dude this is a fantastic video wtf 😭 all sides of the argument well articulated, and your points about its positive use cases are spot on in terms of democratizing the process for the masses. hope your channel blows up 🙏
Music will never change, what changes is the desire of many little souls who want to use music to be idolized or to be blessed by the god of money. The pleasurable relationship between human beings and music is unshakable. In any case, for frustrated candidates for the "music industry" there will always be planting potatoes, the potato industry always needs workers.
Imperfections can and will be emulated. Analogue emulations that replicate tuning drift of ocilatiors is far from impossible as is every other nuance that occurs from the heat generated by components creating artefacts in vintage keyboards. I like to compare to the traditional Samurai sword making analogy when I think about the future of music. Only people who are really passionate about the thing will do it because we don't need swords these days 😅
Wonderfully created, well-made video! You're very entertaining and engaging. It's a hopeful optimism I also once had, but now gone. Once concept artists and illustrators, me and all the peers and colleagues have been displaced; all of our work used in dataset AI training while we've been laid off. None of us have been able to find stable work again. Like you said, there is joy in suffering for creation; it makes our work better for it. The creation of art is fundamentally inconvenient; it's a healthy struggle. I genuinely worry about the cultural impact of the removal of all strife of passion from our lives. Worse than all that, I feel AI has been increasingly used more for actual evil. Malicious deepfakes have begun infiltrating politics, becoming more convincing by the day. Fake historical videos, revenge content, artwork theft, identity theft, phonecall scams; authenticity is slowly becoming impossible for the average eye/ear to detect. Even with the handfuls of good I've seen AI able to achieve, I've grown to believe it's not worth the world of murky skepticism being wrought.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and I’m sorry you’ve found yourself displaced recently. Something I didn’t get too deep into but strongly have faith in is the counter culture AI will inevitably create. I can see a sub culture of heavily anti-AI artists creating a a wave of inspiration for future generations. AI feels really new now, but I don’t doubt there will be younger generations that will rediscover the joy of suffering for your art.
Such a well-made video, man! From the editing to the presentation to a well-made argument. The following started out as a simple comment, but it ballooned into a whole thing. Sorry about that. I took this opportunity to put my own thoughts in order and got carried way. Some of my points are related to yours and some are not. Read at your own discretion. I think we have to be very specific when we talk about AI. It helps to think of AI as a universal upgrade on all kinds of algorithms, but each of these algorithms accomplishes only a specific, usually very narrow, task, so I believe we should consider them individually. There's one AI that provides crappy automated "journalism", and there's another AI that predicts the structure of proteins (which has had an immense effect on biology and medical research). One is awful and we need to think about the societal and moral implications; the other is unequivocally great and we'd be silly to renounce the knowledge it has produced for us. In short: Every blanket statement on AI that doesn't make a distinction between the different applications is absolutely nonsensical to me. (Like being against carbon, because Samuel Alito is partly made of carbon.) The same is true for music. Some AI-applications are just functional upgrades on previous methods, others have much bigger implications that we need to take seriously. Say, if a plug-in like Melodyne utilizes AI in the future instead of a strictly algorithmic tool, then I don't think anything would change on a fundamental level. DAWs have already given us the tools to purge our music of all humanity, and we used and abused them depending on our aesthetics and our personal ethos. That will remain true regardless of whether those tools are informed by machine learning or not. We're entering a dubious area when it comes to broader applications. Pretty soon we'll be able to write a prompt like "Master this like Bob Ludwig would" or "Mix this so that it sounds similar to Drop It Like It's Hot" and the computer will reliably deliver. And that will be a godsend for a lot of bedroom producers and it will also put a lot of mixing and mastering engineers out of business. For the sake of argument, I'll say: fine, that's the way it goes, a new technology supplants an old profession, a tale as old as time. But the extinction of some of these professions (e.g. film composers) will make our lives considerably poorer. You lose me completely when it comes to AI-written and AI-generated music. Writing a prompt is NOT the same as making music. Full stop. Prompting "Make a Taylor Swift-style song about my wife Barbara" is not the same as struggling to learn two chords on a guitar and then singing your heart out to her, out of tune and awkwardly rhymed. (Just like pressing the Start-button on a cum machine is not the same as having sex. You're missing out on all the fun and the stuff doesn't even contain your DNA.) No, the right response to the perceived inaccessibility to music making is absolutely not to outsource the process to a nifty pastiche-machine. The right response is to express your self as well and as unmistakably as you can within your personal limitations. The answer is punk rock, folk music, blues, amateur choirs, an overlong shower, a drunken karaoke night. Start a band with your friends even if none of you play an instrument. The right response is the realization that the heart of music making is not to create some marketable end product, but the joy of creating and struggling and playing together, of expressing yourself like you couldn't with any other medium, of growing calluses on your fingertips and wear them proudly. Call it gatekeeping, but this is my crowd, these are the people who I feel an allegiance to, the people who actually make an effort to create music, whether they succeed or not, they are musicians. Prompt writers are not and I want nothing to do with them.
Well said, and I appreciate you taking the time to write out all your thoughts! Ultimately, I’m firmly stuck in the middle of it all because it does feel so new and general, akin to when the internet felt limitless and truly free. I really hope AI doesn’t go the way of the internet and become this very narrow thing that is extremely useful, but ultimately handicapped by corporations. While I don’t think generative music will ever replace the act of just starting a terrible band with your friends (trust me, there’s no greater feeling), I do think it can gap the bridge into sparking some curiosity. For me, that was the first iteration of GarageBand on a Mac. I played a bit of guitar and piano but I was far from being an actual musician. Playing around with loops on GB (something actual musicians rolled their eyes at back then) made me feel what it was like to make an actual song without ever having to play an instrument. That feeling is what gave me an itch to try to learn my instruments more so that I could write my very own songs. Maybe generative music can be that spark for people who may have otherwise had zero musical inclinations previously. Otherwise, I see no harm with it being a fun gimmick for people to play with similar to how someone might love playing FIFA on a console but might have zero interest in going outside and kicking a ball around with friends (which is obviously way more rewarding than playing a video game). Thanks for watching!
I hope that artists are able to somehow copy write their likeness/style. There are plenty of cynical people out there with teams of lawyers that will attempt to prevent that but we can hope. That being said- AI is pretty sick.
I do think laws will evolve around this to reflect fair play in protecting artists. Copywriting sound likeness is a slippery slope though as it means nobody will be allowed to sound like anyone else.
