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...
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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?
It's not just good at producing complete songs though, AI has made it trivial to take garbage and make it sound good.
I largely stopped making music because imo unless you're in the top 5% of musicians AI is probably able to write better music than you.
I guess it's the same with visual artists. Unless you're really, really good it's hard to understand why anyone would produce art by hand these days.