Because people don’t want to listen to robots. There was a radio station here in Norway caught playing AI music to save on royalties, it was not good for them.
For me music is a form of emotional expression. When I hear that was composed synthetically I feel like it has zero value. I’m fine with AI music that is labels as AI, but when someone markets that music as their own hand made art it feels, or at least I feel, like I’ve been scammed.
(A significant fraction of) musicians are certainly upset about this. I know a few who feel like their smallish income is threatened by this.
Perhaps it's your sphere; I know many musicians (mostly Jazz and people in punk bands) and they aren't thrilled to say the least. Like most things, it's contextual.
> Oddly none of the anti-‘s were musicians themselves.
It is clearly plain to anyone who is a musician or hangs out with a lot of musicians that the independent music world is livid about this stuff. Everyone I’ve talked to, from acoustic songwriters to metal singers to circuit-bending pedalheads are united in their absolute hatred of this technology.
(Yes, follow-up commenter, I’ve seen the Timbaland interview)
As an independent musician, I for one welcome our AI overlords.
They should not be worried about any technology that needs a human to make it remotely interesting.
They should not be worried if they aren't generic sounding independent musicians already.
Lastly, and a historical case in point, this whole conversation is a repetition of the anti-Sampler movement of the 80s and 90s.
Look what that techno-leap brought us.
A new technology brings new sounds, if we all stopped treating a megalithic search engine as a personality, we'll move forwards with a lot less drama.
That's pretty much my point:)
A new technology brought new ideas to a cultural discipline, new forms of music, twisting and morphing the old forms, especially in the hands of the naive, yet creative youth.
I see the same opportunities here, another new tool for the artistic arsenal.
The sarcasm is irrelevant, my use of that term is more a nod towards this platform and historical replies in past discussions, in regard to similar situations. I'll make an effort to excise any superfluous attempts at humour in future posts!
It's all just painfully derivative in a very literal sense. I wonder what I'd think if I didn't know some of these were AI, but once you know, it's hard to ignore.
AI music on a radio station doesn't really make sense. The point is to be able to create custom music tuned to your own tastes -- music that's specifically for you.
Music is about the human experience, emotions, mistakes, accidents, discoveries.
I could listen to music by real people being vulnerable and expressing themselves, or I could listen to a computer soullessly regurgitating a stock "blues" melody with inane lyrics about a trash can. Why would I ever pick the latter?
> Music is about the human experience, emotions, mistakes, accidents, discoveries.
Pro musician here.
There's piles upon piles of human-generated music soullessly regurgitating stock patterns with inane lyrics since long before Alan Turing was even flown in by the stork. Most recent popular music by far is bland sausage factory production.
Why not allow yourself to be moved by beautiful music, wheter it's machine generated or not?
Because the outcome of that is revolting. Its an insult to humanity. Take a look at the clip of Joe rogan crying over some terrible AI 50cent remix. Its delusional, why would you want people to be like that? I'd never listen to music again if that was all I could listen to.
Think about a world where AI creative works are on equal playing field to human works. The AI can tailor an entire library of work for an individual spitting out hundreds of albums per day. Humans would end up listening to majority AI works just out of sheer volume of production. Any human still creating music would just be making data for AI's to steal and repurpose.
Respectfully, 25 years ago someone might've said the same thing about you spending any time online at all. Today, people spend far more time on all number of "artificial" experiences. I'm not going to try to convince you that it's good or lasting or even personally entertaining to me, but it seems that it's entertaining to someone.
Art can be about that, but if it was only about that for everyone, we would never have had Britney Spears autotuned so hard that my mother assumed she was already listening to a soulless computer when she first heard Spears in c. 2000.
Me, I see the patterns too fast to even care for a second play of recorded music from a real human, only theme songs for nostalgia-inducing shows have enough of an emotional kick to get past that.
GenAI music has all the same problems as GenAI images (try asking Suno for "Just fox noises" to see what happens out of distribution), but collectively it has at least been a bit harder for me to spot the pattern behind them in aggregate, even if each song by itself still has the same problem for me as any other recording.
These songs sound like royalty-free stock music at best. Bland and inoffensive, with the same uncanny and compressed quality that AI-generated images have too.
Borderline acceptable for elevator music is a long way from the paradigm shift you claim it is.
it's not art (for humans) if it's not made by a human with a human story.
AI can be used as the tool with which art is made, but not as the maker itself.
now, on the other hand, maybe AI can make it's own form of art for other AI's to consume. However, for the human, the creation of art will always need the human taste and story involved
> The instrumental and vocals were both generated using Suno with a lot fiddling around with the prompts. The video was edited by a human in kdenlive :-)
telling the AI what kind of music i want is not a story? what if i write the lyrics and use AI to add music? or if i use AI to create a song but then play and sing the song with my own instruments and voice? is reciting music not also art?
what about DJing? all DJs are doing is replaying someone elses music and recombining it in creative ways. and that is considered art. isn't that similar to telling an AI what melodies or songs to use?
i'd agree that a fully AI generated song without any human input is not art, but i would not completely reject AI use either. there is a middle ground somewhere, where that is depends on the intention of the creator.
> For complex AI generated music, tools like Suno and Udio are obviously in a different league as they're trained specifically on audio and can produce genuinely impressive results. But that's not what this experiment was about.
If you can generate a song with a two sentence prompt, so can anyone else. Music and art is only interesting when there’s originality or a point of view being expressed.
I really think art (as in art that’s made for it’s own sake, as opposed to jazzing up a PowerPoint slide or whatever) is by definition something AI will not make inroads in
I wouldn't be surprised if it has, or is currently in the process of, doing so. The results are good enough at this point that I think you could probably drop a few songs into a popular Spotify playlist and someone who didn't listen too closely would be fooled. I assume someone is already doing this.
This is why posts here that are not purely tech related have to be taken with a grain of salt. Total disconnect from what caters the tastes and preferences of most people.
We make art because humans are compelled to express themselves. That's it. That's the whole thing. It's not stack ranked. Humans make art because, in the words of Pile, "I want answers to some questions that I can’t speak."
The idea that you'd stop trying to express yourself because you're comparing your own artistic voice to the output of an LLM and somehow seeing it as less valid, or less worthwhile, is just sad.
I don't mean that as an insult, I mean it's genuinely sad for you and for all of us as a species.
There were always musicians who were better than you. If that didn't stop you, why did AI? Were you only making music to be the best? Surely you knew that was extraordinarily unlikely. If you like making music, then make music and like it.
Fair point. Just trying to analysis my thoughts a bit more here...
...
Before when writing music I could come up with something in my head and make that thing real with significant effort. Now anyone can do that, including myself using AI in just 15 minutes. That demotivates me because why would I put effort into something that AI can do as good, or better than me 10-20x faster? I think if I was such a good musician that the delta between myself and AI was significant it would make sense to continue making music, but in my case it is not.
I also really like music production and music production specifically increasingly feels too easy... Over the last 5 years there's been a huge range of "click and make it sound good" type plugins. I could spend hours trying to make something sound good, but I feel like it's less impressive these days because everything can sound good with minimal effort.
I feel the same about lots of creative stuff tbh... I used to like photography, but smart phone cameras and AI filters / editing are so good these days the delta between what I can take on my $3,000 camera + photoshop skills is actually quite minimal now vs someone with an iPhone. 10-20 years ago it would be completely incomparable.
I used to spend hours designing websites too... Thinking about the brand and UX was one my favourite parts of building new projects. I'll never do that again now. Claude Code is good enough that I can't add enough additional value to make it worth designing from hand.
Part of this is just me as a person being obsessed with how I can add something to the world. A lot of the digital creativity which I used to love are no longer productive or value-adding pursuits. And I think for that reason I'm naturally pivoting my time into other things. Specifically creating physical things.
Not saying everyone is like me obviously. If something brings you enjoyment personally then go do it. Just don't expect anyone to actually care if you spend weeks designing a website or writing some music anymore. It's just not impressive.
If the reason you were making music wasn't that you enjoyed making music, perhaps stopping is the right choice for you. If that was the reason, then AI is irrelevant.
I do enjoy making music, and I don't do it "by hand". I use lots of tools (instruments, electronics, a computer for recording and mixing, the internet for distribution). As long as I'm the one directing the tools, it's still art and it's still my music.
While I'm not against AI music, do not you think there's a difference between laying down some beats in ableton with your own bass + guitar writing+playing, vs prompting an LLM?
This song was generated from my 2-sentence prompt about a botched trash pickup: https://suno.com/s/Bdo9jzngQ4rvQko9