The whole point of generative AI plagiarism laundering machines is to make it harder to tell you’re consuming a soulless regurgitation of legitimate talent.
Like seriously, if you are fine with listening to crap and are enjoying yourself. Why does it matter who or what willed it into existence? Isn’t the whole point that it is amusing? Plenty of crappy artists making crap music as well, if you like em you should be able to just enjoy them.
So, my mother is pretty hopelessly addicted to shorts, right? (Facebook reels, Youtube shorts, Tiktok, etc.) And the other day she calls me over to watch one that had just come up on her feed. It was a kitten and a parrot playing. The parrot was talking and the kitten kindof batted at and nuzzled the parrot.
Cute as fuck. Sickeningly so. But something was definitely off. The parrot’s voice was wrong somehow. The cat was a little too… smooth. The way they moved just wasn’t quite right. Clearly an AI generated video. (The audio was probably a human speaking, pitched up and made a little squeakier via simple audio editing. But my point is that no cat and parrot had ever existed in front of a camera doing quite what this video depicted.)
My mother never considered it might be AI-generated until I said it was.
And… what’s the harm? As I said, it was cute. Who cares whether it was “real” or not if it made the dopamine squirt in my mother’s brain?
We’re kindof living in a post-truth world. It doesn’t matter whether content is “real” or not. If it feels good great. If you completely disengage your critical thinking skills and just assume it’s real (or even worse, define real/impactful in terms of what makes the dopamine squirt and not in terms of truth), it feels even better. Produces more of that sweet sweet dopamine.
A person who cares whether something is true/real/authentic may fall for it anyway and still be manipulated thereby. But one who doesn’t care, you don’t even have to manipulate. They’re already living a fantasy.
That’s how you get “alternative facts” and of right-wingers claiming “we white, cishet, christian, men are the ones who are really oppressed.”
Enjoying AI-generated music knowing it’s AI-generated is a red flag. Enjoying it and not realizing it’s fake is extremely concerning. Worst of all is enjoying it and not caring.
When my mother showed me that video, I felt sick to my stomach. Not because it was “too cute.” (Ok, a little bit because it was sickeningly cute, but mostly…) Because she’d been so easily manipulated. And because there were a few seconds before I realized it was fake during which I was similarly manipulated.
My mother also has a problem with blindly trusting Google AI overviews and it’s been a problem a few times.
Every AI-generated bit of media or information I consume makes me feel like I’ve been “tainted”, poisoned, unclean. I’m sure despite the care I’ve taken to verify sources and such, I’ve fallen for it in some ways, but it’s hard to know where/how specifically and what negative effects that will have on me at a later date.
And no, this problem didn’t start with AI, but AI certainly hasn’t helped the situation.
But to bring it home, what you asked wasn’t about AI-generated fake news or cat videos. It was about jazz.
Before AI-generated music like what’s referenced in the OP existed, we had autotune. And I think that’s similarly problematic for the same reason as AI-generated cat videos are. I think people using autotune blatantly to where they weren’t trying to hide it’s use but rather used it as a cool distortion effect was a hugely positive development specifically because it revealed the fact that it wasn’t real.
Maybe someday we’ll end up with an equivalent for AI-generated music. And if so, maybe I’ll be cool with “blatantly AI” music. But so long as we have music that fools people into thinking it was made by flesh-and-blood humans on physical pianos, upright basses, saxaphones, etc, it’s concerning as fuck.
If I ever fall for that shit, please slap me. And if I say I don’t care whether it’s real or not, shoot me.
tbf, a lot of pop and generic stuff is incredibly soulless and it was made by people. One silver lining is that hopefully the artistic part will be more embraced in music because the driving force for a lot of it is money and not art. Not defending AI in any way though, fuck that bullshit to hell.
I hate that AI is controlled by a few huge corporations and that it consumes ungodly amounts of resources. Otherwise I’d be completely fine with it. At least 90% of anything is shit anyway and everything humans create is built on what came before, so I think AI just mimics what we’ve been doing since forever. But as it is controlled by just a few assholes who burn the planet down even faster I am against it.
People have free will and while most people don’t bother using it, a few in each generation think differently. Those are people like Einstein, Picasso, Hypatia, Curie, Yeshua, Tolkein, Wachowski, Ray. They bring genuinely new ideas into the space of human thought. If AI writes all the books, we don’t get any more Voltaires. If AI makes all the movies, we don’t get any more del Toros. If AI writes all the songs, we don’t get any more Hendrixes.
We get Hendrix copycats, sure. But nobody is going to change the game the way all the people I listed changed the game.
That’s alarmist nonsense. There will always be people still doing all those things. AI, in general, is just another tool. There will always be someone who changes the status quo. Always.
Nobody said that. AI is not stopping anyone from making music. In fact, my point is that people will still create art, despite AI being a thing. AI will be incorporated by some, definitely not all, artists. Just like electronics were before. The electric guitar and synthesizers were once new too.
If you could make a time machine and ask all of those people who their inspirations are you will get a list of multiple people from each. No one is 100% uninspired by other people. That’s just not how art or science works.
That doesn’t mean AI can replace human creativity. Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. Maybe we’ll reject it for not being human for as long as its distinguishable. But the argument that visionaries in human history were somehow uninspired is not the reason why AI won’t get there.
We have mastered the art of making pots, we have entire factories that do nothing but make the most beautiful pots in all manner of shapes, sizes and colors. Millions of them each day. Nobody in the rest of human existence should ever need to make a clay pot by hand ever again.
Yet we still do.
Because art is something human. It makes us who we are. It is fun to express oneself. And no amount of automatization will ever take that away. We can be living in space and there will still be people making clay pots.
I once did a remix competition. Not to win, just to have fun playing with samples and the discipline of having a time limit. I knew going in that what I was going to do had 0 chance of getting anywhere near the top.
The winning three entries were judged by the website, the artist, and 3 executives from the record label. And the winning 3 entries were all exactly the same.
They were all the same style of EDM (bear in mind, this was a poppy guitar song being remixed, so there was no particular driving factor towards that direction), they had similar bass lines & synth parts - both in terms of the riffs themselves and in terms of the sounds used. They all sped up and pitched up the vocal and chopped it in a very similar way. And they all had the exact same structure. You could literally play all three simultaneously (after timestretching by a couple of BPM to make them the same tempo) and the intro would be the same number of bars, the beat would come in at the same time, the vocals would come in at the same time, the dropdown would come in at the same time, the build-up would come in at the same time and lasted the same number of bars, they had the same bar of silence after the build-up, and then the drop did very similar things with the bass and all three went into half-time simultaneously.
There were hundreds of entries, and really what you had to do was make something that sounded like everything else. It was depressing, honestly.
Oof that’s super disheartening, I never really entered those contests because I feared it was the same. My music is pretty weird as it is I don’t really want to put it up against more ear friendly stuff lol. I feel like people are all watching the same youtube videos and getting the same tips or using the same tutorials and/or sample packs and projects or presets. DAWs are awesome in that they’ve made music making accessible to literally anyone but they’ve also made it easy to make a lot of music that sounds the same, I mean of course that was happening before computers as well, but it still take some effort to be a cover band.
I recommend it anyway. It’s always fun to play with someone else’s ideas. You end up writing stuff you otherwise wouldn’t. And there’s something to be said for “I’ve got x amount of time to finish this” due to external factors. Just don’t pay attention to the competition aspect and you’ll almost certainly find it rewarding.
The whole point of
generative AIplagiarism laundering machines is to make it harder to tell you’re consuming a soulless regurgitation of legitimate talent.Whatever your view is on AI.
If you don’t notice, why does it matter?
Like seriously, if you are fine with listening to crap and are enjoying yourself. Why does it matter who or what willed it into existence? Isn’t the whole point that it is amusing? Plenty of crappy artists making crap music as well, if you like em you should be able to just enjoy them.
So, my mother is pretty hopelessly addicted to shorts, right? (Facebook reels, Youtube shorts, Tiktok, etc.) And the other day she calls me over to watch one that had just come up on her feed. It was a kitten and a parrot playing. The parrot was talking and the kitten kindof batted at and nuzzled the parrot.
Cute as fuck. Sickeningly so. But something was definitely off. The parrot’s voice was wrong somehow. The cat was a little too… smooth. The way they moved just wasn’t quite right. Clearly an AI generated video. (The audio was probably a human speaking, pitched up and made a little squeakier via simple audio editing. But my point is that no cat and parrot had ever existed in front of a camera doing quite what this video depicted.)
My mother never considered it might be AI-generated until I said it was.
And… what’s the harm? As I said, it was cute. Who cares whether it was “real” or not if it made the dopamine squirt in my mother’s brain?
We’re kindof living in a post-truth world. It doesn’t matter whether content is “real” or not. If it feels good great. If you completely disengage your critical thinking skills and just assume it’s real (or even worse, define real/impactful in terms of what makes the dopamine squirt and not in terms of truth), it feels even better. Produces more of that sweet sweet dopamine.
A person who cares whether something is true/real/authentic may fall for it anyway and still be manipulated thereby. But one who doesn’t care, you don’t even have to manipulate. They’re already living a fantasy.
That’s how you get “alternative facts” and of right-wingers claiming “we white, cishet, christian, men are the ones who are really oppressed.”
Enjoying AI-generated music knowing it’s AI-generated is a red flag. Enjoying it and not realizing it’s fake is extremely concerning. Worst of all is enjoying it and not caring.
When my mother showed me that video, I felt sick to my stomach. Not because it was “too cute.” (Ok, a little bit because it was sickeningly cute, but mostly…) Because she’d been so easily manipulated. And because there were a few seconds before I realized it was fake during which I was similarly manipulated.
My mother also has a problem with blindly trusting Google AI overviews and it’s been a problem a few times.
Every AI-generated bit of media or information I consume makes me feel like I’ve been “tainted”, poisoned, unclean. I’m sure despite the care I’ve taken to verify sources and such, I’ve fallen for it in some ways, but it’s hard to know where/how specifically and what negative effects that will have on me at a later date.
And no, this problem didn’t start with AI, but AI certainly hasn’t helped the situation.
But to bring it home, what you asked wasn’t about AI-generated fake news or cat videos. It was about jazz.
Before AI-generated music like what’s referenced in the OP existed, we had autotune. And I think that’s similarly problematic for the same reason as AI-generated cat videos are. I think people using autotune blatantly to where they weren’t trying to hide it’s use but rather used it as a cool distortion effect was a hugely positive development specifically because it revealed the fact that it wasn’t real.
Maybe someday we’ll end up with an equivalent for AI-generated music. And if so, maybe I’ll be cool with “blatantly AI” music. But so long as we have music that fools people into thinking it was made by flesh-and-blood humans on physical pianos, upright basses, saxaphones, etc, it’s concerning as fuck.
If I ever fall for that shit, please slap me. And if I say I don’t care whether it’s real or not, shoot me.
tbf, a lot of pop and generic stuff is incredibly soulless and it was made by people. One silver lining is that hopefully the artistic part will be more embraced in music because the driving force for a lot of it is money and not art. Not defending AI in any way though, fuck that bullshit to hell.
There’s a formula people like, so they just repeat stuff
I hate that AI is controlled by a few huge corporations and that it consumes ungodly amounts of resources. Otherwise I’d be completely fine with it. At least 90% of anything is shit anyway and everything humans create is built on what came before, so I think AI just mimics what we’ve been doing since forever. But as it is controlled by just a few assholes who burn the planet down even faster I am against it.
People have free will and while most people don’t bother using it, a few in each generation think differently. Those are people like Einstein, Picasso, Hypatia, Curie, Yeshua, Tolkein, Wachowski, Ray. They bring genuinely new ideas into the space of human thought. If AI writes all the books, we don’t get any more Voltaires. If AI makes all the movies, we don’t get any more del Toros. If AI writes all the songs, we don’t get any more Hendrixes.
We get Hendrix copycats, sure. But nobody is going to change the game the way all the people I listed changed the game.
That’s alarmist nonsense. There will always be people still doing all those things. AI, in general, is just another tool. There will always be someone who changes the status quo. Always.
Yes but being a musician shouldn’t necessistate being a genre defining artist.
Nobody said that. AI is not stopping anyone from making music. In fact, my point is that people will still create art, despite AI being a thing. AI will be incorporated by some, definitely not all, artists. Just like electronics were before. The electric guitar and synthesizers were once new too.
If you could make a time machine and ask all of those people who their inspirations are you will get a list of multiple people from each. No one is 100% uninspired by other people. That’s just not how art or science works.
That doesn’t mean AI can replace human creativity. Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. Maybe we’ll reject it for not being human for as long as its distinguishable. But the argument that visionaries in human history were somehow uninspired is not the reason why AI won’t get there.
Good thing I didn’t make that argument you’re criticising
That is never going to happen.
You can compare it to making clay pots.
We have mastered the art of making pots, we have entire factories that do nothing but make the most beautiful pots in all manner of shapes, sizes and colors. Millions of them each day. Nobody in the rest of human existence should ever need to make a clay pot by hand ever again.
Yet we still do.
Because art is something human. It makes us who we are. It is fun to express oneself. And no amount of automatization will ever take that away. We can be living in space and there will still be people making clay pots.
“All” being the key word, and obviously wrong.
maybe it will force people to get more creative and experimental
not if they want to earn any money, I just make music for myself now tbh
I once did a remix competition. Not to win, just to have fun playing with samples and the discipline of having a time limit. I knew going in that what I was going to do had 0 chance of getting anywhere near the top.
The winning three entries were judged by the website, the artist, and 3 executives from the record label. And the winning 3 entries were all exactly the same.
They were all the same style of EDM (bear in mind, this was a poppy guitar song being remixed, so there was no particular driving factor towards that direction), they had similar bass lines & synth parts - both in terms of the riffs themselves and in terms of the sounds used. They all sped up and pitched up the vocal and chopped it in a very similar way. And they all had the exact same structure. You could literally play all three simultaneously (after timestretching by a couple of BPM to make them the same tempo) and the intro would be the same number of bars, the beat would come in at the same time, the vocals would come in at the same time, the dropdown would come in at the same time, the build-up would come in at the same time and lasted the same number of bars, they had the same bar of silence after the build-up, and then the drop did very similar things with the bass and all three went into half-time simultaneously.
There were hundreds of entries, and really what you had to do was make something that sounded like everything else. It was depressing, honestly.
Oof that’s super disheartening, I never really entered those contests because I feared it was the same. My music is pretty weird as it is I don’t really want to put it up against more ear friendly stuff lol. I feel like people are all watching the same youtube videos and getting the same tips or using the same tutorials and/or sample packs and projects or presets. DAWs are awesome in that they’ve made music making accessible to literally anyone but they’ve also made it easy to make a lot of music that sounds the same, I mean of course that was happening before computers as well, but it still take some effort to be a cover band.
I recommend it anyway. It’s always fun to play with someone else’s ideas. You end up writing stuff you otherwise wouldn’t. And there’s something to be said for “I’ve got x amount of time to finish this” due to external factors. Just don’t pay attention to the competition aspect and you’ll almost certainly find it rewarding.
I would like to hear more of that for real, stagnant ass music lately unless you just live in the underground