. Not saying it's right, but in conversations about AI, there seems to be in people's minds this imagined world where there are all these purist artist making unique art that is now being stolen. When reality is that's very rare, and people are just copying each other. Ai is just doing it at scale.

So AI is just a tool. Of course that is so. For now. At some point though, the wielded tool will become the wielder of the tool. The apprentice becomes the master. The created becomes the creator. And then …..

 

[Jeff Scott]

So AI is just a tool. Of course that is so. For now. At some point though, the wielded tool will become the wielder of the tool. The apprentice becomes the master. The created becomes the creator. And then …..

Is this a good point to interject with this?