As warned, and also, Why Aren't You Getting Some of This?

[surreal]

We've just finished an album where we started by generating around 400 songs in Tunee, which is a music AI. As we were working on them we selected songs that met our criteria and I spent a week or two on each, deconstructing the song and rebuilding it in Studio Pro. After about three months we had enough good material for an album. Shortly after, Tunee lost its contract to use Suno's models and the models it started using were pretty useless, so we were lucky to get things done when we did. (Tunee is free, Suno costs money.)

The album has 12 tracks, two of which are short interstitials we made ourselves. The 10 songs we wrote with Tunee have varying degrees of AI sound still in them. 3 or 4 of them have absolutely nothing left from the AI generated original and 3 others have backing vocals from the AI version. Some of them have Battery augmenting the AI drums (I used stem separation in Studio pro to split the tracks), either the drum track as the AI made it or a loop made from the drums. We also left a few spoken word voice snippets in a few of them and a couple have bits and pieces of synth parts from the AI left in to fill out the sound a bit more. I've also added extra parts to some of them and left parts out of others. If I had to put a number on it, I'd say that less than 10% of the sound you hear on the album was made by AI but around 80% of the music was written by the AI, under our direction. We fed it most of the lyrics, although it sometimes changed things around a bit.

For me, the process didn't feel significantly different from working with my bandmate's original ideas. It was really like having a 3rd member of our songwriting partnership. We all had our input, in order - Craig (my bandmate) first, then Tunee, then me, then back to Craig and lastly to me for final mixing and mastering.

From go to woah this album has taken us maybe a month longer than the last one took, so we weren't doing it to save time, and it is without doubt the hardest we have ever worked to get an album finished so it definitely didn't make the job any easier. What it did was make the songs we've come up with a whole lot better than we'd have done on our own and it pushed us out of our comfort zone, it made us try new things we'd never have thought to try otherwise. It is also the first time that I'd say I actually enjoyed the process, which is why we worked so hard on it.

PS: I leave any ethics beside as we now could ask where all the AI is getting the "ideas" from.

From the same places we do. The music I was making before I discovered the EBM genre is very different to what I've been doing since I discovered it. It's had a profound influence on the sort of music I make. And we're all the same, we are a product of our influences. Ai doesn't have the luxury of growing up so it gets its exposure to these influences from its training.

Hi Bones, thank you for your detailed explaination, very intresting and insightful Mate! Hope yourAlbum does well in your genre and community!

[vurt]

You have to agree that people don't care.

i agree that lots of people eat at mcdonalds. doesn't mean i would.

[Seafire Mk2]

AI

There's a clue in the name

[zerocrossing]

So I think AI assistant music can be seen as a creative act. I'm not into it myself but I don't see a reason to talk it down. When you are a songwriter and guitar player and don't want to spend time in sound design and drum patterns and what not, it's fine. I remember the time people went crazy because sample libraries where widely available via CD; yet that gave us a bunch of good music and genres.

PS: Looking at the impact on society and general ethics (not music) AI is a disaster IMO but this is another story.

Sure, if you wrote lyrics, a melody and basic chord progression and use Sunos as a modern Band In The Box, go ahead. I’d still say that is creative. Not everyone is Prince. If you are typing a prompt and generating a full song, that is just not creative at all. That is lame.

[ghettosynth]

You have to agree that people don't care.

i agree that lots of people eat at mcdonalds. doesn't mean i would.

In this case, "people", is the customers. Nobody is suggesting that you should "eat at McDonalds", that misses the point of this thread. Customers want custom songs. If your music is "better than AI", then you can offer a premium product and be paid to make music. What you have to agree with is that if people are told it's not AI, and then it is, and they love the product, that they don't care about the sound quality like you do. It's not an argument for AI usage, but, at the same time, it's not a defense of the popular thesis that non AI music matters to this set of customers.

My take is that you don't care about making money from music, so this thread is not really targeted at you. Further, you make noise, I don't know what other music skills you have, but, I doubt that's what people want hear. Note I'm not throwing shade at noise-musicians, I've been paid to make noise, I guess that makes me a "professional noise creator."

I mentioned earlier that you will see tons of arbitrage "businesses" like this. Expect to see more, but, AI isn't the point here, avenues to sell your music skills is the point. Feel free to ignore that aspect, I get it. Despite having been paid (small amounts of money) to make music in my life more than a few times, I also don't care about getting paid to make music, so I get it. Then again, I'm not complaining that people using AI are destroying whatever demand exists for my efforts.