Moggy wrote:I'm broadly speaking in agreement with GG. Every generation has a panic over things not being "real music". From the horrors of jazz (black people!), rock n roll (black people + devils music!), rap (black people + gritty lyrics) to heavy metal (telling kids to kill themselves + devils music + it originated from black people!) electronic music (they can't play real instruments + it's probably black peoples fault!).
I fully expect AI music to be strawberry floating awful, unless a human has very carefully helped craft it. But who knows, maybe it'll come up with something that's ok. Plus, this time, black people probably won't be the ones to blame (but I'm sure people will still find a way to blame them).
At times I deliberately specialise in especially dodgy music / no wave/noise / "wrong music" with abrupt improvisation or whatever. Because I've spent 28 years playing classical and wanted to "strawberry float you" myself. I did that for maybe 10 years and still do sometimes. It's in my approach. Very much no rules, whereas AI is all about rules.
An AI will try to mask its extreme averageness/beige-ness inevitable through mashing stuff together but it will never do something recorded off the cuff like this
https://soundcloud.com/benmobbs/breadbaking-bluesIt won't be in a single day (within a matter of days) be able to write and sing badly a heartfelt waltz dedicated to someone who suddenly died when they were 18 and I went through that, and then harmonise with itself
https://soundcloud.com/benmobbs/one-less-smileAIs don't die and then write about their AI friends who also played music.
An AI sure can put itself through "dodgy recording" filter to mask its averageness but it can't actually do that incidentally because it can't be bothered to set up a recording properly and just used their phone instead, and yet, there fundamentally cannot be any of the expressive playing and technique interpreted in this piece for example:
https://soundcloud.com/benmobbs/preludio-alfonso-montesIt would be funny if it said something like this though
https://soundcloud.com/benmobbs/you-are ... tely-wrongThese honestly are my gooseberry fool recordings of music, the good stuff I've never finished because I keep iterating on it endlessly, forever. I think some of them manage to sound soulful by accident, because they're not overproduced, whereas that sad AI blues song thing did that on purpose.
I can with honesty, conviction and yes - pride - 100% guarantee an AI cannot come up with the absolute hellscape, chaotic, bloody horrible and chaotic noise rock music in playlists on that page. That stuff comes from something deep in humans that are not trying to algorithmically "solve" music, but create something responding to the borderline insanity that is life. It would be like asking AI to design a new species and then instantiate it on the spot.
I would be interested to see if AI music can, in some sense, "live". Which brings me to a whole other element - live AI music performance?
What would it be like to watch that? Sound appealing?
Listen to Dr Kliener. People are completely right, completely wrong, somewhere in the middle, it doesn't matter. Do your own thing, that's the whole point. I don't think AI poses an existential threat to any artform, but it sure as hell can provide a millionth excuse for people to not dedicate time to their art.
Complain about a bunch of people doing something better than you and so you're going to give up? OK, that's a shame, and that's how mediocrity happens, by believing you're mediocre. Do the same thing but because a computer replaced you? That's unimaginably sad and I wish that upon nobody, and yet I see it all the time.
Feel doom, write a song about it, do something about it. Write about AI. Point at AI and be like, Ah here's another reason to add to my toolbox for not doing gooseberry fool, it's that which I find immensely depressing again exactly BECAUSE I have been through this process of holding myself back for DECADES because of the same thinking.
Same problem, different circumstances. Maybe I have the luxury of spending time making music that will never be commercially appealing. But the last thing I want to see musicians do is give up because they've seen AI do something half convincing in a news article, as if that wasn't the case already, a thousand times over.