[pelotron]

I was involved in a conversation about cheating in video games the other day, and the topic shifted to AI use in music. Someone said, "using AI is like using an aimbot for music." I absolutely love that comparison since it highlights the shortcut past creativity/skill to get a computerized best result while also associating it with blatant cheating.

The "enables creativity" argument is ironic since the root of the word is "create" and AI users are literally removing the "create" step from their production process.

[wincy]

I made my wife a song about how we met using Suno. It took me about 4 hours to get the lyrics just right, rewriting them (without AI help, it’s terrible with lyrics), plugging them in, seeing how they sounded, fixing them some more to get the verse so it sounded right.

She thought it was really special and she cried as we listened to it while holding hands in the car. I can’t play guitar, and I can’t hit some notes with my low singing voice, but I wrote every word and it felt like something really special to the both of us. I don’t really care if people think I “cheated”. To torture the analogy, it’s like cheating in a two player game since I’m not publishing this song to anyone else.

[pton_xd]

> 4 hours

That made me imagine -- in the future when AI is much more advanced, maybe I could just prompt it with say "something sentimental to make my wife cry." I mean, I still came up with the idea and ultimately it's the thought that counts right. What's the limit here? Is this some sort of human emotion exploit, or a legitimate bonding experience?

[gchamonlive]

It's more like going into a video game and tuning the difficulty all the way down so you are virtually invincible. It's taking the fun out of the game for some, but for others that's the only way to play it.

[hecanjog]

It was special and you didn't cheat: you wrote the lyrics and they meant something to you and your wife, which is what matters. If you asked someone else to set the music for you, it would still be music about something meaningful to you both. The AI part of this is pretty meaningless, but you made it meaningful by putting something real into it and sharing that with another person.

[dsubburam]

Maybe we can distinguish craftmanship from creativity. This case can then be cast as one of deploying creativity without embodying the traditional craftmanship (ability to play guitar, sing low notes). I don't see that as illegitimate, so long as no false credit is taken about the said guitar playing, low note singing.

Can an artist be good if they can't draw a good circle by hand? Yes. Except they can't take credit for the goodness of circles that appear in their work, if not drawn by them.

[Edit: "responsibility" -> "credit"]

[noumenon1111]

I've been doing this. I've been a poet/songwriter for a while, but I'm no musician. This lowers the bar and provides a great deal of relief from the "creative boilerplate" necessary when booting up a song from zero using a DAW, especially for me, a non-musician.

So, I get a good song by throwing spaghetti at the wall until something sticks. Then I can export the stems to the DAW and replace the AI vocals with my own. A little audio processing and mixing later and the whole song is mine.

[tjr]

As a semi-professional musician, sounds fair to me.

You wrote the lyrics. There are professional songwriters with many hit songs who only write lyrics. Some can't even play an instrument, much less compose music. So what do they do? They work with a music composer. They hire a music arranger. They hire a band.

So in this case, you still did the foundational songwriting part yourself, but instead of hiring humans to help you finish it, you hired AI.

[rcbdev]

Grand Theft Auto V launched with auto-aim ('aimbot') as default in 2013. It is one of the most successful games in history, bringing joy to many people.

Are you arguing that's not a real game because of this?

[ggrantrowberry]

I disagree. The point of playing a shooter game is to have fun and be competitive while abiding by the rules of the game. Using aimbot is circumventing the whole purpose.

The purpose of making music is to make music. So why does it matter what tool you use to do it? Because tools like Logic or Garageband can create lots of sounds for you is that removing creativity? Really shouldn’t music be recorded with a live band every time? Those music production tools are destroying creativity… No. Obviously not. AI does enable creativity. Turns out it also requires a lot of skill to use it to get something good.

[shinycode]

People just enjoy and value the process of making music. Just like you could enjoy the process of drawing, or doing sports. Given the amount of talented musicians that do not live off their art, most of the time they value the process and the result and if other people like it too and pay for it it’s even better. Most music is not produced to give emotions to other but to the musician. It happens we share the same emotions that the musician sometimes. So if you remove the process or devalue it, it’s touching the artist in its heart and values because most of them worked on their craft for years.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> Turns out it also requires a lot of skill to use it to get something good.

I agree. I don't like blaming/crediting a tool, for how it is used.

Some tools may be too dangerous for "just anyone" to use, and there may be justification in restricting access, but I'm not sure the tools should always be banned.

I was just talking about this, with a friend who leans conservative (but not nuttily so). He was telling me about watching all these shows about folks living north of the Arctic Circle, and how everyone walks around with guns, because polar bears look at us as walking snacks. In those cases, the gun is an absolutely necessary tool, and no one even thinks twice about it.

Not so, New York City.

But it would be a life-endangering mistake for someone in NYC to dictate to an Alaskan Inuit, that they can't carry a gun, and it might be a life-endangering mistake for an Alaskan to insist that everyone in NYC walk around with a gun (I won't get into the political arguments, there, be draggones).

[elsjaako]

I agree. My problem with AI produced media is that a lot of the things I've seen are really bad. If someone uses AI, but has taste and takes the time to curate and fix the output, then the output can be fine.

Just like with digital effects in movies, plastic surgery, and makeup - if it's done well, there's a good chance I didn't even notice it. If it's clearly noticeable, it's often because it's not done well.

I think you can compare to another "uncreative" way of making music: sampling. The way the Timelords do it in "Doctorin' the Tardis" is pretty terrible (in their case on purpose, I believe). There are plenty of hip hop examples where I think musically not much is added to the music, but the lyrics and maybe the act do add a lot. And then there are bands like Daft Punk that will chop up and recontextualize the samples to the point that it's clearly a completely new thing.

[andyfilms1]

The purpose of eating is to ingest nutrients, but that's not why most chefs enjoy cooking, or why people pay more for nicer meals.

[xg15]

During Christmas shopping, I saw several books and board games with illustrations in the signature ChatGPT cartoon style [1, 2] as cover art. (As well as a coloring book that was literally only ChatGPT images) They were sold both in comic shops and large book stores.

I found it just sad, honestly. Nothing against using some AI help to create good cover art, but not even bothering to change the default style screams "low effort".

That's the effect I'm fearing. Sure, AI could probably be used to create new high-quality content by people who really put in the effort, but in reality, it just seems to define a new level of "good enough" that lowers the overall level of quality.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1o0sfzz/chatgpt...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kmao1t/i_asked_ch...

[platevoltage]

AI isn't being used the same way as a drum loop or an electronic instrument, It's being used to vertically integrate services like Spotify so that they don't have to pay as much for content. Maybe you have found a place for generative AI in your workflow that fosters creativity, but this is not how it's being used the vast majority of the time.

[Rooster61]

It's not real music if you aren't hand crafting the atoms that make up the molecules of the medium you are vibrating to create sound waves.

I feel like there should be an XKCD for this

[lukan]

The purpose of music is (usually) to touch people emotionally. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how it was made. There is no cheating when there is feeling.

Generic AI music so far does not touch me. I might tolerate it in the background, but I know there is great music being made with the help of AI. (Which is different from letting the AI do it all)

An aimbot in competive playing is indeed cheating and sucks the fun out for others. But if you have fun with single player aimbots, why not. (I know some games integrated autoaim and they can still be fun)

[kmike84]

I'm not sure I want AI to touch me emotionally.

It feels insincere and manipulative, especially when I don't know upfront if the content (music, video, text) is from another human being or from AI.

AI will become good enough to write songs better than humans; it's a matter of time. But it feels like someone tries to hack my mind, exploit my human instincts, it doesn't feel like genuine art the way it was for the whole human history - people expressing themselves, creating and sharing something beautiful with each other.

The end result is an automated personalized "enjoy" button, and this is sad.

[matthewkayin]

People care about authenticity, though. There are people who get bothered by things like fake DJs, ghostwritten songs, lip synced live performances, and manufactured artists (such as many kpop groups).

And as for single-player aimbots, I agree that it doesn't do anyone any harm, but what's the point? It's like running the course of a marathon on a segway. If you're just doing it by yourself, then I suppose it doesn't hurt anyone, but you can't really say that you ran a marathon, can you?

[gassi]

"The purpose of games is (usually) to win. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how you won. There is no cheating when there is winning."

[ToucanLoucan]

> The purpose of music is (usually) to touch people emotionally. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how it was made.

The touching you emotionally part is due to the quality of the underlying creative work. I'm sure the GP's wife was touched- they put in the work to make something- but the fact is that work they did was enabled by the theft-at-scale of work others have done.

You can square this with your own ethics however you like but there's simply no getting away from the fact that all of this, the text, the music, the video, all of it only exists because of theft of creative work on an industrial scale. These models did not come from the ether- they are weighted mathematical averages based on ingesting shit tons of existing creative work, made by people, the vast majority of which was ingested against those creatives' explicit wishes.

Unfortunately most people don't give a shit where things come from as long as they get whatever they want in the end, which is why our economy is almost exclusively run by sociopaths.

[echelon]

AI music models are a tool. They're only as good as the person doing the steering and curation.

I am a filmmaker. I have made photons-on-glass films for decades.

I have always wanted to make big-budget sci-fi and fantasy films, as have my friends and colleges who went to film school. The barrier to entry is almost impossible to climb. Most of my friends wound up in IATSE or doing commercial work, but never had the chance to follow through on their passion projects.

Ten thousand kids go to film school every year. Very few of them will wind up being able to make what they dream to create. It's a fucking tragedy that all of this ambition withers on the vine.

Getting a large film budget requires connections. You see a lot of nepotism. Sometimes a director who was in the right place at the right time with the right ideas will make it, but that's such a survivor's bias problem. There are orders of magnitude more people that didn't make it. Talented people full of dreams. And that's a tragedy - imagine how many Martin Scorseses, Hayao Miyazakis, Yorgos Lanthimoses, Denis Villeneuves, and Chloe Zhaos we're losing.

AI is the first tool that will level the playing field for truly driven individuals. I mean this with my full heart - this is a great tool for creative and driven people. It's the arrival of the printing press for us.

But the news of this gift has been twisted and soured by the media and by popular influencers who push only a fear agenda.

By trying to make AI films, I have been doxed, sent death threats, insulted, called thousands of names. Every day! People pour out hatred, racist comments, sexist comments - they literally want me (all of us) to DIE because they've been taught to hate this.

I can't even begin to tell you how exhausting this is. Instead, let me focus on the good.

Here's a list of (what I think) are really good AI films. Each of them takes 10+ hours of work:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4 - Made by a film school grad as a demo of real filmmaking combined with AI VFX.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAQWRBCt_5E - Created by a Hollywood TV writer for an FX show you've probably seen. Not the best animation or voicing, but you can see how it gives a writer more than just a blank page to convey their thoughts.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWZYP5jn5w4 - Music video. Slightly MAGA-coded, but made by a Hollywood VFX person.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U - Made by a film school grad as a Robot Chicken homage. If you're going to tell them "don't use AI", then are you going to get them a job at Disney? Also, all the pieces are hand-rotoscoped, the mouth animations are hand-animated, and every voice is from a hired (and paid) voice actor.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4NFXGMuwpY - Made by a film school grad as a Robot Chicken homage. See previous comment.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_KXYpaTe_8 - Another slightly MAGA-coded music video. Made by the same Hollywood VFX person.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hlx5Rslrzk - Amazing Spider-Man vs. Carnage anime created with ComfyUI and other models.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqoCWdOwr2U - Christmas Grinch anime. It's really funny if you like Jojo and get the references.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKYeDIiqiHs - Totally 100% cursed. Made by a teenager following the comic book's plot. Instead of this teenager spending 100 hours on Fortnite, they made this.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps5Dhc3Lh8U - A Pixar-like short film

These tools do not remove the need for editing, compositing, rotoscoping. You still have to understand film language, character arcs, story, pacing. The human ingredients still have to be there.

By using these models and tools, directors and editors can finally pursue projects that would require many people and potentially very large budgets. Like the Red vs. Blue creators sitting down and making machinima, they can create vivid sci-fi worlds or whatever genre or mood they want to evoke.

AI is a tool. In the hands of an artist, you can make art with AI.

Yes, people are using AI to make slop. Cameras also make slop - selfies, food pics. Your own camera roll is full of garbage.

People are posting slop AI because it's novel. If we'd gone from "no cameras at all" to "smartphones" overnight, you would see so much smartphone camera slop it would be unbearable. We, as a society, had time to develop filters and curation around cameras. That'll eventually happen for AI too.

Cameras can make incredible art in the hands of an artist. They can also make a lot of shit. But we don't demonize the cameras. Soon, our feelings towards AI will become equivalent.

But right now, it's extremely painful to be a creative person using AI.

I -

ABSOLUTELY HATE

ABSOLUTELY DETEST

   THE "ALL AI IS BAD" MEME

IT IS MIMETIC VITRIOL

People have let this stupid meme boil over to the point of sending death threats and doxxing creators. And that is beyond unacceptable.

We need to stop adopting angry slogans of hate and start thinking on a case by case basis with nuance.

This entire conversation needs way more humanity and humility.

And we need to accept that there are good things being created with AI too.

[stale2002]

> Someone said, "using AI is like using an aimbot for music."

Ok. Lets go with that analogy. Whats the problem with someone playing a single player game with an aimbot on? Sure they wont get good at the aiming part. But it feels kinda up to them on if that matters or not.

Additionally, I wouldn't see anything morally wrong with that. Now, if someone entered into a music competition, where only human made music was allow then I agree that this would be "cheating". But what if its not that and the listeners simply are OK with the "aimbotted" music?

[ZoomZoomZoom]

> Whats the problem with someone playing a single player game with an aimbot on?

People are doing it on the server where all the musicians live, and they have no other place to go, only disconnect.

[ryandrake]

To use the video game analogy, I think it's more about PVP vs "bots" as opposed to PVP vs "humans". A lot of PVP games (especially battle royale style) struggle with the question of whether to include dumb AI characters as "fodder" for people to play against. The PVP purists, pro players, and streamers tend to be against bots because they think the game should be a pure test of human skill. Normie players, less skilled players, and players who just don't have the time to master the game tend to like to play against a mix of bots and humans. Some people just don't like PVP and would prefer to just play against bots only.

I'm not going to weigh in on which side I'm on, but I notice the discussion around AI "making creativity too easy" and "devaluing practiced skills" to be similar to the discussion around bots in PVP games.

[odyssey7]

The long history of art shows a story of technology developments and how artists have creatively applied them as new techniques and mediums.

Is AI music today able to emulate what a brilliant human artist does? Not really. But is it something that artists can leverage creatively? Absolutely.

[bitexploder]

AI can do the most basic first pass of creation. For a senior engineer writing code is a relatively small part of the job. There is a paradox where complete novices can churn out content / code that looks decent, but is superficially empty or a maintenance nightmare waiting to happen if the complexity increases even a little. On the other hand, for senior engineers, it is truly useful. If you treat the AI like a modestly skilled junior developer and actually still design your software it just does a lot of the boring boiler plate for you. You are still doing almost everything important. When you understand the code and could write it yourself you can almost always keep the LLM on track towards your objective, achieve appropriate code quality, and finish the task quicker. They are also really decent at refactoring and doing boilerplate. Especially in languages like C++ with a lot of boilerplate.

I imagine the same idea above holds for media (music, film) as well. When you understand how to prompt and can get the right scene with all the right constraints you are saving time. The human is still composing, editing, and storytelling. The LLM again becomes a relatively interesting but boring tool in your workflow to speed up some aspects.

Right now the power of LLMs is that you can funnel parts of your workflow that they can handle well and you save a lot of time for minimal design cost in terms of how to use them.

[socalgal2]

I find many of the top videos on civitai.com to be amazing

https://civitai.com/videos

[veunes]

The analogy is great, but it breaks down when we talk about professional use. An aimbot in multiplayer is evil because it ruins the game for others. But an aimbot in game development (e.g., procedural aiming animation) is just a tool. The problem with current AI video is that the model often shoots not where the director wants, but where it's easiest to hit (the template)

[mikkupikku]

There's literally no problem at all with using aimbots, the problem is when you're playing with other people and lie about it. In fact, many games have built in aimbots simply because it's a fun mechanic (Ion Fury and Borderlands: Pre-Sequel are two that come to mind.)

[_DeadFred_]

Using AI to create music is like having your mom buy you a surfer wardrobe in the 80s/90s even though you lived in landlocked midwest or a skater wardrobe even though you didn't skate.

[ZoomZoomZoom]

No, comparing to an aimbot is too charitable. Using AI for music is at best like watching a gaming stream and you barely choosing the game, though not the streamer.

[jacquesm]

That is an excellent way to put it. Thank you for relaying this.

[slowmovintarget]

Agree... AI enables output, not creativity. The mediocre confuse one for the other.