Rick Rubin on AI (& now Graeme Revell, too)

[BONES]

Here's someone with a brain, who sees the same potential in AI that we do. Here are a few choice quotes from the book he has co-written with an Ai on the subject of using Ai as part of the creative process.

"I think there’s a misconception that the computer now does the work, but really the computer is another tool,” he explains. “It’s like a guitar or a sampler; it’s another tool in the artist’s arsenal. The reason we go to the artists we go to, or the writers we go to, or the filmmakers we go to, is for their point of view. The AI doesn’t have a point of view. Its point of view is what you tell it”.

"It’s just another tool for you, as the artist, to make the thing that you want to make,” Rubin concludes. “If you think it’s doing it, it’s only doing what you’re telling it to do. All it knows is what other people have told it to do."

He likens what he calls "vibe coding" to Punk Rock - "So in the past, for music, you had to go to the conservatory and study for years and years. Then someday, you could play in a symphony. And then, when punk rock came along, you could maybe learn three chords in a day — and there were all these bands. That made it for everybody. How I started in music was punk rock. If you had something to say, you could say it. You didn’t need the expertise or skill set, other than your idea and your ability to convey it."

So maybe that's why we're on board with the AI thing, the Punk ethic being alive and well within NOVAkILL, and the rest of you are letting a great creative opportunity pass you by? But it's not too late. You can read more by searching for Rubin's take on AI.

[telecharge]

Thanks for sharing. I like Rick Rubin and his vibe coding/punk rock ethos analogy. I'm not too worried about AI.

In fact, I've been thinking about vibe coding a cross-platform sample manager. It's clearly a pain point for many of us.

[Michael L]

“The AI doesn’t have a point of view. Its point of view is what you tell it” is not actually true.
That does not surprise me, in a book co-written with an AI bot.

AI has the point of view of its tech overlords, their algo programmers who are very similar to each other (according to the Meta AI itself), and its extremely averaged training data. It is insane to call this billionaire capitalist tool for ultimate human conformity, "punk"

The business model of AI is to engage and flatter people at the expense of truth & accuracy (what the Meta AI told me). I am happy you are so engaged with AI-- particularly if it helps you get gigs-- but you can’t generalise your philosophy to others.

[BONES]

What a load of tin-foil hatted nonsense. What "tech-overlord" is going to have their music AI coded such that it conforms to their view of Electro-Industrial music, for example?

Training data isn't "averaged", it's incredibly broad. What you'd like to characterise as "averaged" in AI is what anyone would call "consensus" with people. e.g. If you're looking at product reviews and 80% of them are 4 or 5 stars, do you come to the conclusion that it's probably a decent product or do you use the 5% of 1 star reviews and decide it's rubbish?

With music AI, which is fairly obviously what we're talking about here, you'll only get averaged results if you don't bother telling it exactly what you want. But if you take your time being very specific, you will get very specific results. e.g. If you ask it to write you a mid-tempo Post Punk song, you'll get something averaged across a very broad genre. That might give you exactly what you're after, or maybe it won't, but if you tell it you want a song in the style of The Cure's Pornographic album, it will have something specific to work from and you'll likely end up with a piece that would slot into any playlist a human might build around that album. When you get very specific with your own musical taste, you end up with something that is pretty much exactly what you want, a song perfectly tailored to your tastes and preferences. Maybe it will take you a few dozen, or even a few hundred, revisions/iterations but if you are willing to put in the same effort you would doing it any other way, you'll get results you'll be more than happy with.

[Michael L]

...it will take you a few dozen, or even a few hundred, revisions/iterations but if you are willing to put in the same effort you would doing it any other way, you'll get results you'll be more than happy with.

Not exactly what I would ever call "punk" but hey, dif'rent strokes . . .

[BONES]

Punk, in that you don't have to know what you're doing, you just have to know what you want to express.

[Michael L]

Punk, in that you don't have to know what to do, you just have to know what to ask an AI bot to do for you.

FTFY

[Opaque]

He likens what he calls "vibe coding" to Punk Rock - "So in the past, for music, you had to go to the conservatory and study for years and years. Then someday, you could play in a symphony. And then, when punk rock came along, you could maybe learn three chords in a day — and there were all these bands. That made it for everybody. How I started in music was punk rock. If you had something to say, you could say it. You didn’t need the expertise or skill set, other than your idea and your ability to convey it."

I'm not necessarily opposed to AI, but the punk-rock equivalent will be the things created with AI primarily as an instrument, not a tool - so things that are unique to it, and could only have been generated by it. I've heard already some DJ sets with AI that are crazy.

On the other hand, to use AI as a tool to generate more and arrive faster to that relatively familiar end result would be the essence of pop music as it already functions(in that sense, it replaces Splice as a quicker and more flexible version of it).
Re-creating or imitating the sound of punk-rock with AI would be ridiculous - it amounts to the averaged-out form which arose from the punk-rock spirit, now coded into a familiar aesthetic and mass produced as a style - the equivalent of fighting capitalism by buying Che Guevara shirts.

Punk, in that you don't have to know what you're doing, you just have to know what you want to express.

Yes, but again, punk was political and counter-cultural in both form and content. In contrast, knowing that I want to create a cool punk style track and generating it is potentially just mass production of familiar content with enough variation that it passes copyright. At that point it is important to ask whether there is an artistic angle, and what is it, or is it just content creation.

[osiris]

If you've ever seen him, Rick Rubin is one of the most grounded Zen individuals I've ever seen. I still use his breathing technique he talked about doing in an interview before going into a mix.

[Aloysius]

Metoo. I breathe in and breathe out, naturally. Before I used to wonder why I felt like I was suffocating.

[TheMaestro]

I let AI do all my breathing now.

[Bunny_boy]

Rick Rubin breathes for me. It's quite useful

[revvy]

Rick Rubin uses AI to breathe for me, crafting and refining multiple prompts, that get me closer to my desired breathing style each time.

Totally punk!

[machinesworking]

I think in the bigger picture AI will be abused by most and used in a creative way by some. Commercial music will suffer heavily, not any doubt about that, it will get even more dull than it is already. Wanna be hipsters that do commercial adjacent music will get even more annoying than they are.

One elephant I'm skirting around here is commercial music will lose the older seasoned musician element that meant every once in a while a song by a pop star would have some great music behind it. AI does not have taste so even specifically feeding it only songs you want to copy isn't going to take the great elements from them and come up with something original it's up to the end user to do that. So IMO going forward the chances that some older musician with talent and his hands on the new genres of the day isn't going to make for the type of thing where some pop phenom like Beyonce has a few great hooks in her music, it will be regurgitated hooks that are close to things that would be good, but not quite. Because it will be cheaper to produce.

In terms of what it can bring, I think inputing a song that you've been working on that is missing something and seeing what AI might do is a great use of it, getting a backing drum track for any DAW the way Logic does it with their AI Drummer is a good thing. Inputing all of your favorite artists into it and it spitting out a generic song you would like, well that's up for debate. It's just like Hip Hop when it started though and no one was paying attention to copyright infringement, sometimes melding a half dozen samples from different songs completely changes the elements and it's a new sound, sometimes it's just copy paste.

[BONES]

Punk, in that you don't have to know what to do, you just have to know what to ask an AI bot to do for you.

FTFY

How is that any different from using a synth? You turn a knob and the synth sound is changed. The potentiometer is doing the work, not you. You add vibrato by modulating the sound with an LFO, the LFO is doing the work for you, where a clarinet player has to physically create the vibrato themselves. When you get down to it, even the clarinet player is cheating compared to someone who can whistle. The lines are arbitrary, you draw them wherever you feel like drawing them.

I'm not necessarily opposed to AI, but the punk-rock equivalent will be the things created with AI primarily as an instrument, not a tool - so things that are unique to it, and could only have been generated by it. I've heard already some DJ sets with AI that are crazy.

You're talking about the actual output, Rubin is talking more about the ethic, the freedom for anyone to realise their goals, regardless of skill level.

Re-creating or imitating the sound of punk-rock with AI would be ridiculous - it amounts to the averaged-out form which arose from the punk-rock spirit

Again, you're looking at it too literally. It's about ideas, not output. I don't even understand where this ridiculous idea that anything is "averaged out" by AI even comes from.

Punk, in that you don't have to know what you're doing, you just have to know what you want to express.

Yes, but again, punk was political and counter-cultural in both form and content. In contrast, knowing that I want to create a cool punk style track and generating it is potentially just mass production of familiar content with enough variation that it passes copyright.[/quote]
How is that any different to the Ramones using the same three chords to produce a dozen albums?