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

[sqigls]

No one works alone. Does it really matter if your bassline was laid down by a session bassist or AI? Or if your string arrangement was done by an orchestrator or AI? Historically, these are things that would be outsourced when making a record.

Likewise, does it matter if you use AI for programming grunt work instead of hiring a code monkey to do it? The purpose is the final product, not the process that got you there.

Why don't you hire a lyrics-ape to do better lyrics for you instead?
The time you try to make cool and unique lyrics are just a waste of time when AI can do it in seconds. AI does better lyrics in a few seconds, and the final product is the purpose so what does it matter? I mean people outsource lyrics to someone else all the time.. use AI instead, much faster and accurate if you know how to use the tool that it is.

Vibe coding can be used for things that have already been done before. But AI can't invent new things. Period. Todays wave of ML and AI isn't "learning by doing/trying" - from a "how nature works" perspective.
AI cant do anything without some human first telling it WHAT the correct answer should be or what the result should be or what to look for based on what you have uploaded to it first. Everything is a matter of guessing within context and just guessing the next word or note to play - based purely on what it has been "learned" off previously by humans.

The journey and the process of learning, doing and creating is a huge part of the purpose for humans in large. Happiness is directly coupled with the process of curiosity, learning and exchanging ideas - and relationships - with other beings. This will continue to be true no matter what happens in the future, even though some people don't see it.

and what?
i can't program AI to do my happiness for me? Is that what you're saying?

[jamcat]

Why don't you hire a lyrics-ape to do better lyrics for you instead?

They’re called professional songwriters, and they’ve written the overwhelming majority of hit songs since the recording industry began.

Vibe coding can be used for things that have already been done before.

Are you a programmer? If you are, then you already should understand that everything has been done before. ‘New’ software is made up by tiny components that have been used a million times before. AI will know which pieces to assemble, and exactly how to hook them up to achieve the programmer’s objective. But yes, the programmer has to have an idea and an objective to hand over to AI.

The programmer will need to understand good code hygiene and software design patterns, and keep the AI on track and organized, or their code will quickly become unmanageable.

There are already a dozen AI coding platforms, plus AI coding agents embedded in every major IDE. As a programmer, you actually can’t escape it at this point.

But AI can't invent new things. Period. Today’s wave of ML and AI isn't "learning by doing/trying" - from a "how nature works" perspective.

Neither can people. All human creativity actually just combines and incrementally modifies existing concepts. Humans are incapable of creating something completely original from nothing. That’s shouldn’t be all that much of a surprise, since our brains are just neural networks.

[chagzuki]

Cultural trends that may upset the order of things are usually assimilated as fashion, and their adherents usually co-opted by socio-economic realities. Punk is one example. Hippie fashion is another. Those of us at a certain age can remember everything turning 'Groovy' long after the hippy trend. As a kid, I can remember watching TV and the people still looked like they were from the 50's.
I always accepted the ethos of punk. I just disdained the musicianship.

Yeah, exactly. That's why I thought the comments about distinguishing genres and sub-genres didn't hit the mark. Punk was a cultural moment, and the music made at that moment played a disruptive role in the social realm, and that was its aim. To refer to punk as simply a stylistic genre empties it of the entire original purpose of the music. Music being made now which mimics the style of punk doesn't have any of the original meaning of the genre, hence it makes more sense to refer to it as pop-punk, or crap punk, post modern punk or whatever label serves to convey it's dislocation from what gave the label meaning in the first place.

[Michael L]

All human creativity actually just combines and incrementally modifies existing concepts. Humans are incapable of creating something completely original from nothing. That’s shouldn’t be all that much of a surprise, since our brains are just neural networks.

N0000...
However, this reductionistic association of ideas within the computer paradigm is certainly easier than trying to be original. The world is different every day. We can respond to that novelty in different ways, as all artists do. We are quite capable of creating something original. Many sentences that people speak have never been spoken before, and then add context, emotion, rhythm, melody to those words.... You can say that our brains are "just neural networks" but that's just sophistry ("the clever use of arguments that seem true but are really false, in order to deceive people"). It shows how the ultimate conformity of AI will be so attractive to many people who crave the security of the familiar.

[jamcat]

All human creativity actually just combines and incrementally modifies existing concepts. Humans are incapable of creating something completely original from nothing. That’s shouldn’t be all that much of a surprise, since our brains are just neural networks.

N0000...
However, this reductionistic association of ideas within the computer paradigm is certainly easier than trying to be original. The world is different every day. We can respond to that novelty in different ways, as all artists do. We are quite capable of creating something original. Many sentences that people speak have never been spoken before, and then add context, emotion, rhythm, melody to those words.... You can say that our brains are "just neural networks" but that's just sophistry ("the clever use of arguments that seem true but are really false, in order to deceive people"). It shows how the ultimate conformity of AI will be so attractive to many people who crave the security of the familiar.

Some sentences may have never been spoken exactly before, but they're still made up entirely of words that have been spoken countless times, and in very similar ways. That makes it not entirely original. No matter what the sentence is, it is relying on existing language and familiar concepts.

AI is just as capable of creating an "original" sentence of that nature as a human. But what neither can do is invent something completely new that is not informed or influenced in some way by any part of some pre-existing knowledge or concept.

[Michael L]

AI is just as capable.... as a human... But what neither can do...

More reductionistic sophistry.
Your argument comparing AI to humans cannot be taken seriously because you are made of the same elements as a snake! You have feelings based in organs that are almost identical to those of a pig! Your brain first learned language very much like a bird! You have legs and walk around like any common mammal! Yet AI has none of those physical qualities, thus is an incomparable machine. Identify with it at your peril.

[jancivil]

No one works alone. Does it really matter if your bassline was laid down by a session bassist or AI?

I work alone. (except for 2% of cases, once I had someone do rhythm guitar because I figured he could do the reggae swung off beat better than I would. I didn't have to be specific at all. The other case I used a highly virtuosic sax player and composer I paid $100 to, and his contribution was stellar.) They listen and respond. "AI" isn't a musician; one can say it listens, but this is in the sense that "Dictation" on my Mac is listening, it isn't listening like a bass player is. It has no emotional life; it has no history; it has no idea what time it even is, there is no spur of the moment, there is no moment.

ln the 'before times, when I needed a bass player I always called on one guy, because I never once had to tell him what to play. What does "AI" do given no instructions, live? If it isn't trained on my chord voicings. The key differences here between this basically clueless remark and reality are 1) he's highly intelligent; part of this is he is creative so when we'd go into the inevitable improvisation he was responsive to me and to the drums; 2) we exceeded 'the average' in terms of harmony, of form, etc. He didn't need to be trained on any model to keep up with me
(many yrs hence he became Satriani's bass player). Genuine intelligence isn't even faked by "AI" when we get down to it; my preference is obvious.

It's passing sad to see someone that apparently gets none of this. However I'm somehow far from shocked in this case. AI doesn't get it either, you must relate.

[BONES]

But he did need considerable training and experience to be able to do what you've described. That's where the Punk aspect comes in, with AI you don't have to have that training/experience. If you have something to say, AI empowers you to say it.

I wouldn't know where any particular statement derives, or if this impression is in common currency, but AI is at essence an averaging engine. It does not generate ideas; as one person just put it, it has nothing we can call taste or an opinion or a genuine thought.

Firstly, the quote was from my post, not Opaque's. Secondly, of course AI can generate ideas, that's exactly what it does. You give it some guidelines and it does the creating. "Write song lyrics about people escaping from an unspecified disaster that has laid ruin to their home city" and it will generate ideas around that theme. That's precisely the prompt I used to get the lyrics for ESkAPE on our current album. I got it to iterate several times, until I had maybe a dozen verses to pick and choose from to create the three verses in the song. (ESkAPE doesn't have a chorus.) I changed it around quite a bit but most of the actual ideas came from Co-Pilot, based on my initial prompt. So, if you like, I planted the seed, AI grew the flowers from that seed which I then harvested and processed into something I could use.

It's much the same process we have used in the past, where my bandmate has given me a musical idea and either the name or some vocal sample he has used has given me the seed of the idea that becomes the lyrics. AI just speeds up the process and, I think, has raised the standard when it comes to our lyrical content (which is not a high bar to clear).

It has no capacity to reason through any problem.

That sounds much like most people, don't you think? It's also of no consequence when you are using it to make music.

It's utterly dependent on what it finds and it will go strictly by prevalence, ie., averages.

Not if you tell it to do something different. It will usually do its best to follow your instructions. If you are very specific, it might go with the most obvious solution but it will be averaging a tiny subset of ideas/knowledge but the results can be way out there if that's what you want. As I said yesterday (and several times previously) if it was averaging out across its entire database, then every time you put the same prompt in, you'd get the same result. But that's not what happens. If you don't specify tempo, for example, it will spit out songs in lots of different tempos. If it was averaging out, wouldn't everything be at the same tempo?

So it would be fine for construction of music that is already averaged out, wholly dependent on what one finds and maybe kinda sorta recombines or puts their own words to the thing. Here, however the human is liable to come up with a genuine twist.

My actual, first-hand experience is quite the opposite. One of the things I am enjoying most about using AI is that it comes up with little "twists" that I/we never would and it pushes us in directions we might never explore otherwise. It broadening our palette, not constricting it.

There is currenlty absolutely no possibility for a Large Learning Machine to do any but "average out". What it does is not intelligence.

Why? Why does it "average out" and not simply search for specific examples of what you've asked for? I want to understand where this idea comes from because I see little or no evidence of it in my own interactions with AI. If anything, it can be too radical. It struggles for consistency because it's always coming up with different solutions to the problems you give it.

As to 'punk rock', it originally signaled attlitude(s), didn't it? Even an aesthetic. "AI" hasn't any.

Neither does a guitar, it's the player who embues it with a desired aesthetic - folk. jazz, blues, heavy metal or whatever. Similarly, it's the person writing the prompts that imbues AI with the aesthetic the person is looking for.

The interest for me is how it calls into question what creating something in a conformist genre or style even means.

It's the age old question about the value of genres but, again, if you don't specify a genre and your prompt is detailed enough, it might come up with an entirely new genre for you. For us it has had the opposite effect. For the last three albums, we have started saying we want to make something a little more purely EBM but once we start working on the songs, they invariably end up being more Electro-Industrial, simply because of the way we do things.

Tunee has freed us from that, mostly by creating complete songs that are way simpler than we'd do ourselves but sound great. Because the process is much faster and the end point is given to you almost at the start, we haven't had the chance to lose focus on our goal. Tunee will finally allow us to achieve our stated aim of a much more EBM-focused album.

It's a circular process that starts and finishes with us - we write the prompts, we choose the dozen or so results, from the hundreds that it generates, that work best for us and then we work on them further to make them even more what we're trying to do. The result is something that feels at least as much like our own as any of our other songs/albums.

It's like any other writing process - you sit in front of your DAW or a controller/keyboard and you play around looking for ideas. Working with AI is much the same, only it makes you think a lot more about what it is you want because you have to explain it to the AI.

[BONES]

Vibe coding can be used for things that have already been done before. But AI can't invent new things.

Of course it can, exactly as you or I can. It takes influences, mixes 'em up and spits out something new and original. Twice in my life I have unwittingly created something that already existed, songs I thought were my own but eventually discovered were actually things I'd heard years ago and forgotten about. All of our own creative output is influenced by other's work, whether we are aware of it or not. Who of us here has never heard a synth patch they really liked and spent hours trying to recreate it on our own gear, so we could use it in our own work? It's what we all do so why hold AI to a higher standard that we hold ourselves to?

AI cant do anything without some human first telling it WHAT the correct answer should be or what the result should be or what to look for based on what you have uploaded to it first. Everything is a matter of guessing within context and just guessing the next word or note to play - based purely on what it has been "learned" off previously by humans.

That's not quite how the process works but you're correct in that it is a human endeavour, AI is simply the tool humans use.

The journey and the process of learning, doing and creating is a huge part of the purpose for humans in large.

I've always found the notion that humans have a purpose quaint and amusing. Humans, like every other living organism, have one purpose - to procreate, to continue the existence of its bloodline. That's it, any other purpose you perceive is purely made up to bolster that one driving force in all organic life.

OpenAI has a multi-billion agreement with iPhone-Jony Ive to design wearable AI so people can use it to avoid making any decisions or learning anything

Again, a trend started by social media many years ago, simply heading to its obvious conclusion. You're the perfect example - mind made up without so much as dipping a toe to see what it might really be like, unwilling/unable to be swayed by any counter argument, no matter how well supported by evidence. You want to blame AI for the way people are, which is arse-backwards. AI is a reflection of humanity. The problem is people, not AI.

as they become more conventional, predictable and manipulated by the biases built into the algos of LLMs.

Which are just the biases of people, again perfectly illustrated by your own.

It wasn't about hey, let's make an angry style of music for no reason. People really felt they had NO FUTURE. The climate was not very positive.

Yeah, I saw an interview with either Guy Ritchie or Danny Boyle where he explained the effect Punk had on his working class neighbourhood, the hope and self-belief it gave to everyone around him. It was quite incredible to hear just how profound its influence was because here it wasn't like that at all, it was really just about music in Australia.

For many yes it was. Just make loud "angry" music (more of a release), do drugs, have sex, leave town and play in clubs etc etc.
It was something fun to do besides doing the responsible adult thing known as "work".

You're only looking at the music side of it but there was so much more to it than that.

Well i think the whole sex pistols thing was just a fabricated concept to help promote the punk mindset. It was heavily funded.

You're demonstrating that you know nothing about the Sex Pistols at all. The driving force was Malcolm McLaren, the guys in the band just went along with it all because it gave them something to do. "No future" wasn't just a marketing slogan, it was reality for a lot of young people in 1976.

I 100% agree with VOODOO U about the internet being a strong sedative.

You can say that but it also foments things like Far Right lunatics. For example, do you think the Bondi shootings would have happened in a world without the internet? Would conspiracy theories take hold without the internet? Would there be such a thing as MAGA? The internet is a double-edged sword and none of it is good.

[Michael L]

A fair bloke, BONES is trolling everyone equally without fear or favour!

[VOODOO U]

You're demonstrating that you know nothing about the Sex Pistols at all. The driving force was Malcolm McLaren, the guys in the band just went along with it all because it gave them something to do. "No future" wasn't just a marketing slogan, it was reality for a lot of young people in 1976.

Ok. Please tell Wikipedia and ChatGPT thank you for supplying the info.

You can say that but it also foments things like Far Right lunatics.

Well at least it doesn't foment things like far left lunatics. Cup half full right?

For example, do you think the Bondi shootings would have happened in a world without the internet?

Do you think the Bondi shootings would have happened in a world without guns and terrorists?

Would conspiracy theories take hold without the internet?

I'm telling you, Paul Is Dead.

Would there be such a thing as MAGA?

Of course not. Television, radio and print do not influence the masses.

[Aloysius]

What has all this got to do with Frederick Jay Rubin on AI?

[BONES]

Ok. Please tell Wikipedia and ChatGPT thank you for supplying the info.

Right, because nobody who was actually around at the time could possibly remember how it went down.

Well at least it doesn't foment things like far left lunatics. Cup half full right?

They seem to proliferate well enough on their own, don't they?

Do you think the Bondi shootings would have happened in a world without guns and terrorists?

Or one without people, if you want to take it further. It's been said a millions times, guns don't kill people, people kill people. Always have done, always will do. If there were no guns, they'd have planted a bomb or run into the crowd with swords or machetes, hacking people down. After all, they were a long time planning and training.

A fair bloke, BONES is trolling everyone equally without fear or favour!

Right, because anyone who doesn't agree with you has to be a f**king troll, right? It couldn't possibly be that they actually know, from first hand experience, what they are talking about, could it?

[Michael L]

anyone who disagrees with everyone has to be a f**king troll

Thanks for making room for me in your Troll-A-Thon, bruh

[audiojunkie]

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.

I totally see where you are going with this.

A person has a song in his head, but doesn’t play the instrument (or instruments) well, or at all. Like punks did in the late 70s, they start where they are at—sometimes with nothing, and leverage what they DO have, in order to express themselves.

As the famous punk flier once said:

Here’s a chord (shows a guitar chord)
Here’s another (shows another chord)
Here’s a third. Now go form a band. (Shows a third chord)

Only, in this case, the person wanting to express himself uses detailed prompts to deeply describe the drum rhythm wanted, to describe the specific beats, to describe the specific type of bass drum, to describe the type of high-hats. Once that particular part is laid down the way it is heard in the person’s head, he moves on.

Next comes the bass that the person hears in his head. He uses detailed prompts to describe what he wants to hear, to describe what notes he wants to play, and in what rhythm. He describes the desired articulations, and any effects he wants on the bass. Once the part is as he hears it in his head, he lays it down, and moves on,

The third, the guitar part, is done the same way, with detailed prompts that describe exactly what the person is hearing in his head.

Once the verse has been laid down this way, the same is done with the chorus. Then the bridge, then the intro and the outro. The the artist sings his part and makes corrections.

Essentially, you are treating the AI as your instrument, and instead of midi sequencing, you are using prompts to describe what you are wanting—bringing to life and making your statement, without knowing how to even play your instrument. Doing it yourself while flipping the middle finger at everyone that tells you that you can’t bring what’s in your head to life without years of study and practice. Making your statement!

If that’s not punk enough, I don’t know what is.

Now, having said that…..If some loser tells the AI, “Oi! Make me a punk song in the style of God Save The Queen!” and hopes to get any creative respect, that person is nothing but a poseur.