Have we now reached "peak plug in"

[jamcat]

But AI will make musicians themselves obsolete..

No, it won't, because it can't - ever.

The public already stopped caring about musicians a couple decades ago. They're perfectly happy replacing them with a DJ in a theme park costume, or a cat playing a trumpet. They'll happily ask Alexa to play "wub wub" for 4 hours.

[havran]

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[havran]

As for the OP, I think I have room in my magic kit for another saturator and reverb or two.

[havran]

As for the ability of AI to make art that is resonant with or evocative for humans -- based on observation, collation, and the art of combinations, without any organic emotion or personal life-experience behind it -- sure, why not? Isn't that what the shadow-box maker in Gibson's Neuromancer was doing?

EDIT: However, you know how some people prefer hand-made stuff to factory-made products? I imagine a new cycle of that kind of preference will occur or is already occurring.

Also, I think it might still be a little while before some AI-inhabited or -controlled robot could sit on a stage and present this kind of performance:

[zerocrossing]

I believe we have reached 'peak synth' and now 'peak plug in' you can probably get 4-7 versions of any classic gear and at least one very good version of pretty much anything you can think of.

This is the phenomena known as "doomsday narcissism." You want to be at the end of the story. It makes you feel special. We are not at the end of the story, and we are not special. Your experience has closed you off to the possibilities of what synthesis can be. It can be more, and it will.

[bk]

I don't know, it seems to me a bit like when drum machines were going to put all drummers out of a job. Maybe I'm naive.

[CrystalWizard]

But AI will make musicians themselves obsolete..

No, it won't, because it can't - ever.

The public already stopped caring about musicians a couple decades ago. They're perfectly happy replacing them with a DJ in a theme park costume, or a cat playing a trumpet. They'll happily ask Alexa to play "wub wub" for 4 hours.

I couldn't make such a sweeping statement, but in my tiny subset of the "public" it does seem that most people are now into playlists. Only a small subset of that subset (mostly older friends) actually Listen to music and care who made it. I often ask people "who is this playing?" and get an uncomfortable mumble of "um, i don't know", some at least will check their itoy or googlespyphone and look it up. It's getting rare that i get an answer right off. It has been a few decades since most people i interact with have cared about who makes the music, especially if it is not some celebrity who made it.
Most of my musician friends just make music. If someone likes it that's a plus.
"Alexa, put on some Motown", it puts up 70s, cheezy (Motown) crap hits...
This has happened three times this year, where i had to name a bunch of Motown artists from the 60s to get it to play them. Way off topic...

[JerGoertz]

as im nearly 50, i find it very hard to care, what people will be listening to, in 100 years.

49 this year. Hard to believe it, I started this musical journey over 20 years ago. Doesn't even seem that long ago.

[havran]

The Arcturian Spider Crystals have informed me that when organic beings were first proposed, there was some strong pushback from certain entities who believed those/we would ruin everything.

[jancivil]

as far as telling an "AI" 'do such and such as performed by Frank Zappa' good luck with that A machine learning enough to extrapolate technical aspects of recording studio production therein might be within the realm of possibility in a foreseeable future, but "AI" as though we are dealing with a viable or genuine musician is majorly overhyped BS that has leapt to a misconstruction of "creating music", reducing to calculations as it must. Confer genuine sentience, before we even start.

DALL·E can do that with images from natural language. Google's Dream Track is doing exactly what I described. With the exponential growth in the power of AI, how long do you really think it will be before AI is writing better songs than 99% of musicians, and creating convincing performances of them? It already can generate a convincing violin performance out of nothing. It can write lyrics that are less inane and vapid than most pop lyrics being put out there today. And with a mere 12 tones and simple ratio relationships between them to create music, writing music in any style almost certainly takes less language model analysis than writing a coherent sentence in English.

Bold claims and non-sequitur bullshit. Reduced to what it actually says 'lyrics less inane than most inane and vapid' lyrics is not terribly useful language in itself and writing lyrics has the thinnest of correlation with composing music. A convincing violin performance of what? Something already well known enough to flat copy from data? "Images from natural language" has no correlation and fails to form any kind of analogy with making original music. AFAIC it gaslights me, I mean as though I haven't seen the results daily on FB, FFS. It's not_thought. The last sentence looks absurd, care to demonstrate it, copy/paste some documentation, something/anything? "writing music in any style"; really? Looks like enthusiasm carrying someone far away from reason.

None of this addresses what I was arguing, which is an argument from authenticity and regards genuine invention as opposed to making copies from abstraction and extrapolation of data. and I don't see how one would miss that it regards emotion (NB., quite outside of intent, keeping it real we have to know we cannot determine what - or how intense {or what quality of affect is impressed upon} an - effect a piece of music has on an individual) as well.
Music heretofore is made by human beings; the converse of this, that there is music that may as well be made by an automaton of one variety or another as it's made by and for that segment of the population that never arrives upon genuine ie., original thought but is a conglomeration of received notions repurposed as it were (CF., individual/individuated vs copies); but the music I value was made by people with deep storehouses of memories and reality. Real opinions, real world views based in what the world is like to that individual.
One of the first things we have to do to consider this enquiry is confer what's known as The Qualia Problem. The machine doesn't know 'what it's like' to feel.
I have spoken about this a few times just in the past few days and it seems I need to bring in PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and "Rachael Tyrell"; who is working on creating enough Artifical Qualia that a machine can't know without being proved wrong it isn't human?
You've posited intelligence as though apart from consciousness. I don't believe that and this particular parsing is suspect afaic.

Not sure I know what this "public" you cite actually is, but chances seem rather high it doesn't (or ever did) impact any idea I have regarding music. I'm reminded of a comedic sketch some yrs ago that went "What about the general public ('s reception of _)?" "The general public voted for Hitler and likes Coldplay."

[havran]

I just hope that 2024 is the Year of the Saturator.

[zerocrossing]

I don't know, it seems to me a bit like when drum machines were going to put all drummers out of a job. Maybe I'm naive.

Yeah, I'll believe that when they invent one that has to sleep on your couch and hits on your girlfriend.

[jens]

But AI will make musicians themselves obsolete..

No, it won't, because it can't - ever.

The public already stopped caring about musicians a couple decades ago. They're perfectly happy replacing them with a DJ in a theme park costume, or a cat playing a trumpet. They'll happily ask Alexa to play "wub wub" for 4 hours.

That's whiny mimimi bollocks of the really sad kind...

[bitman]

Not until Audiocity (Or anyone) does the original SAD 1024 EH Clone Theory.

[zerocrossing]

I just hope that 2024 is the Year of the Saturator.

I hope someone finally releases a reverb plugin.