Are we moving from the “AI can never match the quality of human artistic output” phase to the “oh, it’s no big deal, art like that could always be faked” phase?
Tl;dr - in my opinion, a world where machines make our art is a smaller and sadder world.
I make music as a hobby so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. My hot take is that a lot of music has been manufactured for years. My problem with AI music or art in general is not that it’s manufactured, it’s that they’re going to do their best to make it so that art isn’t something people make because an AI songwriting machine will be cheaper and never get tired or burnt out or messy the way a person will.
What has happened for years with manufactured acts is that someone finishes some music. Then you give it to a top liner or a writer’s room who play madlibs with whatever they’re writing about until the prosody feels right. Then you give it to a talented and entertaining person to perform. So you can sneak in new techniques, ideas, thoughts, feelings, performance nuances, whatever and legitimately move art forward. Not every song will and that’s ok. Not every artist and that’s ok.
When you have a machine doing it, first you’re going to get blatant propaganda like this often and they’re going to put it in genres that are usually subversive (punk, they’re coming for you again like they did when Nazis tried making punk). Second, you get nothing new. Machines know what has been, not what will be. They don’t yearn to add emphasis on just the right spot to make a song touch you in your soul. They don’t see that clever phrase in an otherwise unremarkable song and say “yeah, were making that the centerpiece”. LLMs will resolve a story. Suno and similar will use the same instruments the same way every time. They’ll cold open songs with just the barest difference in notes from the last song. They’ll make the exact production choices Rick Rubin or Butch Vig or Max Martin or Pharrell Williams make instead of taking inspiration and learning taste.
AI music, once it hits its stride, won’t be terrible. It’ll just be flat. And it’ll be everywhere. Acceptable at scale will crowd out excellence at the margins. And the only people making human music anymore will be people with enough money not to care that they don’t get paid or underground artists that people never get to hear because no one will elevate the subversive until it’s gotten too big to ignore. Rap had to elevate themselves. Punk, same. “Grunge”, as much as I hate that for a label for the conglomeration of everything from alt metal to post punk to updated standard rock just because they all wore flannel, same.
It’s up to the listener to accept or reject it. A lot of folks don’t care where something comes from as long as they enjoy it. And that gives people making music a hard row to hoe. There’s already enough hurdles to making music (and not just deep, thoughtful stuff, but people doing dumb, fun shit because it’s dumb and fun) that others will hear. Adding the Nashville, New York, or LA machine behind AI music just makes it harder for someone to feel like what they’re doing is worthwhile, which means fewer people do it.
They should be working on AI football teams. At least then there would be less CTE and gladiator fights in the world.
1000%. Beyond the inherent and unavoidable xenophobia and nationalistic prejudice they inspire, sports are so boring. It’s literally the same exact thing over and over and over again, just the teams and players change names. Not to derail the topic, everything you said about music and AI was fucking spot-on and very well said.
I mean, aside from the malignant racism, just how different is this from Milli Vanilli or the Monkees?
The Monkees were actual musicians that did their own music.
FWIW I included them precisely because I like their music (and their take on Neil Diamond’s music, and their cool AF trippy movie)
People said they monkeyed around.
TIL Milli Vanilli and the Monkees were not actually real
Real… but manufactured and mass marketed. Not organically grown.
Pretty sure they were carbon-based
Are we moving from the “AI can never match the quality of human artistic output” phase to the “oh, it’s no big deal, art like that could always be faked” phase?
Tl;dr - in my opinion, a world where machines make our art is a smaller and sadder world.
I make music as a hobby so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. My hot take is that a lot of music has been manufactured for years. My problem with AI music or art in general is not that it’s manufactured, it’s that they’re going to do their best to make it so that art isn’t something people make because an AI songwriting machine will be cheaper and never get tired or burnt out or messy the way a person will.
What has happened for years with manufactured acts is that someone finishes some music. Then you give it to a top liner or a writer’s room who play madlibs with whatever they’re writing about until the prosody feels right. Then you give it to a talented and entertaining person to perform. So you can sneak in new techniques, ideas, thoughts, feelings, performance nuances, whatever and legitimately move art forward. Not every song will and that’s ok. Not every artist and that’s ok.
When you have a machine doing it, first you’re going to get blatant propaganda like this often and they’re going to put it in genres that are usually subversive (punk, they’re coming for you again like they did when Nazis tried making punk). Second, you get nothing new. Machines know what has been, not what will be. They don’t yearn to add emphasis on just the right spot to make a song touch you in your soul. They don’t see that clever phrase in an otherwise unremarkable song and say “yeah, were making that the centerpiece”. LLMs will resolve a story. Suno and similar will use the same instruments the same way every time. They’ll cold open songs with just the barest difference in notes from the last song. They’ll make the exact production choices Rick Rubin or Butch Vig or Max Martin or Pharrell Williams make instead of taking inspiration and learning taste.
AI music, once it hits its stride, won’t be terrible. It’ll just be flat. And it’ll be everywhere. Acceptable at scale will crowd out excellence at the margins. And the only people making human music anymore will be people with enough money not to care that they don’t get paid or underground artists that people never get to hear because no one will elevate the subversive until it’s gotten too big to ignore. Rap had to elevate themselves. Punk, same. “Grunge”, as much as I hate that for a label for the conglomeration of everything from alt metal to post punk to updated standard rock just because they all wore flannel, same.
It’s up to the listener to accept or reject it. A lot of folks don’t care where something comes from as long as they enjoy it. And that gives people making music a hard row to hoe. There’s already enough hurdles to making music (and not just deep, thoughtful stuff, but people doing dumb, fun shit because it’s dumb and fun) that others will hear. Adding the Nashville, New York, or LA machine behind AI music just makes it harder for someone to feel like what they’re doing is worthwhile, which means fewer people do it.
They should be working on AI football teams. At least then there would be less CTE and gladiator fights in the world.
1000%. Beyond the inherent and unavoidable xenophobia and nationalistic prejudice they inspire, sports are so boring. It’s literally the same exact thing over and over and over again, just the teams and players change names. Not to derail the topic, everything you said about music and AI was fucking spot-on and very well said.