Write some generic AI music, have have your small accounts using stolen giftcards bought with dirty money pump the track and watch it climb the charts as other jump on the band wagon.
Et voilà instant layering with no connections.
I'm pretty sure this is exactly how all the music I don't like gets into the charts. :P
You saying it like there are no other easy ways to launder money. Every time I walk by a cleaning service or hairdresser in a less dense populated area I wonder if they are involved in money launderinng.
i've seen a a where three barbershops were a stone's throw away from each other, with a few houses between them on a street in an (only moderately dense) residential area with no carparks anywhere nearby, and wondered how that could possibly have arisen (since they'd detract each other's customers, and laundering operations wouldn't make it so blatantly obvious).
and the same occurs with phone(-repair)-and-vape shops in shopping areas (which I guess are somewhat more understandable, since they only require one employee present each and do get footfall, and the cost to rent a shop has imploded since the coronavirus hit the final nail in the town centre's coffin)
Auto play has been a way for me to find new music. I stopped using it because now every listen is accompanied by a a nagging feeling that the song that is playing might be AI generated.
Now I just go and look for new albums from bands I know I like. I wish there was a pre-2023 filter for the algorithmic feed.
I'd like to point out that there's absolutely no way an Instagram account that is not even a month old gets hundreds of thousands of likes almost every upload. That should be an immediate red flag to everyone, Instagram included.
Another thing worth pointing out is that iTunes charts in 2026 are pretty meaningless. Do you buy music on iTunes? Does anyone else you know buy music on iTunes? Even those that still buy music have at least 3-4 more relevant stores to chase after. It's like finding a niche book category on Amazon, anyone could astroturf their way to the top 100 and I doubt it'd cost you more than for a legitimate artist to even rent a studio to record an album properly.
I bought music from iTunes 2 days ago for the first time in like 15 years. I’ve gone back to the iPod life. But I’d almost never buy anything that would be considered chart level music. I was scrolling through the top 100 thinking “who is buying all this crap?”
That's like asking HN if they buy Christmas CDs at Tesco. This is a very self-selecting group of people. I know people who buy off of iTunes, who don't use Spotify, who've never heard of Bandcamp, who still listen to the radio… there are people beyond your little bubble. It's a big old world.
You're re-arguing their point. They are saying it's such a diverse market that iTunes doesn't effectively act as a proxy for the whole market anymore, not that no one shops there anymore (shades of "No one goes there anymore... It's too crowded!").
I've had pretty good luck finding bands on 7Digital when they don't have a Bandcamp. I'm sure they aren't perfect, but they seem better than Apple at least.
It’s mainly the mental load that you even have to think about it.
I find also that much like junk food, AI music is optimized to be catchy. The initial feeling I get is “yeah this is nice”, but then you realize the lyrics are weird, some words don’t exist, the voice is off…
Guns N' Roses blazed this trail in 1986 with their faux live EP titled Live ?!@ Like a Suicide [0] which was reissued as the B-side to G N' R Lies in 1988.
I've fallen off it a while ago to be honest, AI generated stuff aside, Spotify has only been recommending me really unknown / obscure artists for ages now of debatable quality.
I suspect it's an issue with too big and diverse of a dataset, listening history going back years and tens of thousands of songs.
I'm sorry but this attitude baffles me, and I think it's the sort of thing that will sound so silly in 20 years that we'll have collectively memory-holed it. If you're turned off from listening to Spotify recoms becausue they _might_ be AI and you _might_ not know, what does that say to you about the disconnect between your aesthetic judgment and your values?
If you're listening to Spotify autoplays and a shitty song comes up, skip it. If AI slop is flooding Spotify with shitty songs, they'll naturally fail algorithmically (assuming we trust Spotify to actually be honest about its algos, which I'll admit we shouldn't https://substack.com/@tedgioia/note/c-236242253)
If you're listening to Spotify autoplays and a catchy impressive song comes up, what you do is you _listen to it_ and you _fucking enjoy it_. This knee-jerk disgust reaction of "ugh I worry that it's AI" has no place in your heart in that moment. You're just sitting listening to your plastic-and-rare-earth earbuds reproduce digitized waveforms and paying attention to what the music evokes in you. It seems ridiculous to me that we get distracted by questions about "but what if this music isn't made by a human". Insofar as you're a music-enjoyer, listening to music, the only question should be _is it good_. It shouldn't matter if it was created by duck or slug.
The _economic fairness_ aspect is another matter and I don't have as strong opinions there. I think we should ideally incentivize people who use AI in generating their music to disclose their usage, though I have no idea if it's possible to do so, so that consumers who care about only supporting human artists with their listenship-stats can filter to that group. And certainly anyone who closely imitates _a specific artist_, crossing the line from "inspired by" and "shamelessly ripping off", should be severely disincentivized from doing so, whether they used AI or not.
To a vegetarian: "just think about how it tastes, don't worry if there's meat in it!"
Really this stuff is accelerating a conflict between two philosophies of life:
- one where neural network A (electric) produces a set of stimuli for neural network B (meat), which in turn causes the meat to press buttons to maximize the stimuli received;
- one where humans seek meaning in the world and connection with other humans.
Now, the second is losing, and has been since the decline in philosophical dualism across the 20th century; but it can still express the concepts of "important" and "meaningful", which have no place in the first worldview at all.
> The _economic fairness_ aspect is another matter
More plainly, as soon as I read the headline about one AI occupying 11 top slots I thought it was obviously being gamed by listen-botting. I don't really know how a system where machines "listen" to other machines in order to extract a small revenue from defrauded advertisers is sustainable, but there it is.
This feels like a false dichotomy to me. You can find meaning and connect with other humans over AI music no differently than you can over music written by a celebrity. (And vice-versa, you can listen to music written by a human and just enjoy it for the sound without finding any particular sense of meaning or connection.)
Different people have very different relationships to art (in this case, music). For me, the aspects of communication and empathy are key: I think of a song as a message from a particular person at a particular time trying to get across a particular feeling, message, etc.
There is nothing wrong with your approach to music appreciation (removing the author entirely and appreciating it as an isolated work), but it's worth recognizing that a lot of people have different values from you here and their preferred mode of music appreciation is equally valid.
I see your point, and think its valid, but here is a counter:
Content is graded on both instant appeal (e.g. rotten tomatoes "popcornmeter") and artistic appeal (e.g. rotten tomatoes "tomatometer").
I firmly believe that AI generated content cannot have any artistic appeal, because I believe art is fundamentally an invocation of human expression. This might be fine in some contexts, but in general I'd prefer consuming content from groups that I trust to strike a good balance between these types of appeal (e.g. A24 movies).
> Content is graded on both instant appeal (e.g. rotten tomatoes "popcornmeter") and artistic appeal (e.g. rotten tomatoes "tomatometer").
I understand the distinction, but I don’t find the examples compelling. The difference between the popcorn and tomato meters, as I understand it, is just the source. The latter are critics’ opinions while the former are “regular people” opinions. Professional critics may have some concern for the artistic value of a movie, but their job is to help you decide “should you spend your time with this” and the entertainment value is a primary consideration. Furthermore, a critic can have early access and needs to write their review fast. An audience member, who has no such obligation, can let it ruminate and have their opinions evolve. In that sense, a critic’s opinion may be more influenced by initial appeal.
If you value art as communication with another human soul, then it matters whether a human was involved.
"Who cares if that 'I love you' voicemail is really from your mother. As long as it sounds like your mother, it should give you the same warm feeling."
Man this is my current bug bear. Last year I wanted to go offline for all my music. So many of these sites selling mp3s complain about how Spotify pays a fraction of a cent per stream and I should buy music, and I agree.
But then they sell the mp3 albums at $15, more than the physical version ever was. Come on, there has to be a middle ground. At $5 each I'll buy 20, at $15 maybe 1
when you think there's an AI behind what you are enjoying, it destroys every sense of purpose, and the only goal is clicks and time listened (not trasncendence, recognition, share of emotions or histories), so the "enjoyer" becomes more like a user or consumer than an human enjoying art
This "human connection" is over rated IMHO. We tend to create an image of what a human musician is like and we forget that they are, well, human. Too often human musicians have disappointed fans because of their lifestyle (the expression sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll exists for a reason) or because some do not agree with the social and political causes the musicians support. Occasionally, fans follow an artist for their commitment to their art later to discover they sell out in some way, like their style changes to achieve greater mass appeal, or the sell their work to become a jingle for sugar pops or similar.
I think it is best to appreciate their creation and admit the person creating it may not be someone to place undue adulation on. To quote a film, I think it is best to "separate the art from the artist".
The problem is that it is making Spotify money if they substitute real artists by generated music that they produced themselves. They will have to pay a smaller share of their money to actual artists.
Among other already stated reasons I take listening to human made music as an investment. If everything is AI the originality will disappear because the already struggling artists will be pushed out even more. Even if they move elsewhere then the platform I currently use, and am comfortable with, will become useless to me.
I can’t enjoy listening to music I know was made by AI. If you can, power to you.
Initially bad songs made with real thought often mature into favourites as you learn what the artist was going for.
If you skip every song because you don't immediately like it, then you never learn to refine you palette.
There is then indeed a real fear when a song comes up catered to you, that says nothing about the artist, but was generated to keep you listening. You're getting pidgeonholed.
Interesting. The debate about whether the artist matters in perceiving a piece of art is very old. You don’t seem to consider the possibility that the artist’s intent matters when listening to music. For me it absolutely does. As the AI has no intent (agency), the AI music is void of any value to me.
> Insofar as you're a music-enjoyer, listening to music, the only question should be _is it good_. It shouldn't matter if it was created by duck or slug.
What an awful take. Music is inherently a human act, there's been lots written about this, but the point, and especially for music with lyrics is story telling, emotion, connection, empathy. Things a duck or slug or large language model have not business mimicking.
Well, let's make a revoltingly fun analogy: say a hamburger restaurant opened in your city, that openly admits it puts (ethically acquired) human meat in some of its products. You don't have to worry about the legality of the venture, it's all 100% compliant with the original persons donating their bodies to feed the world. Now, the hamburgers are extraordinarily good tasting, some say the best in town. The price is also good - they have a great hook up for the main ingredient, after all.
By the same logic, would you say that people refusing to eat there have "a disconnect between their culinary tastes and their values?" Or, if people have a visceral reaction to some other fast food joints surreptitiously introducing the same magic ingredient in their diet, would you also tell them to _just eat it_ and _fucking enjoy it_?
The source matters, both for meat and art. It's part of the product itself, you cannot disentangle the taste and sound of the performance from the way it was produced. AI art trying to pass as human art is simply a form fraud, and some people will always reject it, while others are of course free to embrace it and enjoy it.
> You don't have to worry about the legality of the venture, it's all 100% compliant with the original persons donating their bodies to feed the world. Now, the hamburgers are extraordinary good tasting, some say the best in town. The price is also good - they have a great hook up for the main ingredient, after all.
Halfway through this paragraph I started hearing it in the Trump cadence.
> The source matters, both for meat and art.
Yes, exactly. This is why people care about things like DOC, fair trade certifications, UFLPA clothing, cruelty-free cosmetics, and so on.
To deepen the analogy slightly: is the AI "ethically acquired"? Do the people collating the training data have consent for every piece of music they trained it on?
While I think it's an opinion that's somewhat valid and I wouldn't really blame anyone for consuming art this way, it's definitely missing a lot of what art can be about.
A piece of art is not a self-contained thing, the end result isn't where all (or even most) of the interest resides. The intent of the artist, the point they're making, the history that led to it, the references it makes and why, the choices and decisions taken in making it... that's all inherent part of the art and a huge part of why people might enjoy a piece of art or not.
For example, if I listen to some progressive rock, I might enjoy it for how a fellow human managed to identify and break some rules of traditional songwriting, for their expertise in musical theory, for the references they chose to make to other bands/songs/genres... If I learn it's AI-generated, the song itself hasn't changed but there's no point in it anymore, my enjoyment was directly coming from the fact that it was made by a human: if it's a machine I'll just shrug and say "yeah sure everyone knows machines can do that". Entire genres like punk or grunge make zero sense if not human-made.
For a more extreme example: a piece of contemporary art often has very little point in itself. The art is in the artist's process (their point of view, intent, history, etc), not the piece. If a piece is AI-generated, there's literally zero interest in it (except maybe as commentary on AI itself, fine).
> what you do is you _listen to it_ and you _fucking enjoy it_. This knee-jerk disgust reaction of "ugh I worry that it's AI" has no place in your heart in that moment
I suggest being a lot more humble about your understanding of art and other people's relationship to it
> a piece of contemporary art often has very little point in itself. The art is in the artist's process (their point of view, intent, history, etc), not the piece.
I personally find no enjoyment in art where I have to have context for it to be "interesting". Either it is or it isn't interesting on it's own merits. I find all art the same though. If it isn't interesting on it's own, then it's not interesting on the whole (for me).
I wonder how well it would work to use AI as a front end to Band-in-a-Box?
Band-in-a-Box is a commercial program that has been around since 1990. What it did then was let you specify a chord progression, style, tempo, and instruments and it would make a generate a MIDI track. I think it might have also been able to take a melody and come up with a chord progression for it in a style/genre of your choosing.
The target market was musicians. Instrumentalists used it generate tracks to improvise or solo with for example, and songwriters found it useful to essentially have a full band at their beck and call while composing.
Over the years they added more features, and switched to sounds from recordings of real instruments played by real musicians. They have very good stretching and pitch transposition so you can use these at a range of tempos and keys and they still sound good.
It is still aimed at musicians, and can be overwhelming to others. This I've read is made worse because as it has grown in features and capabilities in the 25+ years it has been available the interface has become kind of disjoint.
It is not something the kind of person who just wants to describe what they want to hear and have a song produced would enjoy. But if an AI could operate it for them, maybe that would work and the result would be something with much better sounding instruments than the AI song makers (and without the risk of including unlicensed copyrighted material).
BIAB is still best in class (even if the UI is practically Soviet era) simply because of the sheer number of RealTracks, which are actual performances by musicians that dynamically adapt to your chord progression.
I’ve actually taken some of my own compositions and run them through Suno using the “Cover” option, and it’s pretty nuts what it can do.
What would be really cool is the concept of combining a physical arranger keyboard (like a Yamaha PSR-SX) with real-time orchestration produced by a backing generative model.
> This I've read is made worse because as it has grown in features and capabilities in the 25+ years it has been available the interface has become kind of disjoint.
It's impossible to exaggerate how true this is. I often say "BiaB is the best worst software - or should that be 'worst best software'? - I've ever used." A toolbar that crams dozens of tiny icons, almost no visual hierarchy, dated visual style, waaaay too many dialogs (dialogs within dialogs!), zero discoverability, inconsistent labeling, basic features missing...I could go on. To add insult to injury, I'm using the Mac version and it looks/feels like a port, not a native app.
I like the direction Apple is taking with their digital audio workstation, Logic Pro X. While not overtly AI, they've been introducing intelligent musical features starting with their Drummer feature several years before AI became commonplace.
These days I'm programming drums on dedicated hardware but Logic Pro's Drummer feature had been immensely helpful for me as a guitarist who hadn't done much drum programming but wanted to play along with interesting drum beats while arranging a song. Just a few options but that's what makes it so approachable. It's helped me keep the song "mine" without the hassle of sourcing loops/samples manually, even if only temporarily.
I remember watching a youtube video that was kind of a Star Wars fan fic. It had a great soundtrack, that was a cross between John Williams and Michael Giacchino. The YouTuber was using some commercial program that included samples of all the orchestral instruments and you could use it to compose lush scores. I never used it since it was expensive, but I always dreamed of tools like that, like GarageBand on steroids for orchestras. Now I wonder how quickly I could vibe code something like that...
The code is only a (very important) part of this type of program. The samples are critical and (for the time being anyway) can't be generated by AI.
Especially important if you want orchestral instruments that sound realistic. Just think of the many ways that a single note can be played by a professional player and multiply that by the range of the instrument.
Edited to add: not orchestral instruments, and also not samples, but this gives an idea of the complexities of capturing the characteristics of an amplifier so that it can be modeled faithfully: https://neuraldsp.com/quad-cortex-updates/introducing-tina (I'm not related and I'm actually a Line6 customer, but I saw this at work in an interview by Rick Beato and though it was super interesting)
Agree 100%. The multivariate ways a note can be expressed is almost unlimited. For example, I first heard Bach's Cello Suite #1 played by some random cellist. Fell in love with it and listened to it endlessly. Then I heard Yo-Yo Ma play it and it was a completely different piece.
IIRC the samples in this program were actual performances, so I'm curious how they captured all the variations...
There is a whole world of expensive virtual samples instruments that can very convincingly replicate an orchestral performance in a DAW. See Spitfire Audio, EastWest, Cinesamples, etc.
> I wonder how well it would work to use AI as a front end to Band-in-a-Box?
Wow, I haven't heard that name since... well, since the software was relatively new.
I do like the idea of an AI music tool that lets you have that kind of workflow, choosing a level of granularity (and, presumably, being able to edit the intermediate results etc.).
Personally I would feel ripped off if I'd bought music that would be generated by AI but there was no notification that this was done. Any group that would do so I would permanently disregard for any further consumption or attention from me.
> Any group that would do so I would permanently disregard for any further consumption or attention from me.
Much like saying "I will no longer buy from Brand X on Amazon." I guarantee you that ten "other" companies sell the exact same thing, and they all come from China (or AI, in this case).
Brand reputation is fairly meaningless in a market like that. I mean, sure, Levi's still protects their brand, and Bruce Springsteen won't be putting out any AI musical slop, but if it's ShurFit pants or music by Jest Happening... who knows?
this is an overcorrection not understanding the extent to which music is the product of shared rules that are more an act of mechanical execution than creativity. the creativity is there it's just much smaller than many realize. machine generated music has existed for a long time
My favorite pasttime for the last 12 years, besides reading hacker news, is to make music on my phone, ipad or on my piano. Will I stop making music now that Suno is here? No frigging way. Because I still like to make music. I won’t stop talking either, just because some AI is better at doing conversation about research. If I make enough money on my latest, I will spend more time making music.
tl;dr: the final product is just a receipt of the effort, the sleepless nights, the self-doubt and personal transformation that goes into creating art. They have found a way to automate creating this receipt, without the personal transformation that an artist goes through, a process which leads her to learn more about herself and her place in the world.
An artist will find a way to leverage generative slop into this genuine process, but the by-the-bucket gruel generated in seconds from a prompt will always be a simulacrum of the real thing, despite how good it might sound.
I am pivoting from sterile software engineering where only product and revenue are the guiding metrics, to others where artistry and this personal drive for self-expression will always be valued, despite the attempts at diluting the field for a quick buck by talentless hacks.
The world will always care about Art. It is the most human of instincts.
I dabbled with AI music for a bit with Suno. Worked out well for the most part, only way I'm ever going to hear music with themes for some of niche things I like, like Shadowrun. I threw a bunch of music genres at it and some were good enough that I added them to my normal playlist but after about 30 completed songs I had a hard time coming up with new stuff. As someone who has never tried to create music myself it was fun to play with.
There are two arguments about AI art, one of them is trivially reducible to the “is sampling/collage art”. If you are spending time expressing something using AI produced components then you are producing art, and probably the amount of time you spend working on it (either developing your skills or creating the work) roughly will correlate to how much value others see in it. It’s no different than building a hip hop track out of drum loops.
The second question is more interesting, which is “does raw AI produced artwork have any artistic value” and I am going to punt on the “artistic” part of that equation and answer the “value” part with no, and not because people might not enjoy it, but it falls victim to the classic “my five year old could so that” critique of modern art, except in this case it is true. Anybody can go to an AI and produce some mediocre media.
Where this gets interesting again is _volume_. What AI unlocks is exactly that anybody can create songs, videos and images for _themselves_. The value of it is probably the pennies worth of time ajd expense they put into it, but it might he worth it for them to make something, be mildly amused by it and immediately dispose of it.
You wanted some shadowrun themed music, you got it and enjoyed it. You made something of value only to yourself, but that seems okay? Multiply that times billions of people probably eventually people might luck into something genuinely good and worth sharing from time to time.
> people might luck into something genuinely good and worth sharing from time to time.
A) it would be impossible to find in a sea of AI generated slop
B) even if it were to be recognized as good, it would be instantly copied by other AI’s such that it would be very shortly thereafter be also considered slop
For any work to gain traction with an audience, there needs to be scarcity. Art and artists are valued because they are unique in some way, something about it or them cannot be replicated by others. The ability to instantly produce a piece of “art” negates any artistic value, at least as far as audiences are concerned.
I think your starting definition of value is basically worthless. Value is not about what things cost to make, but what people are willing to pay for them. You reached this conclusion by the end of your comment, but I think it's important to emphasize. My friend group has created incredible value with suno, mostly making meme songs we forget about after a day, but every once in a while we create lasting memories that have real emotional impact. It doesnt matter that anyone can do that, I dont think that cheapens the output at all.
The value you are getting is not from the music as an artistic product, but from the social connection and entertainment it offers your friend group. The meme songs and lasting memories you are getting are fungible with regards to other entertaining and emotionally salient creations you and your friends may share with each other, and not with regards to other pieces of music.
My comment was mostly that it lacks value to _others_. It was probably worth to your friend group roughly the time and money you spent on it. Nobody else is ever going to care.
I played around with Suno a little too. It's actually kind of crazy what it can produce. I mean I don't think it's objectively good in any way but for many applications this (and a lot of other generative AIs) are what I'd call "sufficiently good".
When you move into an apartment or furnish a rental or whatever you might put stuff up on the wall. For many years that might just be some mass-produced prints from IKEA, for example. These might be photos or paintings but a lot of them are "abstract". For this kind of application, current generative AIs are probably sufficient to create what I'd call "wall fillers".
So if you were doing an indie game, it might not be large enough to pay for artists to come up with music or even some basic art assets but an AI can I think fill this role. You can use them as placeholders.
So I'm generally sympathetic to the plight of artists. There is certainly an issue with how these LLMs are trained and if that's "stealing". Legally and ethically we're still working this out because the issue is new.
But I also think there are some things you just don't need an artist for.
So this kind of music has a name, it’s called production music and it’s been long expected in the industry that AI-generated music will compete with the lower-end production music, basically elevator music or background music for corporate training videos etc. It is unlikely, however, that it will get much traction in scripted long form productions, partly because studios believe it’s a legal minefield, and partly due to resistance from creatives (whether justified or not).
My favorite example of resistance from creatives was the space shuttle landing gear button. The space shuttle orbiter was technically capable of performing an automated mission, with the exception of opening the landing gear doors. This was ostensibly so that there would be no risk of the heat shield being compromised, as the landing gear doors were in the heat shield. But it is widely acknowledged that this was an effort by the astronauts office to ensure the continued need of a human crew.
For what it's worth, I support manned spaceflight. But sometimes allowing "creatives" to impede progress has its costs.
Red herring. The Puritan work ethic that seems to always resolve to "human value=human income" (regardless of the ethic's stated intentions) is what causes this, not creatives in and of themselves.
I get that there is a strong online movement to destroy the traditional American Dream value of "work hard, and become rich" but that does not apply in fields where money is not the motivator. No single astronaut has ever expressed financial gain as a motivator for moving into that profession.
Quite the opposite, many have given up fortunes and prosperous businesses to move into spaceflight.
You misunderstand the movements, they exist precisely because of a perception that "work hard" doesn't seem to always mean "become rich", many see rich (correctly or incorrectly) as a product of luck, connections, or other factors unrelated to work. The price of everything constantly going up makes "work hard" work less. They actually would like the dream to work.
Anyway, someone may not want to pursue spaceflight for the money, but everything involved in spaceflight still costs a lot of money, which has to be justified. So I think the phenomenon is still there; people still want to appear to be proving themselves through appearing to work hard and appearing to be needed.
Well I don't know any economic system that guarantees the "get rich" part, nor any that enables such a thing without "work hard". But no other system has enabled so many poor people to become rich people, as has the American system.
I don't live in the US. But I recognize the American system for what it does well.
It's interesting to me that all AI music sounds slightly sibilant - like someone taped a sheet of paper to the speaker or covered my head in dry leaves. I know no model is perfect but I'd have thought they'd have ironed out this problem by now, given how pervasive it is and how significantly it degrades the end product.
I've noticed this too. I have a few theories about this. Disclosure: I know a little about audio, and very little about audio generative AI.
First, perhaps the models are trained on relatively low-bitrate encodings. Just like image generations sometimes generate JPG artifacts, we could be hearing the known high-frequency loss of low data rate encodings. Another idea is that 'S' and 'T' sounds and similar are relatively broad-spectrum sounds. Not unlike white noise. That kind of sound is known to be difficult to encode for lossy frequency-domain encoding schemes. Perhaps these models work in a similar domain and are subject to similar constraints. Perhaps there's a balance here of low-pass filter vs. "warbly" sounds, and we're hearing a middle ground compromise.
I don't know how it happens, but when I hear the "AI" sound in music, this is usually one of the first tells.
Agreed. I find that particularly annoying, and I also seem to find that the spatial arrangement or stereo effect is muted for most instruments (or the model simply doesn't use that feature as well as a good human musician).
I suspect it's because AI generates music as a waveform incrementally not globally so it favors smoothly varying sounds, not sharp contrast. If it generated MIDI data and then used a MIDI synth to create the audio, you wouldn't get that.
Rick Beato had an episode about AI music where he talked about how easy it is to game the iTunes charts. So few people buy music from iTunes that it's relatively cheap to buy your way onto the charts.
Pretty common for authors to get people to pre-order their books so when they go on sale they top the chart for that day (the book's release day) in their category.
I find the production and consumption of AI music to be uniquely... anti-human. You can make utilitarian arguments for most other uses of AI. For example, the code you're generating didn't exist before, and it would take serious time or money to write it. So, I get it, the economic argument is compelling enough.
But music? There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing. Millions upon millions of them, in every conceivable style, for every conceivable mood. There's nothing you gain by listening to AI music day-to-day, so what's the argument for it - other than utmost indifference to human creativity?
Or the uno reverse - that's what the anti-AI crowd is experiencing in their inability to adjust to the coming reality.
You're just going to have to make peace. I don't know how y'all can cope with being angry at progress all the time. It's not going to stop for you. It's also really awesome that we live to see this come to pass.
> As far as I'm concerned we're content scarce and I don't care what makes the music - humans, robots, netherworld demons - I just want good music.
Presumably you've already listened to every piece of music ever recorded? Otherwise it seems it would be more efficient to do that first than wait for AI to generate it and you chancing upon it.
I think humans are machines, they are just vastly more advanced than any machine invented by humans. This is something I thought long before the current AI hype cycle.
What do you think are some important differences between machines and humans?
At an abstract enough level, not really. I treat them with care and try to give them whatever they need to do their thing. I want them to last as long as possible.
But in asking this question you must have some differences in mind. Could you speak to some of those?
What is the non machine part? What do you believe exists other than chemical and electrical systems?
Edit: If you mean machine in a more colloquial sense that's fine. Let us first get clear if we mean machine in that sense or in sense of any physical mechanism.
If the question is what is there about us that's not covered by the body, we can mention things like: feelings, intentions, perceptions, acts of consciousness.
Or however else you want to divide up things that have to do with the mind.
Eliminativists/illusionists may completely deny such things. The rest can fall into many camps, some of them religious.
It's not like there are any surprising new parts. It's about how one chooses to interpret/conceive those we are familiar with.
And what part remains in that space after we have mapped all the brain signals and configurations corresponding to these feelings, intentions and perceptions? I don't feel the need to bring up absurd unproven concepts without waiting for more data. It'd be like me saying there is something aphysical behind Mercury's orbital perturbations if I were born before SR and GR were discovered (as an example). No point in jumping to such an argument without first exhausting more believable causes first. History is very strongly against any kind of bet in the aphysical.
My question to you would be, what do you think remains that's not a simple natural system if/after something like Neuralink is successfully established?
Forgive me if I ramble for too long. I've been seeing a lot of comments in this vein and the thoughts have accumulated.
Tacit in your question is the notion that the inquiries that are important are those that can result in predictive models of phenomena encountered in the world — hence feelings, intentions & perceptions turn into a shorthand for reported accounts of the same — and that given enough reports (data), we could build a dictionary that maps a bundle of reports to a(n equivalence class) of physical system(s).
But when we speak of having feelings, or acting on intentions, most often we are not using these as stand-ins for our failure to pin down the current state of our physical system to another. If I am exposed to fire, I want to get away — I am unconcerned with how well I could translate my report of the pain to a patterns of neural activations. The reality of pain for me is unaffected by the fidelity of my "experience report dictionary". And it is there whether it's a brush fire or a neuralink streaming fire bits to my cortex.
If you decide that primacy ought to always be given to things as they can be modeled, you can choose to elevate the "experience report dictionary" and make the reality of experience a second-class citizen. Then you end up with an eliminativist ontology where indeed, we can rightly be called a mechanism.
But that is a "world-making" decision, a value judgement: "this is how things should be seen". It might be sponsored by our recent history, where we got high on the fruits of applied scientific modelling, nursed by the education which taught us that being a good engineer can have us continue in line with that, and pushed on us by impoverished modern eschatologies promising eternal youth, experience machines and what-not at this point. And it might seem preferable or more dependable than whatever equally impoverished, inhumane eschatologies we may have been presented with before.
It doesn't mean there isn't a whole world of places where we can go instead. But in general, we don't change our value judgements until the current one seems inadequate for some reason.
> If we created a molecule by molecule synthesis of a human being, you'd agree it is conscious and the same thing as a human created via typical reproduction, right?
Eternal youth and experience machines don't seem like problems with any conceptual difficulties. We already know electrical and chemical signals change what the brain perceives and eger6nal youth is no more difficult a concept than making any other form of long lasting machine. Obviously there is a long sequence of research problems to solve in the line but none of it is conceptually impossible or blockaged.
Yes so that was my point, if we can agree that a molecular synthesis of a human being, being a pure naturalistic physical process is as good as any other human then if we assume some aphysical element to consciousness, then we have a purely physical process for achieving a system with aphysicality in it. Which means either its not in fact aphysical or then what, we are left with the quetion at what point during this assembly process this new special aspect arises.
It's my feeling that we are still getting too ahead of ourselves in judging some supernatural element, that it's much like the atomism question in ancient greece. An honest thinker back then could have no really firm reason to support one side over another and they tended toward thesse kinds of endless circular metaphysical discussions. That is until we had further data and observation tools which settled the question experimentally. Juat like certain aspects of consciousness, atomism felt an insolvable question in some ways back then. I feel the problems we will have with consciousness will eventually have a similar fate. This bet has always succeeded for millenia till now.
Another different question to help me understand what you think of this. I think you agree with me, but just to clarify. A human being is independent of the process of creation right? If we created a molecule by molecule synthesis of a human being, you'd agree it is conscious and the same thing as a human created via typical reproduction, right?
Oh that's what you're banging on about. You think AI is like a demon, or you think LLMs are people too, something like that, hence "I don't care what makes the music". That would otherwise be a spooky and implausible phrase that says something strange about what gives music quality, as if quality in music is something ethereal and mathematical and objective and detached from the human condition, and detached from artists. But if you think the AI counts as a person too then it seems less cold and abstract.
(Belatedly) yes. Kind of a big argument to grapple with, but let's start by considering everything. I mean, all the stuff, the abstract stuff, that's out there objectively in the universe and in the future, waiting to be discovered. I believe there's quite a considerable amount of it. It's all potentially of interest to us eventually, and only a teeny tiny part of it is comprehensible to us now. That part is at the leading edge, the cutting edge of our enquiries, and in order for us to see and comprehend and even care about that part, it has to relate to us. It has to be oriented to us and our thoughts and things we can use.
You see what I'm getting at? Humans don't really like abstract things. Mathematicians seem to, but I doubt that even mathematics truly has an objective abstract quality that's distant from human concerns. I reckon humans do human mathematics, and it probably has fashions, too, it's probably modern and current, that is, of its time and place.
So you could accept that, but still claim that music relates strongly to mathematics as we know it. Of course there's such a thing as the mathematics of music. I could dispute the value of that to the quality of the music, as being too abstract and niche compared to the evocative qualities of music, where it evokes things in our physical world: the sounds of hitting things with sticks, heartbeats, tones of voice, meaningful instruments such as bugles evoking battles, mazy noodling around evoking contemplative thoughts (is that abstract?) ... but either way, the point is that we live in a sort of parochial Bag End, if Middle Earth represents everything abstractly possible, and so we only understand hobbit things and only appreciate hobbit art. So to speak.
Sometimes you can't even tell. I was in an uber drive where the driver had this incredible playlist of Brazilian bossa nova. It was sublime and some of the best tracks I ever heard. He even said he loves the singer but cannot find their name anywhere. It turns out it's a youtube playlist that is fully AI generated and genuinely some of the best bossa nova you can imagine. I still hear that playlist daily tbh. Moreover, imagine if you are an independent musician, have a good voice, know how to play instruments...you could ask AI to generate hit tracks for you and then you can play them at concerts or shows and claim them for yourself
There isn't that much good electro-swing made by humans, and not much new coming out. One can easily consume it all and want to hear some new tunes in that genre, and maybe AI can help with that.
I guess we've had different experiences then, because youtube has had no problem showing me huge amounts of electro-swing in the past (before AI-generated music was a thing). I've somewhat moved on from that genre though
I think that's probably the crux of where there's conflict here. There was a time in my life where I definitely much more emotionally invested in the music listened to. I thought I'd definitely kill myself if I ever went deaf. But these days, I really just have it for background noise when I'm working, exercising, doing chores. And it's all just electronic stuff – I don't like vocals (unless they're sufficiently unintelligible so they don't become a distraction to my thinking). At the end of the day, it's just some beats to me. AI or not.
I can recommend you to spend some free time to really listen to music again, Beethoven, Hendrix, Gorillaz, Slayer, Sub Focus, whatever floats your boats your boat. Your brain is wired to remember and sing along to music around a campfire, and will pump you full of exquisite drugs if you really give into it, ideally together with other people. Alleviates stress and makes you happy.
Music demoted to just background noise is unrelated to the social concept of music, which is so ingrained in our nature that we all can’t escape it. And that to me is also why I agree with OP—AI-generated music is fundamentally treason to our species.
Is formulaic pop music produced by a corporate label that's designed to push all the right buttons more "human" than the average track you find published on Suno? I wouldn't say so. Pop music was already to some extent a commodity.
Actually, it is more human, because there are humans involved at each level. Doesn't matter if you think the music sucks, it's definitionally more human than AI music.
I feel like the more important distinction might be whether the creator(s) are expressing themselves or are solving an optimization problem of maximizing audience approval. The latter seems true for both some human and AI pop songs.
One is a form of communication that requires (at least to some extent) meeting both sides to meet in the middle, the other is unidirectional broadcasting.
It is sort of a blend now. Beats and rhythm tracks are often generated. Vocals are auto-tuned. There's still some humanity in it, but it's not what it used to be.
I mean, maybe in the sense that any other corporate activity is technically “human activity” because humans happened to be the ones doing the formula-dictated tasks, but it's ultimately the formula at the helm, not the human.
AI music is generated from the result of training on far more human-made music than any human could ever consume in their lifetime, so there are even more humans involved in its creation.
> Pop music was already to some extent a commodity.
The commodification of humanity predates human history. It may be a negative trend that alienates us from each other and from the products of our labor, but it is truly ancient.
Electronic music exists but has limited commercial scope because most people don't see the point of music if they can't form an emotional connection with the artist through the music. Popular music has an intense focus on the artist.
AI "music" has the same issues as electronic music but worse: because it's trying to imitate humans rather than be its own thing like electronic music, it's not only emotionally unavailable but also creepy. Can you imagine listening to an AI "musician" laughing, for instance? It makes my skin crawl even thinking about it.
That's a dangerous game to play, though—the only value record companies have is their intellectual property, especially if they are no longer financing recording new material. Convincing people to listen to slop is a great way to completely obsolete yourself.
Not only that, but music generated by AI is not copyrightable. If it's truly 100% AI generated, you can redistribute it to your heart's content without infringement. (IANAL)
Someone will surely attempt some kind of end-run around this, perhaps through ToS alterations at the service you obtain the music from, but it's undoubtedly a problem for the labels. In the meantime they have a strong incentive to keep human creativity in the loop.
To me the anti-AI crowd is looking at this through the wrong lens, it's now possible to generate an infinite library of music that isn't copyrighted, and can be freely shared, some of which is quite good. There is a pathway all the way from conception to mass distribution that doesn't require the major labels. Whatever else happens that seems like a silver lining at least.
If you consider say elevator music - music that's just there to fill space, rather than to be listened too - then I don't think there's that much difference between using AI to produce it and using AI to produce clip art or boilerplate code.
Music as wallpaper vs music as artistic paintings.
We are fine with mass-producing wallpaper with machines. People buy this every day, no problem.
We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art".
Both hang on the wall as decoration. Essentially the same purpose. But we have very different feelings about them and hold them to very different standards.
Music is the same. We have muzak - background music that isn't supposed to be listened to, it's just wallpaper. I don't think many people object to this being machine-made in bulk. And then we have music that is art and is supposed to be listened to explicitly. We hold this to a higher standard and expect it to be the product of human creative urges.
It depends entirely upon who the "we" is in question. There has long been an aristocratic tantrum against affordable decoration in the art and architecture world, dating back to men's formal wear going mostly monochromatic as soon as colors became widely affordable instead of reserved for the gentry. There were similar ones against ornamentation with Brutalism (mixed with dadaist 'the world doesn't deserve art!' post WWI despair memes).
The cynical would dismiss the whole distinction between mass produced and unique art as arbitrary. Or worse, just as a racket to create artificial scarcity, a social kabuki show to create the pretension of high culture, or for the purpose of some sort of criminal scheme like money laundering.
Well, code and visual art is more differentiated, so the thing you need probably doesn't exist and it would take effort & money to procure it. Not always, but often enough to make rational people default to AI.
With music... if there's a style you like, no matter how eclectic, there are probably thousands matching human-recorded tracks you can listen to today.
I guess using AI is just the logical continuation of what mainstream pop already did before that: reduce music to the lowest common denominator so it can appeal to as many listeners as possible. AI only speeds up that process.
I remember when Apple got ridiculed for running a commercial where they crushed a bunch of musical instruments and artist supplies into the shape of an iPad.
I guess if AI companies did the same, they would be crushing people into the shape of an input prompt.
There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing
You train an AI on that, in order to create something that combines all of the best parts that you want. If anything, I think AI music is the natural progression of innate human desire to leverage and "stand on the shoulders of giants" to create something bigger from smaller pieces.
Which is of course nonsense because LLM is from definition unable to bring in something new. It's not standing on shoulders of giants, it's just making endless copies of them.
That is trivially untrue, even if we ignore the misnomer of trying to use a language model for non-linguistic audio file outputs. I can assure you there was no reference material of say Sam Altman getting arrested when he is getting caught stealing GPUs from a shelf of a BestBuy. (One of the uses of SORA.)
Used Suno to reimagine a handful of my old demos late last year, and honestly the results floored me. I could never release those tracks though, purely out of shame. But it seems pretty practical to study the AI remixes to understand what I like about them, and use these as a practice tool for music production.
It's not that people want to listen to AI music, per se. According to the article, this artist charting was part of an April fools gag. It's about ego, or maybe hubris. People think their idea for a record is good, but don't want to learn musical composition. Instead, they put blind faith in AI generation. Gen AI is more for the idea men unwilling to put in the effort than the consumers.
Because human singers will usually sing about what they like. They will use their own life experience and imagination to write and sing songs. Other people may or may not like them.
AI will only sing songs that other people like, so AI singers will naturally attract more listeners.
You’ve hit upon a bit of a paradox inherent in music - the average listener really gives next to no shits about human creativity or the artistry and hard work that goes into being a musician capable of releasing music. They can’t even comprehend, so don’t. Music is something that comes out of a speaker same as water is something that comes out of a tap.
It isn’t indifference, it’s obliviousness. My mother keeps on listening to AI music, and I’ll be like “why are you listening to this slop” and she’ll then argue back that it isn’t AI, it’s actually really very good and I’m just jealous, as the synthetic voice continues to warble nonsenses like a fucking arcade machine full of snakes in the background.
It’s an even more uncomfortable truth: your average Joe cannot tell the difference between human made music or AI generations, just as they also really think that that 8 year old African boy with a huge beard and no hands built a helicopter out of old bottles, or that that cat walked into a hairdresser wearing a suit and had its whiskers curled.
So there’s no argument for it apart from “people will buy the product because they can’t tell that it isn’t real”.
while I don't like AI music, "Millions upon millions of them, in every conceivable style, for every conceivable mood." is something that's not true. There very often is a gap which forces me to open up Ableton and make edits
> I find the production and consumption of AI music to be uniquely... anti-human.
I mean, I'm a professional musician - not sure if that gives me more credibility or less - but I don't feel slighted by folks listening to music made by others (whether those others are other humans, or birds, or whales, or AI).
As you point out, music has an infinite edge; one can spend a lifetime exploring either its niches or its closures and still have an infinity of each to continue discovering.
As moat identification goes, I do feel slightly secure in the sense that AI music (and the information age generally) seems to stoke a hunger for dirty traditionals played well on thick steel strings, and it's going to be a minute before robots can pick 'em like we can.
This sounds a tad misanthropic, if I had the choice to opt out of working full time making music is one of the primary things I'd spend my time doing. I like software but at the end of the day to me it's the most creative job I can do while still putting bread on my table reliably.
The reasons I don't do music full time are purely economic ones, far from wanting to 'free up' my time to do other things with AI music I'd rather have more of my time occupied by working on music. I want AI to automate the things I don't want to do, I want it to automate the mindless drudgery that is required to exist in a society. Automating art so that I have more time to work is a philistine position in my view, and one which reveals a somewhat dystopian vision of humanity's relationship with both art and work.
What an insane take. You dont have any songs you like that there arent many others like it and that you can generate an endless supply of with AI? Come on.
I sure do love the dying thrashes of human-creativity chauvanists. AI art, AI video, and AI music will eclipse most humans and there is absolutely nothing that will stop it. And you will use it and appreciate it more too. Once you open your eyes that is.
Have you heard of dubstep? It sounds like robots falling down stairs, and humans made it and love it. If AI can make music less crappy, I'm all for it.
my music tastes are pretty mainstream, and this just does absolutely nothing for me. it's exactly what i'd expect AI music to sound like - completely forgettable, with nothing interesting about it.
i'd be willing to believe that this music was legitimately charting if it had at least some redeeming qualities, but i can't imagine how this could honestly get eleven spots on the iTunes chart without gaming it in some way.
I listen to a lot of music of all different genres depending on mood, and I can honestly I don't think anyone could peg this as AI just by listening to it. It's soulless and devoid of emotion, but so are a lot of real artists. That wouldn't even be so obvious if they just added some background something, anything, like Wall of Sound style. If I played this for anyone and they said "it sounds like AI", I'd confidently tell them they are full of shit.
>honestly I don't think anyone could peg this as AI just by listening to it. It's soulless and devoid of emotion
i agree. as far as ai slop goes, it's pretty good. it could be made by a human who wasn't very artistic. i'm not saying it's obviously AI generated, just that it's not very good music. but that's not because i dislike popular music - i think most of the hot 100 is usually pretty good, and contains significant artistic value even if it isn't to my taste.
if somebody was claiming this was created by a human, i'd believe them but i'd have the same objection: this isn't going to hit 11 positions on the itunes music chart without gaming the chart in some way.
"ai generated music creator manipulates the itunes chart to occupy 11 positions" is a much less interesting story than "ai generated music is so popular it occupies 11 spots on the itunes charts"
> where do people stand on the Flying Lizard's cover of Money (that's what I want)?
It's fine precisely because it provokes emotion that AI stuff doesn't. You may love or hate what the Flying Lizards did, but it's very memorable and you will have an opinion about it (My wife loves it; I think it's stupid--C'est la vie.)
The AI generated music just sounds like every other average artist. I'm definitely not even convinced it's AI. It could very well be somebody claiming "AI" in order to game the system or get people talking about it.
As for occupying iTunes spots, why not? Is there much difference between Max Martin and his ilk shitting out yet more generic glop or AI doing it?
It genuinely warms my heart that the Flying LIzards did what they did .. but I also think it kind of stupid in a fun way and don't got out of my way to listen to it.
I feel much the same about a lot of the early AI music I've heard, I have a couple of channels on a lesser rank of RSS notifications but more and more there's less and less that's remarkable and it's feeling like the worst kinds of elevator music .. you know, not the Brian Eno stuff . . .
So yeah, we're sitting about like two Yorkshiremen giving a real Thomas Beecham "Shostakovich? I think I stepped in some once" vibe here. Probably deservedly.
> completely forgettable, with nothing interesting about it
You just described 90% of young country for decades now. I keep waiting for its fans to get tired of being pandered to with formulaic lyrics, but they seem to be an endless well.
I’ve heard lots of music like this over the years. It’s catchy, the lyrics are very relatable to the audience of people who like this music. It might not be your thing, but it is certainly enjoyed by many, and there are albums written around this subject. Folk/blues are made of this subject.
Is it over all flat and boring? Somewhat. You can only hear the same thing so many times before it gets tiring.
A lot of them read like twitter bots with generic “wow beautiful <emojis>”
Wherever there is profit to be made on the internet, you have massive amounts of weird abuse and botting to game the system. Maybe not even literal bots, but paying a sweatshop in India to leave thousands of generic comments to boost your rankings on the algorithm.
What makes it noise is less the actual comment itself. If I showed someone a piece of art in person and they said this to me, it would be a genuine response. What makes this particular instance noise is it reeks of mass automated messaging with no thought behind it. These comments are generic because they aren't people commenting on the thing they saw, they are just templates being spammed out on mass so they make them generic to fit any context.
To me, this present-day noise is indistinguishable from the pre-bot noise. It's the same noise, in that both things are just noise of that shape. "How beautiful!" "I really feel this one!" "I love this song!"
Sometimes, the signal-to-noise ratio is better. Sometimes it's pretty bad. It always has been this way in online discourse -- especially with things that appeal to old folks.
In a track where the protagonist primarily complains about feeling old, it makes sense that most of the comments are that of what old folks have always written online.
(Are these particular comments primarily bot spam? Maybe. I peered into the depths a bit, and accounts for the top comments I looked at had been around for years. That isn't evidence for or against a well-orchestrated long con, but orchestration is hard and people who write insipid comments are plentiful.)
The AI comment push on that video is certainly an interesting look into the future. Record labels have their work cut out for them in this brace new world.
At least what I’m seeing in dance music is online sales and streaming seem kind of dead, and everything is about events, personalities, and unreleased tracks that all the big names have but you can’t get for a year after if ever.
If you go on soundcloud/spotify/etc there is infinite EDM slop that isn’t worth listening to. But if you listen to real event recordings on YouTube, they are all playing mostly the same stuff by actual artists with new/unreleased music that people get hyped to hear since you can’t find it anywhere else.
It's not great in that way. The mastering -- if there is any -- is definitely kind of shit.
But that's a relatively easy thing for a human with the right combination of toolchain, ears, and experience to fix. It tends to be a slow process that takes a good bit of time, but lots of actual-mixdowns start off way worse than this before they get polished up by a skilled mastering engineer.
(Maybe in a year or three we'll have the mastering process automated into an uncanny mush of soullessness, as well.)
(I haven't actually tried this, I just watched the linked Benn Jordan video.)
IMO, the ideal would be for all music to be supplied unmastered so the listener's playback software can apply this process to their own taste. Mastering is necessary for listening with garbage playback equipment (e.g. phone speakers) or noisy listening environments (e.g. cars, parties), but it makes things sound worse in good conditions. The best sounding music CDs I own are classical CDs on Telarc that have liner notes bragging about the complete lack of mastering.
> Mastering is necessary for listening with garbage playback equipment (e.g. phone speakers) or noisy listening environments (e.g. cars, parties), but it makes things sound worse in good conditions.
Eh? I listened to it on quite good nearfield gear, in a decent room, and the AI track linked above still sounds like it needs a good bit of help from a responsible adult to bring it up on this rig. :)
Good mastering helps everywhere -- on all systems. For instance: The sound of Steely Dan is pretty good on playback with about anything, I think, and that sound took a ton of work.
And while classical music is not my first preference, I do love me a good Telarc recording. I strongly suspect that the signal path that they use isn't necessarily quite as pure as they insist that it is. Everything is a tone control, including a microphone -- and money is money. They're not going to reschedule an orchestra to fix an untoward blip at 3KHz. They'll just fix it in post (hopefully, as minimally as possible) and send it.
But otherwise, I agree. The mastering process can be automated. Ultimately, it will be. And for sure, it will also be a customizable user preference.
Some of that work has already been in the bag for decades. Ford, for instance, has been using DSPs in their factory car audio systems to shape sounds in unconventional ways for over 30 years. This gives them a lot of knobs to turn, and to fix into constraints, to help shape a listener's chosen music to sound as good as it can on less-than-ideal built-down-to-price on-road audio systems.
Or at least: It sounds as good it can to a consensus of engineers, or of a focus group.
But the knobs exist. And they don't have to be fixed or constrained: They can (and will) be automatically twisted to suit a listener's preferences.
I'll try to make time to check out your link in a day or two.
I don't like most AI music I've heard, but you shouldn't be voted down for expressing a preference.
I do sometimes turn on ambient noise, some of it is randomized and musical (like '88 keys' at mynoise.net). Not AI, just algorithmic, but just because there's no human composer doesn't mean it MUST be condemned.
I feel like now, you can't even tell! I was in an uber drive where the driver had this incredible playlist of Brazilian bossa nova. It was sublime and some of the best tracks I ever heard. He even said he loves the singer but cannot find their name anywhere. It turns out it's a youtube playlist that is fully AI generated and genuinely some of the best bossa nova you can imagine. I still hear that playlist daily tbh. A legitimate, real Brazilian was vibing to a playlist he didn't even know was AI generated...
It may not be traditionally "composed" but there was a lot of human thought that went into creating the loops and balancing how they play off against each other.
If you think that AI generated beige music is nerdcore, you don't know what you're talking about. The best is far more sophisticated and deeply - sarcastically - self-referential that I think it would be a real challenge for AI to come up with something both compelling and meaningful.
I think you touched on the point: people who don't actually care about music think musical pablum is 'good', because it slides in their ear and out without challenging them with actual 'listening'. This guy even assigns a genre to his slop while clearly knowing (and, really, caring) nothing about what he claims to like listening to.
i love the braindead takes in the replies you are getting. attacking you for enjoying AI music. these people are in for a rude awakening... actually no. they'll assimilate quietly and pretend they were never this dense.
AI music is just as good as all human-made music. It is at the point of indistinguishability now and anyone actually using suno v5+ knows this.
Go on KEXP, find a new band you like, share it with your friends, buy a physical copy, buy a t-shirt, book tickets, like their stuff on socials. Watch the record companies flock to real bands.
For the second time on this thread, start with Angine de Poitrine. Live music is the antidote.
I agree. When I had my kid I stopped going to concerts because of parenting, time, etc. Last year I went to the Warped tour and discovered some new bands, it changes the whole experience and my joy for music and discovering new bands like when I was young. I have listened to some AI music as a curiosity and the only way to describe it, it is soulless.
We've seen a steady shift in music over the past 2 decades from full length albums, to single hits, to artificially generated.
Surely there's some gained and some lost. But coming from the era of buying an entire album, spending time reading the CD booklets and art, and listening to 10 songs which tell a larger story ---- what's being lost really hits home.
This comment is like 20 years out of date haha. People shifted to single hits when the iTunes store was selling songs for 99 cents. Now (and by now I mean for over a decade) we’re in the age of streaming, and you can easily access whole albums with zero friction. It’s the best time ever for the full listen through experience. And artists are responding by releasing long albums.
What I do think is lost these days is listening to the save album over and over again.
I really don't think we have. When I was growing up in the 90s it was the heyday of the pop single but there were still plenty of albums being produced and I think it's the same today.
I can tell you that myself (and many others) still create concept albums as our primary format. It's not that people aren't still creating it.
The choice is still there for any listener that cares about albums as a format. I don't mean that in a negative way. I suspect that many people listen to both playlists of singles, and albums of their favourite artists, depending on mood.
No, the game has changed. Back then, the singles were typically accompanied by an album, even if it was just filler. It's better to release singles now due to the way the Spotify and iTunes algos work. Best practice is now to release your songs one at a time rather than a full album (at least if you aren't an established player).
On one hand this pretty much destroys thematic albums (like classical music, prog rock, Tool or for example, something like Alice in Chains' Dirt), but on the other few could pull it off and those who can are still doing it (ex: the latest Opeth album). So maybe discovering new music is hurt, because itunes and spotify look like crowded ERs, but there's just as much good music out there - regardless of your tastes.
Right, there's less unnecessary dressing of an "album" of filler. But I don't think that's a meaningful change. Singles drove the market then and they do now. Albums were still produced then and still are now.
ah, the standard trite, reductive anti-pop cudgel.
no, these days, pop albums are more frequently meant to be consumed in their entirety, often with full length visuals for each song that blend into each other in order.
* the death of radio has really meant that singles are declining in utility, especially in our social media era where the songs that pop off an album are not necessarily the record-designated singles
* the more parasocial development of pop encourages fans to invest more in merch and the concept of the album
* like everything else in the economy trending towards more expensive but meaningful experiences, tours are becoming larger productions to experience an album intensely
* in the AI era, we are now seeing artists pivot towards doubling down on experiences that AI cannot curate and provide meaning for
Rosalia this year is touring with a full orchestra and RAYE with a full big band, because these are intentional choices that the pop music industry has been trending towards for a while. There's always going to be trite drugstore music as long as there are drugstores, but what is charting is not really that at the moment.
I feel like in those days I really didn’t appreciate albums. Storage was a premium so I would focus on bands greatest hits songs vs discographies. Both in terms of my burned cd collections and early mp3. I didn’t start getting into albums until terabyte hard drives were cheaper. Then I started pirating discographies and listening to the back catalog for the first time.
music has been a product of its form factor for a long time. It's no coincidence that the wax cylinder, 78, 45, 33, cassette, CD, and mp3 dictated changes in how music was packaged (single, lp, ep, album, b sides) and the average length of a popular song.
Good thing music as a topic is diverse and people are doing all kinds of things. But yes, commercially distributed mass-consumption music is influenced by its packaging and distribution ... obviously.
There is another new trend now that some artists are doing album concerts, where the set list follows one of their albums. I thought that was cool.. probably as a reaction, on how to bring back the album in a way.
One can still buy artisan albums created by independent singers/bands. But they tend to get lost in the marketing/influencer noise and thus do not get worldwide success. As a result you have to search harder for them.
it's become a much larger section of music. Notice, there are no bands any more. Try finding a metal band with musicians under 40, or a Greenday, Linkin Park or, the itself automated Kpop industry aside, a spontaneous boy or girl group.
Solo pop or hip-hop performers with a focus on social media have crowded out collectively made music, likely due to the general social atrophy and technology enabling production from their bedrooms.
Anecdotally, I used to be a guitarist and a lot of my friends are musicians and teachers, teenage bands are pretty much nowhere to be seen.
I suspect this is some trick somewhere with purchased views or something. Not that I'm against AI music. I love the various lo-fi / cyberpunk / etc. AI youtube channels. I also enjoy my own suno music. Overall, I'd say AI music dominates my listening these days.
It just seems unusual that a lot of people like the same thing. Even the channels on Youtube that I listen to are so prolific (people generate a large amount of music and just stick it in there) that I never go look for a particular track or anything. And there are so many of them that each one only gets a few thousand views.
That's true, but I've noticed that AI text content is very prompter-focused. Someone once described them as dreams - more meaningful to the dreamer than to anyone who has to listen to them narrated. Perhaps it's just inherent to the fact that textual content is rarely viral at that length. It's a base-rate issue.
Have you ever been to a live rock show and felt exhilarated during it, feeling connected to the crowd and the musicians and the music? AI won't replace that, and I feel bad for people who won't get to experience it because "AI is good enough".
I have. It's exhilarating. The feeling of involved in the crowd during a great live performance by excellent musicians is one of the best things I've ever experienced.
Not the person you're replying to but each have their time and place. When I have a lo fi playlist on I don't expect to feel exhilarated, connected to the crowd and the musicians.
It kinda makes sense AI music is becoming so popular. We (I'm a suno guy too) are literally providing constant feedback to the models over what they like and don't like.
Mainstream music was created for a good 20 years using the following process:
1. Do the survey/focus groups to figure out a hot topic for a song. For instance your exploration shows that 300K girls between 13 and 17 years old were left by their boyfriend, so there is a 300K market for a song about that.
2. Find someone or group who will sing the song. Something your target audience will identify. E.g. "rebellious teenager" (take Britney Spears), "we need a group that will attack larger target" - take Spice Girls - we take one black, one white, one Latino looking (doesn't have to be real Latino, obviously), one polite and nice, one impolite. You get the point.
3. Note: singer/group does not need to know how to sing, they need to move reasonably on the scene, the rest autotune and computers will handle easily.
So, given the process, AI singer is just a little bit different "music" production process, not so much different from the one used up to date except that you don't need autotune anymore.
Luckily there are still people who do music for the sake of doing music and it really stands out as compared to 80% of fodder for listeners that is on YT, radio, Spotify.
You could say I'm a music snob, big time. I can't stand any of the streaming services, because they only have a small fraction of my favorites (which is variations of discord jazz, often in other genres. I like when music decomposes into noise and then restructures again.) Due to my interest there, I've done a deep hole with AI music generation, not the services, but developing the models and exploring the open weight models being released.
There will be quality real art music created by these systems, but not by those that prompt alone. This is a whole new level of instrument, and the levels of control beneath are there to seriously transform one's thoughts to music, and melody, and that composed symphony of separate elements into a symphony of intended meaning.
Perhaps traditional music and this form of music should be treated separate. The distinction between AI music that is prompt-only and what can be created from a deeper set of controls is immense, and is not distinguished at this time, and may never be with how surface level this entire public assessment of AI music happens to be.
My take is that it will be somewhat similar though perhaps more complex to using sample based libraries, whether it’s for electronic music, symphonic loops, etc., I feel like this will just be the next generation of that kind of music making. I find it very unlikely that it will replace the kind of music making that comes from playing actual instruments and recording them from a live human player but it could still be interesting in its own right.
A couple of weeks ago I went to an 'Italian' restaurant. To my surprise, they played a 10-second video loop of an AI-generated stereotypical 'blues' singer with obvious artefacts. The music was a mix of 'blues' with nonsensical lyrics that couldn’t be found online. It was an odd experience. I don't think it was this creation, but it was disconcerting. Felt like Blade Runner isn't too far away.
There's a fair number of ai generated 1.5 hour or so collections of blues songs on YouTube, and some are actually pretty decent. I suspect the human in the loop guides the lyrics to keep them sensible and the voice from being too muddled, as there's plenty of lower quality stuff too. Same goes for a variety of instrumental stuff.
I hate it, and I hate liking some of it, as it is easier to find than quality human produced stuff in some styles and I'd prefer to support analog over digital creation.
With that said, there's a blues AI cover of gangsta's Paradise that is pretty sweet played at 90% speed. Again, I wish it was human performed, and I'm continuously conflicted about it.
It's similar pattern that we've seen previously, but exaggerated by modern trends and modern technology: the most popular cultural items will often be meaningless and base, and if you want something substantial you need other ways to find meaningful content.
For large swaths of music I'm not sure that matters all that much, not anymore. At least the copy-paste bands had some level of uniqueness, there always seemed to be a distinct sound or gimmick.
I don't really like much of the "mainstream" music right now. It's basically whining, high pitched young men. They all sound exactly the same to me, you can't hear or make outall the words, they play the guitar, sort of and all bass sounds have been scrubbed from the track.
Even if they write their own songs, which I honestly think many do, I don't see the point, when it's basically a stream of high pitched tones which you can't hear. Even if you read the lyrics, they are super generic. Might as well be AI, and I think that's really the point. Most people don't give a fuck, AI or not, who cares, it's noise coming out the speaker or headphones. It's not there because it's music, it's there to be noise and isolate you from the world.
Agreed. It's far worse now, specifically due to changes in technology. I didn't mean to say that "we've seen this all before," but instead meant something more like "given how human nature works, this technology will take us to a worse place."
I don't like AI, but either music is good, or it is not. AI can generate good music, I noticed this on youtube. In my local collection I have zero AI songs and I will probably keep at this number, but AI can produce good music too, there is no doubt about this. The question will be whether humans want to rely on AI music. I'd love to say I don't, but ultimately when it comes to music the criterium that I use is whether my brain evaluates the song as good or not, rather than whether it is AI or not.
I’ve listened to his three top songs on Spotify. They’re practically the same songs with different lyrics. I know approximately 0 music theory and I could tell they’re almost identical.
Reminded me of "sitting at a dock of the bay" with tamer lyrics and more bland and monotone. I suspect AI is much better at DJing than actual composing.
I just listened to the top 3 songs of this project out of curiosity, and it feels like the same song. Same rhythmic pattern, same harmonies, same instruments.
However, I also listened to several other artists on the chart[1]. They all, bar a couple, are so low effort that they may also be generated by neural networks, FWIW.
A decade or two from now your children will be dropping thousands of dollars to go to a concert to hear AI generated music from an AI generated artist.
I was a big fan of listening to music, long time subscriber to Spotify, would listen to music when driving, when cooking, when coding (Same playlist for 20+ years - Matrix + fat of the land).
The last 6 years has been no music. I unsubscribed from everything since I felt music was an intrusion in the moment.
I had a quick listen to the "AI singer", and it's soulless, empty, and generic - Which is modern music anyway.
I searched Spotify and Apple music top 100 songs and Eddie Dalton is not on either. I think the majority of users do not buy singles on iTunes anymore so this may be an easy chart to manipulate. The source mentions the name of the creator in the second line leading me to believe this is some clever advertising for Dallas Little's AI.
Maybe I'm just old (definitely I'm just old) but the live music experience has been completely destroyed for me, between bat-shit-crazy high ticket prices and the absolute collapse of concert-goer decorum. Who would have thought that a bunch of high, adolescent punks in the 80s or 90s would be more appropriately behaved than the 35-yr-old mom pushing past only to stand directly in front to film the entire show over her head on her iPhone, with a few breaks to live-tweet her awesome experience on social media?
I admit that the bands I play in aren't at a level where we play "shows" with high ticket prices. More often we play in bars that host live jazz. I hope you don't give up on live music, but find a way to enjoy it on terms that you prefer.
You hit upon perhaps the solution to the other commenter's issue - scale back to smaller, local (or near local) bands.
Check they local college; they likely have free concerts at their auditorium of a variety of genres, though probably more likely you'll get orchestras and jazz bands (which are great).
I live in a university town, and the free concerts are great. Especially because the students and faculty are most often playing material that I've never heard, including new and experimental stuff.
Over the years it's been hard to avoid noticing that the people who show up for classical and jazz concerts tend to be older. But we're not playing "the music they grew up with." Many of them grew up listening to rock 'n' roll or similar, and when we play an old pop tune, they'll get up and dance.
What I think instead is that they've adjusted their musical tastes to find settings where they can enjoy the performance: Typically quieter, less crowded (though we fill our venues), easier to get in and out of (parking, public transit, etc), and at decent hours.
I'll perform these songs by AI in concerts if the price is right. And that's how AI starts to leak out into the physical world. AI also hires human workers to do tasks in the real world using Task Rabbit and similar apps.
AI music is generally not going to be copyrightable unless they can show genuine human creativity was involved. So if a song is 100% AI, you could just go around performing it or straight up selling copies yourself and there's nothing* they could do about it. Though I do wonder if a human writes the lyrics, but AI generates all the music parts, if it becomes sufficiently human for copyright. Because the lyrics at that point would be actual creativity.
* I am not a lawyer, and this won't stop them from possibly trying to sue you or even winning depending on the situation. Or trying to prove there is human ingenuity involved. Do at your own peril.
I see music as "the space of all possible 5-second clips at stereo 48kHz 24bit depth". If you think about it, that space contains the intro to Stairway to Heaven and Oops I Did It Again, and the end of either song. It contains every 5-second segment of O Fortuna, plus a previously unimagined O Fortuna Remix with MF Doom rapping the pledge of alliegance backwards.
My point is, AI is getting good at searching music space for novel patterns, and that's entirely the point of music, not making a career out of being an alcoholic minstrel with a tour bus.
The audience will out the good patterns, and it's up to the musicians or AI companies to serve better patterns.
That's very reductive. Music, like writing or painting, is a medium, not a thing with intrinsic purpose. It can be a means of communication, sharing human experience, conveying emotion, evoking feelings, expressing a story, ...
I'm not saying AI music is inherently good. I'm saying good music is good music.
My take is literalist, not reductive: Music (and any art product) is configuration. The media involved are the physical laws of nature that present the configuration.
> It can be a means of communication, sharing human experience, ...
1. You're construing the journey with the result. The act of creating is not typically the result product itself.
2. Any perceived relationship to the artist via product is virtual and parasocial (respectfully stated). You have no relationship with Bach or Shakespeare or Michelangelo--you have an appreciation for their accumulated works. You may have a fascination for their stories and life through literary works. You have no relationship with your favorite artist, you have their works in your media library.
To many, the relationship between what was written in the sheet and how it was played by a live performer, day I say virtuoso, is the imporant thing. The human component is the important component.
This is entirely separate from pop, which is the junk food of music - cheap, filling, bad for your health.
I would argue that the human element in music is not an important contributor towards the enjoyment of music for exactly 100% of people.
Humans just biologically enjoy rhythmic sounds. We don't care who makes it, we don't care how it is performed live. Those things are just hijacking emotional memory in heightened moments, but that is completely separate from the general natural enjoyment of music.
AI music simply drives the same point home that listening to random music does when you are without a care for lyrics or artists (often, and everyone).
Your point is asinine. You love a hell of a lot of music besides what you attach to live performance. Everyone does. You do not care about the human component.
Unless you want to lie and claim you're some musical purist, this argument is shallow thinking and nothing more.
I would counter-argue that you're accusing the other party of exactly the shallow thinking you're guilty of - even worse, you cannot concieve of a thing, so you confidently state thing does not exist and the other party is at best a liar. One only has to have a cursory knowledge of performances on, say, pianos, to know that who and how plays an established piece was always a big deal.
You are missing the point entirely. As I already said: live performances are a completely separate type of enjoyment than music enjoyment. It is dishonest to ignore all of the music you enjoy that has nothing to do with performance, and to cherry pick the less than 1% of music you have likes that also overlaps with what you have seen performed live. Please, this only takes a couple seconds of actual critical thought.
> "the space of all possible 5-second clips at stereo 48kHz 24bit depth".
That space is mostly noise.
Try cat /dev/urandom > /dev/audio for an example of the kind of noise that this space contains.
(If you stick with it and manage live long enough, you'll eventually hear a few bars from Stairway to Heaven. If I also manage to live long enough, then perhaps we'll be able to chat about it in a few million years.)
> I see music as "the space of all possible 5-second clips at stereo 48kHz 24bit depth".
5.6MB? That's an astounding number of combinations. 1 followed by 1733933 zeroes.
> If you think about it, that space contains the intro to Stairway to Heaven and Oops I Did It Again, and the end of either song. It contains every 5-second segment of O Fortuna, plus a previously unimagined O Fortuna Remix with MF Doom rapping the pledge of alliegance backwards. My point is, AI is getting good at searching music space for novel patterns, and that's entirely the point of music, not making a career out of being an alcoholic minstrel with a tour bus.
AI is not searching that space for novel patterns for the most part, it is taking what it has heard before and coming up with things based on that. Which isn't a dig at AI, that's pretty much how humans do things too. I don't think today's AIs would be able to come up with something like Stairway to Heaven if Led Zeppelin and the music they inspired had never existed though.
Agree. Maybe novel is the wrong term given my framing. "Listenable?" The combinatorial space of music is hyperastronomical, effectively infinite. And most of it is probably noise.
AI isn't "searching" in the standard indexing sense. But if say, Suno, is doing stable diffusion on fourier transform heat maps, and there's a finite space of configurations... it is using a heuristic approach to pick an option from a well-defined (gargantuan) set of options.
This speaks more about how easy it is to buy botted vanity metrics on Spotify than anything.
The most obvious way you can tell this is inorganic is how all of the "Discovered On" are artist-specific playlists: "Eddie Dalton music", "Best of Eddie Dalton", "Eddie Dalton Hits", etc. A real artist may have some artist-specific playlists but generally their Discovered On will be more general genre playlists, like "Pop Hits" or "Hype" or "Gym Music" or whatever.
I actually can relate to AI music better than to music made by humans.
I always feel some jealousy when listening to rockstars. Because they get all the action and I get so little. They see the world, are desired by all the beautiful women, earn a ton of money and don't have to work a boring job.
With AI music, I know it is just some lonely GPU in a cold, dark datacenter somewhere. Crunching numbers. Just like I do.
I think if you knew more musicians personally, you would feel different. What you're imagining and the day-to-day lived experience of most real musicians don't exactly overlap that much.
So in a sense you're ruining the music for yourself based on nothing but you're imagination.
I think a lot of modern life suffers from this problem. Most of us live such walled in lives now, experiencing everything second hand, from a distance. The absence of information lets us fill the gap with anything we want, which ends up being more a reflection of our own psychology than reality.
Don't have to as they can retire, but as someone who used to be in a professional band (far from a rockstar), I would have end my life if I have to play one of these songs EVER again after playing them 10000s of times (rehearsal + gigs). I cannot understand how anyone does that without being very much drugged up. Especially once you have the money to quit.
"Not all artists". Very few of them, especially these days. I'm reminded of the old joke about how when Mozart was my age, he'd been dead for ten years.
The top 40 has rarely been about "art", though. The music there is highly formulaic and derivative, whose creators know well how to produce music that appeals to the masses.
The effect of this "AI" trend is that now humans with no musical background or experience can flood the medium, making it much more difficult for anyone to make a living from it, whether they're an artist or not.
So absolutely tasteless it should be banned.
I think it's fine if people want to generate music at home like this but also, isn't it questionable what is even copyrightable? Apple makes you pay for this?
oh man, I just am so bummed that around 2007 I ditched my 20 year collection of CDs and went digital whaaaaa!
iTunes? i wonder what kind of sales we're talking about here. people buying music is few and far between, and i wonder what percentage of that customer base buys their music on iTunes when there are great alternatives offering lossless files
Since the Monkeys we all know, there won't be another Elvis Presley - I advise you to look him up, it is massively impressive, what this guy achieved and what records he holds.
Or put another way: what is music? What ain't artificial in music? Is a drum already artificial? Or an e guitar? Playback? Studio music?
The divide between a band and a song writer?
People trashed techno music in Germany during the early 90th as being "machine music without a soul, totally artificial, a computer is doing everything". Kraftwerk on the other hand, was quite the opposite. It is mind blowing, that they had to construct the hardware they were getting their sound of.
But no matter what, techno of the 90th appear to be true craftsmanship in comparison to todays music. Like the 30th Big Bands vs 60th Rock music. I don't imply to say "Everything used to be better." Nothing could be further from the truth. The thing is, some things actually never change except for the medium.
I stopped caring. We are all victim and perpetrator at the same time. You use AI - oh well, cheater I would say.
Women painting their faces - well...
Ever since people went un-natural to be civilized to paraphrase Karl Popper.
I made a cut off regarding literature. I mainly read the classics where no AI was available - but only an editor.
It is tougher than ever but I stopped being judgmental. I try to do, what is expressed with "The bait must appeal to the fish, not the angler." Mundus vult decipi.
We called out WWF for being scripted entertainment while going to the cinema expecting that the hero would actually really die during the first dramatic 5 minutes in the movie - oh well...
Enjoy! If it sounds good, who cares? If someones earns a buck, so what? We pay for Naked Canon etc. just to let lose. :)
In high school i started to hear melodies/lyrics pop in my head and it prompted to learn instruments - pursued songwriting dream in college in Nashville (just a hobbyist since). I was initially excited about using Suno -- make the songs how they're heard in my head a reality as my rough garageband demos with me singing isnt how i hear them. Also, people arent excited by singing. Though my excitement wore off as I started to feel uninspired that it now takes zero talent/zero effort to write songs.
I took a break from Suno for many months .. attacking everyones slop including my own but my bandmates like my AI songs. Now at practice (80s & 90s music band) we listen and play along to the AI versions and have thrown in two into our setlist. Thus, for me Ive finally found an inspiring human usage of AI music! No text prompter could ever enjoy playing / performing their music in a band and to an audience and receive live human feedback. That's unless they do what millions other musicians have done .. cultivate their talent/musical interest.
I love it!
I find it so funny when people come out and say AI music has no soul and no feelingsj. Meanwhile 99% of music is about genetals, pimping, whoring or shaking their asses LOL
On the contrary, AI music is really good and can absolutely be playful and follow themes. The lines are good, the voices pristine and it can invoke emotion like other titles as well. The latter is a state of the listener in any case.
I still don't want to listen to it most of the time. I think in my youth it would have seriously prohibited me from learning an instrument and playing music myself. Today I would skip that and use AI to generate music. What yesterday was playing music yourself and the strange test version of Audio Logic you found on the internet would today certainly just be the next common AI generator.
I don't love it, but the record industry is turning out the same identikit rubbish as the AI, so it is no wonder people don't care.
I think that is the root of the phenomenon behind Angine de Poitrine at the moment. It is live, it is real, it is different. It is like music waking up from a 25 year rest.
I could understand opposing it on an ethical basis. I could even understand it if they claimed that it will dull us out or it just isn't good for the brain, sort of like we can say that tiktok/instagram reels are probably not good for our brains.
But to claim that it has no value? Surely my definition of value is just different, and I'm playing semantics.
The least-funny of clowns has value if they make someone laugh.
The most mind-destroying tiktok/reels have value if they entertain someone for a little while.
I'm not saying these are necessarily good things, but they certainly hold value. And AI art, like memes, like instagram reels, like watching paint dry, has value if consumers enjoy it. It has much more value than watching paint dry because many more people clearly enjoy it (and I don't think their brains will rot because of it).
Personally, I think AI art enables such a low barrier to entry that obviously we have a big problem with mass production of slop. Things that entertain (again, like tiktok/reels), but are probably not a net-positive for society.
However, while I recognize that problem, I know several people who are creating INCREDIBLE art with AI which they would never be able to do. Things that bring tears to my eyes and that are definitely not slop. Even if they are produced in a day, it takes a special mind to conjure up the right things to produce. Faster does not always mean worse (and what even is "good" or "bad" in art??). Tale as old as time.
There is an ethical debate to be had about this art being built on the stolen assets that previous artists, using traditional tools, created. I think it's a serious debate and I don't really know how we'll solve it.
So if I:
1. Ignore the ethical debate around attribution and, as an exercise, assume that there's "fair compensation to everyone involved" (not so sure if this will happen)
2. Assume we do find a system to properly curate content (which I do actually think will happen -- we will find ways of weeding out the best)
Then I absolutely want AI art to succeed. It has enabled so many around me to produce so many incredible things, I can't wait for more chapters in this beautiful history of humanity. Where more people can create more.
"1." is a tough ask. We need to figure it out. "2." I think we'll manage, and I guess even if we don't get "1.", then cat's out of the bag and these tools are too world-changing to keep them from being used. I want to see what these amazing creative geniuses do with them.
I'm reminded of something I've read somewhere "Nothing is more boring than listening about someone else's dreams".
I think it tells a lot about AI-generated art. People prompting the AI find it fascinating because they look at it with in the context of their internal thoughts and moods that led them to it. But the generated artwork itself doesn't communicate that context at all. A complete stranger will find it derivative and boring.
I'm guessing that looking at AI art prompted by your friend and family may be a middle road somewhere. So maybe the fact that you have such a positive opinion on AI art is because it's the people you know closely that are doing it.
This looks like a great way to launder money.
Write some generic AI music, have have your small accounts using stolen giftcards bought with dirty money pump the track and watch it climb the charts as other jump on the band wagon.
Et voilà instant layering with no connections.
I'm pretty sure this is exactly how all the music I don't like gets into the charts. :P
How are Swedish gangs using music platform Spotify to launder money?: https://www.euronews.com/business/2023/10/03/how-are-swedish...
You are not wrong.
You saying it like there are no other easy ways to launder money. Every time I walk by a cleaning service or hairdresser in a less dense populated area I wonder if they are involved in money launderinng.
You saying it like those areas don't need cleaning or hairdressers.
Undoubtedly! I haven't trusted hairdressers for 20 years. I have no idea why people would need to spend money in such establishments. :P
Now those old-timey photo places in every mall in the U.S.? Definitely a money-laundering front.
i've seen a a where three barbershops were a stone's throw away from each other, with a few houses between them on a street in an (only moderately dense) residential area with no carparks anywhere nearby, and wondered how that could possibly have arisen (since they'd detract each other's customers, and laundering operations wouldn't make it so blatantly obvious).
and the same occurs with phone(-repair)-and-vape shops in shopping areas (which I guess are somewhat more understandable, since they only require one employee present each and do get footfall, and the cost to rent a shop has imploded since the coronavirus hit the final nail in the town centre's coffin)
Auto play has been a way for me to find new music. I stopped using it because now every listen is accompanied by a a nagging feeling that the song that is playing might be AI generated.
Now I just go and look for new albums from bands I know I like. I wish there was a pre-2023 filter for the algorithmic feed.
If the artists have live shows, it's generally a good indication it's not AI (for now at least).
It's not like this one's even trying to hide it, one look at their Instagram will tell you everything: https://www.instagram.com/eddiedaltonmusic/
I'd like to point out that there's absolutely no way an Instagram account that is not even a month old gets hundreds of thousands of likes almost every upload. That should be an immediate red flag to everyone, Instagram included.
Another thing worth pointing out is that iTunes charts in 2026 are pretty meaningless. Do you buy music on iTunes? Does anyone else you know buy music on iTunes? Even those that still buy music have at least 3-4 more relevant stores to chase after. It's like finding a niche book category on Amazon, anyone could astroturf their way to the top 100 and I doubt it'd cost you more than for a legitimate artist to even rent a studio to record an album properly.
I bought music from iTunes 2 days ago for the first time in like 15 years. I’ve gone back to the iPod life. But I’d almost never buy anything that would be considered chart level music. I was scrolling through the top 100 thinking “who is buying all this crap?”
> Do you buy music on iTunes?
That's like asking HN if they buy Christmas CDs at Tesco. This is a very self-selecting group of people. I know people who buy off of iTunes, who don't use Spotify, who've never heard of Bandcamp, who still listen to the radio… there are people beyond your little bubble. It's a big old world.
You're re-arguing their point. They are saying it's such a diverse market that iTunes doesn't effectively act as a proxy for the whole market anymore, not that no one shops there anymore (shades of "No one goes there anymore... It's too crowded!").
That's very charitable of you.
I do try to stick with Bandcamp, but a few bands I want just don’t use it.
My wife rolls her eyes at me and my iPod
I've had pretty good luck finding bands on 7Digital when they don't have a Bandcamp. I'm sure they aren't perfect, but they seem better than Apple at least.
It’s mainly the mental load that you even have to think about it.
I find also that much like junk food, AI music is optimized to be catchy. The initial feeling I get is “yeah this is nice”, but then you realize the lyrics are weird, some words don’t exist, the voice is off…
> The initial feeling I get is “yeah this is nice”, but then you realize the lyrics are weird, some words don’t exist, the voice is off…
To be fair, you could say the same thing about at least a few pre-AI pop songs.
Today is the worst it will ever be.
And with all these faults it's still better than Bad Bunny.
Eddie Dalton hologram concert at Coachella
Guns N' Roses blazed this trail in 1986 with their faux live EP titled Live ?!@ Like a Suicide [0] which was reissued as the B-side to G N' R Lies in 1988.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_%3F!*%40_Like_a_Suicide
Get your ya ya's out by The Rolling Stones is also a 'live studio album'
I've fallen off it a while ago to be honest, AI generated stuff aside, Spotify has only been recommending me really unknown / obscure artists for ages now of debatable quality.
I suspect it's an issue with too big and diverse of a dataset, listening history going back years and tens of thousands of songs.
I get that feeling in Lidl. Their ambient music used to be somewhat identifiable, now it just seems a bit off.
This is a seed of OCD. Don't let it grow or it can ruin everything.
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I'm sorry but this attitude baffles me, and I think it's the sort of thing that will sound so silly in 20 years that we'll have collectively memory-holed it. If you're turned off from listening to Spotify recoms becausue they _might_ be AI and you _might_ not know, what does that say to you about the disconnect between your aesthetic judgment and your values?
If you're listening to Spotify autoplays and a shitty song comes up, skip it. If AI slop is flooding Spotify with shitty songs, they'll naturally fail algorithmically (assuming we trust Spotify to actually be honest about its algos, which I'll admit we shouldn't https://substack.com/@tedgioia/note/c-236242253)
If you're listening to Spotify autoplays and a catchy impressive song comes up, what you do is you _listen to it_ and you _fucking enjoy it_. This knee-jerk disgust reaction of "ugh I worry that it's AI" has no place in your heart in that moment. You're just sitting listening to your plastic-and-rare-earth earbuds reproduce digitized waveforms and paying attention to what the music evokes in you. It seems ridiculous to me that we get distracted by questions about "but what if this music isn't made by a human". Insofar as you're a music-enjoyer, listening to music, the only question should be _is it good_. It shouldn't matter if it was created by duck or slug.
The _economic fairness_ aspect is another matter and I don't have as strong opinions there. I think we should ideally incentivize people who use AI in generating their music to disclose their usage, though I have no idea if it's possible to do so, so that consumers who care about only supporting human artists with their listenship-stats can filter to that group. And certainly anyone who closely imitates _a specific artist_, crossing the line from "inspired by" and "shamelessly ripping off", should be severely disincentivized from doing so, whether they used AI or not.
To a vegetarian: "just think about how it tastes, don't worry if there's meat in it!"
Really this stuff is accelerating a conflict between two philosophies of life:
- one where neural network A (electric) produces a set of stimuli for neural network B (meat), which in turn causes the meat to press buttons to maximize the stimuli received;
- one where humans seek meaning in the world and connection with other humans.
Now, the second is losing, and has been since the decline in philosophical dualism across the 20th century; but it can still express the concepts of "important" and "meaningful", which have no place in the first worldview at all.
> The _economic fairness_ aspect is another matter
More plainly, as soon as I read the headline about one AI occupying 11 top slots I thought it was obviously being gamed by listen-botting. I don't really know how a system where machines "listen" to other machines in order to extract a small revenue from defrauded advertisers is sustainable, but there it is.
This feels like a false dichotomy to me. You can find meaning and connect with other humans over AI music no differently than you can over music written by a celebrity. (And vice-versa, you can listen to music written by a human and just enjoy it for the sound without finding any particular sense of meaning or connection.)
Different people have very different relationships to art (in this case, music). For me, the aspects of communication and empathy are key: I think of a song as a message from a particular person at a particular time trying to get across a particular feeling, message, etc.
There is nothing wrong with your approach to music appreciation (removing the author entirely and appreciating it as an isolated work), but it's worth recognizing that a lot of people have different values from you here and their preferred mode of music appreciation is equally valid.
I see your point, and think its valid, but here is a counter:
Content is graded on both instant appeal (e.g. rotten tomatoes "popcornmeter") and artistic appeal (e.g. rotten tomatoes "tomatometer").
I firmly believe that AI generated content cannot have any artistic appeal, because I believe art is fundamentally an invocation of human expression. This might be fine in some contexts, but in general I'd prefer consuming content from groups that I trust to strike a good balance between these types of appeal (e.g. A24 movies).
> Content is graded on both instant appeal (e.g. rotten tomatoes "popcornmeter") and artistic appeal (e.g. rotten tomatoes "tomatometer").
I understand the distinction, but I don’t find the examples compelling. The difference between the popcorn and tomato meters, as I understand it, is just the source. The latter are critics’ opinions while the former are “regular people” opinions. Professional critics may have some concern for the artistic value of a movie, but their job is to help you decide “should you spend your time with this” and the entertainment value is a primary consideration. Furthermore, a critic can have early access and needs to write their review fast. An audience member, who has no such obligation, can let it ruminate and have their opinions evolve. In that sense, a critic’s opinion may be more influenced by initial appeal.
If you value art as communication with another human soul, then it matters whether a human was involved.
"Who cares if that 'I love you' voicemail is really from your mother. As long as it sounds like your mother, it should give you the same warm feeling."
"Mother.com: we can provide you with that warm feeling of your mother's voice, even if she's been dead for years. YC 2027"
Some of us want to support actual human musicians?
Well supporting small artists instead of huge celebrities worth almost a billion dollars or more is a start (not for you, for everyone).
The one you replied to may do so. I certainly listen more to smallish artists than I listen to big.
Man this is my current bug bear. Last year I wanted to go offline for all my music. So many of these sites selling mp3s complain about how Spotify pays a fraction of a cent per stream and I should buy music, and I agree.
But then they sell the mp3 albums at $15, more than the physical version ever was. Come on, there has to be a middle ground. At $5 each I'll buy 20, at $15 maybe 1
You can listen to AI-generated music all you want, why does it bother you so that others won't?
Because they need Technojesus to come save them from never having learned to invert a binary tree, so any anti-AI sentiment is a threat to that.
when you think there's an AI behind what you are enjoying, it destroys every sense of purpose, and the only goal is clicks and time listened (not trasncendence, recognition, share of emotions or histories), so the "enjoyer" becomes more like a user or consumer than an human enjoying art
This "human connection" is over rated IMHO. We tend to create an image of what a human musician is like and we forget that they are, well, human. Too often human musicians have disappointed fans because of their lifestyle (the expression sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll exists for a reason) or because some do not agree with the social and political causes the musicians support. Occasionally, fans follow an artist for their commitment to their art later to discover they sell out in some way, like their style changes to achieve greater mass appeal, or the sell their work to become a jingle for sugar pops or similar. I think it is best to appreciate their creation and admit the person creating it may not be someone to place undue adulation on. To quote a film, I think it is best to "separate the art from the artist".
The problem is that it is making Spotify money if they substitute real artists by generated music that they produced themselves. They will have to pay a smaller share of their money to actual artists.
Among other already stated reasons I take listening to human made music as an investment. If everything is AI the originality will disappear because the already struggling artists will be pushed out even more. Even if they move elsewhere then the platform I currently use, and am comfortable with, will become useless to me.
I can’t enjoy listening to music I know was made by AI. If you can, power to you.
Initially bad songs made with real thought often mature into favourites as you learn what the artist was going for.
If you skip every song because you don't immediately like it, then you never learn to refine you palette.
There is then indeed a real fear when a song comes up catered to you, that says nothing about the artist, but was generated to keep you listening. You're getting pidgeonholed.
Interesting. The debate about whether the artist matters in perceiving a piece of art is very old. You don’t seem to consider the possibility that the artist’s intent matters when listening to music. For me it absolutely does. As the AI has no intent (agency), the AI music is void of any value to me.
> Insofar as you're a music-enjoyer, listening to music, the only question should be _is it good_. It shouldn't matter if it was created by duck or slug.
What an awful take. Music is inherently a human act, there's been lots written about this, but the point, and especially for music with lyrics is story telling, emotion, connection, empathy. Things a duck or slug or large language model have not business mimicking.
Well, let's make a revoltingly fun analogy: say a hamburger restaurant opened in your city, that openly admits it puts (ethically acquired) human meat in some of its products. You don't have to worry about the legality of the venture, it's all 100% compliant with the original persons donating their bodies to feed the world. Now, the hamburgers are extraordinarily good tasting, some say the best in town. The price is also good - they have a great hook up for the main ingredient, after all.
By the same logic, would you say that people refusing to eat there have "a disconnect between their culinary tastes and their values?" Or, if people have a visceral reaction to some other fast food joints surreptitiously introducing the same magic ingredient in their diet, would you also tell them to _just eat it_ and _fucking enjoy it_?
The source matters, both for meat and art. It's part of the product itself, you cannot disentangle the taste and sound of the performance from the way it was produced. AI art trying to pass as human art is simply a form fraud, and some people will always reject it, while others are of course free to embrace it and enjoy it.
> By the same logic, would you say that people refusing to eat there have "a disconnect between their culinary tastes and their values?"
Yes, obviously. It’s almost a perfect demonstration of that.
> You don't have to worry about the legality of the venture, it's all 100% compliant with the original persons donating their bodies to feed the world. Now, the hamburgers are extraordinary good tasting, some say the best in town. The price is also good - they have a great hook up for the main ingredient, after all.
Halfway through this paragraph I started hearing it in the Trump cadence.
> The source matters, both for meat and art.
Yes, exactly. This is why people care about things like DOC, fair trade certifications, UFLPA clothing, cruelty-free cosmetics, and so on.
To deepen the analogy slightly: is the AI "ethically acquired"? Do the people collating the training data have consent for every piece of music they trained it on?
We know for a fact they don't. We know because they told us they didn't.
While I think it's an opinion that's somewhat valid and I wouldn't really blame anyone for consuming art this way, it's definitely missing a lot of what art can be about.
A piece of art is not a self-contained thing, the end result isn't where all (or even most) of the interest resides. The intent of the artist, the point they're making, the history that led to it, the references it makes and why, the choices and decisions taken in making it... that's all inherent part of the art and a huge part of why people might enjoy a piece of art or not.
For example, if I listen to some progressive rock, I might enjoy it for how a fellow human managed to identify and break some rules of traditional songwriting, for their expertise in musical theory, for the references they chose to make to other bands/songs/genres... If I learn it's AI-generated, the song itself hasn't changed but there's no point in it anymore, my enjoyment was directly coming from the fact that it was made by a human: if it's a machine I'll just shrug and say "yeah sure everyone knows machines can do that". Entire genres like punk or grunge make zero sense if not human-made.
For a more extreme example: a piece of contemporary art often has very little point in itself. The art is in the artist's process (their point of view, intent, history, etc), not the piece. If a piece is AI-generated, there's literally zero interest in it (except maybe as commentary on AI itself, fine).
> what you do is you _listen to it_ and you _fucking enjoy it_. This knee-jerk disgust reaction of "ugh I worry that it's AI" has no place in your heart in that moment
I suggest being a lot more humble about your understanding of art and other people's relationship to it
Just one comment
> a piece of contemporary art often has very little point in itself. The art is in the artist's process (their point of view, intent, history, etc), not the piece.
I personally find no enjoyment in art where I have to have context for it to be "interesting". Either it is or it isn't interesting on it's own merits. I find all art the same though. If it isn't interesting on it's own, then it's not interesting on the whole (for me).
>If AI slop is flooding Spotify with shitty songs, they'll naturally fail algorithmically
It implies to trust the algorithm and believe that Spotify developer, first know what they're doing, secondly have your best interest at heart.
I don't believe neither, I don't use their algorithm.
I wonder how well it would work to use AI as a front end to Band-in-a-Box?
Band-in-a-Box is a commercial program that has been around since 1990. What it did then was let you specify a chord progression, style, tempo, and instruments and it would make a generate a MIDI track. I think it might have also been able to take a melody and come up with a chord progression for it in a style/genre of your choosing.
The target market was musicians. Instrumentalists used it generate tracks to improvise or solo with for example, and songwriters found it useful to essentially have a full band at their beck and call while composing.
Over the years they added more features, and switched to sounds from recordings of real instruments played by real musicians. They have very good stretching and pitch transposition so you can use these at a range of tempos and keys and they still sound good.
It is still aimed at musicians, and can be overwhelming to others. This I've read is made worse because as it has grown in features and capabilities in the 25+ years it has been available the interface has become kind of disjoint.
It is not something the kind of person who just wants to describe what they want to hear and have a song produced would enjoy. But if an AI could operate it for them, maybe that would work and the result would be something with much better sounding instruments than the AI song makers (and without the risk of including unlicensed copyrighted material).
BIAB is still best in class (even if the UI is practically Soviet era) simply because of the sheer number of RealTracks, which are actual performances by musicians that dynamically adapt to your chord progression.
I’ve actually taken some of my own compositions and run them through Suno using the “Cover” option, and it’s pretty nuts what it can do.
What would be really cool is the concept of combining a physical arranger keyboard (like a Yamaha PSR-SX) with real-time orchestration produced by a backing generative model.
https://mordenstar.com/blog/dutyfree-shop
> This I've read is made worse because as it has grown in features and capabilities in the 25+ years it has been available the interface has become kind of disjoint.
It's impossible to exaggerate how true this is. I often say "BiaB is the best worst software - or should that be 'worst best software'? - I've ever used." A toolbar that crams dozens of tiny icons, almost no visual hierarchy, dated visual style, waaaay too many dialogs (dialogs within dialogs!), zero discoverability, inconsistent labeling, basic features missing...I could go on. To add insult to injury, I'm using the Mac version and it looks/feels like a port, not a native app.
I like the direction Apple is taking with their digital audio workstation, Logic Pro X. While not overtly AI, they've been introducing intelligent musical features starting with their Drummer feature several years before AI became commonplace.
These days I'm programming drums on dedicated hardware but Logic Pro's Drummer feature had been immensely helpful for me as a guitarist who hadn't done much drum programming but wanted to play along with interesting drum beats while arranging a song. Just a few options but that's what makes it so approachable. It's helped me keep the song "mine" without the hassle of sourcing loops/samples manually, even if only temporarily.
I remember watching a youtube video that was kind of a Star Wars fan fic. It had a great soundtrack, that was a cross between John Williams and Michael Giacchino. The YouTuber was using some commercial program that included samples of all the orchestral instruments and you could use it to compose lush scores. I never used it since it was expensive, but I always dreamed of tools like that, like GarageBand on steroids for orchestras. Now I wonder how quickly I could vibe code something like that...
The code is only a (very important) part of this type of program. The samples are critical and (for the time being anyway) can't be generated by AI.
Especially important if you want orchestral instruments that sound realistic. Just think of the many ways that a single note can be played by a professional player and multiply that by the range of the instrument.
Edited to add: not orchestral instruments, and also not samples, but this gives an idea of the complexities of capturing the characteristics of an amplifier so that it can be modeled faithfully: https://neuraldsp.com/quad-cortex-updates/introducing-tina (I'm not related and I'm actually a Line6 customer, but I saw this at work in an interview by Rick Beato and though it was super interesting)
Is this the vid? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YL8pwF7Mnc
Rick Beato travels to NeuralDSP in Finland.
Yes, that’s it!
Agree 100%. The multivariate ways a note can be expressed is almost unlimited. For example, I first heard Bach's Cello Suite #1 played by some random cellist. Fell in love with it and listened to it endlessly. Then I heard Yo-Yo Ma play it and it was a completely different piece.
IIRC the samples in this program were actual performances, so I'm curious how they captured all the variations...
There is a whole world of expensive virtual samples instruments that can very convincingly replicate an orchestral performance in a DAW. See Spitfire Audio, EastWest, Cinesamples, etc.
> I wonder how well it would work to use AI as a front end to Band-in-a-Box?
Wow, I haven't heard that name since... well, since the software was relatively new.
I do like the idea of an AI music tool that lets you have that kind of workflow, choosing a level of granularity (and, presumably, being able to edit the intermediate results etc.).
Personally I would feel ripped off if I'd bought music that would be generated by AI but there was no notification that this was done. Any group that would do so I would permanently disregard for any further consumption or attention from me.
> Any group that would do so I would permanently disregard for any further consumption or attention from me.
Much like saying "I will no longer buy from Brand X on Amazon." I guarantee you that ten "other" companies sell the exact same thing, and they all come from China (or AI, in this case).
Brand reputation is fairly meaningless in a market like that. I mean, sure, Levi's still protects their brand, and Bruce Springsteen won't be putting out any AI musical slop, but if it's ShurFit pants or music by Jest Happening... who knows?
this is an overcorrection not understanding the extent to which music is the product of shared rules that are more an act of mechanical execution than creativity. the creativity is there it's just much smaller than many realize. machine generated music has existed for a long time
My favorite pasttime for the last 12 years, besides reading hacker news, is to make music on my phone, ipad or on my piano. Will I stop making music now that Suno is here? No frigging way. Because I still like to make music. I won’t stop talking either, just because some AI is better at doing conversation about research. If I make enough money on my latest, I will spend more time making music.
Some of my music is available om SoundCloud. Most of it is made on an iPhone. https://on.soundcloud.com/lHJN26CwcwtnQzc2CB
Keep making music. Here is author Brandon Sanderson eloquently explaining why AI generated slop will never be art: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mb3uK-_QkOo
tl;dr: the final product is just a receipt of the effort, the sleepless nights, the self-doubt and personal transformation that goes into creating art. They have found a way to automate creating this receipt, without the personal transformation that an artist goes through, a process which leads her to learn more about herself and her place in the world.
An artist will find a way to leverage generative slop into this genuine process, but the by-the-bucket gruel generated in seconds from a prompt will always be a simulacrum of the real thing, despite how good it might sound.
I am pivoting from sterile software engineering where only product and revenue are the guiding metrics, to others where artistry and this personal drive for self-expression will always be valued, despite the attempts at diluting the field for a quick buck by talentless hacks.
The world will always care about Art. It is the most human of instincts.
I dabbled with AI music for a bit with Suno. Worked out well for the most part, only way I'm ever going to hear music with themes for some of niche things I like, like Shadowrun. I threw a bunch of music genres at it and some were good enough that I added them to my normal playlist but after about 30 completed songs I had a hard time coming up with new stuff. As someone who has never tried to create music myself it was fun to play with.
There are two arguments about AI art, one of them is trivially reducible to the “is sampling/collage art”. If you are spending time expressing something using AI produced components then you are producing art, and probably the amount of time you spend working on it (either developing your skills or creating the work) roughly will correlate to how much value others see in it. It’s no different than building a hip hop track out of drum loops.
The second question is more interesting, which is “does raw AI produced artwork have any artistic value” and I am going to punt on the “artistic” part of that equation and answer the “value” part with no, and not because people might not enjoy it, but it falls victim to the classic “my five year old could so that” critique of modern art, except in this case it is true. Anybody can go to an AI and produce some mediocre media.
Where this gets interesting again is _volume_. What AI unlocks is exactly that anybody can create songs, videos and images for _themselves_. The value of it is probably the pennies worth of time ajd expense they put into it, but it might he worth it for them to make something, be mildly amused by it and immediately dispose of it.
You wanted some shadowrun themed music, you got it and enjoyed it. You made something of value only to yourself, but that seems okay? Multiply that times billions of people probably eventually people might luck into something genuinely good and worth sharing from time to time.
> is sampling/collage art
Yes.
You will owe royalties.
The latter part is the actual problem.
> people might luck into something genuinely good and worth sharing from time to time.
A) it would be impossible to find in a sea of AI generated slop
B) even if it were to be recognized as good, it would be instantly copied by other AI’s such that it would be very shortly thereafter be also considered slop
For any work to gain traction with an audience, there needs to be scarcity. Art and artists are valued because they are unique in some way, something about it or them cannot be replicated by others. The ability to instantly produce a piece of “art” negates any artistic value, at least as far as audiences are concerned.
it's already impossible to find good music in a sea of slop. that's been the case for decades at this point
as with all art, the hardest part is discovery
artificial scarcity is indistinguishable from greed
> it's already impossible to find good music in a sea of slop. that's been the case for decades at this point
I’ve found some of my favourite music in the last decade, during a time in my life by which it’s generally considered that your tastes are set.
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Well. We Are Charlie Kirk is a true art. So, you are wrong.
I think your starting definition of value is basically worthless. Value is not about what things cost to make, but what people are willing to pay for them. You reached this conclusion by the end of your comment, but I think it's important to emphasize. My friend group has created incredible value with suno, mostly making meme songs we forget about after a day, but every once in a while we create lasting memories that have real emotional impact. It doesnt matter that anyone can do that, I dont think that cheapens the output at all.
The value you are getting is not from the music as an artistic product, but from the social connection and entertainment it offers your friend group. The meme songs and lasting memories you are getting are fungible with regards to other entertaining and emotionally salient creations you and your friends may share with each other, and not with regards to other pieces of music.
My comment was mostly that it lacks value to _others_. It was probably worth to your friend group roughly the time and money you spent on it. Nobody else is ever going to care.
So like 99.9999% of all music and art?
I played around with Suno a little too. It's actually kind of crazy what it can produce. I mean I don't think it's objectively good in any way but for many applications this (and a lot of other generative AIs) are what I'd call "sufficiently good".
When you move into an apartment or furnish a rental or whatever you might put stuff up on the wall. For many years that might just be some mass-produced prints from IKEA, for example. These might be photos or paintings but a lot of them are "abstract". For this kind of application, current generative AIs are probably sufficient to create what I'd call "wall fillers".
So if you were doing an indie game, it might not be large enough to pay for artists to come up with music or even some basic art assets but an AI can I think fill this role. You can use them as placeholders.
So I'm generally sympathetic to the plight of artists. There is certainly an issue with how these LLMs are trained and if that's "stealing". Legally and ethically we're still working this out because the issue is new.
But I also think there are some things you just don't need an artist for.
So this kind of music has a name, it’s called production music and it’s been long expected in the industry that AI-generated music will compete with the lower-end production music, basically elevator music or background music for corporate training videos etc. It is unlikely, however, that it will get much traction in scripted long form productions, partly because studios believe it’s a legal minefield, and partly due to resistance from creatives (whether justified or not).
For what it's worth, I support manned spaceflight. But sometimes allowing "creatives" to impede progress has its costs.
Red herring. The Puritan work ethic that seems to always resolve to "human value=human income" (regardless of the ethic's stated intentions) is what causes this, not creatives in and of themselves.
I get that there is a strong online movement to destroy the traditional American Dream value of "work hard, and become rich" but that does not apply in fields where money is not the motivator. No single astronaut has ever expressed financial gain as a motivator for moving into that profession.
Quite the opposite, many have given up fortunes and prosperous businesses to move into spaceflight.
You misunderstand the movements, they exist precisely because of a perception that "work hard" doesn't seem to always mean "become rich", many see rich (correctly or incorrectly) as a product of luck, connections, or other factors unrelated to work. The price of everything constantly going up makes "work hard" work less. They actually would like the dream to work.
Anyway, someone may not want to pursue spaceflight for the money, but everything involved in spaceflight still costs a lot of money, which has to be justified. So I think the phenomenon is still there; people still want to appear to be proving themselves through appearing to work hard and appearing to be needed.
Well I don't know any economic system that guarantees the "get rich" part, nor any that enables such a thing without "work hard". But no other system has enabled so many poor people to become rich people, as has the American system.
I don't live in the US. But I recognize the American system for what it does well.
so none of the reasons are quality. purely cope and risk lol
It's interesting to me that all AI music sounds slightly sibilant - like someone taped a sheet of paper to the speaker or covered my head in dry leaves. I know no model is perfect but I'd have thought they'd have ironed out this problem by now, given how pervasive it is and how significantly it degrades the end product.
I've noticed this too. I have a few theories about this. Disclosure: I know a little about audio, and very little about audio generative AI.
First, perhaps the models are trained on relatively low-bitrate encodings. Just like image generations sometimes generate JPG artifacts, we could be hearing the known high-frequency loss of low data rate encodings. Another idea is that 'S' and 'T' sounds and similar are relatively broad-spectrum sounds. Not unlike white noise. That kind of sound is known to be difficult to encode for lossy frequency-domain encoding schemes. Perhaps these models work in a similar domain and are subject to similar constraints. Perhaps there's a balance here of low-pass filter vs. "warbly" sounds, and we're hearing a middle ground compromise.
I don't know how it happens, but when I hear the "AI" sound in music, this is usually one of the first tells.
It's because the dataset is all algorithmically lossy compressed music, and not the real source
Basically made with pirated mp3s
Agreed. I find that particularly annoying, and I also seem to find that the spatial arrangement or stereo effect is muted for most instruments (or the model simply doesn't use that feature as well as a good human musician).
I suspect it's because AI generates music as a waveform incrementally not globally so it favors smoothly varying sounds, not sharp contrast. If it generated MIDI data and then used a MIDI synth to create the audio, you wouldn't get that.
Perhaps this is what the human is for - to apply an EQ curve.
Taping tissue paper over the tweeter of ns10s was popular in studios back in the day ;)
The iTunes chart primarily focuses on sales velocity, not streams, and so I wonder how useful that is in 2026 and how easy it is to game.
Rick Beato had an episode about AI music where he talked about how easy it is to game the iTunes charts. So few people buy music from iTunes that it's relatively cheap to buy your way onto the charts.
I saw a video of guy who became an Amazon bestseller in a book category pretty easily by buying his own book.
Through my professional / personal network, I know someone who advertises himself as being a “Best Selling Amazon Author in XYZ category.”
It is semi niche, but I did some ballpark math, and about 72 sales rapidly would put him in the top spot for that niche.
That number sounds about right when he’s mentioned the gross $ sales of his book.
Pretty common for authors to get people to pre-order their books so when they go on sale they top the chart for that day (the book's release day) in their category.
Not even just for their category. "NYT bestsellers" has been manipulated like this since inception.
NYT bestsellers is also not a sales volume chart, there is an editorial lens to it as well
Likely not a bad way to clean money.
People do it with Steam games, too.
I find the production and consumption of AI music to be uniquely... anti-human. You can make utilitarian arguments for most other uses of AI. For example, the code you're generating didn't exist before, and it would take serious time or money to write it. So, I get it, the economic argument is compelling enough.
But music? There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing. Millions upon millions of them, in every conceivable style, for every conceivable mood. There's nothing you gain by listening to AI music day-to-day, so what's the argument for it - other than utmost indifference to human creativity?
>But music? There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing.
Isn’t this an argument against all new music, even human made?
Either we have it all already, or there’s room for new things that we haven’t heard before.
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This is what we call in the business a "fever dream"
Or the uno reverse - that's what the anti-AI crowd is experiencing in their inability to adjust to the coming reality.
You're just going to have to make peace. I don't know how y'all can cope with being angry at progress all the time. It's not going to stop for you. It's also really awesome that we live to see this come to pass.
We're living in a good dream.
> As far as I'm concerned we're content scarce and I don't care what makes the music - humans, robots, netherworld demons - I just want good music.
Presumably you've already listened to every piece of music ever recorded? Otherwise it seems it would be more efficient to do that first than wait for AI to generate it and you chancing upon it.
All good finds are chanced upon. Just now sometimes it's made by AI.
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You’re not a machine. I’m also tired of hearing that ontological take spouted by AI enthusiasts.
I think humans are machines, they are just vastly more advanced than any machine invented by humans. This is something I thought long before the current AI hype cycle.
What do you think are some important differences between machines and humans?
Humans are organic, biological, evolved animal beings. Machines are tools we make and use.
Is there a difference in how you treat machines vs how you treat humans?
At an abstract enough level, not really. I treat them with care and try to give them whatever they need to do their thing. I want them to last as long as possible.
But in asking this question you must have some differences in mind. Could you speak to some of those?
If you're not religious, I would like to hear why or how we are not machines.
How are we machines?
What is the non machine part? What do you believe exists other than chemical and electrical systems?
Edit: If you mean machine in a more colloquial sense that's fine. Let us first get clear if we mean machine in that sense or in sense of any physical mechanism.
If the question is what is there about us that's not covered by the body, we can mention things like: feelings, intentions, perceptions, acts of consciousness.
Or however else you want to divide up things that have to do with the mind.
Eliminativists/illusionists may completely deny such things. The rest can fall into many camps, some of them religious.
It's not like there are any surprising new parts. It's about how one chooses to interpret/conceive those we are familiar with.
And what part remains in that space after we have mapped all the brain signals and configurations corresponding to these feelings, intentions and perceptions? I don't feel the need to bring up absurd unproven concepts without waiting for more data. It'd be like me saying there is something aphysical behind Mercury's orbital perturbations if I were born before SR and GR were discovered (as an example). No point in jumping to such an argument without first exhausting more believable causes first. History is very strongly against any kind of bet in the aphysical.
My question to you would be, what do you think remains that's not a simple natural system if/after something like Neuralink is successfully established?
Forgive me if I ramble for too long. I've been seeing a lot of comments in this vein and the thoughts have accumulated.
Tacit in your question is the notion that the inquiries that are important are those that can result in predictive models of phenomena encountered in the world — hence feelings, intentions & perceptions turn into a shorthand for reported accounts of the same — and that given enough reports (data), we could build a dictionary that maps a bundle of reports to a(n equivalence class) of physical system(s).
But when we speak of having feelings, or acting on intentions, most often we are not using these as stand-ins for our failure to pin down the current state of our physical system to another. If I am exposed to fire, I want to get away — I am unconcerned with how well I could translate my report of the pain to a patterns of neural activations. The reality of pain for me is unaffected by the fidelity of my "experience report dictionary". And it is there whether it's a brush fire or a neuralink streaming fire bits to my cortex.
If you decide that primacy ought to always be given to things as they can be modeled, you can choose to elevate the "experience report dictionary" and make the reality of experience a second-class citizen. Then you end up with an eliminativist ontology where indeed, we can rightly be called a mechanism.
But that is a "world-making" decision, a value judgement: "this is how things should be seen". It might be sponsored by our recent history, where we got high on the fruits of applied scientific modelling, nursed by the education which taught us that being a good engineer can have us continue in line with that, and pushed on us by impoverished modern eschatologies promising eternal youth, experience machines and what-not at this point. And it might seem preferable or more dependable than whatever equally impoverished, inhumane eschatologies we may have been presented with before.
It doesn't mean there isn't a whole world of places where we can go instead. But in general, we don't change our value judgements until the current one seems inadequate for some reason.
> If we created a molecule by molecule synthesis of a human being, you'd agree it is conscious and the same thing as a human created via typical reproduction, right?
Sure.
Eternal youth and experience machines don't seem like problems with any conceptual difficulties. We already know electrical and chemical signals change what the brain perceives and eger6nal youth is no more difficult a concept than making any other form of long lasting machine. Obviously there is a long sequence of research problems to solve in the line but none of it is conceptually impossible or blockaged.
Yes so that was my point, if we can agree that a molecular synthesis of a human being, being a pure naturalistic physical process is as good as any other human then if we assume some aphysical element to consciousness, then we have a purely physical process for achieving a system with aphysicality in it. Which means either its not in fact aphysical or then what, we are left with the quetion at what point during this assembly process this new special aspect arises.
It's my feeling that we are still getting too ahead of ourselves in judging some supernatural element, that it's much like the atomism question in ancient greece. An honest thinker back then could have no really firm reason to support one side over another and they tended toward thesse kinds of endless circular metaphysical discussions. That is until we had further data and observation tools which settled the question experimentally. Juat like certain aspects of consciousness, atomism felt an insolvable question in some ways back then. I feel the problems we will have with consciousness will eventually have a similar fate. This bet has always succeeded for millenia till now.
Another different question to help me understand what you think of this. I think you agree with me, but just to clarify. A human being is independent of the process of creation right? If we created a molecule by molecule synthesis of a human being, you'd agree it is conscious and the same thing as a human created via typical reproduction, right?
If you're just a machine, can I unplug you?
The same way you can unplug a laptop, I guess?
Oh that's what you're banging on about. You think AI is like a demon, or you think LLMs are people too, something like that, hence "I don't care what makes the music". That would otherwise be a spooky and implausible phrase that says something strange about what gives music quality, as if quality in music is something ethereal and mathematical and objective and detached from the human condition, and detached from artists. But if you think the AI counts as a person too then it seems less cold and abstract.
Are you really suggesting quality in music isn’t largely mathematical?
(Belatedly) yes. Kind of a big argument to grapple with, but let's start by considering everything. I mean, all the stuff, the abstract stuff, that's out there objectively in the universe and in the future, waiting to be discovered. I believe there's quite a considerable amount of it. It's all potentially of interest to us eventually, and only a teeny tiny part of it is comprehensible to us now. That part is at the leading edge, the cutting edge of our enquiries, and in order for us to see and comprehend and even care about that part, it has to relate to us. It has to be oriented to us and our thoughts and things we can use.
You see what I'm getting at? Humans don't really like abstract things. Mathematicians seem to, but I doubt that even mathematics truly has an objective abstract quality that's distant from human concerns. I reckon humans do human mathematics, and it probably has fashions, too, it's probably modern and current, that is, of its time and place.
So you could accept that, but still claim that music relates strongly to mathematics as we know it. Of course there's such a thing as the mathematics of music. I could dispute the value of that to the quality of the music, as being too abstract and niche compared to the evocative qualities of music, where it evokes things in our physical world: the sounds of hitting things with sticks, heartbeats, tones of voice, meaningful instruments such as bugles evoking battles, mazy noodling around evoking contemplative thoughts (is that abstract?) ... but either way, the point is that we live in a sort of parochial Bag End, if Middle Earth represents everything abstractly possible, and so we only understand hobbit things and only appreciate hobbit art. So to speak.
Sometimes you can't even tell. I was in an uber drive where the driver had this incredible playlist of Brazilian bossa nova. It was sublime and some of the best tracks I ever heard. He even said he loves the singer but cannot find their name anywhere. It turns out it's a youtube playlist that is fully AI generated and genuinely some of the best bossa nova you can imagine. I still hear that playlist daily tbh. Moreover, imagine if you are an independent musician, have a good voice, know how to play instruments...you could ask AI to generate hit tracks for you and then you can play them at concerts or shows and claim them for yourself
What's the playlist? Curious as a bossa enjoyer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3pD7b08VII
What's the name of the youtube channel?
But what if you like to listen to a specific genre? Say electo-swing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro_swing)
There isn't that much good electro-swing made by humans, and not much new coming out. One can easily consume it all and want to hear some new tunes in that genre, and maybe AI can help with that.
I guess we've had different experiences then, because youtube has had no problem showing me huge amounts of electro-swing in the past (before AI-generated music was a thing). I've somewhat moved on from that genre though
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Neither does the electro-swing, probably
Many people just play music as background noise. Having a bland, generic, vanilla AI music playlist is a bonus.
I think that's probably the crux of where there's conflict here. There was a time in my life where I definitely much more emotionally invested in the music listened to. I thought I'd definitely kill myself if I ever went deaf. But these days, I really just have it for background noise when I'm working, exercising, doing chores. And it's all just electronic stuff – I don't like vocals (unless they're sufficiently unintelligible so they don't become a distraction to my thinking). At the end of the day, it's just some beats to me. AI or not.
I can recommend you to spend some free time to really listen to music again, Beethoven, Hendrix, Gorillaz, Slayer, Sub Focus, whatever floats your boats your boat. Your brain is wired to remember and sing along to music around a campfire, and will pump you full of exquisite drugs if you really give into it, ideally together with other people. Alleviates stress and makes you happy.
Music demoted to just background noise is unrelated to the social concept of music, which is so ingrained in our nature that we all can’t escape it. And that to me is also why I agree with OP—AI-generated music is fundamentally treason to our species.
Have an opposition to the 7 distributal cents of the Spotify subscription going to a lab instead of Taylor.
(Assuming the lab didn't license anything fairly.)
Is formulaic pop music produced by a corporate label that's designed to push all the right buttons more "human" than the average track you find published on Suno? I wouldn't say so. Pop music was already to some extent a commodity.
Actually, it is more human, because there are humans involved at each level. Doesn't matter if you think the music sucks, it's definitionally more human than AI music.
On the other hand, humans made these AI models...
I feel like the more important distinction might be whether the creator(s) are expressing themselves or are solving an optimization problem of maximizing audience approval. The latter seems true for both some human and AI pop songs.
One is a form of communication that requires (at least to some extent) meeting both sides to meet in the middle, the other is unidirectional broadcasting.
It is sort of a blend now. Beats and rhythm tracks are often generated. Vocals are auto-tuned. There's still some humanity in it, but it's not what it used to be.
I mean, maybe in the sense that any other corporate activity is technically “human activity” because humans happened to be the ones doing the formula-dictated tasks, but it's ultimately the formula at the helm, not the human.
AI music is generated from the result of training on far more human-made music than any human could ever consume in their lifetime, so there are even more humans involved in its creation.
Just like AI comments are more human than any human could ever produce... /s
There's a difference between entertainment and thoughtful content.
Music also is thoughtful content.
> Pop music was already to some extent a commodity.
And as everyone knows, some commodification of some thing means we must go ahead and totally commodify all the things.
Also, a lot of the people who hate and resist AI slop also hate and resist corpo slop, we're just outnumbered.
That's disingenuous. The point is that "human" isn't a particularly good dividing line if you want to distinguish music with value vs music without.
> Pop music was already to some extent a commodity.
The commodification of humanity predates human history. It may be a negative trend that alienates us from each other and from the products of our labor, but it is truly ancient.
> what's the argument for it
Record companies can sell it and don't have to pay any royalties. They only pay the artists pennies as it is, but that's too much for them.
Electronic music exists but has limited commercial scope because most people don't see the point of music if they can't form an emotional connection with the artist through the music. Popular music has an intense focus on the artist.
AI "music" has the same issues as electronic music but worse: because it's trying to imitate humans rather than be its own thing like electronic music, it's not only emotionally unavailable but also creepy. Can you imagine listening to an AI "musician" laughing, for instance? It makes my skin crawl even thinking about it.
because most people don't see the point of music if they can't form an emotional connection with the artist through the music
Strong disagree on "most"; most people listen to music simply because it sounds good. For that, AI serves the purpose very well.
That's a dangerous game to play, though—the only value record companies have is their intellectual property, especially if they are no longer financing recording new material. Convincing people to listen to slop is a great way to completely obsolete yourself.
Not only that, but music generated by AI is not copyrightable. If it's truly 100% AI generated, you can redistribute it to your heart's content without infringement. (IANAL)
Someone will surely attempt some kind of end-run around this, perhaps through ToS alterations at the service you obtain the music from, but it's undoubtedly a problem for the labels. In the meantime they have a strong incentive to keep human creativity in the loop.
To me the anti-AI crowd is looking at this through the wrong lens, it's now possible to generate an infinite library of music that isn't copyrighted, and can be freely shared, some of which is quite good. There is a pathway all the way from conception to mass distribution that doesn't require the major labels. Whatever else happens that seems like a silver lining at least.
it's now possible to generate an infinite library of music that isn't copyrighted, and can be freely shared, some of which is quite good.
Many YouTube channels started using AI music because they were getting sick of copyright strikes, and I agree some of it is actually very good.
they def pay artists more than pennies on the dollar
artists complaining about not making enough is like programmers complaining their 7 star repo on github isn't making them enough on ko-fi
I mean my github is like that but I wouldn't expect to live off it unless I was Evan You
If you consider say elevator music - music that's just there to fill space, rather than to be listened too - then I don't think there's that much difference between using AI to produce it and using AI to produce clip art or boilerplate code.
Music as wallpaper vs music as artistic paintings.
We are fine with mass-producing wallpaper with machines. People buy this every day, no problem.
We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art".
Both hang on the wall as decoration. Essentially the same purpose. But we have very different feelings about them and hold them to very different standards.
Music is the same. We have muzak - background music that isn't supposed to be listened to, it's just wallpaper. I don't think many people object to this being machine-made in bulk. And then we have music that is art and is supposed to be listened to explicitly. We hold this to a higher standard and expect it to be the product of human creative urges.
> We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art".
China is full of factories where exactly this is being done and people are fine with this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15742507
It depends entirely upon who the "we" is in question. There has long been an aristocratic tantrum against affordable decoration in the art and architecture world, dating back to men's formal wear going mostly monochromatic as soon as colors became widely affordable instead of reserved for the gentry. There were similar ones against ornamentation with Brutalism (mixed with dadaist 'the world doesn't deserve art!' post WWI despair memes).
The cynical would dismiss the whole distinction between mass produced and unique art as arbitrary. Or worse, just as a racket to create artificial scarcity, a social kabuki show to create the pretension of high culture, or for the purpose of some sort of criminal scheme like money laundering.
Seems a bit silly, though. More economical to paint (or draw, or cut-and-paste, or whatever) one original, scan it, then print many copies.
Even furniture music is art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furniture_music
> We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art".
Sure “we” are; we just call them “prints” or “posters” instead of ”paintings”.
I have the sudden urge to frame some wallpaper.
Relevant Basquiat quote:
“Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.”
> We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art".
Uhh... Cheap, basically AI generated art for home decor definitely exists.
> And then we have music that is art and is supposed to be listened to explicitly
Just like how most people are not sommeliers, most people just listen to pop music "slop"
Well, code and visual art is more differentiated, so the thing you need probably doesn't exist and it would take effort & money to procure it. Not always, but often enough to make rational people default to AI.
With music... if there's a style you like, no matter how eclectic, there are probably thousands matching human-recorded tracks you can listen to today.
Finding those thousands of matching human-recorded tracks and curating them into playlists seems like a benign use of music-aware ML models.
I guess using AI is just the logical continuation of what mainstream pop already did before that: reduce music to the lowest common denominator so it can appeal to as many listeners as possible. AI only speeds up that process.
I remember when Apple got ridiculed for running a commercial where they crushed a bunch of musical instruments and artist supplies into the shape of an iPad.
I guess if AI companies did the same, they would be crushing people into the shape of an input prompt.
There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next to nothing
You train an AI on that, in order to create something that combines all of the best parts that you want. If anything, I think AI music is the natural progression of innate human desire to leverage and "stand on the shoulders of giants" to create something bigger from smaller pieces.
Which is of course nonsense because LLM is from definition unable to bring in something new. It's not standing on shoulders of giants, it's just making endless copies of them.
That is trivially untrue, even if we ignore the misnomer of trying to use a language model for non-linguistic audio file outputs. I can assure you there was no reference material of say Sam Altman getting arrested when he is getting caught stealing GPUs from a shelf of a BestBuy. (One of the uses of SORA.)
Used Suno to reimagine a handful of my old demos late last year, and honestly the results floored me. I could never release those tracks though, purely out of shame. But it seems pretty practical to study the AI remixes to understand what I like about them, and use these as a practice tool for music production.
It's not that people want to listen to AI music, per se. According to the article, this artist charting was part of an April fools gag. It's about ego, or maybe hubris. People think their idea for a record is good, but don't want to learn musical composition. Instead, they put blind faith in AI generation. Gen AI is more for the idea men unwilling to put in the effort than the consumers.
Because human singers will usually sing about what they like. They will use their own life experience and imagination to write and sing songs. Other people may or may not like them.
AI will only sing songs that other people like, so AI singers will naturally attract more listeners.
AI will only sing songs that someone wanted sung, and that someone might not be a particularly good singer at all.
You’ve hit upon a bit of a paradox inherent in music - the average listener really gives next to no shits about human creativity or the artistry and hard work that goes into being a musician capable of releasing music. They can’t even comprehend, so don’t. Music is something that comes out of a speaker same as water is something that comes out of a tap.
It isn’t indifference, it’s obliviousness. My mother keeps on listening to AI music, and I’ll be like “why are you listening to this slop” and she’ll then argue back that it isn’t AI, it’s actually really very good and I’m just jealous, as the synthetic voice continues to warble nonsenses like a fucking arcade machine full of snakes in the background.
It’s an even more uncomfortable truth: your average Joe cannot tell the difference between human made music or AI generations, just as they also really think that that 8 year old African boy with a huge beard and no hands built a helicopter out of old bottles, or that that cat walked into a hairdresser wearing a suit and had its whiskers curled.
So there’s no argument for it apart from “people will buy the product because they can’t tell that it isn’t real”.
https://theonion.com/humanity-still-producing-new-art-as-tho...
while I don't like AI music, "Millions upon millions of them, in every conceivable style, for every conceivable mood." is something that's not true. There very often is a gap which forces me to open up Ableton and make edits
You can repeat your argument with photos, poems, code??, and just about anything else that humans produce.
Not that you're wrong, but human creativity doesn't mean what it used to.
> I find the production and consumption of AI music to be uniquely... anti-human.
I mean, I'm a professional musician - not sure if that gives me more credibility or less - but I don't feel slighted by folks listening to music made by others (whether those others are other humans, or birds, or whales, or AI).
As you point out, music has an infinite edge; one can spend a lifetime exploring either its niches or its closures and still have an infinity of each to continue discovering.
As moat identification goes, I do feel slightly secure in the sense that AI music (and the information age generally) seems to stoke a hunger for dirty traditionals played well on thick steel strings, and it's going to be a minute before robots can pick 'em like we can.
Having AI create music frees us up to do other things with our time.
Indeed, like toiling in factories and mines and farms.
This is a mind boggling argument to make about creative work.
This sounds a tad misanthropic, if I had the choice to opt out of working full time making music is one of the primary things I'd spend my time doing. I like software but at the end of the day to me it's the most creative job I can do while still putting bread on my table reliably.
The reasons I don't do music full time are purely economic ones, far from wanting to 'free up' my time to do other things with AI music I'd rather have more of my time occupied by working on music. I want AI to automate the things I don't want to do, I want it to automate the mindless drudgery that is required to exist in a society. Automating art so that I have more time to work is a philistine position in my view, and one which reveals a somewhat dystopian vision of humanity's relationship with both art and work.
its changed the way I DJ.... I can be much more expressive.
What an insane take. You dont have any songs you like that there arent many others like it and that you can generate an endless supply of with AI? Come on.
I sure do love the dying thrashes of human-creativity chauvanists. AI art, AI video, and AI music will eclipse most humans and there is absolutely nothing that will stop it. And you will use it and appreciate it more too. Once you open your eyes that is.
Have you heard of dubstep? It sounds like robots falling down stairs, and humans made it and love it. If AI can make music less crappy, I'm all for it.
Not to mention vaporwave, which typically boils down to “take song, reduce bass, slow down”.
Or vaporwave's inverse, nightcore, which typically boils down to ”take song, increase bass, speed up”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHQevuohJH8
my music tastes are pretty mainstream, and this just does absolutely nothing for me. it's exactly what i'd expect AI music to sound like - completely forgettable, with nothing interesting about it.
i'd be willing to believe that this music was legitimately charting if it had at least some redeeming qualities, but i can't imagine how this could honestly get eleven spots on the iTunes chart without gaming it in some way.
I listen to a lot of music of all different genres depending on mood, and I can honestly I don't think anyone could peg this as AI just by listening to it. It's soulless and devoid of emotion, but so are a lot of real artists. That wouldn't even be so obvious if they just added some background something, anything, like Wall of Sound style. If I played this for anyone and they said "it sounds like AI", I'd confidently tell them they are full of shit.
> If I played this for anyone and they said "it sounds like AI", I'd confidently tell them they are full of shit.
Even though they'd be right? Interesting.
> If I played this for anyone and they said "it sounds like AI"
It sounds like AI.
> I'd confidently tell them they are full of shit.
Why are you getting offended on behalf of a computer? Or is there a deeper reasoning for this logic?
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>honestly I don't think anyone could peg this as AI just by listening to it. It's soulless and devoid of emotion
i agree. as far as ai slop goes, it's pretty good. it could be made by a human who wasn't very artistic. i'm not saying it's obviously AI generated, just that it's not very good music. but that's not because i dislike popular music - i think most of the hot 100 is usually pretty good, and contains significant artistic value even if it isn't to my taste.
if somebody was claiming this was created by a human, i'd believe them but i'd have the same objection: this isn't going to hit 11 positions on the itunes music chart without gaming the chart in some way.
"ai generated music creator manipulates the itunes chart to occupy 11 positions" is a much less interesting story than "ai generated music is so popular it occupies 11 spots on the itunes charts"
For a reasonable comparison to a minor hit of yore, where do people stand on the Flying Lizard's cover of Money (that's what I want)?
Soulless and devoid of emotion, or an inspired end run about the minor issue of a (self confessed) inability to conventionly sing.
> where do people stand on the Flying Lizard's cover of Money (that's what I want)?
It's fine precisely because it provokes emotion that AI stuff doesn't. You may love or hate what the Flying Lizards did, but it's very memorable and you will have an opinion about it (My wife loves it; I think it's stupid--C'est la vie.)
The AI generated music just sounds like every other average artist. I'm definitely not even convinced it's AI. It could very well be somebody claiming "AI" in order to game the system or get people talking about it.
As for occupying iTunes spots, why not? Is there much difference between Max Martin and his ilk shitting out yet more generic glop or AI doing it?
It genuinely warms my heart that the Flying LIzards did what they did .. but I also think it kind of stupid in a fun way and don't got out of my way to listen to it.
I feel much the same about a lot of the early AI music I've heard, I have a couple of channels on a lesser rank of RSS notifications but more and more there's less and less that's remarkable and it's feeling like the worst kinds of elevator music .. you know, not the Brian Eno stuff . . .
So yeah, we're sitting about like two Yorkshiremen giving a real Thomas Beecham "Shostakovich? I think I stepped in some once" vibe here. Probably deservedly.
It’s slop for sure, but you’re right, it’s hard to label it AI slop because the model has pretty much mastered the human slop sound.
it's unmistakably AI as soon as the vocals come in. maybe your ears are full of shit?
> completely forgettable, with nothing interesting about it
You just described 90% of young country for decades now. I keep waiting for its fans to get tired of being pandered to with formulaic lyrics, but they seem to be an endless well.
I’ve heard lots of music like this over the years. It’s catchy, the lyrics are very relatable to the audience of people who like this music. It might not be your thing, but it is certainly enjoyed by many, and there are albums written around this subject. Folk/blues are made of this subject.
Is it over all flat and boring? Somewhat. You can only hear the same thing so many times before it gets tiring.
I'd say the same thing about two thirds of the iTunes top 100. Different people love different songs I guess.
The lyrics of the one you linked are fairly strong compared to other songs on the top 100 list.
I've been making all my own music lately with suno 5.5. It's pretty sweet, it allows me to explore concepts in a different way. This sucks though. Here's hyperpop version of https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646 -> https://suno.com/song/516c7e52-a03e-490d-ba26-8d9a332eeea7
It feels... commercial. I feel like I have to read a EULA and hit I Agree before I can listen to that.
Pre-video ad served by YT was quite literally a scam.
Which says all you need to know about where all this is headed, I guess.
This channel is not even the official channel.
the comments are very suspicious and very scary
A lot of them read like twitter bots with generic “wow beautiful <emojis>”
Wherever there is profit to be made on the internet, you have massive amounts of weird abuse and botting to game the system. Maybe not even literal bots, but paying a sweatshop in India to leave thousands of generic comments to boost your rankings on the algorithm.
People were responding with period-correct, insipid “wow beautiful <emojis>” replies for decades before we had bots to do it.
It was noise when it was only people; it's still just noise when it also includes bots.
What makes it noise is less the actual comment itself. If I showed someone a piece of art in person and they said this to me, it would be a genuine response. What makes this particular instance noise is it reeks of mass automated messaging with no thought behind it. These comments are generic because they aren't people commenting on the thing they saw, they are just templates being spammed out on mass so they make them generic to fit any context.
Perhaps.
To me, this present-day noise is indistinguishable from the pre-bot noise. It's the same noise, in that both things are just noise of that shape. "How beautiful!" "I really feel this one!" "I love this song!"
Sometimes, the signal-to-noise ratio is better. Sometimes it's pretty bad. It always has been this way in online discourse -- especially with things that appeal to old folks.
In a track where the protagonist primarily complains about feeling old, it makes sense that most of the comments are that of what old folks have always written online.
(Are these particular comments primarily bot spam? Maybe. I peered into the depths a bit, and accounts for the top comments I looked at had been around for years. That isn't evidence for or against a well-orchestrated long con, but orchestration is hard and people who write insipid comments are plentiful.)
If the comments are from humans, that's tragic and frightening.
frightening either way, probably part of an operation that makes this AI chart so high
The AI comment push on that video is certainly an interesting look into the future. Record labels have their work cut out for them in this brace new world.
At least what I’m seeing in dance music is online sales and streaming seem kind of dead, and everything is about events, personalities, and unreleased tracks that all the big names have but you can’t get for a year after if ever.
If you go on soundcloud/spotify/etc there is infinite EDM slop that isn’t worth listening to. But if you listen to real event recordings on YouTube, they are all playing mostly the same stuff by actual artists with new/unreleased music that people get hyped to hear since you can’t find it anywhere else.
Wow, this song is horribly mastered.
It's not great in that way. The mastering -- if there is any -- is definitely kind of shit.
But that's a relatively easy thing for a human with the right combination of toolchain, ears, and experience to fix. It tends to be a slow process that takes a good bit of time, but lots of actual-mixdowns start off way worse than this before they get polished up by a skilled mastering engineer.
(Maybe in a year or three we'll have the mastering process automated into an uncanny mush of soullessness, as well.)
Audio mastering is already automated to the level of a mediocre human:
https://github.com/sergree/matchering
(I haven't actually tried this, I just watched the linked Benn Jordan video.)
IMO, the ideal would be for all music to be supplied unmastered so the listener's playback software can apply this process to their own taste. Mastering is necessary for listening with garbage playback equipment (e.g. phone speakers) or noisy listening environments (e.g. cars, parties), but it makes things sound worse in good conditions. The best sounding music CDs I own are classical CDs on Telarc that have liner notes bragging about the complete lack of mastering.
> Mastering is necessary for listening with garbage playback equipment (e.g. phone speakers) or noisy listening environments (e.g. cars, parties), but it makes things sound worse in good conditions.
Eh? I listened to it on quite good nearfield gear, in a decent room, and the AI track linked above still sounds like it needs a good bit of help from a responsible adult to bring it up on this rig. :)
Good mastering helps everywhere -- on all systems. For instance: The sound of Steely Dan is pretty good on playback with about anything, I think, and that sound took a ton of work.
And while classical music is not my first preference, I do love me a good Telarc recording. I strongly suspect that the signal path that they use isn't necessarily quite as pure as they insist that it is. Everything is a tone control, including a microphone -- and money is money. They're not going to reschedule an orchestra to fix an untoward blip at 3KHz. They'll just fix it in post (hopefully, as minimally as possible) and send it.
But otherwise, I agree. The mastering process can be automated. Ultimately, it will be. And for sure, it will also be a customizable user preference.
Some of that work has already been in the bag for decades. Ford, for instance, has been using DSPs in their factory car audio systems to shape sounds in unconventional ways for over 30 years. This gives them a lot of knobs to turn, and to fix into constraints, to help shape a listener's chosen music to sound as good as it can on less-than-ideal built-down-to-price on-road audio systems.
Or at least: It sounds as good it can to a consensus of engineers, or of a focus group.
But the knobs exist. And they don't have to be fixed or constrained: They can (and will) be automatically twisted to suit a listener's preferences.
I'll try to make time to check out your link in a day or two.
Uh huh. If you didnt know it was AI you would be immediately fooled. My god the intellectual dishonesty in this thread is insane lol
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I mostly listen to AI-generated music. 8 out of 10 of my top listens in the last 180 days are AI-generated.
I gradually went from various genres -> mostly nerdcore -> mostly AI nerdcore.
https://www.last.fm/user/testycool/library/tracks?from=2025-...
EDIT: Updated link to the most listened songs in the past 180 days. The songs are not generated by me.
I don't like most AI music I've heard, but you shouldn't be voted down for expressing a preference.
I do sometimes turn on ambient noise, some of it is randomized and musical (like '88 keys' at mynoise.net). Not AI, just algorithmic, but just because there's no human composer doesn't mean it MUST be condemned.
I feel like now, you can't even tell! I was in an uber drive where the driver had this incredible playlist of Brazilian bossa nova. It was sublime and some of the best tracks I ever heard. He even said he loves the singer but cannot find their name anywhere. It turns out it's a youtube playlist that is fully AI generated and genuinely some of the best bossa nova you can imagine. I still hear that playlist daily tbh. A legitimate, real Brazilian was vibing to a playlist he didn't even know was AI generated...
Would you mind sharing a link?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3pD7b08VII
It may not be traditionally "composed" but there was a lot of human thought that went into creating the loops and balancing how they play off against each other.
It's aleatoric music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatoric_music
Why?
It sounds great to me. AI-generated music is pretty popular with Warhammer 40k lore as well.
Also I tend to listen to songs for a few days, during which time I feel they're the best thing ever, which also helps with momentum during work.
After a few days I have to find other songs. Since AI music started getting more traction it's been way easier to find great songs.
I understand the criticisms of AI music, but that doesn't take away from the fact that for me and a growing number of people it sounds good.
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If you think that AI generated beige music is nerdcore, you don't know what you're talking about. The best is far more sophisticated and deeply - sarcastically - self-referential that I think it would be a real challenge for AI to come up with something both compelling and meaningful.
I don't have strong opinions on whether the AI music I listen to is nerdcore or something else. Maybe I didn't use the correct term.
I think you touched on the point: people who don't actually care about music think musical pablum is 'good', because it slides in their ear and out without challenging them with actual 'listening'. This guy even assigns a genre to his slop while clearly knowing (and, really, caring) nothing about what he claims to like listening to.
I do care a lot what I listen to. It takes me while to find songs that I like.
Also I am not listening to AI generated music that I generate myself.
These are some channels whose music I like:
i love the braindead takes in the replies you are getting. attacking you for enjoying AI music. these people are in for a rude awakening... actually no. they'll assimilate quietly and pretend they were never this dense.
AI music is just as good as all human-made music. It is at the point of indistinguishability now and anyone actually using suno v5+ knows this.
various genres: https://suno.com/s/Oc5842XzzuBTk4Ma https://suno.com/s/RdmFOKpbi4zyVbRf https://suno.com/s/J4Z8t8jU9JXVJ1DB https://suno.com/s/OhfzCYkmcZhFf1Pk https://suno.com/s/VYHHLW7Hkw2uHjrb https://suno.com/s/cTu7AkoOdAyi0eWz https://suno.com/s/QvOExImOVzo1b2Gl https://suno.com/s/MASINon9lGr9JPLS https://suno.com/s/ujpTfZwVdAKy9W0h https://suno.com/s/DwekDLuEzgyNpYGQ https://suno.com/s/psWqWzDQa6Aq96Pk https://suno.com/s/JEM8G2RxD35ZUpGy
also if you like enders game lol: https://suno.com/s/gQ8eGNgnkfktl0Xq
This is no more art than a container of corn syrup is a proper meal.
So it’s perfect for the times. :(
It appears Apple/iTunes has already responded. He's no longer on the Top 100: USA list:
https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/top-100-usa/pl.606afcbb7...
You can stop this in its tracks.
Go on KEXP, find a new band you like, share it with your friends, buy a physical copy, buy a t-shirt, book tickets, like their stuff on socials. Watch the record companies flock to real bands.
For the second time on this thread, start with Angine de Poitrine. Live music is the antidote.
I agree. When I had my kid I stopped going to concerts because of parenting, time, etc. Last year I went to the Warped tour and discovered some new bands, it changes the whole experience and my joy for music and discovering new bands like when I was young. I have listened to some AI music as a curiosity and the only way to describe it, it is soulless.
Today there are zero mentions of Eddie in the top 100: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/top-100-usa/pl.606afcbb7...
I'd really love to see an actual source on this claim.
Definitely still at #3 in the UK when I open “iTunes Store” (not Apple Music) and go to the Album Chart… at least it was the case two minutes ago.
We've seen a steady shift in music over the past 2 decades from full length albums, to single hits, to artificially generated.
Surely there's some gained and some lost. But coming from the era of buying an entire album, spending time reading the CD booklets and art, and listening to 10 songs which tell a larger story ---- what's being lost really hits home.
This comment is like 20 years out of date haha. People shifted to single hits when the iTunes store was selling songs for 99 cents. Now (and by now I mean for over a decade) we’re in the age of streaming, and you can easily access whole albums with zero friction. It’s the best time ever for the full listen through experience. And artists are responding by releasing long albums.
What I do think is lost these days is listening to the save album over and over again.
I really don't think we have. When I was growing up in the 90s it was the heyday of the pop single but there were still plenty of albums being produced and I think it's the same today.
I can tell you that myself (and many others) still create concept albums as our primary format. It's not that people aren't still creating it.
The choice is still there for any listener that cares about albums as a format. I don't mean that in a negative way. I suspect that many people listen to both playlists of singles, and albums of their favourite artists, depending on mood.
No, the game has changed. Back then, the singles were typically accompanied by an album, even if it was just filler. It's better to release singles now due to the way the Spotify and iTunes algos work. Best practice is now to release your songs one at a time rather than a full album (at least if you aren't an established player).
On one hand this pretty much destroys thematic albums (like classical music, prog rock, Tool or for example, something like Alice in Chains' Dirt), but on the other few could pull it off and those who can are still doing it (ex: the latest Opeth album). So maybe discovering new music is hurt, because itunes and spotify look like crowded ERs, but there's just as much good music out there - regardless of your tastes.
It doesn't kill it as songs can be remixed for the album version.
Right, there's less unnecessary dressing of an "album" of filler. But I don't think that's a meaningful change. Singles drove the market then and they do now. Albums were still produced then and still are now.
> there were still plenty of albums being produced and I think it's the same today.
agreed with this, I would almost go so far as to say there are more full length albums being created than ever before.
I think it's an AI-generated response.
Artists have actually been moving back to the full album with goodies, even in mainstream pop with Beyoncé, Rosalia, RAYE, Charli XCX to name a few.
Does it really matter since pop albums were/are (almost?) always "collections of singles + fillers"?
ah, the standard trite, reductive anti-pop cudgel.
no, these days, pop albums are more frequently meant to be consumed in their entirety, often with full length visuals for each song that blend into each other in order.
* the death of radio has really meant that singles are declining in utility, especially in our social media era where the songs that pop off an album are not necessarily the record-designated singles
* the more parasocial development of pop encourages fans to invest more in merch and the concept of the album
* like everything else in the economy trending towards more expensive but meaningful experiences, tours are becoming larger productions to experience an album intensely
* in the AI era, we are now seeing artists pivot towards doubling down on experiences that AI cannot curate and provide meaning for
Rosalia this year is touring with a full orchestra and RAYE with a full big band, because these are intentional choices that the pop music industry has been trending towards for a while. There's always going to be trite drugstore music as long as there are drugstores, but what is charting is not really that at the moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htQBS2Ikz6c&list=RDhtQBS2Ikz...
I feel like in those days I really didn’t appreciate albums. Storage was a premium so I would focus on bands greatest hits songs vs discographies. Both in terms of my burned cd collections and early mp3. I didn’t start getting into albums until terabyte hard drives were cheaper. Then I started pirating discographies and listening to the back catalog for the first time.
music has been a product of its form factor for a long time. It's no coincidence that the wax cylinder, 78, 45, 33, cassette, CD, and mp3 dictated changes in how music was packaged (single, lp, ep, album, b sides) and the average length of a popular song.
Good thing music as a topic is diverse and people are doing all kinds of things. But yes, commercially distributed mass-consumption music is influenced by its packaging and distribution ... obviously.
There is another new trend now that some artists are doing album concerts, where the set list follows one of their albums. I thought that was cool.. probably as a reaction, on how to bring back the album in a way.
One can still buy artisan albums created by independent singers/bands. But they tend to get lost in the marketing/influencer noise and thus do not get worldwide success. As a result you have to search harder for them.
the main article is about marketing/influencer noise completely replacing the artists, enacted by companies close to the search process
You're only describing pop music. Thankfully this is a tiny fraction of all music.
it's become a much larger section of music. Notice, there are no bands any more. Try finding a metal band with musicians under 40, or a Greenday, Linkin Park or, the itself automated Kpop industry aside, a spontaneous boy or girl group.
Solo pop or hip-hop performers with a focus on social media have crowded out collectively made music, likely due to the general social atrophy and technology enabling production from their bedrooms.
Anecdotally, I used to be a guitarist and a lot of my friends are musicians and teachers, teenage bands are pretty much nowhere to be seen.
charts will become totally meaningless.
Event data will be what matters most. That's how artists actually make their revenue these days anyways.
I suspect this is some trick somewhere with purchased views or something. Not that I'm against AI music. I love the various lo-fi / cyberpunk / etc. AI youtube channels. I also enjoy my own suno music. Overall, I'd say AI music dominates my listening these days.
It just seems unusual that a lot of people like the same thing. Even the channels on Youtube that I listen to are so prolific (people generate a large amount of music and just stick it in there) that I never go look for a particular track or anything. And there are so many of them that each one only gets a few thousand views.
It just seems unusual that a lot of people like the same thing.
The same thing happens with non-AI music too. Artists you've never heard of have songs that suddenly become viral.
That's true, but I've noticed that AI text content is very prompter-focused. Someone once described them as dreams - more meaningful to the dreamer than to anyone who has to listen to them narrated. Perhaps it's just inherent to the fact that textual content is rarely viral at that length. It's a base-rate issue.
Yeah, there's this dude, haven't heard anything from him in a long time, but it was somebody that I used to know...
Have you ever been to a live rock show and felt exhilarated during it, feeling connected to the crowd and the musicians and the music? AI won't replace that, and I feel bad for people who won't get to experience it because "AI is good enough".
I have. It's exhilarating. The feeling of involved in the crowd during a great live performance by excellent musicians is one of the best things I've ever experienced.
But I've also seen this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gMX_hR-RoM
The people in the crowd are all just kind of standing around watching robots. It doesn't look very exhilarating to me.
I've been in deader crowds than that with a live band on a stage: At least they didn't scatter.
(I'll do it again, too.)
Not the person you're replying to but each have their time and place. When I have a lo fi playlist on I don't expect to feel exhilarated, connected to the crowd and the musicians.
It kinda makes sense AI music is becoming so popular. We (I'm a suno guy too) are literally providing constant feedback to the models over what they like and don't like.
Mainstream music was created for a good 20 years using the following process:
1. Do the survey/focus groups to figure out a hot topic for a song. For instance your exploration shows that 300K girls between 13 and 17 years old were left by their boyfriend, so there is a 300K market for a song about that.
2. Find someone or group who will sing the song. Something your target audience will identify. E.g. "rebellious teenager" (take Britney Spears), "we need a group that will attack larger target" - take Spice Girls - we take one black, one white, one Latino looking (doesn't have to be real Latino, obviously), one polite and nice, one impolite. You get the point.
3. Note: singer/group does not need to know how to sing, they need to move reasonably on the scene, the rest autotune and computers will handle easily.
So, given the process, AI singer is just a little bit different "music" production process, not so much different from the one used up to date except that you don't need autotune anymore.
Luckily there are still people who do music for the sake of doing music and it really stands out as compared to 80% of fodder for listeners that is on YT, radio, Spotify.
You could say I'm a music snob, big time. I can't stand any of the streaming services, because they only have a small fraction of my favorites (which is variations of discord jazz, often in other genres. I like when music decomposes into noise and then restructures again.) Due to my interest there, I've done a deep hole with AI music generation, not the services, but developing the models and exploring the open weight models being released.
There will be quality real art music created by these systems, but not by those that prompt alone. This is a whole new level of instrument, and the levels of control beneath are there to seriously transform one's thoughts to music, and melody, and that composed symphony of separate elements into a symphony of intended meaning.
Perhaps traditional music and this form of music should be treated separate. The distinction between AI music that is prompt-only and what can be created from a deeper set of controls is immense, and is not distinguished at this time, and may never be with how surface level this entire public assessment of AI music happens to be.
My take is that it will be somewhat similar though perhaps more complex to using sample based libraries, whether it’s for electronic music, symphonic loops, etc., I feel like this will just be the next generation of that kind of music making. I find it very unlikely that it will replace the kind of music making that comes from playing actual instruments and recording them from a live human player but it could still be interesting in its own right.
Who still buys from iTunes? This is likely bot-driven.
I have no doubt that those numbers have been inflated by AI powered marketing tools, dead internet theory style.
Deezer had an analysis where they found almost all the listeners for AI music was fraud bots.
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/18/up-to-70-...
Up to 70% of streams of AI music on Deezer were fraudulent!
Yes it should be easy to find people in one’s immediate social circle who are listening to these tracks if they are that popular. I’ll wait…
Time for a cross, like the New York Times bestsellers.
Right. If we're not hearing these songs on the street, in a pub, etc. then it's just bots praising bots.
A couple of weeks ago I went to an 'Italian' restaurant. To my surprise, they played a 10-second video loop of an AI-generated stereotypical 'blues' singer with obvious artefacts. The music was a mix of 'blues' with nonsensical lyrics that couldn’t be found online. It was an odd experience. I don't think it was this creation, but it was disconcerting. Felt like Blade Runner isn't too far away.
You were probably listening to this guy: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RObuKTeHoxo
That is almost a Rick Roll. Love it.
There's a fair number of ai generated 1.5 hour or so collections of blues songs on YouTube, and some are actually pretty decent. I suspect the human in the loop guides the lyrics to keep them sensible and the voice from being too muddled, as there's plenty of lower quality stuff too. Same goes for a variety of instrumental stuff.
I hate it, and I hate liking some of it, as it is easier to find than quality human produced stuff in some styles and I'd prefer to support analog over digital creation.
With that said, there's a blues AI cover of gangsta's Paradise that is pretty sweet played at 90% speed. Again, I wish it was human performed, and I'm continuously conflicted about it.
I don't mind liking some of it, if it's worthy of praise, but the stuff that was on in the restaurant was just ...nothing.
It's similar pattern that we've seen previously, but exaggerated by modern trends and modern technology: the most popular cultural items will often be meaningless and base, and if you want something substantial you need other ways to find meaningful content.
right, but at least human hands used to touch the process. even in 2000s copy-paste boy band era it was at least human
For large swaths of music I'm not sure that matters all that much, not anymore. At least the copy-paste bands had some level of uniqueness, there always seemed to be a distinct sound or gimmick.
I don't really like much of the "mainstream" music right now. It's basically whining, high pitched young men. They all sound exactly the same to me, you can't hear or make outall the words, they play the guitar, sort of and all bass sounds have been scrubbed from the track.
Even if they write their own songs, which I honestly think many do, I don't see the point, when it's basically a stream of high pitched tones which you can't hear. Even if you read the lyrics, they are super generic. Might as well be AI, and I think that's really the point. Most people don't give a fuck, AI or not, who cares, it's noise coming out the speaker or headphones. It's not there because it's music, it's there to be noise and isolate you from the world.
Agreed. It's far worse now, specifically due to changes in technology. I didn't mean to say that "we've seen this all before," but instead meant something more like "given how human nature works, this technology will take us to a worse place."
I don't like AI, but either music is good, or it is not. AI can generate good music, I noticed this on youtube. In my local collection I have zero AI songs and I will probably keep at this number, but AI can produce good music too, there is no doubt about this. The question will be whether humans want to rely on AI music. I'd love to say I don't, but ultimately when it comes to music the criterium that I use is whether my brain evaluates the song as good or not, rather than whether it is AI or not.
I’ve listened to his three top songs on Spotify. They’re practically the same songs with different lyrics. I know approximately 0 music theory and I could tell they’re almost identical.
Reminded me of "sitting at a dock of the bay" with tamer lyrics and more bland and monotone. I suspect AI is much better at DJing than actual composing.
Are these really the top songs or they have only become the top songs thanks to Spotify pushing them ?
I just listened to the top 3 songs of this project out of curiosity, and it feels like the same song. Same rhythmic pattern, same harmonies, same instruments.
However, I also listened to several other artists on the chart[1]. They all, bar a couple, are so low effort that they may also be generated by neural networks, FWIW.
[1]: https://itopchart.com/us/en/top-songs/
A decade or two from now your children will be dropping thousands of dollars to go to a concert to hear AI generated music from an AI generated artist.
And they'll "go to" the concert at home with their VR headsets
And the parents will scream that they need more healthy hobbies and they should use a real screen instead.
No way, even in this future VR still won’t catch on with the mainstream.
I was a big fan of listening to music, long time subscriber to Spotify, would listen to music when driving, when cooking, when coding (Same playlist for 20+ years - Matrix + fat of the land).
The last 6 years has been no music. I unsubscribed from everything since I felt music was an intrusion in the moment.
I had a quick listen to the "AI singer", and it's soulless, empty, and generic - Which is modern music anyway.
People have been saying the same thing since forever. There has always been and always will be good music. It's just difficult to find.
It is extremely easy to find amazing new music. Modern pop music has not been the place to look for it since maybe forever
Thankfully I still buy proper music, what a sad state for human culture.
I can't find any of his songs on Top 100[1], is it another list?
[1]: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/top-100-usa/pl.606afcbb7...
He/it/they have 7 entries according to this data aggregator, though I don't understand how and why it differs from apple's own chart.
https://kworb.net/ww/
I searched Spotify and Apple music top 100 songs and Eddie Dalton is not on either. I think the majority of users do not buy singles on iTunes anymore so this may be an easy chart to manipulate. The source mentions the name of the creator in the second line leading me to believe this is some clever advertising for Dallas Little's AI.
Live shows are the biggest part of music anyway
Maybe I'm just old (definitely I'm just old) but the live music experience has been completely destroyed for me, between bat-shit-crazy high ticket prices and the absolute collapse of concert-goer decorum. Who would have thought that a bunch of high, adolescent punks in the 80s or 90s would be more appropriately behaved than the 35-yr-old mom pushing past only to stand directly in front to film the entire show over her head on her iPhone, with a few breaks to live-tweet her awesome experience on social media?
I admit that the bands I play in aren't at a level where we play "shows" with high ticket prices. More often we play in bars that host live jazz. I hope you don't give up on live music, but find a way to enjoy it on terms that you prefer.
You hit upon perhaps the solution to the other commenter's issue - scale back to smaller, local (or near local) bands.
Check they local college; they likely have free concerts at their auditorium of a variety of genres, though probably more likely you'll get orchestras and jazz bands (which are great).
I live in a university town, and the free concerts are great. Especially because the students and faculty are most often playing material that I've never heard, including new and experimental stuff.
Over the years it's been hard to avoid noticing that the people who show up for classical and jazz concerts tend to be older. But we're not playing "the music they grew up with." Many of them grew up listening to rock 'n' roll or similar, and when we play an old pop tune, they'll get up and dance.
What I think instead is that they've adjusted their musical tastes to find settings where they can enjoy the performance: Typically quieter, less crowded (though we fill our venues), easier to get in and out of (parking, public transit, etc), and at decent hours.
I'll perform these songs by AI in concerts if the price is right. And that's how AI starts to leak out into the physical world. AI also hires human workers to do tasks in the real world using Task Rabbit and similar apps.
AI music is generally not going to be copyrightable unless they can show genuine human creativity was involved. So if a song is 100% AI, you could just go around performing it or straight up selling copies yourself and there's nothing* they could do about it. Though I do wonder if a human writes the lyrics, but AI generates all the music parts, if it becomes sufficiently human for copyright. Because the lyrics at that point would be actual creativity.
* I am not a lawyer, and this won't stop them from possibly trying to sue you or even winning depending on the situation. Or trying to prove there is human ingenuity involved. Do at your own peril.
It's as if what William Gibson wrote about in Idoru has already become a reality. Soon we will see celebrity AI gossip.
“Soon” we will see celebrity AI gossip?
Someone clearly missed the first season of Fruit Love Island[0].
[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/viral/ai-fruit-love-isla...
baby gronk got rizzed up by livvy?
I see music as "the space of all possible 5-second clips at stereo 48kHz 24bit depth". If you think about it, that space contains the intro to Stairway to Heaven and Oops I Did It Again, and the end of either song. It contains every 5-second segment of O Fortuna, plus a previously unimagined O Fortuna Remix with MF Doom rapping the pledge of alliegance backwards. My point is, AI is getting good at searching music space for novel patterns, and that's entirely the point of music, not making a career out of being an alcoholic minstrel with a tour bus.
The audience will out the good patterns, and it's up to the musicians or AI companies to serve better patterns.
> and that's entirely the point of music
That's very reductive. Music, like writing or painting, is a medium, not a thing with intrinsic purpose. It can be a means of communication, sharing human experience, conveying emotion, evoking feelings, expressing a story, ...
I'm not saying AI music is inherently good. I'm saying good music is good music.
My take is literalist, not reductive: Music (and any art product) is configuration. The media involved are the physical laws of nature that present the configuration.
> It can be a means of communication, sharing human experience, ...
1. You're construing the journey with the result. The act of creating is not typically the result product itself.
2. Any perceived relationship to the artist via product is virtual and parasocial (respectfully stated). You have no relationship with Bach or Shakespeare or Michelangelo--you have an appreciation for their accumulated works. You may have a fascination for their stories and life through literary works. You have no relationship with your favorite artist, you have their works in your media library.
To many, the relationship between what was written in the sheet and how it was played by a live performer, day I say virtuoso, is the imporant thing. The human component is the important component.
This is entirely separate from pop, which is the junk food of music - cheap, filling, bad for your health.
I would argue that the human element in music is not an important contributor towards the enjoyment of music for exactly 100% of people.
Humans just biologically enjoy rhythmic sounds. We don't care who makes it, we don't care how it is performed live. Those things are just hijacking emotional memory in heightened moments, but that is completely separate from the general natural enjoyment of music.
AI music simply drives the same point home that listening to random music does when you are without a care for lyrics or artists (often, and everyone).
Your point is asinine. You love a hell of a lot of music besides what you attach to live performance. Everyone does. You do not care about the human component.
Unless you want to lie and claim you're some musical purist, this argument is shallow thinking and nothing more.
Exactly. Gorillaz was literally the cartoon characters in my mind for the entirety of my childhood, before I knew who Damon Albarn was.
I would counter-argue that you're accusing the other party of exactly the shallow thinking you're guilty of - even worse, you cannot concieve of a thing, so you confidently state thing does not exist and the other party is at best a liar. One only has to have a cursory knowledge of performances on, say, pianos, to know that who and how plays an established piece was always a big deal.
You are missing the point entirely. As I already said: live performances are a completely separate type of enjoyment than music enjoyment. It is dishonest to ignore all of the music you enjoy that has nothing to do with performance, and to cherry pick the less than 1% of music you have likes that also overlaps with what you have seen performed live. Please, this only takes a couple seconds of actual critical thought.
> "the space of all possible 5-second clips at stereo 48kHz 24bit depth".
That space is mostly noise.
Try cat /dev/urandom > /dev/audio for an example of the kind of noise that this space contains.
(If you stick with it and manage live long enough, you'll eventually hear a few bars from Stairway to Heaven. If I also manage to live long enough, then perhaps we'll be able to chat about it in a few million years.)
> I see music as "the space of all possible 5-second clips at stereo 48kHz 24bit depth".
5.6MB? That's an astounding number of combinations. 1 followed by 1733933 zeroes.
> If you think about it, that space contains the intro to Stairway to Heaven and Oops I Did It Again, and the end of either song. It contains every 5-second segment of O Fortuna, plus a previously unimagined O Fortuna Remix with MF Doom rapping the pledge of alliegance backwards. My point is, AI is getting good at searching music space for novel patterns, and that's entirely the point of music, not making a career out of being an alcoholic minstrel with a tour bus.
AI is not searching that space for novel patterns for the most part, it is taking what it has heard before and coming up with things based on that. Which isn't a dig at AI, that's pretty much how humans do things too. I don't think today's AIs would be able to come up with something like Stairway to Heaven if Led Zeppelin and the music they inspired had never existed though.
Agree. Maybe novel is the wrong term given my framing. "Listenable?" The combinatorial space of music is hyperastronomical, effectively infinite. And most of it is probably noise.
AI isn't "searching" in the standard indexing sense. But if say, Suno, is doing stable diffusion on fourier transform heat maps, and there's a finite space of configurations... it is using a heuristic approach to pick an option from a well-defined (gargantuan) set of options.
I can’t tell if this is sincere or parody. It is like you set out to write the most HN take on music possible.
Looks like https://clackernews.com/ is leaking!
I love music, I make music. It is sincere.
I just checked Spotify, it has 368k followers and at least one song has over 1M streams.
This speaks more about how easy it is to buy botted vanity metrics on Spotify than anything.
The most obvious way you can tell this is inorganic is how all of the "Discovered On" are artist-specific playlists: "Eddie Dalton music", "Best of Eddie Dalton", "Eddie Dalton Hits", etc. A real artist may have some artist-specific playlists but generally their Discovered On will be more general genre playlists, like "Pop Hits" or "Hype" or "Gym Music" or whatever.
Wasn't there already some scandal with swedish criminals using this to launder money?
Chart rank is mostly distribution and playlist economics—treating it like a referendum on whether people prefer AI vocals is the real industry coup.
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I've heard vinyl and CD's are making a comeback. Hopefully this is one of the reasons for this.
I actually can relate to AI music better than to music made by humans.
I always feel some jealousy when listening to rockstars. Because they get all the action and I get so little. They see the world, are desired by all the beautiful women, earn a ton of money and don't have to work a boring job.
With AI music, I know it is just some lonely GPU in a cold, dark datacenter somewhere. Crunching numbers. Just like I do.
That's an interesting thing to feel.
I think if you knew more musicians personally, you would feel different. What you're imagining and the day-to-day lived experience of most real musicians don't exactly overlap that much.
So in a sense you're ruining the music for yourself based on nothing but you're imagination.
I think a lot of modern life suffers from this problem. Most of us live such walled in lives now, experiencing everything second hand, from a distance. The absence of information lets us fill the gap with anything we want, which ends up being more a reflection of our own psychology than reality.
> and don't have to work a boring job.
Don't have to as they can retire, but as someone who used to be in a professional band (far from a rockstar), I would have end my life if I have to play one of these songs EVER again after playing them 10000s of times (rehearsal + gigs). I cannot understand how anyone does that without being very much drugged up. Especially once you have the money to quit.
"Not all artists". Very few of them, especially these days. I'm reminded of the old joke about how when Mozart was my age, he'd been dead for ten years.
How can you say that!? Compared to your GPU, you are terrible at crunching numbers.
It’s really odd to listen to - the vocals seem like they’ve been recorded at a really low nitrate.
The top 40 has always been riddled with garbage, in my opinion, but at least real, human musicians were making a living from their art.
The top 40 has rarely been about "art", though. The music there is highly formulaic and derivative, whose creators know well how to produce music that appeals to the masses.
The effect of this "AI" trend is that now humans with no musical background or experience can flood the medium, making it much more difficult for anyone to make a living from it, whether they're an artist or not.
No, back when there were actual musicians playing actual instruments the top 40 was legitimate art
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Hot_100_sin...
1984 gets more real every day.
I like AI Music, there is some great all instrumental stuff out there.
So absolutely tasteless it should be banned. I think it's fine if people want to generate music at home like this but also, isn't it questionable what is even copyrightable? Apple makes you pay for this?
oh man, I just am so bummed that around 2007 I ditched my 20 year collection of CDs and went digital whaaaaa!
This reminds of the time Data started performing with the violin…
iTunes? i wonder what kind of sales we're talking about here. people buying music is few and far between, and i wonder what percentage of that customer base buys their music on iTunes when there are great alternatives offering lossless files
Isn't it too early in this timeline to have a Rei Toei?
I really don't get it. Mundus vult decipi.
Since the Monkeys we all know, there won't be another Elvis Presley - I advise you to look him up, it is massively impressive, what this guy achieved and what records he holds.
Or put another way: what is music? What ain't artificial in music? Is a drum already artificial? Or an e guitar? Playback? Studio music?
The divide between a band and a song writer?
People trashed techno music in Germany during the early 90th as being "machine music without a soul, totally artificial, a computer is doing everything". Kraftwerk on the other hand, was quite the opposite. It is mind blowing, that they had to construct the hardware they were getting their sound of.
But no matter what, techno of the 90th appear to be true craftsmanship in comparison to todays music. Like the 30th Big Bands vs 60th Rock music. I don't imply to say "Everything used to be better." Nothing could be further from the truth. The thing is, some things actually never change except for the medium.
I stopped caring. We are all victim and perpetrator at the same time. You use AI - oh well, cheater I would say.
Women painting their faces - well...
Ever since people went un-natural to be civilized to paraphrase Karl Popper.
I made a cut off regarding literature. I mainly read the classics where no AI was available - but only an editor.
It is tougher than ever but I stopped being judgmental. I try to do, what is expressed with "The bait must appeal to the fish, not the angler." Mundus vult decipi.
We called out WWF for being scripted entertainment while going to the cinema expecting that the hero would actually really die during the first dramatic 5 minutes in the movie - oh well...
Enjoy! If it sounds good, who cares? If someones earns a buck, so what? We pay for Naked Canon etc. just to let lose. :)
In high school i started to hear melodies/lyrics pop in my head and it prompted to learn instruments - pursued songwriting dream in college in Nashville (just a hobbyist since). I was initially excited about using Suno -- make the songs how they're heard in my head a reality as my rough garageband demos with me singing isnt how i hear them. Also, people arent excited by singing. Though my excitement wore off as I started to feel uninspired that it now takes zero talent/zero effort to write songs.
I took a break from Suno for many months .. attacking everyones slop including my own but my bandmates like my AI songs. Now at practice (80s & 90s music band) we listen and play along to the AI versions and have thrown in two into our setlist. Thus, for me Ive finally found an inspiring human usage of AI music! No text prompter could ever enjoy playing / performing their music in a band and to an audience and receive live human feedback. That's unless they do what millions other musicians have done .. cultivate their talent/musical interest.
I love it! I find it so funny when people come out and say AI music has no soul and no feelingsj. Meanwhile 99% of music is about genetals, pimping, whoring or shaking their asses LOL
On the contrary, AI music is really good and can absolutely be playful and follow themes. The lines are good, the voices pristine and it can invoke emotion like other titles as well. The latter is a state of the listener in any case.
I still don't want to listen to it most of the time. I think in my youth it would have seriously prohibited me from learning an instrument and playing music myself. Today I would skip that and use AI to generate music. What yesterday was playing music yourself and the strange test version of Audio Logic you found on the internet would today certainly just be the next common AI generator.
I don't love it, but the record industry is turning out the same identikit rubbish as the AI, so it is no wonder people don't care.
I think that is the root of the phenomenon behind Angine de Poitrine at the moment. It is live, it is real, it is different. It is like music waking up from a 25 year rest.
Does sex and dancing not involve feelings and the soul? Is prostitution not a societal issue worth discussing through song?
I am wondering when Dr. Phoxotic makes it to the top 10...
Reminds me of music from Christone Ingram.
Bullshit. This does not represent what real people are listening to, there are ways to game the system.
The idea is explained by Rick Beato here: https://youtu.be/rGremoYVMPc
Cant see any on top 100 usa. Fact check please.
https://music.apple.com/no/playlist/top-100-usa/pl.606afcbb7...
Grifters figured out several years ago that the iTunes sales chart is extremely gameable, and can be juiced for some cheap headlines.
I mean music in the charts has always been total shit anyway.
Alternate title: iTunes charts still easy to game.
I see many people claiming AI art has no value.
I could understand opposing it on an ethical basis. I could even understand it if they claimed that it will dull us out or it just isn't good for the brain, sort of like we can say that tiktok/instagram reels are probably not good for our brains.
But to claim that it has no value? Surely my definition of value is just different, and I'm playing semantics.
The least-funny of clowns has value if they make someone laugh.
The most mind-destroying tiktok/reels have value if they entertain someone for a little while.
I'm not saying these are necessarily good things, but they certainly hold value. And AI art, like memes, like instagram reels, like watching paint dry, has value if consumers enjoy it. It has much more value than watching paint dry because many more people clearly enjoy it (and I don't think their brains will rot because of it).
Personally, I think AI art enables such a low barrier to entry that obviously we have a big problem with mass production of slop. Things that entertain (again, like tiktok/reels), but are probably not a net-positive for society.
However, while I recognize that problem, I know several people who are creating INCREDIBLE art with AI which they would never be able to do. Things that bring tears to my eyes and that are definitely not slop. Even if they are produced in a day, it takes a special mind to conjure up the right things to produce. Faster does not always mean worse (and what even is "good" or "bad" in art??). Tale as old as time.
There is an ethical debate to be had about this art being built on the stolen assets that previous artists, using traditional tools, created. I think it's a serious debate and I don't really know how we'll solve it.
So if I:
1. Ignore the ethical debate around attribution and, as an exercise, assume that there's "fair compensation to everyone involved" (not so sure if this will happen)
2. Assume we do find a system to properly curate content (which I do actually think will happen -- we will find ways of weeding out the best)
Then I absolutely want AI art to succeed. It has enabled so many around me to produce so many incredible things, I can't wait for more chapters in this beautiful history of humanity. Where more people can create more.
"1." is a tough ask. We need to figure it out. "2." I think we'll manage, and I guess even if we don't get "1.", then cat's out of the bag and these tools are too world-changing to keep them from being used. I want to see what these amazing creative geniuses do with them.
What recommendations do you have for AI artists doing genuinely interesting work, or good places to find them?
Unfortunately these are people in my circles: friends and family. So I cannot bring you any recommendations.
I'm reminded of something I've read somewhere "Nothing is more boring than listening about someone else's dreams".
I think it tells a lot about AI-generated art. People prompting the AI find it fascinating because they look at it with in the context of their internal thoughts and moods that led them to it. But the generated artwork itself doesn't communicate that context at all. A complete stranger will find it derivative and boring.
I'm guessing that looking at AI art prompted by your friend and family may be a middle road somewhere. So maybe the fact that you have such a positive opinion on AI art is because it's the people you know closely that are doing it.
Or perhaps I just like some of it in general.