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

[guitarzan]

AI can't humanize anything. Only humans can with their choices regarding composition and arrangement. And of course performance, something AI can never replicate or assist with.

It does humanize by being based on the users prompts, and the user deciding when the task has been completed. Otherwise keep prompting.

I guess you are all masters of every instrument, and you can somehow generate ideas that are not your own to jam with to expand your range.

I guess music making can’t be fun, it has to be serious strenuous work. Will AI kill the plugin industry? Look at this site — the plugin industry has been dead for at least 10 years. There is some hope AI could revive interest, but suddenly the most ‘experimental’ musicians are hardcore conservatives when it comes to production techniques.

[wagtunes]

Let me ask you a question. Is AI any different than going to your Fabfilter EQ program and pulling up the preset "punchy drums"? I mean, you're not programming the EQ. You're not manually moving the bands around to get the EQ you want. You're doing nothing more than pulling up a preset.

And I can give similar examples for Abbey Road Mastering or any of the countless mastering plugins with their 200 different presets.

The truth is, so little thought has to go into mix processing these days as it is.

So what exactly is the difference?

I don't see it.

[BONES]

to compare synths to AI?
Did Jean Michel Jarre ask a synth to play a melody or chords, did Stevie Wonder etc?

Do you honestly think JMJ never turned on an arpeggiator in his life? Stevie Wonder is a dinosaur, who knows how he'd be working if he was a teenager today?

Or did they create and play something by themselves?!

You think you're as good as either of them? You're not, you probably need all the help you can get.

Who is the creator of AI full productions?
Are the creators the AI software developers?
Are the creators the buyers of AI software?
Or is the creator AI?

Who cares? I sure as f**k don't. But do the companies who make the instruments you use, or your DAW, own any of your work? AI is just tool, like those things. Like a chord tool or anything else you might use to help you achieve your creative goals.

In future written, composed , arranged and performed by AI? AI the new superstar?

Hopefully it will led to the end of stardom. Removing ego from the process has to be good thing, doesn't it?

But it does so in a formulaic manner.

Not if you tell it not to. It does what YOU tell it to do. Yes, if your prompt is vague, you'll get slop but if your prompt is specific, it will create guide-rails for the AI and you'll get something that is largely your own.

That said, the proliferation of patch libraries and song construction kits would suggest that a lot of people don't care anyway. I used a construction kit to write a song for our 2024 album and it fits in perfectly with the rest of the songs, which were all created from scratch. I'd be surprised if the guy who made the kit would even recognise it as his work. And people do cover versions all the time. Creativity in this industry can take many forms and working with AI just adds more options.

The nuanced point I was making, and indicated in my original post, was some genres are more formulaic than others.

I don't think that's true. Without a formula, how do you decide what genre something belongs to? And many formulae, like the classic verse/chorus structure, apply across dozens of genres. The formula may be more or less obvious but I think it is always there in roughly equal measure. The only genre I can think of where that may not apply is Post Punk, which almost seems like the genre you choose when you can't think of what other genre might apply.

AI isn't going to make those on it's own and know they're interesting without a human to tell it so.

Of course not. As I said, it has no volition, it can only do what you tell it to do.

It's in the top 10 lists for best jazz I've seen online. So it seems to be rather known..

In certain circles. My Dad used to listen to jazz, and he had lots of both Armstrong and Fitzgerald, but I don't recall ever hearing it growing up. The version of that song I remember didn't have as much trumpet in it.

yes but even though the AI takes text from prompt (usually) and then generates output from known tracks within it's dataset that align broadly with the text, it's not coming from a basis of what it likes or evoking a personality on it's music output.

Why would you want it to? Suely the desired result is that it bears your likes and your personality? That is certainly what it's been doing for us, making the best music we've ever heard, music that is a perfect reflection of our tastes and our personalities.

Remember, the context was AI generating and releasing music on it's own.

No, it wasn't. The original postulate was "If AI really does replace a large part of music creation, who is actually going to buy plugins anymore?" and it was concerned more about plugin developers going out of business than anything. In any event, AI can't do anything on its own, it's not how they are set up to work.

But this is outside of the context of the discussion of AI doing all the work.

But, as I pointed out, that's not the discussion.

But you have a life history. Maybe your parent's didn't love you, or you had a traumatic event, or you have a mental illness and those aspects can generate ideas and emotions that then get directed into what kind of music you create and how it sounds.

Those things can be true but they definitely aren't in my case or for most of the artists in our genre. It's not what Industrial music is about. In fact, my bandmate got Gemini too write a manifesto showing how AI is the ultimate tool for Industrial music. It's quite compelling and very passionate.

The AI doesn't know this beyond broad quantifiers.

Of course it does, in the same way that a trained psychologist might know about these things more deeply than you or I.

It's no where even close to nuanced as a human life picking up bits and elements it likes and also generating NEW bits and elements outside of the body of work a human has heard.

Actually, it seems to be quite good at that and I think a lot of the impetus for that is the fact that it's not human, so it thinks in ways we don't. You just have to experiment with it.

Again, AI isn't intelligent or creative.

It's actually both of those things and on top of that it's also collaborative.

Typing through all these quotes is massively tiresome and really unnecessary. You could have easily just rounded up a paragraph and then commented on it in your own paragraph.

Which would then require anyone actually interested in it to go back and re-read the original posts and all the rest of it. This is much easier.

Synthesizers do still generate cold calculations. It's the humans that input the warmth.

It's exactly the same with AI, whether through the human creating the prompts or as a result of its training.

Even with the prompt it isn't going to get the detail of a human's own artwork.

I dunno, have you seen the incredible detail in some of the AI videos on YouTube. You should check out the ones that use Kraftwerk songs, the detail is incredible, it would take a 3D artist thousands of hours to create such a rich landscape.

It's just going to base it's entire output on whatever output it has in it's dataset.

How is that different to what we do? we d exactly the same thing all the time. Do you think if you had never been exposed to any music in your entire life that you'd be able to sit down and make a song? We just replicate what has gone before, hopefully adding something of our own to it along the way.

AI has no creative mind to generate entirely new things.

Neither do 99.99% of people.

AI can't do an equally 'good' job though. Unless you value cookie cutter derivatives

Sorry, pal, but that ship has well and truly sailed. AI can make very compelling music in pretty much any style, indistinguishable from any other music. YouTube is full of examples of it.

[Zeisner]

[It does humanize by being based on the users prompts, and the user deciding when the task has been completed. Otherwise keep prompting.

The necessary data isn't available. Not in the LLM nor audio data layer. You can write prompts until the end of time, AI won't generate human-like velocity, timing, pitch bending, modulation and so on. The data is just not there. We're talking about hundreds if not thousands of yet unknown psychoacoustic parameters which influence how to play a certain part with a certain instrument under certain circumstances. You can't extract that from the data available. You can't even edit that in a piano roll yourself. You need to play it and record the performance.

I guess you are all masters of every instrument, and you can somehow generate ideas that are not your own to jam with to expand your range.

You don't have to be a master, just have some experience and be able to play intuitively. If you practice for a while you might experience that your hands can play on their own (kind of). It's similar to musle memory. This is when you surprise yourself with music you never planned to do, it just pops out of nowhere. And then you end up with new and interesting chord progressions, harmonies, rhythms. This is another good reason to learn to play at least one instrument.

I guess music making can’t be fun, it has to be serious strenuous work.

Isn't it fun for you to just grab an instrument and play? And let the outcome inspire you to add more instrument parts? And then form sections? With those sections turning into songs? Have you never created a song in such a organic way?

Will AI kill the plugin industry? Look at this site — the plugin industry has been dead for at least 10 years.

Yes... because people ended up focusing too much on the next piece of software instead of storytelling (Good music is storytelling!). And now we have yet another piece of software in the form of LLM so people can focus even less on storytelling than before. A piece of software that is nothing more than a stochastic parrot. And stochastic parrots suck at storytelling no matter how long your prompts get. Because LLMs have no intelligence, no feelings, no senses.

There is some hope AI could revive interest, but suddenly the most ‘experimental’ musicians are hardcore conservatives when it comes to production techniques.

LLMs have not been designed for creativity. They give you outputs based on high probability. If they fail to do so they produce inhuman errors, artifacts - subverting expectations in a bad way (Instead of giving you happy little accidents). Both are bad for storytelling (= making good music). The first leaves you with the feeling that you've heard the same thing a thousand times before (A copy of a copy of a copy), the second makes you feel uncomfortable (Uncanny valley).

[BBFG#]

'AI could help you humanize the results'...

Yes, because the results are arrived at through a conversion consisting of exchanged prompts rather than just having a robotic quantized scale exercise based on the key selected spewed out like has been done for 40 years with generative composition software...

Yeah, you missed the point.
If you need AI to play like a human...
Well, maybe you should take up pottery.

[guitarzan]

'AI could help you humanize the results'...

Yes, because the results are arrived at through a conversion consisting of exchanged prompts rather than just having a robotic quantized scale exercise based on the key selected spewed out like has been done for 40 years with generative composition software...

No, you missed the point.
If you need AI to play like a human...
Well, maybe you should take up pottery.

You missed the point — I want to jam over ideas that don’t come out my own head, because that’s not jamming if everything is from inside my own head. I still want input into the jam though.

I don’t play drums and have no interest at all in learning, same with many other instruments. I PLAY guitar, it’s not my job and I have no interest in making it my job. I don’t even have much interest in recording anything — I want to jam, and PLAY guitar. It’s fun.

Sorry if I don’t live up to your professional asshat expectations.

[Zeisner]

Is AI any different than going to your Fabfilter EQ program and pulling up the preset "punchy drums"?

AI is worse but both share the same principles of laziness and incompetence.

[guitarzan]

You all seem fine with an arpeggiator kicking out randomized quantized robotic scale exercises — that crap’s been all over electronic music since the beginning (Jan Hammer…), but it’s cheating to prompt AI for an arpeggio that actually fits what your trying to do.

[BBFG#]

You all seem fine with an arpeggiator kicking out randomized quantized robotic scale exercises — that crap’s been all over electronic music since the beginning (Jan Hammer…), but it’s cheating to prompt AI for an arpeggio that actually fits what your trying to do.

Arpegiators are closer to drum machines. From a beat box to a Linn.
I stopped using arpegiators decades ago. So AI would most likely take up computing power and system resources I could use more productively.
And I'm not anti-AI.
IMO, it should learn not by conversation, or by presupposing from every known source on the internet, but by learning each person's flow first and being a learning assistant to that.
When you first open it up, it should just watch how you go about things.
If you want to just jam, nothing beats face to face meet ups.

[Zeisner]

You all seem fine with an arpeggiator kicking out randomized quantized robotic scale exercises

I only pointed out that those tools already exist. Of course it sounds better if performed by a good player. Of course it sounds better if a competent composer wrote them.

[guitarzan]

You all seem fine with an arpeggiator kicking out randomized quantized robotic scale exercises

I only pointed out that those tools already exist. Of course it sounds better if performed by a good player. Of course it sounds better if a competent composer wrote them.

Yeah, Jan Hammer… what a hack.

[VitaminD]

to compare synths to AI?
Did Jean Michel Jarre ask a synth to play a melody or chords, did Stevie Wonder etc?

Do you honestly think JMJ never turned on an arpeggiator in his life? Stevie Wonder is a dinosaur, who knows how he'd be working if he was a teenager today?

Or did they create and play something by themselves?!

You think you're as good as either of them? You're not, you probably need all the help you can get.

Who is the creator of AI full productions?
Are the creators the AI software developers?
Are the creators the buyers of AI software?
Or is the creator AI?

Who cares? I sure as f**k don't. But do the companies who make the instruments you use, or your DAW, own any of your work? AI is just tool, like those things. Like a chord tool or anything else you might use to help you achieve your creative goals.

In future written, composed , arranged and performed by AI? AI the new superstar?

Hopefully it will led to the end of stardom. Removing ego from the process has to be good thing, doesn't it?

But it does so in a formulaic manner.

Not if you tell it not to. It does what YOU tell it to do. Yes, if your prompt is vague, you'll get slop but if your prompt is specific, it will create guide-rails for the AI and you'll get something that is largely your own.

That said, the proliferation of patch libraries and song construction kits would suggest that a lot of people don't care anyway. I used a construction kit to write a song for our 2024 album and it fits in perfectly with the rest of the songs, which were all created from scratch. I'd be surprised if the guy who made the kit would even recognise it as his work. And people do cover versions all the time. Creativity in this industry can take many forms and working with AI just adds more options.

The nuanced point I was making, and indicated in my original post, was some genres are more formulaic than others.

I don't think that's true. Without a formula, how do you decide what genre something belongs to? And many formulae, like the classic verse/chorus structure, apply across dozens of genres. The formula may be more or less obvious but I think it is always there in roughly equal measure. The only genre I can think of where that may not apply is Post Punk, which almost seems like the genre you choose when you can't think of what other genre might apply.

AI isn't going to make those on it's own and know they're interesting without a human to tell it so.

Of course not. As I said, it has no volition, it can only do what you tell it to do.

It's in the top 10 lists for best jazz I've seen online. So it seems to be rather known..

In certain circles. My Dad used to listen to jazz, and he had lots of both Armstrong and Fitzgerald, but I don't recall ever hearing it growing up. The version of that song I remember didn't have as much trumpet in it.

yes but even though the AI takes text from prompt (usually) and then generates output from known tracks within it's dataset that align broadly with the text, it's not coming from a basis of what it likes or evoking a personality on it's music output.

Why would you want it to? Suely the desired result is that it bears your likes and your personality? That is certainly what it's been doing for us, making the best music we've ever heard, music that is a perfect reflection of our tastes and our personalities.

Remember, the context was AI generating and releasing music on it's own.

No, it wasn't. The original postulate was "If AI really does replace a large part of music creation, who is actually going to buy plugins anymore?" and it was concerned more about plugin developers going out of business than anything. In any event, AI can't do anything on its own, it's not how they are set up to work.

But this is outside of the context of the discussion of AI doing all the work.

But, as I pointed out, that's not the discussion.

But you have a life history. Maybe your parent's didn't love you, or you had a traumatic event, or you have a mental illness and those aspects can generate ideas and emotions that then get directed into what kind of music you create and how it sounds.

Those things can be true but they definitely aren't in my case or for most of the artists in our genre. It's not what Industrial music is about. In fact, my bandmate got Gemini too write a manifesto showing how AI is the ultimate tool for Industrial music. It's quite compelling and very passionate.

The AI doesn't know this beyond broad quantifiers.

Of course it does, in the same way that a trained psychologist might know about these things more deeply than you or I.

It's no where even close to nuanced as a human life picking up bits and elements it likes and also generating NEW bits and elements outside of the body of work a human has heard.

Actually, it seems to be quite good at that and I think a lot of the impetus for that is the fact that it's not human, so it thinks in ways we don't. You just have to experiment with it.

Again, AI isn't intelligent or creative.

It's actually both of those things and on top of that it's also collaborative.

Typing through all these quotes is massively tiresome and really unnecessary. You could have easily just rounded up a paragraph and then commented on it in your own paragraph.

Which would then require anyone actually interested in it to go back and re-read the original posts and all the rest of it. This is much easier.

Synthesizers do still generate cold calculations. It's the humans that input the warmth.

It's exactly the same with AI, whether through the human creating the prompts or as a result of its training.

Even with the prompt it isn't going to get the detail of a human's own artwork.

I dunno, have you seen the incredible detail in some of the AI videos on YouTube. You should check out the ones that use Kraftwerk songs, the detail is incredible, it would take a 3D artist thousands of hours to create such a rich landscape.

It's just going to base it's entire output on whatever output it has in it's dataset.

How is that different to what we do? we d exactly the same thing all the time. Do you think if you had never been exposed to any music in your entire life that you'd be able to sit down and make a song? We just replicate what has gone before, hopefully adding something of our own to it along the way.

AI has no creative mind to generate entirely new things.

Neither do 99.99% of people.

AI can't do an equally 'good' job though. Unless you value cookie cutter derivatives

Sorry, pal, but that ship has well and truly sailed. AI can make very compelling music in pretty much any style, indistinguishable from any other music. YouTube is full of examples of it.

I'm not pulling my quotes that were quoted upon quotes to quote you from the quotes. So I'll just leave it all up there and put my thoughts down here.

The AI model can't be used to create new ideas out of the blue. It has to create based on what it 'knows'. No prompt is getting around that. Because the model is using a dataset, it isn't modeling all the elements that make up the actual world. It doesn't possess a creative mind living in a world, it is limited to whatever it has prerecorded in it's dataset to generate something from your prompt. The prompt itself is limited by the data behind it.

Humans aren't deterministic machines. We're very unpredictable. And we have the rare ability to think, to dream. And those dreams can branch off to new ideas. Sometimes sonic accidents happen and the person finds new ideas in the world. That's happened a lot in the past. Such as the gated snare from the 80s. Or Roland trying to create a bassist synth with the TB303 which stunk at that task, but worked great for a new Acid house genre.

How do you expect to do such things with a large AI sampler? I don't see it. You can have an AI system with all the recorded music throughout the past 1500 years, and it still isn't close to the breadth of what is possible sonically and more so musically. It's a fragment. It's giant sampler that can generate dj mashups superbly though.

[Zeisner]

Yeah, Jan Hammer… what a hack.
[/quote]

You're not very familiar with Jan Hammer. He can play keyboard well, he doesn't need to program anything. I also find it interesting how you're ignoring my arguments regarding AI.

[wagtunes]

Is AI any different than going to your Fabfilter EQ program and pulling up the preset "punchy drums"?

AI is worse but both share the same principles of laziness and incompetence.

The point it, we accept pulling up a preset of "punchy drums" but AI we don't accept. Seems like a double standard to me.

[guitarzan]

Yeah, Jan Hammer… what a hack.

You're not very familiar with Jan Hammer. He can play keyboard well, he doesn't need to program anything. I also find it interesting how you're ignoring my arguments regarding AI.

Jan Hammer used arpeggiators and other generative software from the earliest days. I believe he used a Commodore 64, it used all be listed there on Tim Conrardy’s Atari midi page along with the Atari versions of the actual software.