Maybe there is a way to fix the AI problem!? (Let's talk about how we can handle this sh*t)

[BONES]

Nicely summarised, any point to it? You want to believe AI is the problem but it's not, people are. If you think AI is not for you, that suggests you see yourself as part of the problem, that you don't trust yourself to use it for what it has to offer. Proof, of course, is that none of you seem willing to even try it for yourselves. You think that reading a few posts on social media and watching a video or two on YouTube, all likely from vested interests, is actually informative. Surely the best way to learn about AI is to actually use it, to see how much (if any) truth there is to what you've read from 3rd parties, so why don't you? What are you scared of?

What you'll discover is that if you want to create something generic and boring, you can do it in a few minutes but if you want to craft something worthwhile it requires lots of thought, lots of creativity and as much hard work as doing it any other way.

[VOODOO U]

Look at it this way, someone using A.I. is like a conductor in an orchestra. They're having others do the work of playing the instruments but the conductor must know what they want from them. I suppose this is where theory does help as much as i despise that garbage.
I will say this though, I wouldn't trade it for the experience and the outcome of playing an instrument with the aid of some drug be it weed, alcohol or whatever gets one in that "zone".
There's no A.I. usage that will ever compare to that experience and coming up with medicinal music (meaning one can listen over and over and have a feel good emotion).
If someone can come up with music using A.I. where they can listen to it over and over again because it feels good than good for them. I can do the same playing an instrument, chugging down some JD, and press record on the daw.

[BONES]

The same is true of multi-tracking in a sequencer - instead of having multiple players, the sequencer is doing all the work of a backing band. To me, your reliance on drugs, legal or otherwise, to get you into some "zone" is absolutely pathetic.

[mixyguy2]

Look at it this way, someone using A.I. is like a conductor in an orchestra.

Sorry, not a valid analogy. There is more to an orchestra than just playing the instruments; if not, the notion of conductors would have never gotten off the ground. And the conductor isn't putting on any pretense that he's playing the instruments. But people using AI are having AI spit out something and then signing their name to it and pretending they "created" it.

Sadly, there is no fixing this. We're far down the rabbit hole and there's no going back.

[BONES]

Who is? Nobody who is making music for the same reasons you and I are and what they're doing doesn't make a blind bit of difference to any of us anyway.

[VOODOO U]

To me, your reliance on drugs, legal or otherwise, to get you into some "zone" is absolutely pathetic.

Why is it pathetic? You *think* you're way to an artistic expression and i *drink* my way to an artistic expression. We all have our ways.

And the conductor isn't putting on any pretense that he's playing the instruments

Of course not, they're conducting. What's there to hide that fact???

But people using AI are having AI spit out something and then signing their name to it and pretending they "created" it.

They *did* create it. A.I. doesn't "create". It spits out orders based on human input.
That human input is the creative aspect of humanity.
Can A.I. create??? No. It needs input from a creative source which happens to be us humans.

[Starbright]

Here's my idea:
Let's have generative AI companies flag the data used in a song and make prompters agree to be responsible for properly crediting them (as data songwriters/data session musicians ?) or pay the data originators a buyout sum (similar to ghostwriters or ghostproducers, etc.).

THIS exists and is already being done...see my threads
viewtopic.php?p=9130524#p9130524

That's actually amazing! It would be cool if it that would be the case in other countries (I live in germany). It's also a shame, that I couldn't engage more since I started it (I got a very busy month luckily).

And why I read some posts in here, that make me a little bit sad.

How about engaging with the f**king topic? A discussion should be about ideas, not personalities. Nothing is personal, why do you need to see everything through that lens? It's what makes this place such a waste of f**king time.

Interesting... I've heard rumours this is the way to detect whether it's AI generated or not. Myth or truth?

I don't know and don't really care. Good music is good music, where it comes from is totally irrelevant. I mean, I can't stand Miley Cyrus but her Nine Inch Nails cover is f**king great -

It's amazing that Ted Kaczynski has actually been proved right, that AI is a bad thing

It's IMO not amazing at all, it's stating the obvious to anyone with their eyes wide open. Sadly, that doesn't describe the vast majority of people out there.
The movie "Idiocracy" was made as a farce...but it's becoming more like a documentary.

Seriously? Please explain to us all exactly why it's a bad thing. I see no downside beyond the idiots who are allowed to access it. i.e. As always, it's people who are the problem. If you are too stupid to embrace AI, you will just be left behind.

I’m hoping the current AI fanfare — which feels a lot like the internet boom of the 2000s to me — will eventually calm down. Some of the hype will collapse, and what’s left will be the more realistic, (financially viable) uses.

Here's the thing, though, the internet boom didn't fade, it just became normalised. The boom itself has continued unabated.

My hope is that the tech will eventually make its way into our DAWs in small, practical ways.
Not “write a song for me,”

Why not? Song writing is a boring process, it's only having the thing finished in front of you that's rewarding so why not use tools to speed that up? I imagine you're going to say that getting Ai to write you a song is too easy but that will depend on how low your own personal standards are. If you want to write a good song, it takes a lot of trial and error, a lot of perseverance and thought to get exactly what you're after. Again, I refer to my bandmate's approach - his hit rate is about one useful thing in 600 attempts. He'll use up his 450 daily credits in a few hours, refining and refining the results until he gets what he wants. Does that sound too easy to you? I don't see how it's any different to spending a whole evening trying to refine a patch for a part in a song or balance a mix or do any of the other boring things music production involves. It's just a different toolset but it still involves a lot of time, effort and thought to get to where you want to go.

It may sound like sht. Compared to AI super glossy glitter, but it's my sht.

Why is that any different if you use AI instead of a DAW? I can guarantee you nobody else is getting the same results out of their tinkering with AI that we are. It's as much us as anything we've ever done. How could it not be?

I cleary believe that good art is interesting art. What do I mean by that? It's taking a flaw and making it a feature. Like wanting to sing the phrase "love is wonderfull" and accidentally singing "love hurts wonderfull".
Writing can be the most funny, frustrating and joyful process. But never boring.
Actually the process is easy, it's only our ambitions that make it harder than it is.
And true artist transforms what he/she/they hears, feels and see. Leaving that to ai makes it lesser, enhancing and transforming it with ai is different.
I recently tested the new SUNO model and I'm a bit dissapointed: sonically it's better, but it's musical qualities have become more clichee.

And when it comes to the argument "a good song is a good song": that's just wrong!
A good song grabs your heart by the throat and makes it feel... joy, sadnes, anger, hate, despair...
And I think AI is worsening musical quality, it's like tiktok - tiktok worsened video content a lot by making it even more shallow and headline heavy.
It's like having a conversation with a friend about his favourite movie and all he says is: "Ilike it because it makes boom". You wanna hear more details about it if you're interested.
Same with music: you want to hear the artist struggle with the song. And I'll come back to chess: chess is interesting because of the risk that one player will fail and the other will loose. Same with music: it's artist vs song, fail or succeed...

Also I read Sunos terms of service (and probably the rest won't be different): basically you'll give up all distribution and usage rights...

[Bombadil]

Thanks to the internet, there’s a generation that can barely read, has little contextual knowledge of world affairs, history, or really anything meaningful. I’ve seen this in young people. They’re, sorry to say, dumb and ignorant as shit.
AI is, from early studies so far, making it worse.
Now there’ll be a generation of musicians, songwriters who can’t play an instrument, write a song, just generate garbage by pressing a few keys, and inputing a few prompts.
Oh wait, we’ve already started down that road.
The world is getting dumber and dumber.
‘The machines that we build, will never save us, that’s what they say.’ Jimi Hendrix.
Glad I won’t be around to watch de-evolution run its course.

[bermudagold]

Actually the process is easy, it's only our ambitions that make it harder than it is.
And true artist transforms what he/she/they hears, feels and see. Leaving that to ai makes it lesser, enhancing and transforming it with ai is different.

exactly..to me there are three elements of music that really resonate with humans the most
1. Melody: something that makes you want to sing along or hum along...things that become earworms...they subconsciously create joy by hearing or repeating even without hearing
2. Cadence: rhythms that trigger an innate response to move the body...things that propel motion...make a person or groups of people synchronize bodies, heartbeats, breathing to a cathartic pulse...why so many forms of dancing are trance inducing and quantitatively proven to be biochemically euphoric and therapeutic
3. Prose: being creatures of advanced and sophisticated language...lyricism can enrapture the brain like the first 2 do the body...prose that is profound in its relatability or eloquence can touch the spirit in a way that is unique to humans

the less of these 3 come from your conscious intent,...the less of an artist u are...with many use cases for AI, ur not even a conductor, who at least is engaging with the act of creation in an intimate and visceral way...ur basically a construction site foreman

AI music has to be a lesser art form because it is devoid of the spontaneous alchemy of human ingenuity and the uniquely human compulsion to create...the motivation impetus is intrinsically different... AI music cant help but be derivative and formulaic...because by definition it is derived from a formula

[havran]

My prediction is that AI is a problem that will fix itself.

In addition to other points you made in your post, there's just the power-consumption/requirements and waste heat to be considered.

[havran]

The thought that AI companies are ripping us off is complete bullshit. Humans do exactly what AI does - they hear music from many different sources and it inevitably informs their own creative output. e.g. When we first heard Leather Strip's Solitary Confinement, it completely changed our perceptions of what our own music could/should be and changed what we do forever.

When we go to a club or turn on the radio, we aren't paying for the IP of the music we hear, so why should AI companies pay for publicly available content they use to train their AIs? It's a double-standard that defies any logic.

Anyway, I think AI is f**king awesome and it's already making way better music that we can. My bandmate has been mucking around with Tunee for a week or two and some of the stuff he's come up with is unbelievable. As in, it's so good that if I heard it at a club, I'd have to go and ask the DJ who it was so I could go home and buy everything they've ever released.

As it is, we have a two-pronged plan. First is to deconstruct the AI generated songs, using AI powered stem separation, cutting the tracks into phrases so we can rebuild them into something we can use as a bed, before replacing the AI vocals (which have a very obvious American accent) with our own. If that doesn't work, or doesn't work well enough, we'll instead create a whole album of AI generated music to release as a side-project because what my bandmate has come up with is well worth sharing with the world and has the potential to be far more popular than anything we've done as two stupid humans chasing what makes us want to jump around like lunatics.

To be clear, the AI stuff isn't perfect out of the box but we've been able to improve it considerably by reinforcing the drums with Battery, using Ozone's Rebalancer to make the vocals sit in the mix better (they are always too loud), followed by running it through my standard mastering chain.

The other thing is that you can say that it's not our music or that we didn't create it, the AI did, but I think that is also bullshit. I would defy anyone else to come up with music like ours, it is completely and utterly a product of our input and is as much ours as anything we've ever done in Cubase or Studio One or even in our hardware from the old days. It's just a different set of tools that you have to use in a different way but there is as much creativity involved in writing the AI's prompts as there is in crafting a song in a DAW. Yes, it feels less musical but most of the production process is completely unmusical anyway, so it's really just an incremental change, not the massive paradigm shift people seem to see it as.

Thank you. I had at least one similar thought, but you have brought that more into focus and articulated it better than I would have. (I spent some time this evening trying to re-find this post of yours just so I could "like" it and maybe add a comment or two of my own.)

That thought being something along the lines of us organic humaniforms ourselves being collectors, aggregators, borrowers, mimickers, alchemists, magpies, etc. -- prior to whatever works of art we might amalgamate and cough up -- which let's hope would include some elements and observations not available to prior artists.

This has been an area of interest to me maybe for a while, even if we were to leave "AI" out of it. I don't have any answers, and don't think I can make any cogent and eternally valid bon mots about this whole domain of consideration at the moment.

I do also get @funky-lime's idea that nowadays or sometime soon, people might still appreciate human talent and skill demonstrated live -- whether with music or watercolors or the theater, for instance.

On the other hand, in many cases people might need to have spare money to attend such demonstrations, as well as a relative lack of fear (at least in the USA).

I might express this badly, but I think a significant difference between human vs AI/LLM/LGM/LMM/LVM aggregation and production is that human art producers in any field -- although their capacity for aggregation is necessarily more limited -- have the important traits of specificity regarding localization, circumstances of occurrence, milieu, temperament, transits through life, and personal experiences throughout, and maybe also personal selectivity from the buffet of art, as well as the experience of personal traumas and the noticing of synchronicities.

Earlier in life when I wrote more poetry, during the most recent phase some decades ago I thought of myself as constructing artifacts for contemplation (inspired by William Gibson's phrase-making and maybe his automated shadow-box maker in "Neuromancer", and Michael Stipe's lyrics-writing) -- but there was still some imagination involved before publishing re: how those assemblages might be received by others -- and I was also the first "contemplator".

It seems that for some artists there might be a struggle between "this is what I/we want to lay out" and a consideration of what others might want or would be ready to receive.

Not with you, though! Valid!

[dexrow]

ai seems to be a bubble off of nvida chips.. I don''t give investment advice but the big short guy who is wrong at times is being fairly dramatic with this one. For video it costs them more to do it then you are paying them and there are other ways to get lowcost videos anyway... The thoughts per watt issue... That doesn't mean that someone doesn't wipe out nvidia at some point with better tek... I don't use ai at all beause it interferes with my distribution although one of my vocals with ringmod may have been flagged by an apple music detection system...

[BONES]

Why is it pathetic? You *think* you're way to an artistic expression and i *drink* my way to an artistic expression. We all have our ways.

You can't think without some form of artificial help and you don't see how pathetic that is? Really?

And true artist transforms what he/she/they hears, feels and see. Leaving that to ai makes it lesser, enhancing and transforming it with ai is different.

How is it different? To me it's exactly the same thing, not different to using quantize to fix your sloppy playing or an arpeggiator instead o playing the arpeggio in yourself.

I recently tested the new SUNO model and I'm a bit dissapointed: sonically it's better, but it's musical qualities have become more clichee.

How long did you spend on it? 5 minutes? One hour? Whatever, it clearly wasn't long enough to get any useful results. That's no different that judging a DAW on the first demo project you come across. You have to learn how to use it before you can expect decent results.

And when it comes to the argument "a good song is a good song": that's just wrong!
A good song grabs your heart by the throat and makes it feel... joy, sadnes, anger, hate, despair...

And what's stopping an AI generated song from doing that? The "cliches" you referred to above are cliches for a reason.

And I think AI is worsening musical quality

And there are millions of people who said the same thing about synthesisers, about sequencers and about using computers to make music and guess what? They've all been proved wrong over and over. You're just another cliche in a long line of Luddite cliches.

Same with music: you want to hear the artist struggle with the song.

Maybe you do but I f**king don't. In fact, I think that's one of the most ridiculous things I've heard this week. I mean seriously, we're living in a world where Barbie Girl is the 16th best selling single of all time and you want to spruik bullshit like this? Spare me days!

And I'll come back to chess: chess is interesting

Chess is actually not interesting at all. War is interesting, chess is a game.

Now there’ll be a generation of musicians, songwriters who can’t play an instrument, write a song, just generate garbage by pressing a few keys, and inputing a few prompts.

What's a piano piece other than "pressing a few keys"? I've been a performing musician for more than 40 years and I can't play an instrument, so this argument holds no water at all.

Oh wait, we’ve already started down that road.
The world is getting dumber and dumber.

Yes, as is amply evidenced by the ignorance displayed in posts like yours.

[Bombadil]

By definition, you aren’t a musician if you can’t play an instrument. You’re a performer, not a musician. I am both, or at least, was.
You hold your own water. I’ve got to take a leak.

[BONES]

exactly..to me there are three elements of music that really resonate with humans the most
1. Melody:

The popularity of all forms of dance music would tend to disprove this hypothesis. But the thing is, an AI generated song is capable of having just as much melody as a song created in any other way. You just have to tell the AI that you want that and it will generate it for you.

.they subconsciously create joy

Why would you want to create joy? I want my songs to create anger, to spur people into action. Joys is irrelevant, it's pathetic.

Cadence: rhythms that trigger an innate response to move the body...

Again, ask the AI for cadence and it will deliver in spades.

Prose: being creatures of advanced and sophisticated language...

Having read every book in existence, AI understands prose better than you or I.

ur basically a construction site foreman

No, the AI is the foreman (and all the workers), you're the architect who is trying to realise his artistic vision, to make something of lasting value. AI is just a tool.

AI music has to be a lesser art form because it is devoid of the spontaneous alchemy of human ingenuity

Are you f**king kidding? People are f**king morons, they have about as much creativity in them as a cucumber. I again draw your attention to the popularity of such classics as Barbie Girl and Shadapp You Face.

the uniquely human compulsion to create...

Ha! Birds build nests, bower birds build elaborate displays. There is nothing at all special or unique about human beings.

the motivation impetus is intrinsically different... AI music cant help but be derivative and formulaic...because by definition it is derived from a formula

The AI has no motivation, you supply that. The AI does exactly what you tell it to, just like a guitar or a piano does - you press middle C and the piano responds by playing middle C. You tell the AI to make you7 a song that conforms to your needs and desires and it will do it for you. How good it is will depend on YOUR ability to use the tool. Just like anything to do with computers, it's a case of garbage in->garbage out.