If AI replaces musicians, does the entire plugin industry die with them?

[wagtunes]

Do you all remember the gloom and doom over Y2K?

I rest my case.

[mi-os]

AI is just the latest scapegoat as to why people don't get success in the music business. They want to pretend it's all about the art, it's not because if it were they wouldn't care what other people are doing or using or how many songs are on Spotify

AI is ZERO threat to anyone's musical artistic endeavors, because you can make any music you want, however you want as an artist.

Some may use it as a scapegoat, but it's still a useless and unnecessary invention.

[BBFG#]

I'm starting to envision AI Automata filling the internet and not allowing human involvement without passing their own version of a Turing test. Forcing all musicians to return to hardware like the primitives AI already knows we are.

Corporations already function as gatekeepers here. You can't post here if you don't pass the basic compliance test. You're trusted to post up to the point that you fail the test. Humans, not AI, invented that structure.

Compliance and sentience are two different things.

What I'm posing as an additional question is "What happens when AI reproduces itself to the point of flooding and saturating the Internet and automatically parsing out any human attempt to participate in it?"

You've been reading too much sci-fi. I get that people want to think about this as something real, but I'm just not here for that.

Perhaps.
But most of what we're experiencing today was first proposed by science-fiction from fifty to seventy-five years ago.
Where the dystopias went wrong was the proposal of only one happening. We had no idea they would be competing all at the same time to keep us from realizing they're the system.

[coroknight]

Do you all remember the gloom and doom over Y2K?

I rest my case.

Yeah and since then computers have had very little impact on the world /s

[IvyBirds]

AI is just the latest scapegoat as to why people don't get success in the music business. They want to pretend it's all about the art, it's not because if it were they wouldn't care what other people are doing or using or how many songs are on Spotify

AI is ZERO threat to anyone's musical artistic endeavors, because you can make any music you want, however you want as an artist.

Some may use it as a scapegoat, but it's still a useless and unnecessary invention.

It's actually very useful and is being used in all kinds of ways for all kinds of things

However even if all someone is doing, is going on Suno and using it to make a complete song and have some fun doing it, it's worthwhile, and if someone else finds enjoyment from listening to it that also has tremendous value

Music in all its forms no matter how it was created serves no other purpose than to bring joy to humans in either its creation, performance, or listening

If I sit down at my piano and play for an hour this afternoon (as I will in a few minutes) and get some joy from the experience (as I will) that enjoyment holds no greater or lesser value than someone spending that same hour making music entirely with AI who also got some joy

And if others here me play and enjoy it their experience holds no greater or lesser value than someone who hears an AI created song and enjoys it

It's a sad existence to think we are in charge of what others find enjoyable, and that their enjoyment holds less value than what we do

[vurt]

Do you all remember the gloom and doom over Y2K?

I rest my case.

was there toast?

[Bunny_boy]

Do you all remember the gloom and doom over Y2K?

I rest my case.

Wasn't that due to multiple companies expending huge amounts of time, money, and energy updating their systems?

[alexey_m]

AI is lightning fast to search the patterns, but music is not just the circle of fifth.

[mi-os]

However even if all someone is doing, is going on Suno and using it to make a complete song and have some fun doing it, it's worthwhile, and if someone else finds enjoyment from listening to it that also has tremendous value

To me, it sounds like such people could exist, but they could also be a product of your imagination. I think generative AI is primarly of interest to imposters, cheaters and corporate cheapskates. Anyway, if you need Suno to make a song, you might be better off looking for another hobby. Just my opinion.

[coroknight]

Saying AI is useless is like saying google is useless because you don't know how to google.

It's baffling.

[BBFG#]

Saying AI is useless is like saying google is useless because you don't know how to google.

It's baffling.

Google has been useless for quite some time now.

[coroknight]

Saying AI is useless is like saying google is useless because you don't know how to google.

It's baffling.

Google has been useless for quite some time now.

So you don't use a search engine?

[BBFG#]

Not Google.

[coroknight]

Well I use google all the time. Sounds like a skill issue.

[Stokely]

Do you all remember the gloom and doom over Y2K?

I rest my case.

As an aside, a lot of people did a lot of work to head off Y2k. Our entire dev team--and people who were not devs, like report writers and analysts--put everything else on hold for months to re-code a lot of old stuff that most definitely was going to break on 1/1/2000. Not just months, but months of (unpaid) overtime. We were just a timeshare company, so hardly a dire emergency compared to say the power company f**king up, but we probably would have started billing people incorrectly and doing little oopsies like drastically figuring mortgage interest wrong, so bad enough.

That aside, it's not even close to the same situation other than "worry for the future". Y2k was concerns about very, very specific issues that were going to arise in old software.

A very simplistic example: If you are doing "date math" in old code that stored years as two digits... then 99-97 is "2". 00-97 is...well, it could be "-97", or "97" (if the negative is just ignored), or perhaps "0", or it could just break the application for a number of reasons. None of those are good. Out of those options, the application breaking is the "best" but if your application is say running a dam or a power plant, yikes.

Anyway, nothing to do with AI but the whole dismissing a problem because Y2k didn't break society I've heard one too many times. If we spent the effort on a given problem that we collectively spent on Y2k, well great...we probably wouldn't have that issue. Not that AI is even a "problem" in that sense, a better comparison would be climate change.