It's really depressing that I have gotten into music composition right when this is happening.
All of these projects are basically just destroying entire fields of human creativity.
It doesn't seem so bad at first when the quality is mediocre, but as soon as they get good, then any human composition will be completely devalued, despite the enormous amount of knowledge, skill and effort that goes into producing one.
A composer who writes a piece of music themselves, instead of being recognised and admired basically becomes the equivalent of someone who bakes their own sourdough instead of going to the supermarket: a curiosity, someone who does things the hard way for their own amusement.
Graphic artists and bloggers were the first to suffer this, but it feels like it's just going to happen to basically every type of creative expression that can be represented digitally. It's just a question of how many months until that happens.
I'm also saddened by the impact of tech on creative industries. But art always was something you do for yourself and to share with others, for some fundamentally human experience. Could an AI pray for you or ride your bike? I don't know anyone in my personal life who wants to listen to AI music, view AI art, or read AI books. I wish art careers were easier, but I don't think a career alone is the right reason to make art.
Much like the restaurant industry, creative industries will probably bifurcate. Cheap (AI, drivethrough, takeout) for daily and most use cases, experiential (vinyl records, concerts, upscale restaurants) for special occasions, connoisseurs.
Who cares? The world is being handed an infinite creation machine that conjures entire worlds into existence, radically reshaping the future of the species and what our descendants will be able to do, and your reply is ~"they took our jobs!"
Figure out how to stand on the shoulders of giants like any of your predecessors of note.
It's being handed an infinite slop machine, drowning out genuinely good content and making it harder than ever to discover. As it becomes harder to discover, fewer talented creatives are able to make a living. We are destroying our own culture with a machine that enforces regression to the mean on creativity.
I mentioned this in another comment thread, recently, but I value art, including music, for the fact that another human being(s) created it to express something. I have zero interest in it if it's AI-generated. The thought of endless content created from the void for me to gorge on like oreos fills me with nothing but despair.
I really want to like ai music but none of them seem to be trained on reward models that reward "ambiance" or any sort of interesting sound design (which this paper obviously doesn't even concern), which might be reflective of the people training them not having niche music tastes
The vocals in the few songs I listened to are so very clearly AI. I find Suno's much more credible in many genres.
If anyone has tried Suno's Studio 2, I would love to hear your take on it. At $24-30/month, it's approaching Ableton Live 12 Suite rent-to-own territory, without the "own" part.
That example "Comedy" sounds like the most soulless synthetic example of "music" ever. Like the music analogue of a PR-speak article of a big corpo generated by an LLM. It's still technically impressive but it's 0/10, absolutely empty of soul.
You know how they used heavy metal music to break the spirit of Manuel Noriega? I'm sure there's some DoD (or is it DoW now?) psychological operations people right now studying the prolonged effects of high volume mediocre AI slop music.
The use case is control. It's essentially a controlnet for the actual music writing. So a musician could compose melody, harmony, and lyrics and generate many performances of the same song until they get one they like. A non-musician could similarly generate the symbolic input from scratch, and perhaps they like the composition but not the performance. This allows them to re-render and re-render until they like the performance.
> a musician could compose melody, harmony, and lyrics and generate many performances of the same song until they get one they like
Can't relate to this. Art doesn't come out as a left-brained problem solving exercise or identifying the right product for a market. It's about expression. You do it when you're feeling things.
I'm a composer and I can 100% get behind this workflow. I will often compose on one instrument (guitar or keys) and then throw the midi into a DAW and experiment with sounds.
All of these projects are basically just destroying entire fields of human creativity.
It doesn't seem so bad at first when the quality is mediocre, but as soon as they get good, then any human composition will be completely devalued, despite the enormous amount of knowledge, skill and effort that goes into producing one.
A composer who writes a piece of music themselves, instead of being recognised and admired basically becomes the equivalent of someone who bakes their own sourdough instead of going to the supermarket: a curiosity, someone who does things the hard way for their own amusement.
Graphic artists and bloggers were the first to suffer this, but it feels like it's just going to happen to basically every type of creative expression that can be represented digitally. It's just a question of how many months until that happens.
Figure out how to stand on the shoulders of giants like any of your predecessors of note.
If anyone has tried Suno's Studio 2, I would love to hear your take on it. At $24-30/month, it's approaching Ableton Live 12 Suite rent-to-own territory, without the "own" part.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641627
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-40090809
Can't relate to this. Art doesn't come out as a left-brained problem solving exercise or identifying the right product for a market. It's about expression. You do it when you're feeling things.
This is that.
are you kidding