It’s an area that I think will have to change in law (which is what I’m getting at), that really should be defined more accurately. Humans could only derive new ideas from existing and were limited by our biology, when we copy, we end up imprinting ourselves on the new inherently, AI can steal an creative identity with far less distinguishable flaws. The playing field is changing.

The difference between AI tools for consumers and AI tools for producers can be distilled into this - when it’s for consumers it eliminates people, when it’s for producers it augments people. I know which future I’d prefer.

Consumption of content is a passive process, production is active. As a musician you produce, as a listener you consume. The tools you need for both are quite different, you’re not problem solving or creating as a listener, you’re not engaging your creativity, creatives are always in need of an edge to achieve the best they can, as a producer you want to be the best you can be and communicate yourself and your ideas as brilliantly as possible. Tools are therefore geared towards delivering what you want in each case, augmenting you to be the most… erm…. “You” you can be as a creative, making content directly for you as a consumer.

There is some dude that does this already and has posted on here. I subscribed to his work out of curiosity. Let's put it this way, he is not going to be putting Rosalia or Tony Benet out of work any time soon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UbOKoYsIPY

Who decides when a consumer becomes a "producer"? It's all just people. Some people, for years, have already decried all the tools that "augment" what musicians/producers do by doing it for them.

You get a drum vsti or drum machine, press a button, and boom, you are Ringo. You really don't have to be creative in the least, and an actual drummer has been completely replaced. How is that being "you"?

Not saying it's right or wrong, it just is, and I think it's going to be difficult to regulate.

:Revolver :
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-63226914

I don’t imagine it’ll be long before AI is capable of creating brilliant music.

Judging by some of the links shared by OP it seems like we’re still in the uncanny valley, but even now AI generated music seems capable of creating functional music - that is to say, music which can be ignored. We probably already hear it more than we realise in commercials and television beds. It’s definitely a concern for jobbing composers.

I don’t see any threat to live music and the emergence of new scenes. I think groundbreaking music will always require an ape with feelings.

I don't think anyone imagines themselves as Ringo by playing a midi loop in a vst. Even if they did, would be the end of the world if the law told them "nope, you're not"?

Currently the law allows for fairly broad definitions of creator. You can be just the ideas guy and file a patent on an idea itself for instance, you need not be the creator at all to file for a copyright in some cases, and in some situations you must be instrumental in the manifestation of an idea to have rights. It's this last one that I would argue is correct for dealing with AI and copyright and at the same time to me determines the nature of the tools required. See my previous definition.

I don't know the correct approach to protecting creatives, eccentrics, free thinkers and outliers, and I'll admit that for sure historically legislation usually isn't it. However the cost of convenience can be much higher than people expect. The loss of such peoples voices coupled with AI will likely lead to homogeneity as all convenience does, and that's stasis - and that's decline. I think we'll find this path is a mistake, and Ideally it should be recognized as such sooner rather than later, because later there's no going back. Later unless everyone loses interest fast could be after all online information is tainted by dilution and deep fakery and we cease to trust or find any value in any non-tangible or digitally sourced media, a literal information dark age. It's already hard enough with human bad actors. I can see a lot of money in verification systems, however how they would remain AI proof remains a mystery.

I just meant you don't need Ringo, nor do you have to be the least bit creative nor a talented drummer...the machine spits out a perfectly professional drum track with the "creator" simply saying, okay, that sounds good, I'll use it in my track which is mine and I'm calling it mine even though I can't play drums, I can't record drums, and I didn't even "produce" the sounds or the beats or anything, it was just there and I chose it and took it. And you can already do that with every instrument. I don't know how you can stop that sort of thing. So if that's okay...and everyone seems to think it is...then having the machine spit out the whole song/track completely is just taking it the final step.

I took one of those online TTI generators for a spin the first time, and it was obvious the tech still has a way to go and is at the "Missle Command" stage. It was fun for a minute, but as an artist, it basically gave me some crude images to work with, edit, or layer into other work. It is either that or scouring DeviantArt like I did back in the day, but those are copyrighted for the most part. With AI you can avoid infringements I suppose.
So the AI music is just the same, maybe I need it to run some sequences or chord progression algos to spark my interest just like digging through vinyl and sampling does. I don't feel threatened, but I would expect AI music to be eventually on playlists with human music and be designated as such.
All that still seems way far off. We usually find the error is still human like we did with crime-predicting AI. Or that poor guy who got the pig heart. There is a limit to what Nature will permit.

Don't base your views on ancient history. Go check out where things are now with Dal-E and Stable Diffusion. I don't think many people are ready for how quickly this is happening.

In the end, I think AI generated music/art proliferation will come down to money...just like everything else.

In terms of saving money...if I'm a hotel chain and I want 10k unique pieces printed for the rooms, AI generated will probably be a great option. For music, I think many of the ideas in this thread will become viable...you need a unique piece for an intro/outro/hold music/maybe even commercials/movie scores, it might be more affordable than having someone create it. I think this will be devastating for people who make money with this type of work since it will be so difficult to compete.

In terms of generating money...if virtual celebrities/bands become a successful genre then we'll get 100k variants of it until everyone is sick of it (honestly can't wait for the cork sniffing previous AI vs next gen AI conversations lol). In a world where Kardashians are somehow a thing, I'm certain a virtual AI celebrity has a chance....and it's clothing/makeup line. If I were placing bets....I'd put my money on celebrity virtual DJs or YouTube influencers taking off first before actors or bands.

I see the most likely scenario being like it is today but on steroids. In the way that big artists hire teams of songwriters to help them write their next album...I would also expect to see "AI enhanced" music. Take a musical idea and get infinite variations of melodies, harmonies, solos with the artist/producers/team assembling the songs and being the face for it. Marketing teams then push the bionic songs with maximum scientific catchiness to get mainstream attention and somewhere behind the scenes, corporations and the top .01% of artists make piles of money.

And in the way my grandparents never got into that new fangled Rock n Roll, I doubt i'd ever hang an AI generated piece of art on my wall and I'd expect to keep listening to real musicians making music....while eating artisanal pretzels and drinking craft beer being whatever the next generation calls a hipster.

To me, this whole conversation is reassuring : it seems most people here don't have any clue about what art is.
I guess they are making EDM music, or commercials, and of course they feel threatened by AI, because all these people will be gone with AI, and actually nobody will care because the "music" will stay the same (at least, the industrial one : EDM, urban, commercial, trailer, Zimmer like stuff...).

Same idea with pictures : I saw a lot of AI "artworks", and sure they are beautiful pictures, but they don't have any meaning and are just a combination of human pictures randomly taken from internet. Yes it's a technical "tour de force" to combine and arrange pictures automatically with a program.
I guess it will help the Jeff Koons of this world to produce some more meaningless (but trendy) shit without the help of any human assistant, but it will not replace the Picasso, Klimt or Egon Schiele of this world.

Did you ever ask yourself why Velasquesz or Caravaggio were considered important ? Do you truly think it's only because they knew how to technically reproduce a hand or a face ?
Did you ask yourself why even after the invention of photography people are still going to Museum to see paintings from Caravaggio ?
It's not even about naturalist figuration, because it's the same with Basquiat or Bacon.
But I guess nobody in this thread that thinks AI will replace artists ever understood why Caravaggio or John Coltrane were artists, and why Taylor Swift or Jeff Koons are just industrial products (that will be, indeed, replaced by AI without any problem).
Taylor Swift, Beyoncé or Jeff Koons are indeed just the brands (public image) that give a human identity to the product of an industrial process, exactly like Mercedes is a brand, and the Mercedes cars are made in factories with the collaboration of many people having different skills - all these people being used exactly like machines (even the engineers or the marketing people). The important in the car industry is not the people, it's the process, the organisation of work.

AI needs to be feeded with some content, the most content you can find, and can make some combination and variation about that.
It doesn't choose. It doesn't tell nothing about life. It doesn't produce meaning. It just produces pure form based on what you feed it.

So AI is just the last stage of industry and automation. It will replace humans exactly how machines replaced humans before.
But the arpeggiator never helped in playing some Bach music...

Because AI will never be able to produce human content, just an imitation of it. AI is just processing power. It doesn't have a body, sexual needs, neurosis, family history, pleasure and pain, friends, religion, metaphysics, it doesn't have taste and doesn't have a way to connect for exemple music theory and emotional experience... Feed it with some Billie Holiday songs and it will make some variation about it, maybe a good copy, but it will not have much more meaning than the jazz student mimicking the Coltrane changes after he learnt them at the Berkeley school of music...
And nobody ever cared about a jazz student mimicking Coltrane changes...

I checked out Stable Diffusion. Its just computer gamer graphics. It's not art. My wife is an art teacher and her grade 12 student's make better art than that. Good art usually needs to have substance and meaning which so far only a human has been able to instill into it.

The Hatsune Miku example is a particular case that is tied to a particular demographic audience and culture. My guess, it's people steeped deep into manga. But it's a very very small segment of what is music fandom. People get attached as fans to other artists to whom they respond psychologically as a person for better or worse.

I am still curious to know exactly what sorts of problems in music do you see AI solving?

I'm pretty sure Taylor Swift is AI

AI is the new retro.

When I first read Dune, I just thought that was just one of Herbert's ways of getting to write a novel set in the far future and still have medieval "action" scenes. Just like how shields made bullets obsolete and set everyone back to fighting with knives.

Now that I have given it more thought, it seems like such a war could happen, but I think it would be 50-50 if it could be brought about in time. By the time enough people realize the danger, we may be already hooked.

Perhaps this is the actual progression of evolution. Instead of the aliens waiting for us to invent warp drive or whatever before welcoming us into the Galactic Federation, maybe all the aliens are machines waiting for us to invent AIs, at which point they will be welcoming our machines into the Galactic Federation.

Hell, a lot of songs are samples of last year's hit. As always, art predicts the future, and as you say, a lot of human artists are already acting like machines.

Perhaps not now, perhaps not anytime soon, but IMO, Human Exceptionalism is just one possibility of the way things will turn out to be. And besides, we may not be the intended audience for the music that these machines make...

Dune was written during the US oil crisis. It's about the world dependence on oil and the disasters it creates.

No. Dune is about humanity trying to give more value and meaning to humanity. It's about how people can act as humans, and not as animals or objects. The whole Dune serie of books is about that idea.

I think Herbert was concerned about the way industrial society was changing people, and tried to give his view of how we could evolve in the future not thanks to technology (any tool is external to the body, so it doesn't necessarily involve progress in the user), but thanks to mind or spiritual techniques (that ar as diverse in Dune as metaphysics, spirituality, education, yoga like training, etc. etc.).

You can find similar kind of concern in The Seven Samurai from Kurosawa (for exemple), or in any deep piece of art treating about modern world... The use of guns, for exemple, killed the honor scheme in modern Japan, like it did in China, and plenty of movies were made about this idea...
Today, we can clearly see that amazing technology is not correlated to intelligence, humanity or decent values (see Trump, Poutine, Musk, Zuckerberg...).
Maybe quite the contrary actually...

By the way, I don't know about any oil crisis in 1965, when the first book of Dune was published.

Really? Hmm..I got double check. I recall reading those old series of books when I was a kid. iIRC, Herbert was writing about the oil fiasco at the time. The spice is the oil. The worms are earth spirits.

Yes, there are analogs in Dune of today's events-corruption and bribery in the highest places, whole police forces lost to organized crime, regulatory agencies taken over by the people they are supposed to regulate. The scarce water of Dune is an exact analog of oil scarcity. CHOAM is OPEC.

-Frank Herbert

https://vasil.ludost.net/dunegenesis.pdf

Just recently a guy won the first price with an AI generated picture. The judges didn’t knew and didn’t noticed it.
Source separation AI was used for the latest stereo remix of Revolver and is used right now for Atmos mixes of other songs from the 60s.

Yeah that just happened: https://www.extremetech.com/internet...enerated-piece

AI will most definitely be capable at manipulating human emotion, most likely moreso than humans once it crosses certain tipping point. You don't have to feel emotion to manipulate emotion, you just have to understand how human emotion works, which doesn't require you to feel a thing.

Full blown sociopaths and psychopaths are the most adept at making others feel things, and they feel little to nothing beyond their own base needs.

I image amazingly immersive ear crack is on the way, the likes of which we've never seen.

Here's the AI winner:

Yeah. I recall reading that article. The guy in Colorado. But it's not really art in the real sense of art community. Its computer graphics artwork type stuff. It has no real substance to it other than fancy computer graphics. The issue there was how is that allowed to be submitted into a competition. Imagine a guy going to the Olympics with a motor bike and competing against Jamaican world class runners. He should be at a motor bike race competing with motor bikes.

What is real art? A case in point, the kids have art shows every year and I go to them and see all sorts of stuff from prints, to paintings to sculptures. Some are great. Most are so so. I recall one of the kids in my wifes class did this self portrait of herself in a freezing Ontario lake and she looked like some sort of weird shriveled piranha with teeth and it was freaky and great at the same time. It was about her and her fear and anger and insecurity about herself and her future and what she was going to do with the rest of her life after high school. I got it right away and it was freaky and great at the same time. The interesting thing was most of the people that go to those things know very little about art but they all agreed that was the best work and it stood out miles above everything else on display at that show. And yes, that kid did go on to go to OCAD and study art cause she really was great and had a true natural artistic mind and inclination.

That doesn't really seem like AI to me.

If they used AI to actually remix it, that would be something.

Looks pretty darn good to me. Better than most crap done by humans.

Yeah I was impressed. From the clarity of the darker colors and reflection of the window on the floor, to the vague and undefined blur outside and below the window leaving a lot up to the viewer's imagination, to the general feeling of the whole thing. It feels like a well executed artistic vision.

Tip of the iceberg I think.

AI or humans?

Feelings aren’t required by whatever is making a person feel something. Humans, AI, a cat, a tree, a sunset. . Whatever is causing the feelings doesn’t need to feel anything to make someone else feel something deeply.

So I think AI will become quite adept at cutting to the core of the human soul in its artistic works.

And that's already old old news. There's content indistinguishable from photographs, from the style of certain artists often with no visible artifacts now. These tools absolutely produce 50 dodgy images for a decent one, but it doesn't matter how many rubbish ones there were, only that there was one great one. In fact the number of "hits" is probably higher than most humans. Especially as it takes it no time to generate.

Thing is, how much do you now value this content? To me it was "wow" first two or three, then "yawn", and now basically zero or actually negative value as it's annoying to find AI content cluttering up my streams. I'll assume things are AI till proven otherwise, so it's affecting my perception of the value of all sources, not that I have to worry too much because all of the art streams I follow have gone from a torrent to a trickle at this point.

I think that's what'll happen for other sources as they get replaced with AI too. I can't see myself ever valuing AI music, it's not an expression of connection to other humans, it's just raw unit of commodity. Wouldn't matter if they started charging a million a pop to make them, it'd still be worthlessthannothing to me. With a massively negative social impact - play music offline sure, but what's the fun of music not shared? Same for AI generated news stories, movies, games, AI generated anything. AI itself.

It increasingly feels like it's just a parasitic commodity of nothing, that consumes the whole field, then whether embraced or not kills the healthy crop. A virtual cuckoo egg...

Where is all this AI stuff happening, cluttering up your streams?

Eventually it'll just be another artist name on Spotify. And people will either like the sound of it better or worse next to everything else, and either add it to their playlists or not.

I think this distinction exists only in this early phase, as people show off AI advances. Once it tips past a certain point, it'll just be art, with no way to know who/what is behind it at face value, you'd have to do the research.

That’s already the case with that panting. If it were hanging on a wall for sale you’d either like it or not, without knowing who’s behind it.