Interesting article from Attack mag on how AI music might affect musicians.
Soundful is a “human-assisted AI” that can create music on demand. My take is that it might put jingle artists and “content creators” out of work, but for artists, it will be just another handy tool for inspiration, like generative tools now.
Andres Guadamuz, a technology researcher, discovered a marketplace not for A.I. tools, but the human-written prompts that go into them. You read that correctly. You can buy and sell prompts that help A.I.s work better.
A marketplace of “prompts” and “inputs” is pretty interesting. In a way it’s like soundpacks to place into a grid on a DAW. And the AI is like a plug-in that processes things.
But I’m just too old to be stimulated by “the new”.
The more directly a piece of art reflects a creator’s emotional experience of the world and the personality they’ve developed as a result of being alive, the more fulfilling it ultimately is…for me, at least.
It will rapidly advance to a point where AI musicians will out perform, out pace, out emotion, and outright dazzle and fulfil the listener making humans 100% obsolete in the music making process.
It’s inevitable and no matter how you try to justify humans place and having something that just can’t be replaced by algorithms and machines - you will be proved wrong in the end.
This might certainly replace humans in the creation of background music in much of today’s online “content” as they state themselves.
But before they know it, the very “creators” using this as the soundtrack to their videos will themselves have been replaced by script-writing AI and text-to speech AI…
I think that the use cases that AI is currently being built for are certainly influenced by the culture (or rather, strategy of the big platforms…) of having massive endless streams of content. We are only really starting to think of the ramifications now that people are putting out efficient tools tailored to this very goal (generating infinite amounts of content on demand).
but first, millions of truck drivers, insurance and bank office workers, factory workers, healthcare workers, cleaning workers, fishermen and sailors, farmers, railroad workers and pretty much all leftover average janes 'n joes will run out of their daily missions, their once so called jobs…
and by then, nobody’s left to think about silly stuff like art anymore and anyways…
since by then, it all comes down to hit rock bottom and those few truu essential questions…
how to prevail shelter, food, water and air…
my last album will be called…oops, there goes the tipping point…
no one left to consume it…but hey, at least everbody will be able to finally sing along…
I think Pandoras box is open, and some will embrace it (then cry about it after, and wish for good ol capitalism back ) some will reject it, neo luddites, techno rebels.
Kurzweil’s singularity theory seemed like bollocks ten years ago, not so much now, Orwells 1984 was a bit premature, Toffler’s Future Shock was pretty apt.
Welcome to the Great Reset, get used to the taste of crickets
I want an AI that demoes new gear, so that we can get rid of all the synthfluencers. That’ll be the day.
I don’t know if we’ll ever see the singularity, but honestly - I don’t care. If I have to be oppressed, it would maybe be better to be oppressed by an AI than by my “fellow” man.
I’m interested in how this will be used and abused by artists like us. In a way it’s like the advent of photography, which made portrait painters obsolete, but created a whole new art form.
At first, people were just making content that would occasionally be favored by algorithms powering platforms like Facebook and YouTube.
Then, as more content started going viral, and going viral became a thing that was more directly related to financial gain, more and more creators figured out how to make content specifically for those algorithms.
This suddenly produced a bunch of new forms of art and culture — ASMR videos, Soundcloud rap, listicles, reaction videos, Let’s Play streams, those artists that just redraw Disney princesses as different stuff all the time
I see it very much the same as AI art, as you alude to in your OP I see it potentially steam-rolling ‘low value’ creative output - but I don’t really see this as a bad thing - I don’t think it will result in fewer artists any more than drum machines result in fewer drummers - I think it just widens the scope of both who can participate in the art and what it means to be an artist.
Ideally the people that would have been doing that low value work now have the opportunity to do something with more substance, as that’s where their skill has value.
This is one of the ultimate goals of automation more generally - we don’t want to be doing this kind of work, it holds us back from exploring our full potential.
But I won’t lie, as a musician that’s still fumbling their way through their music making journey part of me does worry that someone will be able to just ask an AI to make better music than I can. I don’t think it would stop me wanting to create music but it would be a strange feeling.
A bit like the first time I did a premier on YouTube and realised that the countdown intro music was better than the track I’d uploaded.
I don’t think people like DeadmauFive have to worry though.
I don’t think this is inevitable, since better isn’t really quantifiable, or static, even once ML gets very sophisticated it might throw out more frogs than princes, and people could get tired of it. Maybe stuff like getting it to remix human made songs on a whim could be a thing for a while, but again I’m not sure it would have enough lasting appeal for everyone.
Probably AI music/art will run alongside human made music/art for at least a while, but industries with simpler to assimilate skills and rules will be taken over sooner, legal profession, accountancy, teaching, tech support, sales and marketing etc. These things are more easily measurable as being done better by AI because they are end result based, so an easier target.
exposes how funnelled, formulaic and boring genre music has become.
static, stale music that sadly would be just fine as inoffensive backing tracks on anyones beauty/gaming/just chatting stream.
i’m still waiting for an agi assisted piece of music which does something excitingly brand new with sound but seems a vast leap from smashing data together randomly to considered aesthetically pleasing ideas.
If AI is going to make work redundant, I guess the question is only really whether we’re all going to live in a soma soaked Utopia weaving baskets and playing the flute to pass the time… or enslaved to whoever owns the algorithms.
So I reckon getting into the guillotine sharpening business is the clever move.
(or programming)
To what end though? The existence of AI does not make our existence obsolete, nor does it make me any less interested in experiencing things and sharing those experiences with others. I do however have a choice with whom I choose to interact.
Power tools didn’t eliminate the need for carpenters, as best I can tell.
) some will reject it, neo luddites, techno rebels.
