This is probably just the communities I'm in, but it feels like whereas AI art had a fairly serious backlash, AI music has not? Is this your impression?
@ZachWeinersmith I suspect some of it has to do with the accessibility of these tools. It's easy to prompt for text or photos and with minimal effort publicize that, and even have it seem relatively competent. Doing that for a song is much more difficult.
It's important to remember that not all AI tools are created equal. Even the text generators require some significant human intervention to create long format cohesive works.
@ZachWeinersmith i find it hard to tell the difference between AI music and composed music. But I am not a musician and the communities i am in aren't musically inclined. We all claim to be against it, but gun to our heads I don't think we would be able to spot it.
I should note that I like synth music, so I might be worse at spotting it than other people.
@ZachWeinersmith much less used, mostly trained on long-dead artists, longer history of procedural music generation with human-designed (as opposed to “scrape content everywhere”) algorithms. Very different situation.
@ZachWeinersmith Music, to me, has always been less anonymous. It's quite usual on Internet to see art and not know who did it ; it was probably easier to steal, so AI art has been much more prevalent and needed a stronger fight back? I don't think I have heard a lot of AI music; is there as much?
Also, due to the music industry as it is now, companies are fighting AI music while none are fighting AI art, afaik.
As someone outside of the music making community, but in the music listening community, I would say that since the introduction of digital synths and super multitrack (my understanding is that modern pop songs can have 300 tracks or more) digital recording there is a feeling that a lot of (big, popular) music is already mechanical and programmed. In that sense adding "AI" to the mix is not that big of a deal.
@MylesRyden@ZachWeinersmith
I too prefer music that's more handmade, but I think an important point people who criticize electronic music tend to miss is that a big part of creating music is composition, and (at least before AI) that still was done by humans.
Agreed. Can't really say I have listened to the radio in many years. Even "back in the day" I preferred tracks that sounded like and entire band recorded in a studio rather than pieced together by a producer.
The human touch is essential, of course, but I have mixed feelings about sampling, looping, etc. When it is broken down to its elements, it sounds really cool (I enjoy "Digging the Crates" on Youtube), but somehow it is still very mechanical.
As it now exists "AI" is a giant chopping and looping machine. I don't think it is better than human composition, but I can see how with having people doing it for so long now, it opens the door to "AI" as being part of the process.
@ZachWeinersmith Certainly people talk about it a lot less. Off the top of my head, I don't know where to make it, whereas I can think of plenty of places to make images. So maybe it's just because people aren't coming across it much?
If I wrote music for ads for a living I'd be worried though!
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