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

[vurt]

Doom and gloom is always easy.

Yeah, add more low end, distortion and screaming vocals!

pfft that's not doom.

[guitarzan]

AI acknowledges you’re right and says future training will address that. Take the win.

I am not writing because I want to win. I only care about facts. I have already explained why the data won't be available. It's way too expensive and too much effort to generate such high-quality data and finetune the model too to handle it correctly. The NES sound is an easy example, imagine if a user asks for a very specific electric guitar equipped with a particular pickup and special strings going into a certain amp standing in a room with certain dimensions and acoustic elements, recorded with a very particular microphone. The amount of data to replicate all of that with a low error rate is insane, it's beyond all sci-fi. It's impossible to extract it from the available data.

That’s probably why the longterm goals include separate stems and detailed midi output. Then use your own hardware or software to tailor the sound.

Have the guitar track output an unprocessed DI and tailor it with the myriad of guitar, fx, and amp modeling software.

Route amazingly expressive MIDI (MPE) to any VSTi or MIDI hardware soundsource that was ever available or ever will be available. This is the very beginning … this is like the DOS or even Unix days of AI music tools, it has literally just begun.

It is planned to be increasingly a collaborative music production tool rather than a strictly generative device, at least according to Gemini/Lyria.

[Zeisner]

That’s probably why the longterm goals include separate stems and detailed midi output. Then use your own hardware or software to tailor the sound.

This is what I can't understand. Why they didn't start with a simpler but more effective model with MIDI functions as the primary goal. It would generate revenue much faster at the fraction of the cost. And then slowly adding audio functions too and combine those with data mining so they can get all the takes and inserts and mixes without and with all sorts of effects, of course uncompressed. This would have been a lot better from a technical and economic point of view. But now you have all those huge models trained on poisoned data. Washing that out will take longer and cost more than just starting small with high-quality data and you will never be able to completely remove it.

[guitarzan]

That’s probably why the longterm goals include separate stems and detailed midi output. Then use your own hardware or software to tailor the sound.

This is what I can't understand. Why they didn't start with a simpler but more effective model with MIDI functions as the primary goal. It would generate revenue much faster at the fraction of the cost. And then slowly adding audio functions too and combine those with data mining so they can get all the takes and inserts and mixes without and with all sorts of effects, of course uncompressed. This would have been a lot better from a technical and economic point of view. But now you have all those huge models trained on poisoned data. Washing that out will take longer and cost more than just starting small with high-quality data and you will never be able to completely remove it.

MIDI is probably a hard sell to backers and such, they needed something bigger to draw the investment bucks.

There is Magenta Studio which is mainly MIDI-centric and exists in tandem with Lyria and there is already some crossover and an eventual further merging is in he plans.

There was MuseNet but that seems largely abandoned, Magenta is probably the closest thing to a successor.

MIDI files are so small that maybe an independently trained AI can be created by smaller developers, most of the backbone stuff is already open source.

[Zeisner]

MIDI is probably a hard sell to backers and such, they needed something bigger to draw the investment bucks.

But now they maneuvered themselves into a corner. Expectations for gigantic revenues are sky high and investors are getting increasingly nervous. Everything can get lost very quickly, there is no solid foundation they could fall back to. It's closer to gambling than to business administration.

[guitarzan]

MIDI is probably a hard sell to backers and such, they needed something bigger to draw the investment bucks.

But now they maneuvered themselves into a corner. Expectations for gigantic revenues are sky high and investors are getting increasingly nervous. Everything can get lost very quickly, there is no solid foundation they could fall back to. It's closer to gambling than to business administration.

I was editing while you were posting. This thing I was adding kind of fits here as a reply:

MIDI files are so small that maybe an independently trained AI can be created by smaller developers, most of the backbone stuff is already open source.

[DCrown]

"So the reason there are separate forums for Instruments and Effects is that you "have to" keep them separate? There can be no intersection or overlap in those two things? It's a very poor argument."

To compare Instruments and effects to ai productions, well, ok why not.
An instrument was created to be played. In order to play an instrument, you have to learn it. In order to play an instrument very well, you need talent. No talent without a lot of excersising.
More or less the same as to effects, you need experience to know how to use or apply effects.

All you need to know in order to use ai is to know how to switch on a computer, I could tell a kid how to do it and the kid would learn within a minute and you know to write to tell ai what to do, in future writing will be replaced by speaking to ai.

So AI probably is not for illiterates at the moment, I am sure in two months even illiterates will be able to use ai when it will be made possible that AI can read your thoughts. It will possible to think music and thoughts turned into a product, ain't that great?!

You can ignore completely the fact that ai destroys more than it creates.
You can completely ignore that ai is used to turn an already oversaturated market into a nonsense over-over-over-saturated market.
You can completely ignore the fact that ai creates so much emptiness in life and so much free time and make a lot of people jobless that boredom, laziness, stupidity, lack of perspective and suicides rates will raise drastically.
You can completely ignore the fact that quite a lot of people do not appreciate ai productions at all and consider ai music an insult to art, musicianship and their ears.

"Why would I care? It's not like I think civilisation is worth protecting. Look at what it's doing to the planet we all live on. Humanity is like plague of rats, destroying everything with no regard for anything but filling it's own belly."

I agree, as long as I still have access to.music created between 1700 and 2001 life still has some ok moments.(2001, cuz there were still 2 songs I like that were released then)

The funny thing is that there is a theory that ai will be the next level of evolution one day, humans completely replaced by ai, maybe there will be some kind of zoos with humans in cages.

[wagtunes]

Oh God, give it a rest already. You've made your point in this thread at least 100 times. Enough already.

[DCrown]

Oh God, give it a rest already. You've made your point in this thread at least 100 times. Enough already.

Just like Bones and you.
Are you on the verge of committing suicide?
Please find some help and stay away from ai!

Has ai already complete control over you?
Wagtunes, is it you?
Or just some ai posting to defend its existence?

There's an ai forum now here for people like you!
What are you doing in instrument forum anyway.
Ah, I see you are producing hybrid haha
I hope kvr has some shrinks for the ai forum who could help there in worst case.

You obviously prefer pretending to be blind not to see, there are lots of people who do not enjoy that people who like playing with a devil's tool share opinions on the same thread and ignoring facts again and again and again and they obviously don't comprehend the difference between music and noise productions.

Wait I will post the link to ai forum.

Sorry, I forgot you have to create an account there by ai with password to get access to it.

[DCrown]

yes, you will get your personal ai assistent there.
First you will tell assistent what to post,
then assistent will give you several suggestions and you just choose,
finally assistent will have complete control over you and post whatever it wants to without you being involved any more.
A time saver, great, what will you do with that much free time?!

[guitarzan]

…they obviously don't comprehend the difference between music and noise productions…

But you obviously do:

… music was a thing years ago for me, now noise production is just some distraction and it makes me move my fingers.

yes, you will get your personal ai assistent there.
First you will tell assistent what to post,
then assistent will give you several suggestions and you just choose,
finally assistent will have complete control over you and post whatever it wants to without you being involved any more.
A time saver, great, what will you do with that much free time?!

My AI personal assistant says to tell you to STFU and go create your handcrafted noise productions in peace — AI music generation is no threat to you.

[DCrown]

…they obviously don't comprehend the difference between music and noise productions…

But you obviously do:

… music was a thing years ago for me, now noise production is just some distraction and it makes me move my fingers.

yes, you will get your personal ai assistent there.
First you will tell assistent what to post,
then assistent will give you several suggestions and you just choose,
finally assistent will have complete control over you and post whatever it wants to without you being involved any more.
A time saver, great, what will you do with that much free time?!

My AI personal assistant says to tell you to STFU and go create your handcrafted noise productions in peace — AI music generation is no threat to you.

"STFU" is rather an obvious threat and
whoever shows aggressive behavior like that using such expressions should immediately be banned from forum.
AI not threat???Lol it will ruin more than just unimportant music productions.
Your noise is worth nothing, just like my noise is worth nothing, just like 200.000 new daily uploads of noise are worth nothing

[guitarzan]

So why worry about any of it? It’s here and KVR isn’t going to stop it. It’s either ignore it or learn to use it.

[BONES]

If it could it would be able to solve the issue.

Except it told you how to solve the problem, it just said it wasn't in a position to do it without further training. That sounds like a reasonably well thought-out response to me. AIs probably can't look shit up on YouTube like we can.

No, it's not. Human voice is.

In that case, it's game over because AI has absolutely f**king nailed it. Spend half-an-hour over at elevenlabs and see what you can come up with.

To be aware of something it would have to be able to sense and think which is not the case.

That's just semantics, it's not any kind of argument. AI doesn't need to be "aware" of anything it just has to look up its indexes (or indicies, if you prefer) to find the information it requires.

That said, the response it gave clearly indicated that it is aware of its limitations, which is something a bit new for AI. It won't be long now until all your worst nightmares come to pass.

imagine if a user asks for a very specific electric guitar equipped with a particular pickup and special strings going into a certain amp standing in a room with certain dimensions and acoustic elements, recorded with a very particular microphone.

It is completely clear to anyone with even two functioning brain cells that Suno, Udio, Tunee and other AI are not designed to do that. It's like buying a 20 year old Corolla and expecting it to win races on a track day without serious modifications. Who knows, maybe one day AI will have achieved everything else and some clever fellow might design/train one to do that kind of thing. That it can't right now is apropos of nothing.

Why they didn't start with a simpler but more effective model with MIDI functions as the primary goal.

Seriously? You don't understand this? You don't understand that the market for anything to do with MIDI is so small as to be irrelevant to 99% or more of the population. OTOH, who wouldn't want to make their own music if they could? Or listen to music made by AI if it was any good? Your market goes from a few tens of thousands of painfully annoying customers, globally, to tens of millions of happy idiots. It's a pleasant and probably interesting diversion and a great PR exercise, it's not any kind of serious, standalone, sustainable business. Just ask NI or Cakewalk.

But now they maneuvered themselves into a corner. Expectations for gigantic revenues are sky high and investors are getting increasingly nervous.

Nobody is putting big bucks into music AI. Why would they, there's no money in creating/releasing music any more and everyone knows it. Music AIs are a spin-off, a by-product, nothing more. The money in AI lies in other fields.

[BONES]

An instrument was created to be played. In order to play an instrument, you have to learn it.

No you don't, you can load it into your DAW, choose a preset you like, load up a MIDI file you downloaded off the 'net and drop it in. Voila! You're making music with an instrument. All you need to know is how to drag 'n' drop and press "Play". Putting a record onto a turntable is more technical.

In order to play an instrument very well, you need talent.

No, just a good source of MIDI files and preset packs. Free ones will probably do.

No talent without a lot of excersising.

That's just the "10,000 hours" thing, it's why I have very little respect for musicianship. It's more obsession and drive than talent a lot of the time.

All you need to know in order to use ai is to know how to switch on a computer, I could tell a kid how to do it and the kid would learn within a minute.

Yeah, and it might take two minutes for the same kid to get something going in a DAW. Still no talent required.

You can ignore completely the fact that ai destroys more than it creates.

I can, because it's something you've just made up and I live in the real world and can see for myself.

You can completely ignore that ai is used to turn an already oversaturated market into a nonsense over-over-over-saturated market.

I can because it makes no difference to me, the damage was done by Spotify years ago (but I bet you have a Spotify account). At least AI has some positive aspects, things I can use it for, things I can get out of it.

You can completely ignore the fact that ai creates so much emptiness in life and so much free time and make a lot of people jobless that boredom, laziness, stupidity, lack of perspective and suicides rates will raise drastically.

That sounds like wishful thinking on your part to me, nothing even close to reality. My experience of AI is almost completely positive. It helps me at work, it helps me in my musical endeavours, it has improved my ability to search for knowledge. It's all good as far as I'm concerned. Better still, it just keeps getting better and better, taking all the drudgery out of my life so that I have more time to be creative. Sure, there'll be winners and losers, the trick is to be n the winning team.

Anyone who works in my industry has been watching this all play out for 20+ years. It's nothing new to us, just the next evolutionary step in an ongoing process. e.g. 10 years ago there were 8 people in the studio for the 6pm news, not counting the on-screen talent, plus more than a dozen in the control room. Today the cameras are all remote controlled so there's only one person in the studio and just three people in the control room. That's an 80% staff reduction, all taented people who'd been doing that their whole working lives. My department used to have 40 people in it, now we are fewer than a dozen. AI will almost certainly be the reason for the next round of redundancies but if it wasn't AI, they'd have other excuses. Every business's labour forces are cut to the bone these days, it's how business runs and it's often the only way to remain competitive.

You can completely ignore the fact that quite a lot of people do not appreciate ai productions at all and consider ai music an insult to art, musicianship and their ears.

That's because those people are deluded fools and, therefore, easily dismissed.

as long as I still have access to.music created between 1700 and 2001 life still has some ok moments.(2001, cuz there were still 2 songs I like that were released then)

This is precisely why anything you have to say is so easily dismissed. You're living in the past, you refuse to move with the times. The artists you like don't even make music any more, that's how f**king talented they are (or maybe they're dead?). OTOH, some of my favourite artists from the late 70s and early 8-s are still putting out new music and a lot of it is still worth having. In 2026 already I've bought new albums from three such artists (Peter Murphy, Fischer-Z and Shriekback, if you're interested).

The funny thing is that there is a theory that ai will be the next level of evolution one day, humans completely replaced by ai, maybe there will be some kind of zoos with humans in cages.

Now that's a zoo I'd love to visit, but I'd make sure I kept my hands away from the cages, humans are vicious little f**kers.

there are lots of people who do not enjoy that people who like playing with a devil's tool share opinions on the same thread and ignoring facts again and again and again

Yes, but we put up with you because we feel sorry for the deluded state you seem to walk around in and we'd honestly like to help you see reality.

they obviously don't comprehend the difference between music and noise productions.

You clearly don't even understand what you just said. Go and search your favourite music service for "noise" and see what you get. It's a whole sub-genre of Industrial and it's surprisingly vast. Not my cuppa at all but lots of people seem to like it just fine. I definitely prefer it to any kind of jazz. Strangely, though, I find it really easy to make. This is one of mine, a B-side from 2016 that would qualify as Noise.