Here's what we feared: the entirely AI synth - guk.ai

[CinningBao]

This is what we're dealing with. Looks like externalisation to me

[billinder33]

Despite his abrasive nature, BONES is the only one in this thread that has actually used AI in a practical manner and been willing to share his experiences with it. And in doing so, expose himself to all the vitriol for daring to experiment with a new technology and post about it.

Having experimented with Suno Studio to build novel acapellas, I actually agree with his position. If you're trying to use AI as a creative tool to augment your own productions, it IS a lot of work. A lot of trial and error, iterative prompt development, and post processing.

I'm more disappointed in KVR's snowflakery and lack of intellectual curiosity than I am in BONES' poking back at people who disapprove of his harmless usage of a technology that won't be going away anytime soon. He's clearly using it to create art rather than just entering prompts to spit out AI sloptracks and spam post them on streaming services, so I don't see the big deal. That's a way different situation than megacorps like Spotify using an AI to spit out prompts that are sent to another AI that autogenerates tracks to flood the service and kill royalty payments to artists.

[Scotty]

Billinder33:

Your statement (quoted below) isn’t quite accurate, and that’s understandable. I am engaged with AI. I’m building a web-based chord generator for the Moog Subharmonicon and Behringer Spice, and I use AI interactively for other small projects, including Arduino. I run a hybrid setup with an RTX 3090 for locally hosted LLMs and a ChatGPT front end. I’m not an expert, but I’m not on the sidelines either. The issues around content ownership and uncredited training matter to me and to many others, and none of that stops me from using the tools creatively.

Bones wasn’t called out for experimenting with AI — he was called out for the nonsense, the fakery, and the refusal to examine his own contradictions. I didn’t mention my experience earlier because I know its limits. What I was addressing was the absurdity of his arguments, their lack of consistency, and the way he shuts down anything that doesn’t fit his worldview. And yes, I added a bit of salt because he wrapped it all in punk aesthetics that didn’t hold up. If someone else had made a coherent argument, I would’ve left it alone.

billinder33:

"Despite his abrasive nature, BONES is the only one in this thread that has actually used AI in a practical manner..."

I respect the sentiment, but it doesn’t reflect the full picture.

swilow11:
Don’t feel obliged to engage.

His fallback is always the same: “you don’t matter, nobody cares, you’re stupid.” It’s the conversational equivalent of a bargain-bin your-mama joke — something you reach for when there’s nothing else left.

We all see what’s happening. When he runs out of material, the “I don’t give a damn and you're inconsequential ” routine gets louder to cover the gaps. Bones will be Bones — more posture than substance.

That’s my last post on the subject so others don’t have to scroll past the noise to get to the useful discussion.

Apologies to the good-faith commenters in the thread for letting this go on as long as it did.
If I have anything further to say, I’ll take it to PMs.

The constant belittling of others must be tiresome

I'm not belittling anyone, just reminding those who need it that none of us are as good as we think we are. It's important work.

Why is it important work?

[starflakeprj]

I'm more disappointed in KVR's snowflakery and lack of intellectual curiosity than I am in BONES' poking back at people who disapprove of his harmless usage of a technology that won't be going away anytime soon.

The problem is that AI will produce better music than most producers and music creators in this forum, and that is a potential threat once the sound quality gets better. So it's not a shocker people here are hating on it. Sh*t, did I say that out loud?

[Scotty]

Some of us who bring up concerns about AI aren’t trying to stop it; we’re reacting to the reality unfolding around us. Major AI companies have already been hit with lawsuits over training on copyrighted work they didn’t have permission to use. Anthropic had to settle for around $1.5 billion after authors found their books (including pirated copies inside training datasets. The New York Times is in court with Meta and OpenAI over millions of articles it says were scraped into their models. Disney and Universal are suing Midjourney for allegedly using their characters and imagery as training fuel. And the irony isn’t subtle: the same companies telling creators to “adapt” or who deliberately don't disclose their "sources" are the ones fighting hardest to defend their own IP when it’s their material on the line. That's the key point here. They fight to protect the ownership of what they stole. Let that sink in.

So when some of us say, “Hey, can we talk about who owns what here?” it’s not fear of the technology; it’s just paying attention. And part of that is the terms of service. Some people don’t realize that using these tools can mean giving the company permission to train on whatever you enter, upload, or create. You may not even own what you collaboratively develop with AI. I don't think that makes you a snowflake.

You can love the tech AND care about the artists who are getting railroaded by corporations that control it. Who knows? Maybe that could be one of us.

I'm more disappointed in KVR's snowflakery and lack of intellectual curiosity than I am in BONES' poking back at people who disapprove of his harmless usage of a technology that won't be going away anytime soon.

The problem is that AI will produce better music than most producers and music creators in this forum, and that is a potential threat once the sound quality gets better. So it's not a shocker people here are hating on it. Sh*t, did I say that out loud?

[starflakeprj]

Some of us who bring up concerns about AI aren’t trying to stop it; we’re reacting to the reality unfolding around us. Major AI companies have already been hit with lawsuits over training on copyrighted work they didn’t have permission to use. Anthropic had to settle for around $1.5 billion after authors found their books (including pirated copies inside training datasets. The New York Times is in court with Meta and OpenAI over millions of articles it says were scraped into their models. Disney and Universal are suing Midjourney for allegedly using their characters and imagery as training fuel. And the irony isn’t subtle: the same companies telling creators to “adapt” or who deliberately don't disclose their "sources" are the ones fighting hardest to defend their own IP when it’s their material on the line. That's the key point here. They fight to protect the ownership of what they stole. Let that sink in.

So when some of us say, “Hey, can we talk about who owns what here?” it’s not fear of the technology; it’s just paying attention. And part of that is the terms of service. Some people don’t realize that using these tools can mean giving the company permission to train on whatever you enter, upload, or create. You may not even own what you collaboratively develop with AI. I din't think that makes you snowflake.

You can love the tech AND care about the artists who are getting railroaded by corporations that control it. Who knows? Maybe that could be one of us.

I have full respect for your answer. And to be clear, I don’t dismiss any of the issues you’re raising. The lawsuits, the lack of transparency, the questionable datasets and the double standards around IP could all be real problems and absolutely deserve to be handled on a legal, ethical and industry level.

My point was aimed at something different. I’m fully convinced that a lot of the pushback against AI here isn’t really about copyright or ownership. People use that as the surface argument. Underneath, many (not everyone obviously) are upset because AI can now create music that sounds better than what a lot of users on this forum are able to produce themselves, including myself, even though I am not upset about it.

If there is something I actually am upset about, it is people creating full AI tracks and uploading them to platforms to monetize them, and at the same time cluttering the database with AI tracks while claiming it is their own work (including all the fake artists). So it’s a different part of the chain.

Artists and producers have been copying other artists consciously and unconsciously since music was invented. We’ve just reached an era where this process is automated by AI. What matters now is how we handle authenticity, credit and transparency, not pretending that originality suddenly became a new problem.

[CinningBao]

I am waaay to old-school for this.

I cannot understand why someone would _not_ want to learn the skills needed to do the thing they want to to instead of farming it out to an electronic brain. Being able to use them isn't smart. It isn't warming your soul, it isn't training your fingers or mind and it certainly isn't giving you the satisfaction of knowing you learned a thing in order to do it.

The stealing of human created information (books, articles, FB posts(?), reddit, wiki..) and being able to electronically regurgutate it in a weighted fashion is what it is. It isn't clever; it's a predictive system which _looks_ like it knows what it's saying. It doesn't. The same goes for the audio (and probably visual stuff too but that isn't my territory); the stolen audio is analyzed and consumed into the brain and requests are made to regurgitate the input in various ways.

Asking an electronic brain to puke up some input it never understood in a way you think, is NOT like asking another human the same thing. Humans absorb and mature (well, maybe not everyone) their feelings through time and experience. When you ask a human to write a song about a feeling, it will come through experience of that feeling, how it changes within the situation, the NUANCES of the human condition. Ask an electronic brain the same thing and it is literally trying to satisfy you based on success of previous reqeusts.

These AI tools are reeeally good at what they do, and what they do is literally count and compare numbers. That's it. They're amazing at analysing data, like, proper awesome. Stick them in medical/science industries to look at patient or experiment data, stick them in the vile banking industry to buy/sell at mind-boggling speed, whatevs.. the brains are great at analysing this system data. But they do not art. They might look sometimes like they do, but they don't.

Perhaps I'm of the mind that as soon as you farm off skill to another anything (machine or person) you aren't learning that thing yourself, and THAT's the least we can do with our amazing brain and body things. Do as much as you can. We thrive on the subtleties and nuances of human expression, we learn from other people's subtlety of human expression. Using AI to generate art is literally dumbing down everyone who uses the tools or listens to the music (or looks at the images etc).

So did anyone try the synth yet?

[BONES]

The issues around content ownership and uncredited training matter to me and to many others

Why? This is an argument that makes absolutely no sense to me at all. If something is up on a website and available to the general public, why should companies be excluded from using it to train their AIs? It would be something else entirely if they were hacking firewalls and stealing protected content but they only use that which is publicly available, stuff that every one of us can also use to improve our understanding of the world and to inspire our creativity. Compared to what Google does to sell advertising, it's trivial. If it's available for anyone in the public domain, then it's fair game the way I see it. And yes, that includes any of my music because a) I'd be a hypocrite to have any other attitude and b) using it might get a lot easier if AI knew everything there is to know about our music. If it ended up spawning 1,000 new artists who sound like us, then that's 1,000 times more new music to enjoy without having to lift a finger. It's win-win-win-win-win as far as I can see.

Bones wasn’t called out for experimenting with AI — he was called out for the nonsense, the fakery, and the refusal to examine his own contradictions.

What a load of absolute bullshit and what complete hypocrisy - you're happy to use AI after it's been trained, but you complain about how it got trained. And you side with the greedy corporations who don't really care if AI is being trained on their IP, they just want a cut of the profits without having to earn it. You want to suggest that I'm allowing myself to be exploited while you side with big tech. Spare me f**king days! If anyone needs to take a good, hard look at their bullshit, it is you.

What I was addressing was the absurdity of his arguments, their lack of consistency

Well, after reading your shite, if that's what you think of mine, I reckon I must be doing OK because you have shown yourself to be totally devoid of any capacity for rational thought.

the way he shuts down anything that doesn’t fit his worldview.

I don't shut anything down, that's the little snowflakes who have no arguments to back up their statements. If you have a cogent argument to back up the things you say, I want to hear it. If it's bullshit, though, I would be doing you a disservice to let you go on believing it.

I added a bit of salt because he wrapped it all in punk aesthetics that didn’t hold up.

No, you just showed that you haven't got the first f**king clue what Punk was about. After all, every successful Punk band signed to a major record label - Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Stranglers, Sham 69, Spizz, Dead Kennedys, Buzzcocks, Ruts - all of them - so very clearly the people who started it had no problem selling out to the man. Where did you even get such a dumb-arse idea?

The problem is that AI will produce better music than most producers and music creators in this forum, and that is a potential threat once the sound quality gets better. So it's not a shocker people here are hating on it. Sh*t, did I say that out loud?

Don't worry, we were all thinkin' it, although I reckon the quality is already more than good enough for pretty much anything.

AI does a lot of weird shit, though, that we wouldn't do. e.g. When I did some stem separation on a song the other night, I discovered that what I thought was a brass part under the vocal in a chorus, was really only tiny snippets of brass between the words that gave the impression of a full part. Obviously the AI analyses things in a very different way to us, which I see as a good thing because it gives us a different perspective that can fire our creativity in new ways.

Some of us who bring up concerns about AI aren’t trying to stop it; we’re reacting to the reality unfolding around us. Major AI companies have already been hit with lawsuits over training on copyrighted work they didn’t have permission to use.

Yeah, because some fat cat wants a free pay day. And you're siding with those greedy c**ts, WTF?

Anthropic had to settle for around $1.5 billion after authors found their books (including pirated copies inside training datasets.

Perfect example - they 'll take the money but they don't actually have any interest in stopping the root cause of the problem - the pirates who stole the work - because the pirates don't have any money. Of course, the cool thing is that they won't have to share that $1.5 billion dollar pay day with the artists who actually created the copyright work. At most the authors would have a right to a handful of royalties, which is probably just a few cents per book.

The New York Times is in court with Meta and OpenAI over millions of articles it says were scraped into their models. Disney and Universal are suing Midjourney for allegedly using their characters and imagery as training fuel. And the irony isn’t subtle: the same companies telling creators to “adapt” or who deliberately don't disclose their "sources" are the ones fighting hardest to defend their own IP when it’s their material on the line. That's the key point here. They fight to protect the ownership of what they stole. Let that sink in.

Yeah, and you support them. let that sink in.

Some people don’t realize that using these tools can mean giving the company permission to train on whatever you enter, upload, or create.

Why wouldn't they? I always assumed they would and the main beneficiary of that would be me, because it would get better at understanding and anticipating my needs. If they asked I would say "f**k, yeah! Bring it on". It's not different to beta-testing software - I'm a Windows Insider because I want to see Windows developed in a way that improves my experience. Of course that never happens but just like the lottery, you gotta be in it to win it and I can't complain about changes that inconvenience me if I haven't at least tried to change their minds.

You may not even own what you collaboratively develop with AI.

So what? I don't own any of the software on my computer, just a license to use it.

You can love the tech AND care about the artists who are getting railroaded by corporations that control it.

I don't see how, given that the tech wouldn't exist without the corporations and the actions they take to train them. It require a pretty big dose of denial to be able to live with those two opposite feelings about what is ultimately the same thing.

Who knows? Maybe that could be one of us.

As I've said, I wouldn't care, as long as it got out there somewhere. We've been giving our music away for 30 years, we'd be complete hypocrites if we suddenly had a problem with it now?

[OscSync]

I just saw this pop up.


Only at the "gold standard of shit" part so far

[BONES]

I cannot understand why someone would _not_ want to learn the skills needed to do the thing they want to to instead of farming it out to an electronic brain.

Do you fix your own car? Can you even change a tyre? When the toilet backs up, do you sort it out yourself or call a plumber? I'm not interested in acquiring skills, even useful ones, I'm interested in music.

Being able to use them isn't smart.

The f**k it isn't. Give it a go and see what you get. My bandmate has been honing his skills for a few years now and his results are an order of magnitude better than anything I've been able to do.

It isn't warming your soul

Listening to it certainly does. It's better than anything we've ever been able to make with hardware or "standard" software tools (DAW and plugins) and the Ai is a way better vocalist than I will ever be. Honestly, it's the best music I've heard in years and I spend all day at work champing at the bit to get home so I can listen to it some more.

it isn't training your fingers or mind

Of course it is, it's a whole new way of assembling words that requires careful thought, skill and experience to obtain a worthwhile result.

and it certainly isn't giving you the satisfaction of knowing you learned a thing in order to do it.

Again, like anything, there is satisfaction in getting anything right that you have worked long and hard on and if you think you can get good results in a few minutes, you're kidding yourself.

The stealing of human created information (books, articles, FB posts(?), reddit, wiki..) and being able to electronically regurgutate it in a weighted fashion is what it is.

Except the only things that were stolen were stolen by humans and made available to the public. There was, as I understand, no intent to use anything that wasn't freely available on the public domain. If you and I can go to the local library and read a book for nothing or listen to music on the radio without paying, why shouldn't AI have the same access?

It isn't clever

It's cleverer than you , pal, have no doubt.

_looks_ like it knows what it's saying. It doesn't.

So like 99% of the human population, then.

The same goes for the audio (and probably visual stuff too but that isn't my territory); the stolen audio is analyzed and consumed into the brain and requests are made to regurgitate the input in various ways.

As I said, nothing is stolen, it's all in the public domain. Yes, some of it is in the public domain illegally but that someone else's fault.

Asking an electronic brain to puke up some input it never understood

If it didn't understand, it would never get anything right. The problem, at present, is that it doesn't always know when it's wrong, and can't be told, but that will change sooner rather than later.

is NOT like asking another human the same thing.

Yep, there's no ego, no bias, it just does what you ask of it as well as it is able.

Humans absorb and mature (well, maybe not everyone) their feelings through time and experience. When you ask a human to write a song about a feeling, it will come through experience of that feeling, how it changes within the situation, the NUANCES of the human condition. Ask an electronic brain the same thing and it is literally trying to satisfy you based on success of previous reqeusts.

Right and no human has ever told anyone what they wanted to hear instead of the truth, have they? Humans share their feelings in books and music, AI will have no trouble understanding any and all of it. And, of course, you can give the AI lyrics to sing and it will use them. To be honest, though, the AIs tend to write better lyrics than I do so I'm happy to get them to do all the work. I'll just go in and make a few corrections if I need to.

But they do not art.

Of course they f**king do and my bandmate has 101,582 images generated by Mid Journey to prove it. Ya just gotta stick with it until it's right. Tell me why this isn't art, it's beautifully done -

Do as much as you can.

The thing is, I can do a lot more with AI. We started working on our last album last December and it will finally be released next week. We started working with AI three weeks ago and we already have four songs that just need my vocals to replace the AI vocals. We anticipate that we'll have our next album ready to go before Easter next year, for release in July (festival season in Europe). That means AI is halving the time it takes us to make and release an album, effectively doubling our capacity to make new music.

We thrive on the subtleties and nuances of human expression

Who does? People disgust me.

Using AI to generate art is literally dumbing down everyone who uses the tools or listens to the music (or looks at the images etc).

Except that most people literally can't tell the difference so you are either completely wrong about people or completely wrong about AI. Or maybe just partially wrong about both.

[Examigan]

That video is pretty cool.
I’d like to try to create a soundtrack of my own for it.

[Cuauhtli]

It's like Blade Runner but they couldn't afford to get Vangelis. Or zombie Vangelis at this point.

[cake builder]

I don't have the energy to get involved in the moral debates about AI, but looking just at this plugin and ignoring the greater scope of things, it seems like this thing sucks in its current state.

[BBFG#]

Hmm...
I do work on and fix my vehicles, plumbing, electrical, yard/tree work. And as the Buddha says, "chop the wood and carry the water."
It would be infantile not to.

I don't fear AI. I just expect more of it to be an actual assistant and not an excuse to abdicate personal neurons.

[CinningBao]

...words and more words

Your measure of human expression is clearly very different from mine, and a few others..
Fascinating answers give us an insight into you and your mind, what thrills you get from the living experience and how you seek them.

And yet you still find a way to belittle others (me in this case, to paraphrase "AI is clevered than you" - I would argue that AI isn't actually clever at all; It's _very_ good at convincing people that it is and it's done a great job on you!) as part of the general tone of your conversation. Really unsavoury I find. We're all in different states of loving ourselves, which we need to learn to do before we can understand the pain of others and how to exist in a state that chooses not to exacerbate that pain.

The sentence you wrote "Humans share their feelings in books and music, AI will have no trouble understanding any and all of it." That's where you are wrong. It DOESN'T understand anything (maybe you don't want to believe that or seomthing, I dunno). But AI is literally a weighted predictive algorithm; it feed back to you what you want it to, not what it feels or thinks. It doesn't 'understand' the language it consumes, it understand the patterns of words and how likely one letter/word is to go after another. No feels, no expression, no thinking, just weighted probablities.

If the human mind, to you, is no more complex than that, I wish you all the successes! It's funny how many conversations i have with people talking about how great AI is but they literally don't know what it's doing, why it's doing it, or how.

It isn't magic, it isn't clever, it doesn't 'think', it doesn't have life experience, it doesn't know how to play a synth or drums, and any lyrics it poops out are a product of this very simplified algorithm

<input prompt> * <likelihood of succesful previous words used to output from ingested test> = your imagined output.

I'm pretty sure even you are smarter than that Mr Bones.