Couldnt give a flying one what AI does in a DAW. I dont use one. Happy tinkering with knobs, faders and my little tascam recorder thanks.
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Public taste is already guided by algorithms, and that will accelerate. We’ll be told we’re horrible elitists, racist basically, if we prefer human creations. Engaging in contemporary culture will be a battle to keep up with the evolving preferences of the deep AIs controlling the discourse. We’ll be working to please them rather than other people. As we already are, but more so.
So yeah, I think it’s fucking horrible and anti-human. I do believe it’s a slippery slope rather than a helpful, harmless gimmick. The homogenisation of all human culture into a tepid, ahistorical, placeless, irrelevant slurry. What a laugh.
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The argument against the copyright office’s ruling will go something like this:
- Scan a piece of art made using entirely traditional methods, such as pen and ink.
- Apply a warp perspective tool with your favorite image editor.
- The result is still obviously a human-created work that can obviously be copyrighted.
- Now apply the perspective tool hundreds then thousands then billions of times.
- Sill copyrightable?
- OK, an LLM is just more of that (linear algebra, specifically), so the idea that “AI” did any “generating” at all is clearly incoherent.
- Don’t buy the argument in point (6)? CPU/GPU design has relied on AI tools for decades. If you still think “AI generation” is a thing then at the very least semiconductor IP has some serious legal challenges and thus troubling implications for national security.
Once provenance is built into LLMs, I expect Disney’s lawyers to show up and insist that if your artwork has at least 0.02% of Mickey Mouse content in the training set of tools used to generate it then Disney owns the copyright to your work.
So unless you love shoveling literal mountains of money into law firms, or are a culture-jamming artist, it is probably best not to base any business or investment decisions on the current legal state of “AI.”
My intuition here is that the homogenization argument is also incoherent. Humans are extremely good (though not perfect) at making aesthetic categorizations. If AI methods are able to produce human-equivalent novelty then homogenization isn’t a concern. If AI methods can’t produce human-equivalent novelty, then AI generated artwork will join Muzak in the category of things that are aesthetically bland and thus only useful for elevators and annoying humans who have been put on hold.
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Humans are currently good at making distinctions between artworks. We used to be good at distinguishing trees, now most people couldn’t tell between a pine and a cypress. We make distinctions within the category of things we have adequate exposure to.
I suspect AI content will be preferentially pushed because it is algorithmically generated and thus meets the criteria of other AI as to what is worth showing. Think of those YouTubers who apologise sheepishly for their cheesy thumbnails but do the OMG thing anyway because it’s what the algorithm wants, not what they want to do or what their (still mostly human) audience enjoy.
If the public’s listening habits weren’t dominated by streaming services that serve up a proprietary mix of payola, in-house royalty-free Muzak, and whatever your Amazon cookies say you should like, maybe this dynamic wouldn’t work.
Anyway I hope I’m wrong. But what I see already is humans bending to make themselves more attractive to the content shitfunnel, not AI adapting to human preferences. Parasocial relationships with digital entities are already more important to some people than being a member of a human community; this is part of the same trend. Sure it’s just expressed preferences of individuals, but in toto it is a collectively shared episode of lazy, pathetic nihilism. Moloch wins because we want Moloch’s approval.
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Fantastic discourse between you two! Ya love to see it.
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“The technology we use for beauty and creativity adds to the good of the future. The technology we use for utility and ego-fulfillment adds to the evil of the future.”
-Rudolf Steiner
I suppose this sort of tech can be used for either thing.
Follow the golden rule of artistry: Do unto your culture what you would have your culture do unto you. Or something like that. Basically, will your ancestors and descendants be proud of you or ashamed of you based on what you’ve done and how you did it?
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I’m probably just rehashing what others have said, but AI will be a boon to a certain type of producer. IE: People who watch countless YouTube videos on “how to get that professional, radio ready sound”. These are people who are already following strict, cookie cutter formulas to get as many listeners as possible. That kind of shit may as well be made by robots anyways.
As for me I will continue to build everything from scratch for my 7 monthly listeners on Spotify.
Edit: I’ll add that I absolutely believe AI can be used in an authentic and human feeling way - as others have mentioned LFOs, arpeggiators, and dynamic EQ plugins like Soothe are already being used, and that hasn’t destroyed creativity. Much like sampling it will depend on the user to decide whether it’s a crutch or simply another tool in the toolbox.
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When AI starts telling “artists” what drugs to use I’ll start to worry.
Mescaline.
The answer is Mescaline.
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I won’t need a machine elf to tell me my AI assisted music sucks.
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I would love the perfect AI mastering recording tool that capture live performance jams and perfects to studio release ready albums. Would save me hundreds of hours of DAW work.
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I’m with you and @m0ld, sometimes we are just working alone when we would need someone to help when making a decision.
The usefulness of AI tools for me would be giving some ideas when you need them, not to make the whole thing.
Anyway I think that there are tools that make sense, like a wheel, a pulley, a lever… And other tools that completely take the fun out of an activity.
That’s the reason why people still paints without a computer for example but no one makes concrete music cutting tape by hand anymore.
At the beginning of Dall-E I was very excited with the results, now AI generated images are boring for me, you can be curious, but they have no real interest.
Maybe the imposture can become convincing for a lot of people in many areas, but a machine will never have “soul”, and surely this is going to show the value of the human when creating anything.
A machine could give you the music you prompt, but it will never be in the mood to create music, it won’t have any urgency to express anything.
This phenomena reminds me that sometimes we just need a friend with good judgement to count on when you need a second opinion.
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now AI generated images are boring for me, you can be curious, but they have no real interest.
I’m still pretty intrigued by the image generators. Messing around with re-training using a smaller subset of images and being really precise and iterative about the prompting has shown me that tools like Stable Diffusion continue to reveal hidden depth in their potential for output. Similar to the way that audio synthesizers do.
I don’t think I have much interest in asking a machine learning algorithm to write melodies for me but I probably won’t be able to stay away from future audio generators for the purposes of exploring new sound design possibilities.
Of course if these tools are well used that can be awesome, I mean a lot of things I see that can be surprising in the first moment but then there are thousands like that.
I’m very curious about a lot of AI uses and tools, and how people will be using them to inspire themselves, for example.
Only a reminder: in the school they told me that luddites were against the technology, the machines, the progress… I think their problem was that the owners of those machines condemned them to misery, precarity and a new slavery.
So, is progress always good? Progress to where? Leaded by who?
there are two coexisting paradigms of «music»:
- harmonies, melodies, all that stuff. i call it music for musicians.
- «interesting textures», «advanced effect chains», «creative randomization» and all that stuff. i call it music for non-musicians.
currently this paradigm prevails, since either mainstream (hip-hop based) and underground (techno based) genres don’t require any tunes at all and can be entirely made just of beats, textures & effects.
AI sucks when it comes to making music from notes.
but AI certainly can and will rock in doing all that fancy technical stuff.
I’m curious what are the best AI tools for music right now? The whole Drake/Weeknd thing is all over the news being touted as AI generated music. However, beyond deepfake vocals it seems like the track was created and produced by someone like any other track. I’m not sure how much of it is supposed to be AI or not and the media kind of misunderstands and dumbs down the idea to make it sounds like someone just types in a prompt.
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Somebody please train an AI to compile all of @sezare56’s posts about the Octatrack into a nice manual. 
That would be great.
Nothing against that Merlin guy…
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