A provoking thought i keep having.
Since “ai” (id rather call it just an aggregator/scraper but yeah) is just taking input from everything humans have done on the internet and spitting out an amalgamation, how exactly can we say its any different from an average musician who has influences from hundreds if not thousands of bands?
There’s many, many, songs out there that you can tell are inspired by others. How can you differentiate this from prompting the slop generator to “make a song similar to x artist and throw in some drum parts similar to y artist”. I myself definitely know the music I write has a sound to it that can be traced to a lot of groups I listen to, even if I just sit down and start writing I will naturally sometimes come up with something that sounds similar to music id been really into that week, for example. Of course I notice this and then work to change it up if possible, and many times others dont even hear the same influence I did in the end!
The only difference i can think of is, if you took a human baby, put them on an island with no music and a caretaker, and gave them a piano, they would create something. Of course a computer could never do this.
Peaceful discussion if we can. 🙂
I’ve heard this sentiment expressed a few times in recent years and I gotta say, it’s not the same.
What we are talking about here is removing the person and the novel inputs they can contribute to the process of creation.
I would argue that a lifetime of honing skill and soaking one’s mind in various art forms, coupled with an individual’s intellectual and emotional experiences create feedback loops between the creator and their creations that result in new things outside of existing frameworks because there is a special ingredient: someone’s life, their way of thinking and being as a result of so many factors.
Generative tools that have the appearance of creating something are just chopping up what exists and rearranging it.
People do that too, but they often end up unintentionally putting something of themselves in there, because they can’t help it. That’s how we get new art.
The thing is, if we remove the experience how to become a musician completely, we also remove our selves from the equation more completely. Generative tools can “make me a composition in the style A with influences from genre B, with song subject C” but that’s not the entirety of artistic practice. There’s more to it than that, and only by suffering through the process and making it a part of ourselves and so our selves a part of it, do we get something special and new.
If we decide that is not necessary anymore, then I think we will render ourselves incapable of making new art on a personal level, and live out a dreary existence in thrall to a content mill of increasingly bland, recycled tropes…perhaps only the rich and privileged will ever have the opportunity to dedicate enough time in their lives to making new art that is distinct, or perhaps nobody will consider these art forms as worth investing any time in at all.
I think we are going to kill our own creativity and deskill ourselves as a population and destroy how artists get made. if we keep buying into this shit it’ll be like the issue with “moving manufacturing jobs back to the US”. There’s not even enough skilled workers left to support such an idea. Try making an original film feature that isn’t 99% slop or having a real orchestra when everyone has given up on actually being an artist/musician as a job long ago.
It’s not the same as DAWs or synthesizers or drum machines or cameras or whatever. We are talking about killing art as a human endeavour because we are stupid and lazy and think Gen “AI” is “good enough”.
Yeah, it is sad. Ive always enjoyed older movies my whole life, but even more so now because I can look at them and go, wow, they did that for real! Same reason I still listen to a lot of 70s/80s rock. It was for the most part, real (even though a lot of the time it was corporate, you still had acts like Kansas and Rush that wrote amazing music, recorded to tape, and worked their asses off playing 250 shows a year)
I think going forward, we wont have talent like that anymore. Unless maybe the kids rebel against slop and we have a revolution of human music and art (id be fine getting rid of quantizing and melodyne myself, never liked it).
Heck, the band im in is in a very small minority that does not use backing tracks and we use real amps. Its all real and performed. People ask us what we use for backing tracks, is the guitarist using looping pedals too? Nope. Its all us and how we wrote the music to sound good live.
But then we have the other kids, the ones who will pump out slop songs and call themselves an artist. And the worst part, people will probably like the slop songs more than the human created ones. If we can even tell a difference in 5 years.