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

[Zeisner]

So basically AI can't innovate or create. It can only recreate what it is fed.

Weak AI can't. Strong AI could (theoretically). LLMs belong in the weak category because of their inability to reason and think.

[Zeisner]

Any comments are welcome.

I would like to listen to your voice isolated. Because I have a few ideas how to spice things up with EQ and distortion. I had a few clients with weaker voices in the past and managed to add more definition and presence with weighted distortion, mimicking the sound of older ribbon microphones. I also want to hear how low and high you can get. And how well you can manage to make your voice raspy or make ot crack on purpose.

There are additional tricks which require you to adapt the composition, like running your voice and another instrument into distortion together to form subtle power chords for sections with more intensity. If you have trouble with tremolos, consider using a send reverb and put a tremolo onto that instead. Gives you similar vibes without cheating.

The performance is also an issue. I think you're trying to do something you're not "supposed" to do, the uplifting style sounds forced. You wrote that you had an accident and you're drowning in medical bills and that you struggled for a long time with earning royalties. Put all of that into the performance.

[BONES]

lmao.. imagine being scared of creativity. The insecurity is loud and blaming tools really wild.

Mate, I have trouble wondering what the f**k most of these idiots think creativity is, given that they don't demonstrate any at all. It's like this incredibly precious thing they covet, yet none of them have anything they think is worth showing for it. You included, apparently.

... many open problems about "AI" and copyright, respectively the question if machine code should have the same rights like human beings... sooner or later lawmakers have to treat this problem and I guess (and hope) it will not be in favour of "AI" ...not at least because of the fact that most "AI" training is based on stealing existing work...

This argument makes no sense to me at all. People are every bit as influenced by the music we all hear every day - in shops, on the radio in the car or as we walk past a building site, on TV in advertisements, etc. That's all music we hear, that influences our own creative endeavours, and we don't have to pay for so why shouldn't AI be able to train on publicly available sources and retain the same "rights" people have? Even if AI is being trained on Spotify, I don't ee that it requires anything more than the company who makes the AI I paying a month's subscription to facilitate the training. The people who are saying otherwise are just greedy c**ts trying to stick their fingers into other people's pies and/or control something they have no right to control.

I can imagine that at some point "AI" developers will be brought to court to justify how their model was trained and if it was based on stealing there could be huge fines bringing these people on their knees...

I see that as the equivalent of Oasis being taken to court by The Beatles because it is completely obvious that Oasis listened to a lot of Beatles, which had a huge influence on their own music. (Liam Gallagher once said in an interview that the only difference between Oasis and The Beatles was that The Beatles used those chords first.) Musicians would be afraid to tell anyone what their influences were for fear of being sued.

When I started with music The Beatles and Elvis were my main inspiration, the songs were simple with a nice melody you remembered after first listening. So I could play and learn the songs on piano very fast and enjoyed it.

This is a perfect illustration of my point above - if you trained on Beatles and Elvis music, shouldn't you have to pay them royalties on every song you make? No, of course not, the very thought of it is ridiculous. So why should AI companies have to pay for the music that influences their AIs, assuming it is freely available to the public?

So basically AI can't innovate or create. It can only recreate what it is fed. That's not really intelligence is it?

Maybe not on purpose but it's pretty good at ignoring what you tell it and doing its own thing so it's quite likely it could create something new and original by accident. e.g. The stuff it's been giving us is a unique blend of influences I've never heard before. It's mostly pretty easy to listen to something in our genre and know that it was made by a North American artist or a European artist. You don't have to listen for accents, there are certain tells that tend to make it obvious if you are familiar with the genre. Tunee has taken the American vocal style, which you never, ever hear on European Electro-Industrial music, and put it over very European backing tracks which, again, you'd never hear on a North American recording.

AI will never have a soul or a spirit.

Neither do people.

It's just a mindless machine spitting out what it's prompted to do.

So are most people.

If one can get any artistic or personal satisfaction by making music using words in a prompt then I have nothing but sympathy for them as they are missing the whole joy of creating Art in any form.

In the same way I feel great pity for people whose greatest joy is in something that in my experience is insignificant in the face of the true joy of music. But, again, I think that's just about whether you put the music first or yourself, about how clever it makes you feel in the moment.

if the music you make is the type of music that a robot can nail the essence of, then good f**king riddance.

You do understand that a robot is a very different thing, right? But if you mean AI, it is already capable of nailing pretty much any genre, so you may as well say goodbye to all music now, because that battle is won.

[wagtunes]

Any comments are welcome.

I would like to listen to your voice isolated. Because I have a few ideas how to spice things up with EQ and distortion. I had a few clients with weaker voices in the past and managed to add more definition and presence with weighted distortion, mimicking the sound of older ribbon microphones. I also want to hear how low and high you can get. And how well you can manage to make your voice raspy or make ot crack on purpose.

There are additional tricks which require you to adapt the composition, like running your voice and another instrument into distortion together to form subtle power chords for sections with more intensity. If you have trouble with tremolos, consider using a send reverb and put a tremolo onto that instead. Gives you similar vibes without cheating.

The performance is also an issue. I think you're trying to do something you're not "supposed" to do, the uplifting style sounds forced. You wrote that you had an accident and you're drowning in medical bills and that you struggled for a long time with earning royalties. Put all of that into the performance.

Okay, well, you know what? If that's all you got out of what is arguably one of my best songs and best vocal performances ever, then there really is no hope for me and spending the time I would need to spend to do what you want me to do just isn't worth it.

But thanks for being honest.

[Zeisner]

But thanks for being honest.

Well, I expected you to snap back into your usual routine. At least I tried.

[wagtunes]

But thanks for being honest.

Well, I expected you to snap back into your usual routine. At least I tried.

What did you expect me to say? You asked me to do something that I can't physically do. I'm no singer. I freely admit that. I'm a composer. I never wanted to be a singer. I always just wanted other people to sing my songs because I know I can't sing. So no, I'm not snapping back into my usual routine. I'm just being honest.

[jamcat]

lmao.. imagine being scared of creativity. The insecurity is loud and blaming tools really wild.

When I first read that, I assumed you were agreeing that fear of a creative tool like AI is silly. But apparently you were responding to my statement that knob-twiddlers are technicians, not musicians?

The irony here is that the knob-twiddler who goes in with no creative ideas and just plays with their DAW’s modulators and generators to “see what happens” is in fact doing exactly what some are accusing AI users of doing: they’re sending some arbitrary input into the machine and letting the machine sort out what happens. Then they decide if they like what it gives them or not.

That is the polar opposite of what a songwriting musician does, which is they have some deliberate thoughts or a story they want to tell, so they write it down in the form of lyrics. They hear these lyrics as a melody going over a chord progression, which they work out. Then they write accompanying parts that fit the music they’ve created. That is creativity. That is musicianship. They are bringing a creative vision to life. The knob-twiddler does none of that.

Pointing out these distinctions isn’t controversial. Not every painter has to be Salvador Dalí. Some are just Jackson Pollock. And you shouldn’t get so offended when someone points out the obvious fact that what they did was not the same thing.

[Zeisner]

You can twiddle with strings or keys or percussion just like knobs, there is no difference regarding the lack of a creative vision. You can also tell stories with pure sound design (Foley artists!).

[jamcat]

Or you can twiddle with AI. Just don’t clutch your pearls over AI while declaring your mindless knob-twiddling to be high art.

[Zeisner]

Of couse. It's not art at all. But art isn't what people are demanding anyway, they want to pose.

[Tubeman]

What I wonder is what will happen when AI don’t have any new fresh food to feed on? Right now, fine it scrapes music out here previously created by artists, bands and musicians but after that, it will feed on its own stuff on and on and on? A photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy….

[jancivil]

Going from 'prompts are the same as George Martin getting a string orchestra to do the section In Day In the Life so session musicians are easily replaceable by "AI"' to '"AI" isn't replacing musicians because the whole thing of musicianship is they perform and sell their personalities' is incoherent in multiple ways...
I think these examples of botched thought might be replaceable by the hallucinations of say Chat GPT arriving at text in disagrement with its source, jamcat. jagoff

[nix808]

AI will never have a soul or a spirit.

Neither do people.

I am going to argue that you don't know that
My belief is as strong as yours is inversely, that biological beings do have a spirit,
people foremost
I can't prove it,
but I think you cannot exclude the possibility

[DCrown]

lmao.. imagine being scared of creativity. The insecurity is loud and blaming tools really wild.

Mate, I have trouble wondering what the f**k most of these idiots think creativity is, given that they don't demonstrate any at all. It's like this incredibly precious thing they covet, yet none of them have anything they think is worth showing for it. You included, apparently.

... many open problems about "AI" and copyright, respectively the question if machine code should have the same rights like human beings... sooner or later lawmakers have to treat this problem and I guess (and hope) it will not be in favour of "AI" ...not at least because of the fact that most "AI" training is based on stealing existing work...

This argument makes no sense to me at all. People are every bit as influenced by the music we all hear every day - in shops, on the radio in the car or as we walk past a building site, on TV in advertisements, etc. That's all music we hear, that influences our own creative endeavours, and we don't have to pay for so why shouldn't AI be able to train on publicly available sources and retain the same "rights" people have? Even if AI is being trained on Spotify, I don't ee that it requires anything more than the company who makes the AI I paying a month's subscription to facilitate the training. The people who are saying otherwise are just greedy c**ts trying to stick their fingers into other people's pies and/or control something they have no right to control.

I can imagine that at some point "AI" developers will be brought to court to justify how their model was trained and if it was based on stealing there could be huge fines bringing these people on their knees...

I see that as the equivalent of Oasis being taken to court by The Beatles because it is completely obvious that Oasis listened to a lot of Beatles, which had a huge influence on their own music. (Liam Gallagher once said in an interview that the only difference between Oasis and The Beatles was that The Beatles used those chords first.) Musicians would be afraid to tell anyone what their influences were for fear of being sued.

When I started with music The Beatles and Elvis were my main inspiration, the songs were simple with a nice melody you remembered after first listening. So I could play and learn the songs on piano very fast and enjoyed it.

This is a perfect illustration of my point above - if you trained on Beatles and Elvis music, shouldn't you have to pay them royalties on every song you make? No, of course not, the very thought of it is ridiculous. So why should AI companies have to pay for the music that influences their AIs, assuming it is freely available to the public?

So basically AI can't innovate or create. It can only recreate what it is fed. That's not really intelligence is it?

Maybe not on purpose but it's pretty good at ignoring what you tell it and doing its own thing so it's quite likely it could create something new and original by accident. e.g. The stuff it's been giving us is a unique blend of influences I've never heard before. It's mostly pretty easy to listen to something in our genre and know that it was made by a North American artist or a European artist. You don't have to listen for accents, there are certain tells that tend to make it obvious if you are familiar with the genre. Tunee has taken the American vocal style, which you never, ever hear on European Electro-Industrial music, and put it over very European backing tracks which, again, you'd never hear on a North American recording.

AI will never have a soul or a spirit.

Neither do people.

It's just a mindless machine spitting out what it's prompted to do.

So are most people.

If one can get any artistic or personal satisfaction by making music using words in a prompt then I have nothing but sympathy for them as they are missing the whole joy of creating Art in any form.

In the same way I feel great pity for people whose greatest joy is in something that in my experience is insignificant in the face of the true joy of music. But, again, I think that's just about whether you put the music first or yourself, about how clever it makes you feel in the moment.

if the music you make is the type of music that a robot can nail the essence of, then good f**king riddance.

You do understand that a robot is a very different thing, right? But if you mean AI, it is already capable of nailing pretty much any genre, so you may as well say goodbye to all music now, because that battle is won.

What you won't find in my noise productions is The Beatles and Elvis haha They made me learn to play piano and guitar faster and train my voice, thank you.; that's indeed a lot, should I feel bad now, cuz I owe them a lot? No, cuz my father had to pay the records he bought! Do you have to pay money to the family whose ancestor was the first one to speak your language?!
I don't care about AI any more, first I disliked it, now I think, all AI will change is to turn a mass product into an even bigger mass product of an oversaturated market. I am not interested in AI for music production at all, so I will ignore it.
Anyway there are a lot of more important things than music in life. So you might wonder why I join discussions about music, well, music was a thing years ago for me, now noise production is just some distraction and it makes me move my fingers.

[swilow11]

You know what I find most hilarious about this thread? You're wanking on about "creativity" like it was something you actually possessed. Well, where is it? Where's all this creative output that seems to be so f**king central to your sad, little lives? Seriously, where is it? Are you all so f**king busy propping up your wobbly, fragile egos that you don't have to time to actually do anything? I've gone back 10 pages in this thread and only found two other posters with links to their creative output. What the f**k do the rest of you get up to? Is it possible that you "creativity" is so limited, so poor that you're embarrassed to share?

Meanwhile, we actually do stuff. Our last 4 albums have been Top 5 in the only chart that matters in our genre, and we've had singles in various DJ charts alongside artists like Red Hot Chili Peppers and even Taylor Swift. What have any of you ever actually achieved? So maybe think about that for a minute before you start accusing people of cheating or taking shortcuts or not doing things the right way.

You could at least try to be a little less pathetic.

f**king hell