Rick Rubin on AI (& now Graeme Revell, too)

[audiojunkie]

No one works alone. Does it really matter if your bassline was laid down by a session bassist or AI? Or if your string arrangement was done by an orchestrator or AI? Historically, these are things that would be outsourced when making a record.

Likewise, does it matter if you use AI for programming grunt work instead of hiring a code monkey to do it? The purpose is the final product, not the process that got you there.

Exactly. A tool is a tool, if done right. AI as instrument; not AI as artist.

[audiojunkie]

I think it really comes down to the difference between a specific person with their own hyper critical tastes who comes up with some slightly unique style based on those tastes. AI is not at this point capable of discernment, it likely never will be. So you put in post punk bassline and you will get what the programmers tagged as post punk basslines they used to machine learn how to play that genre, it will be a distillation of all of the style of that instrument in that genre without any discernment based on ancillary genres that person loves.

Almost every great musician I know does not stay in their genre, they love a couple completely unrelated ones. Those subtle influences from that wider taste make them unique players. I think AI will do a good job at coming up with boring basslines and drum patterns and backing tracks in general, but if the individual doesn't input some of their own weirdnesses into the main parts of the song, it's just going to dilute music into bland remakes. Sort of like how every genre ever starts becoming archetypical and loses some initial shock of the new, but times 100.

It all comes down to how deeply detailed you get with your prompting. You don’t say, “give me a post punk riff that matches my song” and expect to get any artistic credit for writing that riff.

You get into the granular level of description. You use your prompts like one would use a midi sequencer. There are lots of ways to facilitate this, but it comes down to your skill at prompting—and it is a skill that has to be developed—just like learning a guitar.

You could play your keyboard and upload the part in midi or audio, and instruct the AI to change the part you uploaded as a guitar instrument. You could describe the rhythmic playing style with up strums, down strums, mutes, bends, etc. You describe the effects. Your synth part now sounds like a guitar.

This method of getting what is in your head to a recorded DAW track is worthy of being considered a tool for the recording musician, IMHO.

[audiojunkie]

It depends on how much agency you are prepared to surrender and how much of “you” you are prepared to subtract from the claim of ownership.

Quite the opposite, it's about how much you are prepared to put in to ensure that what comes out is exactly what you were trying to achieve. It's the same with any process. Do you use a guitar tuner or tune by ear? Do you use an arpeggiator or play every not by hand? Do you use a chord tool or work that stuff out for yourself? Do you build your own instruments or buy the result of someone else's work and claim what you make with it as your own? Do you keep doing takes until you get it right or do you edit your playing in the piano roll and pass it off as your own playing?

Hiring that session bassist is in part prompt-driven, but it isn’t neatly contained within a chat. You likely heard their playing and selected them because of skill and the potential to augment the song with their input.

You also get to choose an AI before you get into any chat environment. And I don't see any difference between a written chat with an AI and telling a session muso what you want him or her to do.

It likely wasn’t a blind handover.

Nor is it with AI.

Their performance wasn’t perfect. There were some happy accidents that you maybe exploited in the editing.

Which you'll get x100 when working with AI.

If you were asked about that bassline, you probably could describe why it worked, why you chose that particular take, and what that bass player’s contribution meant to the song. In a sense, you could defend the work, or at least speak to it. Maybe that doesn’t matter. But if we don’t acknowledge that the process itself has value, not just the outcome, we risk losing the ability to meaningfully relate to the work at all.

All of which is at least as true when working with AI, much of it moreso. It's just a different process. If you've spent 50 hours trying to craft prompts to get what you're after, you'll have thought far more deeply about what it is you are trying to do than you ever would working in more traditional ways.

It becomes harder to explain why something worked, harder to stand behind choices, and easier to treat creation as a series of simple outputs.

no f**king way! It's the exact opposite because to get what you want, you have to be able to articulate it to the AI. OTOH, most of the time you are making up justifications after the fact when you are working the old fashioned way.
quote]A person who likely wouldn’t have spoken found a voice. It wasn’t her voice and it most likely wasn't her words.

You mean like when someone reads a bible verse or quotes from a poem at a funeral or wedding? Are those moments any less potent? No, often they add extra potency to proceedings.

I think it really comes down to the difference between a specific person with their own hyper critical tastes who comes up with some slightly unique style based on those tastes. AI is not at this point capable of discernment, it likely never will be. So you put in post punk bassline and you will get what the programmers tagged as post punk basslines they used to machine learn how to play that genre, it will be a distillation of all of the style of that instrument in that genre without any discernment based on ancillary genres that person loves.

If that was true, wouldn't it always spit out the same thing every time it got that prompt? It won't. Try it 10 times and you'll get 20 very different results.

Almost every great musician I know does not stay in their genre, they love a couple completely unrelated ones. Those subtle influences from that wider taste make them unique players. I think AI will do a good job at coming up with boring basslines and drum patterns and backing tracks in general, but if the individual doesn't input some of their own weirdnesses into the main parts of the song, it's just going to dilute music into bland remakes.

That's up to you. If you tell the AI to give you a PP bassline (although f**k knows what that even means) but in the context of an Industrial Rock song, it can do that. It's not tied to genres, it does what you tell it to do. And Tunee comes up with way more interesting drums than I do. That's one of the good things about working with AI. Drums for me are always an afterthought, the last thing I do and something I put comparatively little effort into but Tunee doesn't know that so it comes up with some great percussion.
[/quote]

I agree with you. Whether it is valid art or whether it is averaged out trash comes down to how the tool is used. And that depends on how good a person is at prompting—getting what is in one’s head to a recorded file.

A knife can be used to murder, save life (think life saving surgery), butter bread, or even open a letter. Everyone here acts like the knife is to blame, when it is the wielder who is control.

A motor can make the mechanical horsies go up and down for the little kiddie rides, or it can plow a field or dig a trench. What matters is what’s done with it.

AI can spit out mediocre garbage top 40 copy-cat songs with no effort, or it can be the means of bringing one’s vision to life—even if that person doesn’t play an instrument.

[audiojunkie]

You could probably call everyone PUNK at this stage. The PUNK thing was partly about 'doing it yourself'. That's what most people are doing these days. No record label.

no, diy is a separate thing, even if a lot of punks did employ diy.
punk is not a music genre, punk is an ethos, punk rock was the music.
it's about ignoring trends and doing your own thing.
which is what killed punk rock, as it did become a trend, post punk faired better, as eg pil don't sound like magazine or the stranglers... acts that did their own thing, in some cases from album to album even.


hip hop isn't punk, again there's a diy connection, but the ethos is again different, was started out as local block parties, the politicization came later. to say there's no skill to turntablism is so daft a notion, ill do nowt but laugh

This may be the best definition in this thread so far….

[audiojunkie]

> punk is not a music genre, punk is an ethos

True that. I remember the black + fluorescant striped skinny jeans only True Punks wore, they spitted on anything commercial and sheepish behaviour.

Then it turned out the shops which sold this clothing (life) style was no different from other clothing brands with a specific demographic audience. iirc it was Malcolm McLaren who profited most from the pocket money spent by young punks, selling not only records but also clothes & safety pins. Sheep behaviour, ironically.

Agreed.

[audiojunkie]

A non-musician on reddit posted how he crafted a punk album using AI for a few hours each evening over two weeks. He wrote the lyrics and polished them using ChatGPT, made the music using Suno, made music videos using Midjourney, and a band logo using Dall-E 3. He said it's important to be transparent if your "music" is made using AI.

I agree. I would have a lot less respect if he hid his use of AI, rather than using available tools to get what was in his head recorded.

My musical hero, Brian Wilson, considered himself an artist. He was continuously trying to grow and develop as an artist. He wasn’t incredibly technically proficient in his playing skills, but he pushed the Wrecking Crew hard to get what was in his head out to recorded tape. He experimented heavily recording “feels” and splicing them together to create what ended up being genius created masterpieces.

After Smile collapsed, it was Darian who worked with Brian to finish stringing and splicing the feels together into a finished, cohesive project. He did this with his DAW.

I can’t help but think that Brian would have been fascinated with experimenting with AI prompts instead of experimenting with bobby pins on piano wires to achieve the sounds and effects he heard in his head.

It all comes down to this: AI is a tool, when used properly in the hands of an artist.

[Michael L]

A while back I fed AI some nonsense prompts to generate a theme for an animation about a group of animals and it returned a bouncy tune with a nice intro, verses in ABC structure, and lyrics sung in an invented language. It was pretty good! The client didn’t like it but I'm happy that I tried it, and I still remember the tune. Yet, I did not find the actual process interesting or emotionally satisfying. It was like using a musical search engine. Not my cuppa.

[Freaqpeak]

They’re called professional songwriters, and they’ve written the overwhelming majority of hit songs since the recording industry began.

Exactly. With the purpose to create a "product" that is made to fit as many peoples taste (or lack thereof) so that it can bring in money. Nothing new.

Regarding coding, for new concepts and approaches AI will not work at all.

Example: try telling AI to come up with a new kind of unique audio synthesis that is useful for humans when humans are creating audio or music. Or ask any LLM to create a new approach to making a filter, not previously done, that is useful or pleasing for the human ear.
It will not work.
Also tell it to make it fully optimized for real-time usage for all current CPU architectures and respective operating system. All the info that is needed is out there to get started for a human. But any LLM will totally fail. It will start to hallucinate gibberish for sure.

I'm not working as a professional coder, but I grew up surrounded by coders. I do scripting a lot for work though. When I started learning C in the 90's my friends were already using assembler/machine code. In the end they had more knowledge than then the manuals or specifications even described.
My friends even created me my personal simple sequencer and two highly optimized software synths to be able to help them with to do previously unheard real-time generated audio.. I love that kind of co-operations. We could swap creative ideas in our different areas of knowledge, which opened our minds to new concepts. In that mix of knowledge and creative thinking we could create new things, totally unique which had never been created before. Todays LLM's can't do that.

Anyways, I just do lightweight scripting as part of my work. Mostly Python these days, which I also use for different LLM's and local RAG implementations. And yes, I get suggestions from AI as most to that uses the common IDE's. Luckily its easy to turn off when its getting too annoying.
It's often more annoying than useful to be honest. It takes more time to fix what AI suggests than to just write the code yourself. Of course mundane things like creating a basic templates for your projects can be used with very good result. Or if you need a set up a number of specific functions, classes or whatever. It's all still very basic programming. Outside getting help with pure writing tasks in the code like that, 50% of the time even simple questions generate stupid (even funny) or sub-optimal suggestions. If people does not know that it is stupid coding and/or sub-optimal, it is a real problem. Therefor todays LLM's are still a joke for many things. Vibe coding without understanding exactly what the code actually does is incredibly stupid, on so many levels.
I have yet to find a single experienced programmer that is happy with the results LLM's gives when asked for something else than very simple and specific (but not too specific, since it brakes as soon as you want it to only use the latest knowledge about a subject for example). I know many inexperienced programmers spend hours trying to correct LLM's suggestions, more hours than it takes an experienced programmer to do it from scratch.

For simple high-level scripting and basic programming like I do, of course AI can make guesses that might "work" when asking for more complex tasks. But sub-optimal code is already a huge issue because it takes in the range of 10x-100x more energy to execute "bad" code for some AI related tasks. It is already a huge problem for our datacenters and power grid that people think that any code that "works" is good or even OK.

And again, todays AI does not "know" anything. 100% guessing within contexts.

Neither can people. All human creativity actually just combines and incrementally modifies existing concepts. Humans are incapable of creating something completely original from nothing. That’s shouldn’t be all that much of a surprise, since our brains are just neural networks.

Yes they can. 100%.
Of course we learn of each other and in that way it is incremental. But it is also incremental for one human being: you learn in steps. You can create new concepts without incremental thought process. Probably not useful or good concept, but you can create new things without knowing anything about the subject before. The equation doesn't need previous information hold by previous humans to be true, although because humans only get 100 years to discover new things, its rather nice that we can share knowledge so that we don't NEED to re-discover everything our selfs.

According to your definition, NOTHING "new" can ever be created until another human has known something, and then showed it to some other human and that then changes something. Well. That first human must feel pretty overlooked. Humans discovering new things in parallel, without knowledge of each other, is a thing as well.

The importance of trial and error to discover new things are 100% necessary for humans.
And for AI to be able to come up with new things it needs to be done in a completely other way: it must use trial and error. Todays AI is not using that concept as a ground, but researchers are working on it.. That kind of AI will be true AI.

Humans are 100% capable of learning, discovering and creating new things only by using their senses + trial+error. And also to create things that can be useful, like tools or processes, with trial + error.

From the first moment a child is born, it learns and developes its new skills by using only its senses and through trial. That way it LEARNS new things, it isn't teached by anyone else.
That is how all children and all animals does it. Things not in our DNA to do from birth are discoverd by trial + error. These things are not taught by parents or adults.
If a child gets zero interaction from adults it will still learn a lot of new things, including walking, by using it's own senses, curiosity and by trial + error. That is not in doubt in the scientific community... With that said, OF COURSE, children and animals will ALSO discover new things by interacting with others, both other individuals but also environment.
New ideas are made by humans all the time of course, built upon knowledge known previously.
Doesn't mean that humans can't or don't discover new things without prior knowledge. Instead we use trial and error to discover and understand new things.

In a broader perspective, when we create something new, it is just another way of saying that we discovered something about how the world and the universe works (of course including the human mind).. Nothing can break the law of physics, and nothing humans do can cause a new laws of physics...

Anyways, just me rambling.

[VOODOO U]

Nothing can break the law of physics, and nothing humans do can cause a new laws of physics...

Jesus did it. Otherwise we wouldn't have Santa.
Speaking of doesn't rick rubin look like santa these days?

[BONES]

Only, in this case, the person wanting to express himself uses detailed prompts to deeply describe the drum rhythm wanted, to describe the specific beats, to describe the specific type of bass drum, to describe the type of high-hats. Once that particular part is laid down the way it is heard in the person’s head, he moves on.

I'm not sure that any of the music AIs will do that. We've asked Tunee to give us instrumental versions of some of the things it's made for us, and one time asked for a version with no drums, but it ignores that and puts them in anyway. It seems it always has to spit out a finished song. We use stem separation to deconstruct the piece so we can mould it to our preference, mostly because it spits out very short songs and we need to extend the arrangements. But we're cool with that because it gives the AI the latitude to surprise us, which it does every now and then, in the same way that you might stray from your original vision as you build up an arrangement, when something you do works better than what you were thinking of.

Now, having said that…..If some loser tells the AI, “Oi! Make me a punk song in the style of God Save The Queen!” and hopes to get any creative respect, that person is nothing but a poseur.

Poly Styrene had something to say about poseurs -

[audiojunkie]

Only, in this case, the person wanting to express himself uses detailed prompts to deeply describe the drum rhythm wanted, to describe the specific beats, to describe the specific type of bass drum, to describe the type of high-hats. Once that particular part is laid down the way it is heard in the person’s head, he moves on.

I'm not sure that any of the music AIs will do that. We've asked Tunee to give us instrumental versions of some of the things it's made for us, and one time asked for a version with no drums, but it ignores that and puts them in anyway. It seems it always has to spit out a finished song. We use stem separation to deconstruct the piece so we can mould it to our preference, mostly because it spits out very short songs and we need to extend the arrangements. But we're cool with that because it gives the AI the latitude to surprise us, which it does every now and then, in the same way that you might stray from your original vision as you build up an arrangement, when something you do works better than what you were thinking of.

Now, having said that…..If some loser tells the AI, “Oi! Make me a punk song in the style of God Save The Queen!” and hopes to get any creative respect, that person is nothing but a poseur.

Poly Styrene had something to say about poseurs -

Indeed she did!

[eassae]

Comparing vibe coding to punk is the dumbest thing I've heard today. Thanks, Rick Rubin

[BONES]

I'm sure you bothered to read into it, to understand his reasoning first, right?

[eassae]

I'm sure you bothered to read into it, to understand his reasoning first, right?

I didn't read the entire book if that's what your asking, but the quote you provided seems to give his reasons for the comparison…and, it's the dumbest thing I've heard today—I can't imagine a further explanation where it's not the dumbest thing I've heard today—maybe it's my lack of foresight? And, although I do like a number of things Rubin has produced, I don't take a guy that probably read "How to be a Guru" one too many times(the persona is effective to certain people, so maybe he read it just the right amount of times?) very seriously.

[BONES]

I can't imagine how utterly daft you'd have to be not to see his point. It is pretty f**king obvious, I'd have thought. Or maybe you need to share the Punk philosophy to get it and I'm just being a c**t?