[lukevp]

And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?

AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs.

Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument. Auto tune made it so you didn’t have to learn how to sing on key. There are many innovations in music over time that make it easier and less gatekeepy to make music.

We are just moving from making music as a rote activity similar to code, to making music like a composer in much the way that you can create software without writing code. It’s moving things up a level. It’s how the steady march of innovation happens.

It won’t work to put the genie back in the bottle, now it’s to find what you love about it and makes it worth it for you and to focus on that part. Banning the new types of art is only going to last as long as it takes for people to get over their initial shock of it and for good products to start being produced with it.

[vharuck]

>And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?

Personally, I don't buy this "AI models are learning just like we do." It's an appeal to ignorance. Just because we don't fully understand how a human brain learns, one can't claim it's the same as a statistical model of ordered tokens.

But even if it were true, I'm alright with drawing a line between AI learning and human learning. The law and social conventions are for humans. I want the ability to learn from others and produce original works that show influences. If this right is allowed to all humans, there is a chance one learn from and outperform me. That would suck for me, but I can accept it because it came from a universal human right I also enjoy. But an AI model doesn't have human rights. For models, the law and social conventions should still favor humans. The impact on the creative community and future creative endeavors should be balanced against the people who create and use the models.

I don't know how to do that with LLMs in a way that doesn't prevent the development of these amazing models. Maybe the government should distribute a portion of the revenue generated by the models amongst all citizens, to reflect how each model's value came from the written works of those citizens.

[tensor]

> If this right is allowed to all humans, there is a chance one learn from and outperform me. That would suck for me,

This is a rather sad take. If someone learned from my art or music and did something new and more popular, I would be happy! I had influence, I mattered. That new more popular work takes nothing away from my previous work. In fact, when I do science I'm doing it explicitly for this reason, to build on.

For me, creating music is not about "being the best" or "making more money than some other artist." It's about telling the stories I want to tell. An AI would not tell my stories, ever. It might produce things that somewhat similar, but it won't tell a human story, just a shallow imitation.

On the flip side, AI can be immensely useful. For example, stemming means that DJs or visualizer applications can do more with music. Perhaps AI can be used to create interesting new effects, or interesting new instruments or sounds. It can give ideas and help with inspiration.

I honestly have a hard time seeing AI actually driving musicians out of business because it can't tell a story. And it can't do that because it hasn't lived a life. Yes, I can see it producing low quality ad-jingles or low quality filler tracks like you see in spotify, so some people will be impacted. But we're long past time for some form of universal basic income to deal with this. It's not just artists that need a basic income at this point.

[pixl97]

>The law and social conventions are for humans.

I don't know about that. America shows us that laws and social conventions are for corporations. Humans are just entities to extract profit from.

[datsci_est_2015]

> Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument.

This is cliche. Most celebrated artists in the electronic music world can play several instruments, if not expertly, than at least with enough familiarity to understand the nuances of musical performance.

Electronic musicians are more akin to composers and probably have more in common with mathematicians and programmers in the way that they practice their craft, whereas musical performers probably have more in common with athletes in the way that they practice their craft.

[butlike]

You also need to understand how instruments make sound at an engineering level if you want to make timbre-perfect synthesizers which sound like said instrument, for instance

[crucialfelix]

Electronic music is also very closely related to computer animation. Animated film technology is much more advanced, but a lot of techniques are similar.

[JohnFen]

> Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument. Auto tune made it so you didn’t have to learn how to sing on key.

Neither of those things are really true, though. They made it possible to make poor music without learning those things, I suppose, but not make good music.

> Banning the new types of art

Nobody is seriously talking about banning AI generated music. What you're seeing is a platform deciding that AI generated music isn't something that platform is into. There are a lot of different platforms out there.

[Krasnol]

What is "good" music?

[array_key_first]

Humans are humans, computer programs aren't. A computer program learning doesn't matter, and it's not comparable to human learning. I have no empathy, sympathy or any sort of allegiance to computer programs.

I would imagine the vast majority of other humans agree with me. I'm not just gonna betray humankind because some 1s and 0s "learned" how to write music. Who cares, it's silicon.

[flumpcakes]

> AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs.

I guess the difference is proprietary code is mostly not used for training. It's going to be trained on code in the public. It's the inverse for music, where it's being trained on commercial work, not work that has been licensed freely.

[ajam1507]

LLMs are absolutely trained on commercial work. You just need to look at the lawsuits coming out against the AI companies.

[munificent]

> Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?

Yes, when I make music, I am taking inspiration from all of the other artists I've listened to and using that in my music. If someone listens to my music, they are getting some value from my contribution, but also indirectly from the musicians that inspired me.

The difference between that and AI is that I am a human being who deserves to live a life of dignity and artistic expression in a world that supports that while AI-generated music is the product of a mindless automaton that enriches billionaires who are actively building a world that makes it harder to live a life of stability, comfort, and dignity.

These are not the same thing any more than fucking a fleshlight is the same as being in a romantic relationship. The physical act may appear roughly the same, but the human experience, meaning behind it, and societal externalities are certainly not.

[somekyle2]

100%. I think there are some clear distinctions between AI training and human learning in practice that compound this. Humans learning requires individual investment and doesn't scale that efficiently. If someone invests the time to consume all of my published work and learn from it, I feel good about that. That feels like impact, especially if we interact and even more if I help them. They can perhaps reproduce anything I could've done, and that's cool.

If someone trains a machine on my work and it means you can get the benefit of my labor without knowing me, interacting with my work or understanding it, or really any effort beyond some GPUs, that feels bad. And, it's much more of a risk to me, if that means anything.

[handoflixue]

> I am a human being who deserves to live a life of dignity

Sure, but so does the homeless guy living on the streets right now because computers and the internet automated his job - and yet here you are using the very tools ("mindless automatons") that put him out of work.

[sheeh]

Spot on Sir

[butlike]

> AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs.

Not necessarily apples-to-apples here. Full songs generated from AI prompts don't crash like a computer program would. You could simply upload the garbage to Spotify and reap the rewards until it got removed (if it even does).

[nobody_r_knows]

Some of the worst (best?) AI "artists" on Spotify have millions of views. It's tragic what it says about us. That most of us not only can't tell, but actually prefer this kind of uni-tone, blase, on-the-nose, emotionally manipulative crap.

[gspr]

> And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?

But the parent poster is, presumably, human! Humans have the right to take inspiration like that from other humans (or machines)! Why do we seem so keen on granting machines the right to take from us? Are we not supposed to be their masters?

[wilg]

Couldn't you just as well say it's a human taking inspiration from other humans through a machine?

[eagleal]

> And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?

The volumes of production are really scales of magnitude of difference between a human producing music, and a computer.

With a script and generator 1 individual could oversaturate the whole marketplace overnight rendering it impossible for other individuals to be found let alone extract any value.

Also, I don't know if you've ever done music production for fun but you don't really just setup only a prompt. It takes a significant amount of time to actually produce something. Time setting up a DAW system and export an empty track, and submitting it. An empty track.

Let alone actually doing all the microoptimizations by ear and trial to produce any catchy tune. Meanwhile a statistical approach doesn't even have to understand what's it's doing, could as well be white noise for all it matters.

[leptons]

>We are just moving from making music as a rote activity similar to code

From this statement, I doubt you've written any music worth listening to, or any code that's not trivial.

Don't confuse music with muzak. What you get from an "AI" is muzak. It will never, ever have the same depth, warmth, or meaning as a human translating human emotions and experience into music and lyrics.

[lukevp]

Where did I claim in my post to have written music worth listening to or nontrivial code? Seems like you’re just insulting me in particular instead of providing a counter-argument.

There have already been AI-created #1 hits.

Sure, there’s music that has all of the attributes you lay out as “requisite” for “good” music, but this is classic moving of the goalposts. It’s how people always justify that AI is not here yet, because there’s this facet of it that’s not human enough.

A lot of the music people listen to is devoid of the depth, warmth and meaning you mention, even without AI involvement. It’s written and produced by tens or hundreds of people and there’s no single visionary behind it. It’s a product.

Similarly, there can be AI assisted music that has just as much depth, warmth and meaning as a human, BECAUSE a human is involved in the decision-making of that music.

Do you believe that if someone uses a sample, or uses a prebuilt drum loop, that their music automatically is bad? What level of assistance is acceptable? Where do you draw the line?

[isolli]

I think the analogy here is with Grok generating images of (real) people wearing bikini. It could always be done in Photoshop before (and with hand-made photo montages before that), but it's now accessible at scale to people with zero skill. That's when a quantitative change becomes qualitative.

[CJefferson]

Actually, to me this is the perfect argument to make AI music not have copyright.

Normally the copyright is owned by the creator. Algorithms can't own copyrights, so there is no copyright. There is already legal history on this.

[strangecasts]

> And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?

For me, one key difference is that I can cite my stylistic influences and things I tried, while (to my knowledge) commercial musical generation models specifically avoid doing that, and most don't provide chord/lead sheets either -- I would find it genuinely sad to talk to a musician about their arrangement/composition choices, only to find they couldn't

[crazygringo]

> I would find it genuinely sad to talk to a musician about their arrangement/composition choices, only to find they couldn't

So much of music composition is what "feels right" and is instinctual. Artists aren't consciously aware of probably most of their influences. They can cite some of the most obvious ones, but the creative process is melding a thousand different vibes and sounds and sequences you've heard before, internalized, and joined into something new, in a way only your particular brain could.

Let music historians work on trying to cite and trace influences. That's not something artists need to worry about.

[TiredOfLife]

I am 100% sure you can't cite all of them

[DamnInteresting]

> It won’t work to put the genie back in the bottle

It's not about putting the genie back in the bottle, it's about helping folks realize that the vague smell of farts in the air IS the genie--and this particular genie only grants costly monkey paw wishes that ultimately do more harm to the world than good.

[spopejoy]

> less gatekeepy to make music

Is "gatekeepy" how we're referring to skill now? "Man I'd like to make a top-quality cabinet for my kitchen, lame how those skilled carpenters are gatekeeping that shit smh"

[fenwick67]

Gatekeepy to not like something that's not to your taste

[jccc]

> And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?

This is an argument that the AI should be allowed to benefit, not the person prompting it.

[wesleywt]

> Electronic music...

Your instrument is the computer and designing sound. You still have to have talent and musical ear to make this music.