If we are honest every single musician was influenced by musicians before then. We all heard music we liked and at some point decided "hey I could do that"coffee or coffee wrote: Sat Nov 08, 2025 12:14 am i use the word rationalize because, in my estimation, the negatives of ai use far outstrip any positive aspects. from the devastating environmental impact to how its trained by plagiarizing the arts
Was that you "plagiarizing the arts"? Or was that you learning from what others did before you and doing your own thing with it? And remember the people you learned from also did the same with people before then who did the same from people before them. AI is just learning from the music that has been publicly made available. As an artist I want my art to be consumed publicly. If an AI learns from my art and incorporates that into something that brings joy to others awesome that's the point of art
As an artist I make art for me, if other people enjoy it so much the better. If however I am stuck crying about lost revenue or plagiarism I am not creating art, I am creating a commercial product that I sell access to, that's awesome but let's not pretend it's some kind of sacred endeavor
And that isn't just a thing with music, it's also a thing with painting, sculpting, photograph, drawing, woodworking, basket weaving, and every other artistic endeavor
Honestly the arguments being fostered against AI are the same exact arguments that were fostered against sampling in the early 1980s
Check out this video from "The Today Show" featuring Keith Emerson who was using a Fairlight CMI to score a movie in 1983
The worry was that so called "real musicians" would be out of a job and "real artistry" was gone because you could use a computer to score a movie. Our take 42 years later on Sampling is rather different wouldn't you say?
AI is here, it's not going anywhere, it's just a tool. People have been making shitty music long before AI existed. I myself have been making shitty music since 1979. If the end goal is shitty music AI is just another tool to get you there
However as a tool AI can be a powerful tool for creative expression
So as musicians we can either shake our fists at the sky which will accomplish nothing, or we can embrace AI and figure out ways to use it creatively, or at least not just reject everything that uses AI. Doing that is exactly like all the people that rejected sampling 40 some years ago
