The reason you don’t have more time for music is not technological, it’s social. We have enough technology to offer a basic life for everyone for free, but we have not agreed that doing so is worthwhile.
Many people would not know how to live under such a system. By this, I mean that I strongly believe people would become severely depressed or insanely stir crazy.
I’ve been on an extended sabbatical after 20 years in tech. The first year was magical. “I could do this forever” I told myself, and actually considered it.
The second year was more complicated. I could feel myself drifting away from myself. The structure of work and the rewards of working on big projects were now fully missing, and I could feel this growing emptiness that needed to be filled.
For health reasons, I entered the 3rd year, and by that point I needed more major psychological intervention. I’d become severely depressed and while I knew that getting back to work might help, I was now in a position where going back to work sounded impossible.
I’m not claiming that my experience is universal. But I’ve started to find more accounts that are similar to mine. I’m also not saying it’s impossible to replace work as a form of necessary challenge and satisfaction. But the societal structures do not exist to fill the void.
For better or worse, we’ve been a species that relies on “work” in some form to live. I use quotes because clearly this has looked different ways over time. Hunter/gatherers certainly had a different set of tasks than the modern city dweller.
But ultimately I’m not convinced that we’re equipped to live satisfying lives without some form of striving for survival. In a post-work era, I think a lot of us will go some kind of crazy or experience depression.
I don’t think most people are aware of how awful things can feel after enough time away from work has stacked up.
It reminds me of that feeling when going on vacation somewhere nice. “I could just live here forever”. But the reality is that the thing that makes the vacation feel incredible is the contrast from normal life. Remove the contrast, and things become pretty flat.
Edited to change “most” to “many” in the 2nd paragraph because that better reflects my belief.
As Carl Sagan said, we’re a species that needs a frontier. We need to explore. That’s how hunter-gatherers actually survived, by following the animal migration and pushing outwards when population pressure or ecological change demanded it.
I don’t see how our modern incarnation of plantation jobs is in anyway equivalent to that natural instinct. I don’t think that the vast majority of people would have as much trouble as you finding meaning in their lives without work - especially since 99% of them don’t even have a sliver of a chance at “fuck you money” like you did.
> especially since 99% of them don’t even have a sliver of a chance at “fuck you money” like you did.
I didn’t have “fuck you money”. Just enough to live a moderately frugal life on the equivalent of median income as long as the market didn’t tank.
The thing about your point that doesn’t make sense to me is that you’re describing a scenario in which 99% of people suddenly are in the same situation I was.
> The second year was more complicated. I could feel myself drifting away from myself. The structure of work and the rewards of working on big projects were now fully missing, and I could feel this growing emptiness that needed to be filled.
If you don't mind sharing — why did you not choose to do a big project? I've always imagined that if I were lucky enough to have a sabbatical/retire early, it's not that I wouldn't work, it's that I'd choose to work on stuff that is really important, but undervalued by society (which is the reason I can't do it as a living right now): e.g. activism & lobbying or volunteer work in the community.
I’ve asked myself the same question, because before taking the break I also had visions of working on important/meaningful/undervalued things on my own terms.
I think there were multiple factors. I hadn’t accounted for how much I relied on the work environment for social contact, and I didn’t have the social habits in place to maintain a healthy social life. This felt fine at first because I was also recovering from burnout, and solo road trips and adventures in the mountains felt great.
But every time I’d think about working on something, it felt insurmountable to my brain, and I just got stuck. I’d led huge projects in enterprise environments, but felt incapable of getting something going without some of the structure surrounding that.
I suppose it boils down to a skills issue. Had I realized I’d get so stuck, I may have prioritized a different set of activities. But one thing led to another and I was sliding down the depression slope at which point everything got exponentially more complicated.
I have to conclude that I could have done things differently and that could have led to a better outcome. But all of my professional success hadn’t prepared me for the personal habit changes I needed to implement to have a better outcome.
This is what they keep telling us. My hunch is that people will find plenty of "work" to do in their families, their communities, in creative pursuits. Let's find out.
We have found out, it's just that the people who do the finding out generally have money, so their opinion is automatically discounted.
It's a bit like forever single people getting so lost in the ideas of a relationship, intimacy. That everything will be great once they have someone, once they have connection, that life will be amazing and nothing else will matter. Their life sucks because they don't have a relationship. People in relationships don't know what it's like and their opinion is invalid.
Then they get in a relationship and learn that it's actually comparatively banal and requires a lot of work and compromise, and definitely was not the insanely-built-up-over-many-years-magical-life-cure-all.
There are -endless- stories of people who made it rich early on, retired, and ended up in a mental health crisis despite having everything. That fact should be taken as a reality check to calibrate your own perceptions.
I have no data either way but I can imagine that there are many more people who are wealthy and quietly having a great time with it. Most of the retired people I've known, early or not, also enjoyed it. Some have definitely taken up work-like pursuits on their own terms.
Secondly the wealth being the means to achieve this is itself a confounding variable. I don't think it's good for your mind or soul to "have everything," no. Life isn't and shouldn't be merely a series of your own preferences. That doesn't indicate to me that lacking confidence in your mere survival is necessary for human thriving. As far as I know research indicates the opposite.
My point is that I was firmly in the “I want to retire early” category, found myself with the means to do so, and that this wasn’t theoretical for me.
But the thing I imagined is not the reality that I found.
I realize “they” have other motives for convincing people such a future is a problem. But that doesn’t remove what I truly believe would be a hellish reality for many.
I’m all for pushing society in a less work-centric direction and think current work culture is toxic. That’s a big part of the reason I burned out and went on sabbatical.
But I’m also pretty worried about what a sudden shift without careful planning may bring about. I know I certainly didn’t have the habits/skills in place to navigate it in a healthy way.
If you switch from (forced) workaholism and burnout to the opposite, you're going to have whiplash. And perhaps PTSD.
I think the concept of personal freedom is hugely misunderstood. The US model seems to be some combination of wealth, privilege, and absence of social/financial obligation to others.
But we're seeing over and over that the people who attain that kind of freedom are often deeply unhappy, and sometimes deeply toxic.
Which is reflected all the way through work culture.
What would a non-toxic economy and work culture look like? Not just emotionally and personally, but in terms of social + economic structures and collective goals?
I've not seen many people asking the question. There's been a lot of oppositional "Definitely not like this", much of which is fair and merited.
But not so much "We could do try this completely new thing instead." Answers usually fall back to standards like "community" but there doesn't seem to be much thinking about how to combine big planet-wide goals with individual challenges and achievements with supportive social middleware that has to bridge the two.
I agree with this comment. If I’d started from a position where I had a better relationship with work, maybe the whiplash wouldn’t have been so severe and I could have transitioned to something better before getting stuck.
My worry is that so many people around me - from all walks of life and across a wide range of pay scales - have a similarly unhealthy relationship with their work and would experience the same whiplash.
My deeper worry is that the rate of technological progress is far outpacing any efforts to implement a less toxic economy and culture, and that such changes to economy and culture must necessarily be gradual to avoid massive societal upheaval and chaos.
Ultimately I want to work on big world-impacting problems whether I’m getting paid for it or not. I know this is possible, but spent most of my early life training for the toxic work culture that burned me out.
I think we need off-ramps and on-ramps, not cliff dives.
I was basically unemployable due to health problems for several years before covid made work from home normal. It's not really theoretical for me either.
It was, all things considered, great. I have never been more involved in the communities and connections that I find valuable and fulfilling. I learned several complex skills that continue to benefit me and the people around me, I taught and mentored young people some of whom are now adults entering professional careers based on that momentum.
I don't believe either of our individual experiences are really a good predictor of universal human experience in this area. Do you?
> I’m not convinced that we’re equipped to live satisfying lives without some form of striving for survival
If we're all struggling for survival, some of us will fail. I invite you to dream bigger about what we're "equipped for." One of the very few universal human traits across time and culture is refusal to be bound by our biological history.
> I don't believe either of our individual experiences are really a good predictor of universal human experience in this area. Do you?
No, and I said as much in my comment. My point was not that my experience is universal, but that I have direct experience with the failure mode of such an arrangement. Am I 50% of the population? 75? 5? I don’t know. But as I went though it, I met more people who’d gone through something similar, and I learned a lot about myself that made me realize my previous imagination about a life without work were mostly fantasies. Again, this isn’t to say there aren’t productive ways to navigate it. Just that the ways I imagined this working were very different from reality.
The bottom line is that we don’t know what such an arrangement would bring about at mass scale, and if people are more likely to have an experience like yours or like mine. There’s probably a spectrum of experiences between them. I just think we should approach such a future thoughtfully and carefully.
Diving in head first with a “let’s see what happens” attitude seems dangerous and ill advised.
You had that disclaimer but most of the rest of the comment was about your prediction that most people would be affected in the same way. Some friendly feedback for your future writing on the subject, I guess.
That’s fair, and I edited “most” to “many” shortly after I wrote it because the truth is that I don’t know what exact proportion of people will have the same issues. I had hoped the extensive context throughout the rest of my comments made that position clear.
I do feel confident that the number is higher than some of us think. Certainly I did not expect this to unfold in my own life, and through the experience I became aware of the many others who’d gone through something similar and were similarly caught off guard.
All of this will hinge on personal upbringing, background, support systems, life experiences, locale, etc. At some point I hope to write in more detail about the factors in my own life that I believe led me here after I’ve gotten fully to the “other side” of the experience.
What I find so incredibly frustrating about comments like this is the assumption that this is how it has to be. Human liberation is a bad idea because you had a bad experience during sabbatical and that’s the way it has to be.
This is not what I took away from the experience or what I’m trying to communicate with my comment.
I’ve elaborated in various sibling comments, but my point is closer to this: regardless of what is possible, many people simply don’t have the skills for a rapidly and drastically altered social arrangement.
To your point, people can gain those skills. Society will adapt. But the worrying thing to me is the rate of change. Whatever we can imagine about a future in which we’re not bound to our jobs, there is also the harsh reality that we have to collectively agree about an awful lot of things to get there, and that agreement isn’t happening at the same rate as technological progress.
If anything, some forms of “progress” (social media) are grinding healthy collaboration and agreement to a halt while big tech ushers in a new era of tools despite the fact that we haven’t adapted to the last major advancements.
None of this is assuming this is how things must be. It’s more about the very real problems that will come with such a transition and the fact that we’re already doing a pretty bad job of ushering in such a future in a way that is actually beneficial to people.
Progress is not evenly distributed, nor are all forms of progress beneficial.
In my mind, it is exactly because of the areas of regression that other areas of progress are problematic if we don’t place enough focus on solving the new problems such progress creates.
e.g. many of the worst aspects of modern social media discourse boil down to people with an extremely limited understanding of complex problems believing in overly simplistic solutions and forming strong world views based on that lack of understanding.
Much of the technological progress recently involves abstraction on top of abstraction on top of abstraction making extremely complex things appear simple. The further down this road we go, the further the technology moves the average person out of contact with the underlying reality.
Push a button and shoes show up at your door. Nevermind the thousands or hundreds of thousands of people involved in making that happen or the many harms that occur along the way ranging from ecosystem destruction to child labor.
I don’t see the concerns I have about certain forms of progress as having any bearing on the areas of obvious regression. I’d even argue that some of the progress has directly caused that regression. The law of unintended consequences and all that.
The thing I would tell my former self is this: pivot now. Waiting may make things harder. Don’t assume it will sort itself out. And if you can find a good therapist, it can be extremely helpful.
Actively seek out something that provides structure and consistency, even if that’s not work. Something that keeps you in regular contact with other people.
I had started to look into various volunteering opportunities but didn’t take action before my major slide. In retrospect I think I’d have been better off if I did.
I do think people will learn/adapt. I’m in the middle of that now. The question/concern is more about what happens during that learning process, and whether or not society has structures in place to facilitate it at scale.
e.g. my journey involved quite a bit of professional psychological help, and I feel lucky that I found good care given the shortage of good care in this category.
Absolutely. But most retirement planning doesn’t cover 40-60 years of time. Most retirement planning also assumes a period of time when a person is gradually losing their ability to fully engage with society.
It’s a whole different ballgame when the period of time involves a person’s “peak” years. Many people have a drive that they haven’t yet satisfied in their 20s/30s/40s. This isn’t to say this drive can’t be channeled into something other than a traditional job. I’m just saying we don’t currently have societal structures and norms such that an entire population will know what to do.
Expecting all humans across different cultures and languages to come together and figure out basic income for 9 billion people is absurd. This kind of cooperation never happened and probably never will. People are completely unable to cooperate at the massive scale this requires, let alone solve far smaller challenges like mitigating outbreaks or making an effort to avert climate change.
We as in, it's not a social cooperation thing, many people's individual moral ethics make it so they themselves would be uncomfortable with the idea of not working to earn a living. Currently, society as a whole generally believes that it's each individual person's prerogative to find paying work and most people don't really examine this belief. There's nothing to cooperate on yet.
I think the idea of a society where work is optional and people having their needs met by the society they live in is actually well explored. It's a Utopia. The problem is human nature is competitive and just being provided with everything you need to live, even being given ample time to create art and enjoy life, is not enough for many people. Utopian ideas all look great on paper but when meeting reality you cannot build Utopia around greed and elitism and you can't abolish them either.
That's an interesting take. Is there any historical precedent for an international change that started with a UN resolution? Because my cynical take is that UN resolutions are typically either ineffective, or made post-hoc.
And as a result of "we" being divided, we have the resurgence of many vaccine preventable diseases, because that achievement was flat out rejected by part of humanity.
The rejection itself was a collective action. It wasn't passive, anti-vaxxers did work spreading propaganda, protesting and undermining vaccination efforts. They made it a part of their identity and culture.
If it was a rejection of anything, it was of any assumption of good faith on the part of either government or scientific institutions. Why that happened, as quickly and thoroughly and as polarized along clear partisan lines as it was, is a mystery.
> If it was a rejection of anything, it was of any assumption of good faith on the part of either government or scientific institutions. Why that happened, as quickly and thoroughly and as polarized along clear partisan lines as it was, is a mystery.
It isn't a mystery, it was the bullshit and lies that happened the first month of covid in USA, many people then stopped listening even when the bullshit and lies stopped. I remember the cases in New York exploding and the local democrat told people to continue as normal since its nothing to worry about, and that masks doesn't prevent spread so don't go buy masks, that was how it all started.
They say they had to tell those lies to save resources for those who needs it, but that made people stop trusting them and that counts for so much more. I hope they learned their lesson, but likely they didn't as they never said "Sorry we lied to you, we shouldn't have done that".
Except if you understand they were being misleading, and you understand why, you also understand Covid was a real problem and that there were serious infrastructure and logistics problems that had to be dealt with. You get angry with the government for fumbling the effort, but you still get vaccinated. That doesn't justify believing Fauci and Biden cooked up Covid in a lab or that the vaccines were spiked with microchips or that masks give you brain cancer or half the stuff antivaxxers actually wound up claiming.
People literally formed resistance organizations and were warning of a global fascist takeover, we were entering an eternal police state in which the unvaccinated would become a slave underclass and if you didn't have your vaccine card you would get shot dead in the street.
All of it went far beyond simple mistrust in the government's PR.
You forgot the flip side of the predictions: that the vaccinated would end up bleeding out in the streets. I believe there were a large number of such predictions, which should have already happened.
I think this only strengthens your observation that anti-vaxxing went far beyond simple mistrust.
The idea that those jobs can only be done by desperate individuals so society needs desperate individuals is your logic here. I am not sure I can even counter it, I lack the imagination to see an alternative.
Sure, but one shift as a nurse in a hospital will open your eyes to just how difficult a job that can be, and not one many people would do unless "forced" to.
I’m not sure what your scare quotes mean, but nurses don’t work for free and traveling nurses in particular make good money.
“Forced labor” originally meant things like slave labor, but some people have it backwards.
I think anyone will agree that being able to walk away is important for negotiations. How much you’re paid has little to do with that. Having alternative job offers or the savings to do without a job for a while is more important.
There's many incentives encouraging people to work in America. Many of them are positive ones (pride, a sense of community, ambition) and many of them are negative (inability to pay rent, health insurance, food otherwise).
A lot of terrible jobs are required in our society to be done by people from negative encouragement. The belief that all jobs can be done purely through positive encouragement I think is potentially naive. Maybe nurse was a bad example but people who work from this negative encouragement are in many ways "forced" to.
For illustration some of the worst farm labor jobs in America are done by illegal immigrants, and it's not obvious legal citizens would do those jobs at any rate that makes economic sense. The economic engine that gets us food in our grocery store runs on their desperation.
I broadly agree that the economy works that way, but I’m somewhat doubtful that “running on desperation” is quite the right way to describe it. It seems a bit reductive.
Consider joining the military. Most Americans would never consider enlisting. There are people who consider possibly getting shot at or killed to be worth it. Maybe some of them were desperate when they joined, but often not.
Similarly, people who decide to immigrate to the US have a variety of motivations. Is hoping for a better life desperate? It depends.
Sometimes people regret their choices in life, which means they had choices and the other choice wasn’t obviously worse, in retrospect.
More generally, there are a lot of ways that people can get into situations that feel like a trap, and a bad job could be one of them.
I don't think I've ever met a nurse who felt well compensated for their work, but they continued to do it because they were passionate about providing care to those who needed it.
Do you want a washing machine with Alexa built-in?
Be careful what you ask for.
(I know what you meant, but the only laundry-related AI you can hope for, is a cloud connected smart speaker telling you it can't wash with unapproved third party detergent pods)
> the only laundry-related AI you can hope for, is a cloud connected smart speaker telling you it can't wash with unapproved third party detergent pods
This seems unnecessarily fatalist.
Laundry folding machines exist[1] and there were attempts to create a consumer friendly one, so far unsuccessful. Technology advancements could make that happen. At least that's what I'm hoping for.
Well you know, all those fun and creative parts in software engineering has been taken over by vibe coding and now humans are supposed to do only tedious works, so probably the same thing applies here.
Perhaps much of what humans be doing in this regard is - validation, and the physical work left. But we're not there yet, of course. Vibe coding takes a lot of manual labor, and it's nowhere near for the actually complex tasks such as... multi-part CTEs munching gigs of spatial-temporal data.
Speaking of AI in music - well, perhaps many will welcome some tools when you have to:
- clear hissing
- process levels in tedious clearing
- auto-removal of aaah, oooh, eeerrmm and similar
- podcast restoration, etc.
but of course, nobody wants darn model singing in the mornings, and composers definitely don't need anyone to make up melodies, drum rolls, or bass lines for them.
I see deepmind advance their offering, still I find it difficult to imagine any of my producer friends embracing such abomination, and particularly giving it is a remix tool before all else, and not a composition tool. People love details the same way a painter loves details.... dilettantes think all this irrelevant, they really can't be wrong more.
I’ve been writing software for 25 years and am “vibe coding” a fairly complex game in my spare time. It saves time on boilerplate but it is absolutely not capable of doing all the work. There’s still some assembly required and doing so requires domain knowledge and expertise. Also, prompting properly requires the same. If I were to compare the experience to building a house, I’m now the foreman—and no longer doing the manual labor. There’s a real risk of systems making it to production that nobody understands, but we have that today.
There’s no such thing as vibe composing music, even though experimenting with knobs is not writing notes, and even though writing notes seems like writing programs.
À music score may be complete since very first attempts at it, while arrangement and sound désign may be added later. Writing actually catchy music is much more difficult than writing a todo app even though they may seem similar in engineering complexity.
Coding is not composing and vice versa. Code which produces music scores is not what audio models do.
The scary thing is while a construction labourer knows how to properly lay bricks, an AI's output is reliably unreliable. Does the foreman have to go round checking every little thing on the site? That would be a waste of time. Using these AI tools for anything important is too high risk.
There exist many problems for which it's easy to verify the inputs-outputs, but much harder to write the functions to convert the inputs into the outputs.
Just write an executable spec and have the AI generate the code that fulfills it. Where is the risk?
I guess the risk would be that the cost of compute would explode out of control long before you got a viable solution.
To give a bit of an absurd example, I imagine there's a reason it's not currently worth it to generate the code with a random character generator, even though hypothetically that would get you there eventually. If we consider AI a much, MUCH better version of a random character generator (let's say it's a million times faster. No, let's say that it'll get you the solution in quadratic time instead of factorial time), that doesn't necessarily mean it's actually worth it now.
Ok in that case I guess the risk would be that it simply wouldn't work and you'd lose whatever time and compute happened in the time box. Which would be a pretty cheap price to pay, but I imagine you'd only try it a few times before giving up and using a different strategy.
> Does the foreman have to go round checking every little thing on the site?
Uh, is that not half of the foreman’s job? They’re there to direct and coordinate the work, resolve unforeseen issues, and to enforce the required quality of work.
I'm certain they don't check every brick. In the same way I shouldn't have to check simple maths. Today's "AI" can't even reliably add two numbers, it's ridiculous.
> Well you know, all those fun and creative parts in software engineering has been taken over by vibe coding and now
Maybe on your YouTube shorts playlist but not in real life. People doing real work are not vibe coding. The previous perpetual react learner turned ai vibe coder certainly is doing vibe coding, but not for money from a job.
> Well you know, all those fun and creative parts in software engineering has been taken over by vibe coding
What? In what way? Fun and creative parts are thinking about arch, approach, technologies. You shouldn't be letting AI do this. Typing out 40 lines of a React component or FastAPI handler does not involve creativity. Plus nobody is forcing you to use AI to write code, you can be as involved with that as you'd like to.
> Plus nobody is forcing you to use AI to write code, you can be as involved with that as you'd like to.
I had management "strongly encourage" me to use AI for coding. It will absolutely be a requirement soon for many people.
The more generative AI you use the more dependent you become of it. Code bases need to be structured different to be friendly to LLM's. So even if you might work somewhere where you technically don't have to use AI, you will need it to even make sense of the code and be competitive.
The job of an software engineer for the most part will change fundamentally and there will be no going back. We didn't know how good we had it.
Everyone shares music and art they make but nobody ever shares videos and motion capture of themselves doing laundry and vacuuming their house. Maybe we need to start sharing that instead
The UMI gripper project is working on this. they have a handheld gripper device full of sensors that they use to record doing things in the field, like picking Starbucks, which they then use as training data.
The other thing to note is part of the aloha project isn't just to record people folding laundry and loading the dishwasher, but to take that data and plug it into a simulator with a physics engine, and use a digital twin to get 10x the amount of data to be used in training the model than if they'd just used real world data. So yes we need that data, but not as much as we would otherwise.
That's indeed the second worst issue with current model architectures. For a model to be trained to something nearing usability for an actual task it needs an amount of data that is far beyond what can be obtained. Companies like Facebook and OpenAI downloaded pirated copies of every single book humans have written to reach the current level of text generation, and even with that, it's not like those models are perfect or that intelligent.
It is going to severely limit the possibilities of building actual agentic AIs. We do not have an endless amount of data of humans performing menial chores. And normal people will probably more hostile than the kool aid drinking software developers when it comes to being spied on, who's going to agree to wear a camera while working so as to help train their own replacement?
Yet it's kinda what devs are doing gleefully adopting software filled with telemetry and interacting with copilot.
There will be no difficulty equipping people in minimum wage jobs with cameras. You could probably even get companies to pay to give you training data, if you sell it as an AI-powered system for reducing shrinkage or avoiding liability.
The most likely source of pushback (that companies will care about) is likely to be from customers interacting with people wearing cameras, so it might be limited to non-customer-facing roles.
Another good source of data would be exoskeletons, though I don't know that any of those have actual seen real commercial success yet.
This isn’t the reason at all and comes across a weak attempt to make researchers stealing the work to train come across as blameless and helpless to circumstance.
They’re doing it because there is a lot of value to extract in making it so anyone can do these things regardless of talent or skill.
AI is going to do jobs like radiologists, so humans can work at McDonald's or be bartenders! I mean, the pouring drinks part of it, the conversational skills of an AI bartender will be superior to those of humans!
The underlying problem is that humans consistently underestimate how difficult some of our "lowest" functions are, like sorting out socks and folding the laundry.
Unless you are someone that has chores to do like say... Most people? Yes we could technically leave our dirty dishes on the sink while we do art but that decision bites you next time you want to cook lol.
Obviously we mean we want to use that time of doing dish towards art instead, like how automation has always worked?
Chores are just a convenient excuse because of fear of failure. How is it that some people are "too busy" for decades on end? There is time for making art if you want to.
I will. There are people in much worse situations who still manage to make time for art. I'm happy to be "privileged" to have some spare time. Medieval serfs and cavemen also had that same privilege. Most animals have that privilege.
I'm not sure how this contradicts what they said. AI would likely lower the number of paid opportunities.
Additionally, art requires practice. Sure, some "lower-tier" artists may produce work that AI could replace without anyone noticing. But by removing that step, we risk having fewer truly great artists emerging.
If you expect to live off typing letters and numbers on a keyboard, (or off the labour of others, while you siphon up the lion's share of their productive surplus), you are doing it wrong.
That's the point: for almost everyone it's not a career. It's a hobby. Like some people have a career researching physics because they're extremely good at it and society has decided it makes sense to have a few. Then there's people like me who learn what they can of it in their free time, but I do something else as a career because realistically very few people have need of someone who's familiar with the Dirac equation or whatever. Among the general population I'm probably in the 99th percentile of math/physics knowledge/ability, but I don't do that for work because we don't need 1% of the population working on such things. And that's for a skill that causes most people to get anxiety; the demand mismatch is probably even greater for things that average people actually enjoy.
But it also has the potential to make the experience of creative pursuits better. e.g. have it listen to your playing of an instrument and give feedback on how to improve your technique. Or have it be an always available multi-instrumentalist partner for a jam session. You start playing and it just rolls with it and maybe inspires you in a way you wouldn't have thought of alone.
People are so weird about how to view ML/advanced signal processing. Don't look at things thorough the myopic lens of "prompt ChatGPT and it responds poorly". Look at it as an auto-complete, or a better form of on-the-fly procedural generation. Remember e.g. Audiosurf creating levels from your music? Make it happen on the fly. Maybe you could even create an interactive game where one person plays an instrument and the other does some kind of beat-sabre or dance-dance-revolution thing based on it analyzing and anticipating what's going to be played. The game scores you on how well the group was able to get into a groove together or something.
It feels to me like people get upset about ML encroaching on creative endeavors because they're not sufficiently creative to see how it could augment those fields and be a tool to make these things more interesting instead. Corporations will use it for cheaper slop, but slop was already what they wanted from humans anyway. For people that are actually interested in the artistic or social side, they'll have new tools.
The last 5 years have been a supersized lesson in Moravec’s paradox [1]. More people need to hear about this: the tech world doesn’t have some kind of conspiracy against the creative class, it literally is the lowest hanging fruit as predicted 30 years ago.
For the last year I have been generating music heavily with Udio. For few years before that I was creating music by hand, trying to get into all aspects of music creation (theory, composition, sound design, mixing, arrangement, etc.) and let me tell you - this last year was the most fun I had with music. Generation isn't just a big button to push to get the output. It's completely separate creative process that opens a plethora of possibilities which you can mix & match with all the other skills you had before.
One other aspect of art generation is that it can complement your other creative process. You may need illustration for a book you're writing, or assets + music for your game. So let the AI help you where you need help and you yourself focus on the things that matter to you the most or where you are having the most fun.
Here's another good quote from Kurt Vonnegut's highly relevant "Player Piano" from 1952:
“The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings,"
said Paul, "not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.”
I recall they asked some elderly women what the greatest invention they saw in their lifetime was a few years back and they said the laundry machine. Before the laundry machine, it was an all day, physical chore with a washboard. Hours of your life devoted to just doing laundry versus putting it in a machine and coming back in an hour
Still a chore with the machine. It is implied that AI will take over the machines, collect your socks and shirts from around the house, put them in the machine, dry them out, iron them and put them back in the drawer in an energy efficient and hygienic way while you are happily painting.
Yep, the beloved image of Aristotle gazing out at the slaves in the fields and saying that someday robots will do the labor and people will be at leisure, and not slaves looking toward the pagoda discussing how someday robots will own us all.
I am not too sure about that. Isn't the whole thing about art and music is that you can convey something that words cannot? Of course, these models start to support image and audio inputs as well, but the most interesting mixing step that happens in the artist's head seems missing in the generated output. If you have some vision inside your head, making something out of it by hand is still the best way to convey it. Just as writing something down refines the thoughts and reveals holes in your thinking - drawing something is visual thinking that reveals holes in your imagination. You can imagine some scene or an object pretty easily, but if you try to draw it into existence, you will immediately notice that a lot of detail is missing, a lot of stuff you didn't think through or didn't even notice was there at all. The same applies to creating music and programming. Using generative AI certainly has some artistic component to it, but I feel like using these models you give up too much expressive bandwidth and ability to reflect and take your time on the whole endeavor.
Who is the work for? If I lived in the automated future (or could afford private staff in the present) I would do more creative stuff just because I enjoy it and with no expectation of having an audience.
For context, I'm an occasionally-published photographer, and I like playing piano but I'm not at a level anyone else would want to listen to.
But photography is not art, you didn't paint it! You literally pointed a device at something, twiddled a few knobs and pushed a button. Literally anyone with a smartphone can do that!
/s of course, but basically that's the argument people make nowadays related to AI and art (of any form).
Loading and unloading them and folding clothes makes it not good enough yet. There are so many things a humanoid robot could do around a house.
Laundry, dishes, picking up clutter, taking out the trash, wiping down surfaces and dusting, pulling out weeds etc. I actually think we’re somewhat close to gettin g like that relatively soon.
Humanoid or not, anything that can do these things and understand you when you ask to do them, in a useful way that's not like 'white mutiny' but actually like a proper servant…
…deserves to sit on the back porch playing guitar if it likes.
If it's a superintelligence way superior to its human masters, it deserves that MORE than if it's a hapless, semi-useless mechanism.
I like to practice my improv solos to backing tracks. Having an AI band that is listening and reacting to my playing, much like a good band would, would make it a lot easier than trying to get jam sessions going. Good drummers with availability are somewhat hard to find!
This particular direction is over 180 years old at this point.
"[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine...Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."
Lovelace, Ada; Menabrea, Luigi (1842). "Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq".
I don't think there would be any art or writing to do if there was absolutely no "laundry and dishes", conflict, either. The Wall-e future seems more consistent with that honestly, but maybe I'm just revealing an ugly part of my own personality
This is contradicted by the fact that, throughout history, there have been tons of rich people who not even once had to do laundry or any other menial tasks.
Many of them were interested in art or produced it. And many led fulfilling lives without getting depressed from not working as some people fear.
Ok yes very good point you're right. What often happened in the olden times was that science took the shape of art, or religious or ideological conviction drove tireless creation.
Let's say science is left to the robots and the lack of "laundry" never leads to people's suffering, never leads to people asking the big questions about life, etc (I was making big assumptions about AI-keeps-us-as-pets, life in abundance, lack of common threats or conflicts etc). What art is there to create, sans banana stuck to the wall? Somebody in the thread joked about being fed through a tube in a pod or something
But yeah in such a case there will probably still be some fire art about the alienation implied by merely being a human. In the end, no AI can experience being a human that was replaced by AI. Given the vestigial remains of our by then atrophied intelligence can appreciate it
Selection bias, and few are smart and talented enough to become successful artists or scientists. Money cannot buy that.
There are people who inherited significant wealth and it ruined them. It destroyed their motivation and they became depressed drug addicts. A life without purpose. Debauchery and depression.
Well the difference is those rich people didn't have to work for money, so had the time and energy to devote to those passions
I'm not sure what society would look like if and when AI takes over all artistic and creative work. People that would otherwise have a fulfilling career pushed to do menial tasks just to earn an income?
Stanisław Lem has told us about the grave dangers of such a development decades ago.
This is a good summary, summary quoted below, full article linked on the page (requires a login - but reading Lem's story itself is better than reading about it anyway):
"Shortly after Ijon Tichy's return from the Eleventh Voyage, newspapers made much of the competition between two washing machine manufacturers. They were producing robot washers of increasing complexity. They came out with sex-pot washers, washers that seduced women, carried on intelligent conversations, etc. A man named Cathodius Mattrass started a religious cult called the cybernophiles, which believed the Creator had intended humans to be a means toward creating electrobrains more perfect than itself. He turned himself into a giant robot and established himself in outer space. A series of court cases ensued. Finally, a special plenary session was held to decide if Mattrass was a planet, a human, a robot, or what, and Tichy was invited to attend. Suddenly, after much argument and deliberation, cries rang out that electronic brains disguised as lawers were present. The Chairman went through the room with a compass and an x-ray machine was brought in. Eventually everyone was kicked outNthey were found to be made of all sorts of thingsNcotton wool, machinery of all kinds. Ijon was the only human, and then he turned the compass on the chairman and found that he, too, was a robot. He kicked out the chairman, paced the empty hall for a while, and then went home."
One problem is, you have to make them into real capable robots, since you want them to pick up what needs washing by themselves. That then leads to feature-creep and ever increasing abilities that have little or nothing to do with washing, and it escalates from there. The story also had gangs of abandoned intelligent washing machines robbing parts from still owned and in use ones, and more.
The story is part of "Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy"
I think out of everything Lem has written, the idea of seductive washing machines that lead the way to a semi conscious cyborg planet is not the best example for actual tangible dangers o AI.
That is not a good representation of the story. I added a few sentences to show you the parts we can already relate to.
In addition to that, we already had discussions here about emails and ads and other things where it is conceivable we end up with AI both creating and consuming the content, with the humans out of the loop (just yesterday: one part email users using AI to create nice long emails, other users using AI to condense them back into the summary).
We also have the kind of feature creep that adds more and more stuff that has nothing to do with the original purpose of the device or the software.
That 1957 story already talks about those kinds of developments.
We need to recognize the reason. It is about scale and cost. Pseudo-art and pseudo-writing can be done completely in the cloud and scale easily. Having a robot to fold even a single towel requires millions of physical robots instead of dozens of servers. Physical products are hard to scale and they break more easily plus they have to live in an uncontrolled invironment.
All these art producing AIs are a byproduct of the research progress towards AGI and AI that can do your chores. It is inevitable that somebody has made image or music generating AI in a world where household robots exist. So I don't see any problem with DeepMind trying what they can do with current technology. It's just a reality of the world we have to live with.
Or even have a prompt work on multiple files --- why isn't there an LLM front-end which will accept as input a folder of files, and then run a working/tested prompt on each file in that folder, then return the collected output as a single process/result?
I'm getting a little tired of hearing this quote at this point.
What about humoring the opposite?
I want AI to automate art so I can spend more time doing dishes and doing laundry. Dishes and laundry are purely analog human experiences. Art, at this point, is essentially digital, and digital is the domain of machines so we can let machines do that now.
What's to humor here? Do you have a passion for laundry and dishes? Do you spend your free time gleefully dirtying dishes just so you can wash them again? Is art or music something you feel forced to do but don't want to?
I am struggling to understand what's really the opposite here. I don't think anyone views art as the same sort of burden as people view dishes. It's not something you're forced to do (even in the situations you do need it it's pretty trivial to buy).
I keep coming back to this thought. Maybe it’s how I was raised, but knowing that I’m doing something useful to other people / humanity is the entire point.
When a machine can do everything better than we can, then what do we derive meaning from?
I usually get out of the existential dread by thinking that we’re still some time away from the issue, and that there will still be some pursuits left, like space colonization. But it’s not fully satisfying.
He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry, or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who’d taken a notion to help out for a while.
“Of course I don’t have to do this,” one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. “But look, this table’s clean.”
He agreed that the table was clean.
“Usually,” the man said. “I work on alien – no offense – alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that’s my specialty… like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalog, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But… the job’s never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get reevaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled… but” – he slapped the table – “when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement.”
“But in the end, it’s still just cleaning a table.”
“And therefore does not really signify anything on the cosmic scale of events?” the man suggested.
He smiled in response to the man’s grin, “Well, yes.”
“But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway” – the man laughed – “people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,” the man said with a smile, “it’s a good way of meeting people. So where are you from anyway?”
It definitely is (and I would encourage that even).
But such resistance cannot be luddite if it actually wants to win. Therefore, its goal cannot be "no AI", but rather "AI used for the benefit of society".
I'm not worried about controlling ASI acting on its own behalf.
What we need is to prevent humans in position of power from using the fledging AI that they control to entrench themselves and stomp on the rest of us.
My grandmother-in-law especially enjoyed our visits, engaging her in conversation, she delighted in serving us a lovely hot pot of tea. We would give her a few days notice so she could bake a cake, later she just bought one.
Thanking of yourself as "redundant" limits your view of a human to that of a machine, and in doing so you are doing humanity a great disservice. I'd recommend reading the Culture series for a vision of a future where AI has essentially taken over and humans can live out their lives as they want instead of as they need to.
Use your imagination a little... There are endless things you can do. I don't understand this mindset. Especially if you are intelligent enough to be a competent software developer, you have the capacity to do a LOT or at least in my experience you probably do.
You don't need "companies". You need enough customers to buy/support your work so that you get a living out of it.
Being a software developer is a _facet_ of your work. You (unconsciously perhaps) do many other things around/with it that the most efficient AI today cannot do alone. And AGI is still far on the horizon, if not a mirage.
Hey we're talking about a future scenario where AGI actually exists and is vastly better at software development than any human, and can do it much cheaper than current developer salaries.
We're talking about science fiction which may become true much sooner than most people expect.
I would be competing with cheap AGI services so it makes no difference whether I am a freelancer or not.
> Being a software developer is a _facet_ of your work. You (unconsciously perhaps) do many other things around/with it
The non-development parts of my job are not interesting at all. If that's gone then my career is finished. I'm done.
> scenario where AGI actually exists and is vastly better at software development than any human
then humans deservedly should no longer be doing software development, and those who were doing it would necessarily be the economic sacrifices. This has happened to many industries before, and shall continue to happen to others. I don't think there's any necessity to stop it - just ease the transition via taxpayer funded schemes.
However, none of this stops anyone from persuing an artisanal craft - because otherwise, they would be persuing it for economic reasons rather than artistic reasons.
> then humans deservedly should no longer be doing software development
Then you could argue that humans won't "deserve" to exist when aliens show up with superior military technology. This isn't a matter of technology becoming obsolete. It's a matter of human beings becoming obsolete.
No need to call to aliens for that, this happened within human history several times... towards other humans, and towards other species (which some were considered as pest, until it was discovered they were crucial to the ecosystem balance).
That's definitely where the danger of some AI builders is, one more example of how technology _is political_ and the reason it's not so surprising some tech leaders are totally aligned with Trump/Project 2025 (if not funding it).
(all while there is a _real_, _documented_, _non fictional_, _short term_ ubiquitous threat that is global climate change)
You sound really jaded and close minded to me in your posts. If AI replaces software development, the only reason you are "done" is because you are jaded and close minded and seemingly unwilling to adapt to the world and life.
You are totally misunderstanding the point.
I am talking about the hypothetical AGI/ASI scenario where ALL jobs are replaced by machines. Not just software development. The economic value of human labour drops to zero. This is not just about me and my own little career. It would impact everyone.
This is a serious topic that is being discussed and debated at a high level. It is an existential threat to human society. It could be catastrophically disruptive. No one knows how it would play out. There could be severe economic inequality and stratification of society unlike anything we have seen in the past.
I am actually not worried about my situation. ASI is unlikely to arrive that soon.
HN is a place for nerds to discuss technology and its future impact. Nothing has more disruptive potential than AI.
"Governments worldwide (e.g., US AI Executive Order, UK AI Safety Summit, EU AI Act), international organizations (UN), leading AI researchers (including pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio who have voiced strong concerns), major tech companies, and dedicated research institutes (like the Future of Life Institute, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk) are actively discussing, researching, and debating the implications and safety of advanced AI."
"If ASI concentrates wealth and power in the hands of those who own or control it, while simultaneously rendering most human labor economically valueless, the resulting inequality could dwarf historical examples based on land, capital, or industrial technology ownership. It raises fundamental questions about resource distribution and societal structure in a post-labor world."
> What if you WANT to have a career or a job which is now done exclusively by AGI?
> If AGI takes my job as a software developer, my career is finished. I don't know what else to do.
Do you want to have a software developer career for the sake of having a software developer career (because you enjoy it), or are you worried about your livelihood?
But there are people who already doing what you are currently doing. Also they do it waaaay better. If this does not make you redundant, why would AI do it?
No they don't. There is a very limited supply of developers who are better than me.
I am talking about a future where we have a practically infinite supply of cheap AGI software developers that are vastly superior to the smartest human being who ever lived.
And where do you find the energy technology required for that to happen?
Hint: it's not on the radar, but if you account for several fundamental breakthroughs in energy production, storage and transport, and all that while having positive side-effects on Earth's ecosystem, within the next 50 years.
Totally agree, IF an AGI can fully replace/improve on the work of developers, it's definitely cheaper.
But: 1/ cheaper isn't always affordable either.
2/ who will engineer/maintain/steer AGI once AGI takes the job? once you make that leap, there's no way back, no one to understand the machine that makes the stuff we rely on.
And that circles back, in some way, with the debate about AI-generated art: there's no human component in it, there's no understanding, no feedback loop, no conversation.
> who will engineer/maintain/steer AGI once AGI takes the job?
Yeah that's the question. A reduced number of human developers may be privileged to work in these companies.
It's hard to imagine a world with cheap artificial super intelligence. It's like we are introducing a new artificial life form into society, whether it's actually conscious or not.
> debate about AI-generated art
I hope there will always be a majority of people who reject AI generated music.
Does digital art reduce analog art in the world? Not even. There’s still more and more, courses, workshops, live performances and physical artefacts.
> and digital is the domain of machines so we can let machines do that now.
Art by machines for machines to understand machines (to the extent they would have a notion of self and of other), fine, do your thing as long as the energy you need does not deprive humans needs.
As for me and many others, life happens in the analog realm, so does art.
I go to art museums regularly and look at framed canvas hanging on the walls. It’s an entirely analog experience minus the occasional digital exhibition. I use this experience as an escape from the digital world and hope it stays this way.
You don't need AI for that. Just come to my house, I can allow you to spend time in analog human experiences like dishes and laundry for free. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.
"essentially" is, regrettably, a misplaced word. I meant "basically" or "generally".
But if the art is expressed as a sequence of bytes/tokens (ex. a song on spotify, a movie on amazon prime, a png, etc.), then it is by definition digital. I think it's reasonable to assume this is how most art is produced and consumed today.
I mean I guess In this obtuse, maybe someone's joy In life is doing dishes and that is their art, then idk maybe but not even then.
First, this just misunderstands what is being said here. For most people, chores like the dishes is a menial task that we will be happy for any reduction in time/effort. In addition, dishes and laundry are considered necessary for modern life.
By contrast, art like music and visual mediums is often associated with joy and the creative act of building something out of making art rather than getting a task done.
To misunderstand this contrast is to misunderstand why we automate things in the first place, to minimize the unnecessary toil and maximize human flourishing. This does the opposite frankly.
A nice thing about doing dishes over creating art is that it's something you can work hard in and get a predictable amount of work done which is gratifying. Meanwhile you can stare at a blank sheet of staff paper in frustration for an hour not knowing the best way to evolve your music composition and it's a really bad experience. That's my experience often. Personally, it's not too difficult for me to invert it / humor the opposite. My context is that I got a degree in music composition and also had several jobs washing dishes. It often goes with having a music degree :)
Obviously the original quote deliberately creates an unfair fight in the arena by matching a conventionally dull-sounding analog task such as "washing dishes" with a sophisticated digital task such as making art (digital since LLMs do it, and that's what the complaint is about).
I could also create an unfair fight by saying "I'd rather have machines organize my spreadsheets (boring digital task) so I can have more time to hang out with other humans I love (appealing analog task)."
For me, by inverting it, I've come to realize it's not about art or dishes, but more about analog and digital. If one is partaking in any digital activity, then the trend of machines entering and taking over that space is inevitable. I think humans will revert more towards prioritizing and finding meaning in purely analog endeavors. Human art will shift back to analog. That's just my personal prediction.
I love your perspective here. I don't agree with all of it, but it really made me think.
I do a lot of photography as a semi-amateur hobby (semi because I occasionally get paid but my goal is not to be a professional.) Often when I'm going out shooting in a city, thousands, maybe even millions have observed the same sight I'm seeing. I'm not snapping the first picture of the Hindenburg or the unveiling of the Empire State Building. But it's my unique perspective that makes my art. People like and recognize my pictures because of my personal composition. In general I think most portrait and street photographers have come to terms with this, and an increasing number of landscape and event photographers in the age of smartphones.
With art there's no "right answer", it's the soul found within the work.
That's a crummy quote to be honest. Not everybody has the ability to be creative on their own, so AI can help expand the demographic of creativity to those who may not have the basic skills. In the same way that word-processors help those who may not be able to write 'proper' English create prose that is acceptable. It may never be great art, but if it fulfils a a personal need, then why not?
The entire point of art is about human experience. If we’re really going to automate humans out of art (I don’t believe we will), and you really just want to look at some AI pictures that you like, why stop there? Why don’t we just go straight to the brain stem and have AI-administered doses of dopamine?
Interior and exterior design are applications of art/design, not reasons. The other three things are human experiences. I’m not saying a human cannot create art using gen AI. In fact, whoever thought of making Gemini generate a “17th century British monarch eating watermelon” created a piece of art as provocative commentary on gen AI itself. But if we remove the artists and just have machines churning out materials to consume, maybe based on some signal of consumer preferences, I do not believe that is art. What fun, inspiration, or expression would be enjoyed by either creator or consumer?
With all due respect, even if you are Thom Yorke (actually definitely if you are Thom Yorke) I would probably be bored by your music if it is unwilling to expand and grow with the nascent possibilities of technology. While AI music creation tools tend toward vapid imitation at worst and noble democratization of hit songs at best, Google is providing a more sophisticated interface here which may allow the truly creative to discover viably unique and new music. I live for that. While I support those who want to grab an acoustic and sing at open mike, it would be a loss if all music had to sound like that and it never further evolved.
I would dispute that what is happening with AI music is well described by the phrase "expand and grow". In my view "democratzation" s a weasel word, meaning the removal of skill and effort from the process of production. The operator of such a system inevitably becomes more like a client, choosing between options served up to them. You could plausibly replace the human with a random number generator, and an external observer would not tell the difference.
I'm not sure music will evolve further. Computers are able to mimic every instrument's sound, what new instruments will be invented? What more can be done?
Popular music evolved and developed rapidly post WW2 cause of invention (instruments and distribution channels) and economics (disposable income among youth giving rise to youth culture). That is a product that may be at the end of its S curve.
When digital recording became a thing, there was a huge backlash against it from the artists and studios who had invested obscene amounts of money into full analog recording studios, saying that it made the process too easy and would fill the world with amateur slop.
Records were released with labels proudly saying that the albums were recorded fully analog.
When Autotune became a thing, there were artists complaining that it was inauthentic and cheating, allowing talentless hacks to sound like they have more natural talent than actually talented human beings, and released albums proudly saying that they used no autotune.
Even now, the hint that a natural sounding singer is using autotune is a common insult among recording musicians, even though almost everyone does.
Whether you agree with the original analog non-autotuned musicians or not, (which, honestly, I think they were correct to a certain degree, but that's its own discussion), AI music generation is almost certainly here to stay.
That being said, digital recording made making music possible for people who would have never had the opportunity otherwise, and had generated a lot of good stuff that would have otherwise never have existed.
Autotune has enabled people to express themselves the way they want to express themselves even though they didn't otherwise have the talent or skill to do so.
AI "might" make it so that people who can imagine a song they could never spend the time and energy needed to create such a song to create the songs they hear in their heads they way they imagine them.
AI "might" give people the ability to express themselves in ways they never could before.
It doesn't yet do that, it only remixes what it's heard before. But combine that with people then tweaking/reprocessing that output, doing other things to it, making AI mashed potato music into crisp potato chip music, it can be a good thing.
Doesn't mean the au-naturale artists are obsolete or wrong, I would rather listen to 1 mediocre human musician than a SOTA AI music box, but if the music box is used as part of the total, I'm ok with that.
The creation of music by AI brings to mind a quote from David Bowie:
“Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So take advantage of these last few years, because this will never happen again. Get ready for a lot of touring, because that's the only unique experience left.”
While Bowie had different reasoning for making that statement, it's interesting to think that with AI-generated music, his idea of "music like water or electricity" might finally come true.
> his idea of "music like water or electricity" might finally come true
That was already the case with Spotify & Co. where music has become an anonymous commodity. People order by mood or playlist and rarely care about who composed, produced or played the music, even if the meta data are available. From the user's perspective, AI makes mostly the selection process more precise. I don't think people will care much whether the music itself was a human-made recording or just AI generated.
But making music is still fun (I speak from experience, see e.g. http://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1317); people just won't care, unless you have a big name; all this was already the case before AI generated music became good enough. So by the end of the day, AI is just another act in a rationalization and anonymization process which started a long time ago.
Just try to do so. The music is CC licensed, which explicitly allows you to remix, tweak, and build upon the original work, which includes creating derivative works like nightcore versions. Send me a link of the result ;-)
Musicians are actually a lot poorer than they should be, the label system is a complete scam and syphons off almost all the value created before the artist sees any for close to no benefit.
If labels offer so little benefit, why have they not become obsolete? Nowadays artists can self-publish with minimal cost, so why haven't we been seeing independent artists that are massively popular?
>If labels offer so little benefit, why have they not become obsolete?
Because artists are preyed upon early in their career into signing contracts that encompass the most profitable years of their lives and often the output of those years forever for small loans and promises of success.
The way these label deals are structured, if VCs in the tech world did the same it would be like having the investor of your very first failed company idea still taking money from you for startup attempt four that actually was successful and owning a chunk of that by default.
Of course I don't think musicians are blameless, they signed the deals and often regret it or go to huge expense of time and money (e.g Taylor Swift) to pull their work back into their own ownership.
> why have they not become obsolete? Nowadays artists can self-publish with minimal cost
You cannot self publish to Spotify without giving money to the major labels via arms of the majors like DistroKid. Spotify has no "Upload" button.
> so why haven't we been seeing independent artists that are massively popular?
There are: Frank Ocean, Tyler The Creator, Macklemore, Chance the Rapper, etc.
But if you're independent you're swimming against the tide because major labels own and scoop cream at all levels, from LiveNation to DistroKid to being signed on the label itself.
But that's not the same as "you need a label because you can't self-publish on Spotify". You can if you have $20, so that's not a reason why we don't see more successful self-published artists.
I'm a musician and honestly I often feel that the music boat already left in many ways before the generation Bowie grew up in. The best musical experiences I've ever had have been in quiet houses playing music with people I care deeply about, playing for dancers or impromptu public meetings with other musicians. I think that ever since the first wax cylinder was pressed those experiences have become harder and harder to find as most people forgo learning instruments in favour of the record player. Sitting at a party with a David Bowie record on already didn't feel like a musical experience for me in many ways, this is just another step in that evolutionary chain.
He effectively predicted all the paradigm shifts that the internet entailed.
I've thought about his interviews many times as it was a very optimistic view compared to the alternatives -- one being the internet as a generalized tiktok (or what is called brainrot) and the other being the internet being totally subsumed by existing media corporations.
While these exist to a large extent, they have not been able to stop the change in relationship between artist and audience, the meaning of "critique", the status symbol of culture, etc.
It has also been argued that he anticipated cryptocurrencies and NFTs with his Bowie bonds. Similarly, even if you strongly dislike the current state of this tech, they complete the puzzle of this positive worldview.
I think the same is happening with video games. Especially with Xbox game pass or whatever it's called. I've done it to myself with roms. Everything available so none of it valuable to me.
In my opinion the referenced music fragment of that video is fairly "unmemorable", it is "just" a sequence of harmonized textures. And that is precisely what AIs (LLMs) are good at.
(I listened for ≈7 min from the reference point.)
(I am talking about the music, not the live performance itself.)
Actually from what I've heard from musicians is that digital made living just from music really hard. First it was piracy and now it is streaming, the days where an average whole band could live off playing and creating music are gone.
AI will be the nail to the coffin where it'll almost completely becomes a hobby.
The anouncement of the "death of the band" is premature.I dont believ this for a second, nothing can replace live music played by humans, as the experience and the very real positive benifits of an audience comming together can not be digitised, in spite of the many attempts to package high tech
simulated environments. There are hundreds of thousands of full time touring musical groups world wide, and millions of music festivals every year.
Just because the bar is high, very high, to become a working musician, and has been forever, does not give credence to the notion that some nameless randoms get to make the call because there tube vid got 3 views.
> nothing can replace live music played by humans, as the experience and the very real positive benifits of an audience comming together can not be digitised
I wish it were true but I'm also very aware of how many people I see in audiences today are scrolling instagram while the band plays.
> There are hundreds of thousands of full time touring musical groups world wide, and millions of music festivals every year.
Those figures seem very high, do you have a source for these? Or even how you worked it out as a guesstimate?
8 billion people, maybe 9 billion...200000 bands that gives one band for every 42500 people.....
23 bands in a city of a million
was a pure guess, but low
right
all bands tour at one point or another, unless they are "housebands"
million + festivals is from my definition of "festive",a million, is a low estimate, again
That sounds like a comment about streaming and artists getting basically nothing from it ?
I think music AI in live music would actually be interesting - theoretically it can react to crowds better than any human could. A group music editing session with the AI weaving it to music - sounds like a fun art project.
> theoretically it can react to crowds better than any human could
That's one area I'd expect AI to do poorly. Performance is a two-way dialog between performers and the crowd, with facial expressions and body movements from both the stage and the audience in communication. I'd expect any AI that's not attached to a humanoid robot to be less exciting to a crowd.
However, I am very excited about AI in some of the other contexts you mentioned, like as a music-writing or editing partner.
Imagine a club where the people dancing are wearing, for example, heart rate monitors amongst other things. In that scenario they already weren't looking at the DJ and the AI would have a steady stream of information to work with.
We've had that for years in the DAW and autotune and snapping to grid.
The result's pretty boring and interchangeable, and that's largely what AI music is trained on. Accuracy is not novel here. Ever since the 80s it's been increasingly possible to augment musical skill or lack of, with technology.
I don't think we're very close to correcting for sloppy intentionality. Only to correcting 'mistakes', or alternately adding them in the belief that doing stuff wrong is where the magic is.
I know I've seen a video where somebody takes part of a Led Zeppelin song and snaps all the notes to a grid. What started off wonderful became sterile and boring.
You can snap while still maintaining arbitrary levels and styles of swing. I suspect the video was intentionally framing the correction software as soulless (of course it is, but the limit of its expression is the human technician using it).
Is there any big difference between using that and instead doing playback lip syncing and fake playing the guitar, like already happens sometimes at concerts?
It has been the case for at least 15 years with the rise of Spotify/Deezer and we could even argue that it started with the first mp3 players with pirated music libraries.
Bad in the sense that it is at it's core a denial that there exists something such as good, and even something such as bad — in almost every sense of the word, whether it be aesthetically or morally.
The human race, according to religion, fell once, and in falling gained knowledge of good and of bad. Now we have fallen a second time, and not even that remains to us.
One of the core contentions of the Christian faith, is that there is something more abhorrent than doing something bad, and that is the denial that it is possible to do something bad. Yet, this is about the only article of faith for our modern insanity.
The musicians of the 19th century were free to produce anything they liked. They were free to write a "Missa Solemnis" where the very silence is breathtaking, where one does not merely hear that God has died, but where one feels His rebirth. And what have they done? Have they produced in their liberty anything grander or more beautiful than the scrawling of the deaf composer? Have they summoned sounds more jubilant than those conjured by the consumptive Romantic, the limping Dresden Kapellmeister? We know that they have produced only a few forgetful tunes.
Whether cultural libertinism be better than cultural rigidity may be discussed, but that the cultural libertinism of the 20st century amounted to less than the cultural rigidity of earlier century will be difficult to deny.
People will remember Bowie for his words longer than they will remember him for his music because his music is as hollow and unmeaning, by design. He believed the world is an unmeaning wilderness, or at least that he was the most meaningful thing in it, at least in the sense that the only meaning of it derived from himself. But an egoist in a mere unmeaning wilderness is not impressive.
In Bowie's theology, life is something much more grey, narrow, and trivial than many separate aspects of it. The parts seem greater than the whole. If his cosmos is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos. The thing has shrunk.
Bowie could not make any music that was joyful because he could not understand joy. The modern philosopher has told Bowie again and again that he was in the right place, and he had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But those that came before him had heard that they were in the WRONG place, and their souls sang for joy, like a bird in spring.
If you stay hung up on an intellectual interpretation of what Bowie's doing, firstly you're right where he wants you, he'll play with you like a toy and in so doing, he'll have a grand time, he loved that even at times when his life was faltering.
Secondly, you overlook the glee with which he collaborated with people to jointly express their humanity, and who inspired him to do this. You can read the lyrics and parse them all you like, but what does it FEEL like when you've soaked up the whole song and are at that moment of…
"Ain't there one damn song that can make me…"
That's not even getting into my personal faves like Station to Station, Scary Monsters, where he's venting some really personal stuff and turning it into sound-as-art and also hellacious good funk, with the most gifted companions you could wish for.
Bowie liked to record vocals in one take, just fling himself into expressing and run with whatever he had in the tank that day, and it communicates like mad. He's maybe the canonical example of the opposite to AI music. In bringing that to fruition, I'm certain he understood countless joys. You gotta express many other things than just joy to have hit records, but then Beethoven excelled at that as well.
I've doubtless taken more trouble than I needed to, rebutting what could have been a GPT-extruded troll of an argument, but it was fun :)
> I've doubtless taken more trouble than I needed to, rebutting what could have been a GPT-extruded troll of an argument, but it was fun :)
Yet failed to address even one of my contentions, which if I had to summarise them for you again are:
- Music of the 20th century falls short of music of the 19th century, and it's not particularly close.
- Having no boundaries and standards does not make for better art.
- Bowie's music cannot convey meaning or wonder because he did not believe there is any meaningful or wonderful in the universe other than him, even if he held this view "humbly".
- Bowie could not write joyful music because his world view made it impossible for him to have joy.
(quoted) The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people who did believe in the Inner Light. Their dignity, their weariness, their sad external care for others, their incurable internal care for themselves, were all due to the Inner Light, and existed only by that dismal illumination. Notice that Marcus Aurelius insists, as such introspective moralists always do, upon small things done or undone; it is because he has not hate or love enough to make a moral revolution. He gets up early in the morning, just as our own aristocrats living the Simple Life get up early in the morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games of the amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land. Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. He is an unselfish egoist. An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion. Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.
I can't tell if that's "yes because …" or "no actually I mean …"; but in either case it is droll to witness someone disregarding a human artist the way many disregard AI.
Bowie disregarded everything but himself. It's not difficult to disregard this outlook on the world, because it is not even an outlook on the world, it's more akin to a denial of the world.
"The man who destroys himself creates the universe. To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea. When he looks at all the faces in the street, he does not only realize that men are alive, he realizes with a dramatic pleasure that they are not dead."
Yet, Bowie could not ever quite make a convincing case that he believed other people are not dead, or at least that their existence was anything more significant than their non-existence because for him, all significance came from him and him alone.
Well, then he gave up cocaine and had lots of happy years of further creativity. I think you're mistaking the Thin White Duke for the guy who survived portraying the Thin White Duke. I guess he's throwing darts in haters' eyes, too :)
> When Danse macabre was first performed on 24 January 1875, it was not well received and caused widespread feelings of anxiety. The 21st century scholar, Roger Nichols, mentions adverse reaction to "the deformed Dies irae plainsong", the "horrible screeching from solo violin", the use of a xylophone, and "the hypnotic repetitions", in which Nichols hears a pre-echo of Ravel's Boléro.
Have you seen that classical accordian player? To coin a phrase, he breathes new life into some classic pieces.
I'm loathe to link because I'm on mobile and this will be hasty, but: https://youtu.be/9SE222v1eyM at least most people will have heard a movement in this.
Probably the only virtuoso of a non-standard instrument I know, readily.
Your contention would have been more believable if Bowie actually believed the star man he sang about was real. He did not. He did not believe that there was a starman waiting in the sky who told us not to blow it 'Cause he knows it's all worthwhile. Bowie did not believe it's all worthwhile.
(quoted) Once in the world’s history men did believe that the stars were dancing to the tune of their temples, and they danced as men have never danced since. With this old pagan eudaemonism the sage of the Rubaiyat has quite as little to do as he has with any Christian variety. He is no more a Bacchanal than he is a saint. Dionysus and his church was grounded on a serious joie-de-vivre like that of Walt Whitman. Dionysus made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. Jesus Christ also made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. But Omar Khayyam makes it, not a sacrament, but a medicine. He feasts because life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad. “Drink,” he says, “for you know not whence you come nor why. Drink, for you know not when you go nor where. Drink, because the stars are cruel and the world as idle as a humming-top. Drink, because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing worth fighting for. Drink, because all things are lapsed in a base equality and an evil peace.” So he stands offering us the cup in his hand. And at the high altar of Christianity stands another figure, in whose hand also is the cup of the vine. “Drink” he says “for the whole world is as red as this wine, with the crimson of the love and wrath of God. Drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle and this is the stirrup-cup. Drink, for this my blood of the new testament that is shed for you. Drink, for I know of whence you come and why. Drink, for I know of when you go and where.”
Trying to look at the bigger picture for a moment. A lot of the philosophical debate about art I see here, and elsewhere on social media, is often very shallow and can be reduced to:
Does one believe that the value of the art-piece (be is music, paintings, film, or whatever) is created in the mind of the artist, or is it created in the mind of the consumer?
If you believe only in the former, AI art is an oxymoron and pointless. If you believe only the later, you're likely to rejoice at all the explosion of new content and culture we can expect in the coming years.
As far as I can tell though, most regular people think that the truth is somewhere in between these two extremes, where both both the creator and the consumer's thoughts are important in unison. That culture is about where the two meet each other, and help each other grow. But most of the arguments I've seen online seem to ignore or miss this dichotomy of views entirely, which unfortunately reduces the quality of the debate considerably.
You are on to the key insight here.. what is emerging is the creative consumer. I.e. I know what I want when I hear it. Or I know what I want when I see it.
This means you can hear something and say.. you know this is nice, but I would like it more if it were different in this way.
With generative tools you can do that. Personally I really like to listen to music, but I generally dislike the lyrics. I want uplifting songs, maybe about what I am doing right now to motivate me. Well with something like Suno.com.. I can just make one. Or I can work with claude or chatgpt to quickly iterate on some lyrics and edit them to create an even higher fidelity song.
The key here is that I can give a rat's ass if anyone in the world likes or cares about my song.. but I can listen to it while I work. It is exactly what I wanted to listen to or close enough.
My theory is that as the quality of these generative tools increase, we'll see the public opinion of them slowly shift. Regardless of philosophy (although discussing it is always fun), it just seems inevitable since there are so many more consumers than producers. And as you say, consumers are the ones that will primarily benefit from this new technology. As a consumer we care primarily (some could argue solely) about our own emotional reaction to the music —or more generally put, art-piece.
In practical terms I also believe that this will give rise to a lot of new consumer behavior, and, as you so aptly puts it "creative consumers" will become normal.
The ability to on-demand create more content to fill out some very narrow niche is a great example ("Today I want 24 hours of non stop Mongolian throat singing neo-industrial Christmas music"). Or maybe to create covers of songs in the voices of your favorite long dead artist. Anything from minor tweak of existing works ("I wish this love song was dedicated specifically to ME", to completely new works (Just look at how much the parody-music genre has grown since Suno and the like first appeared). The possibilities are near endless.
In the age of the social feed things are currently tipped more towards the selector/curator/consumer, where before, when all you could do was listen to songs on the radio, it wasn't really possible to participate.
But culture will always be fundamentally about 1:many - we have to collectively agree on liking something- algo-based feeds are making the number of people that agree smaller and more siloed, but the dynamic is still the same.
In that sense I don't think truly 100% algorithmically created and promoted content could ever truly become cultural- at the very least humans will always ascribe some meaning or motive to it, e.g., when instagram launched AI generated accounts some people pointed their finger at Mark Zuckerberg, tracing something back to a human they could ultimately hold responsible.
I agree, the story behind the work is part of how we humans view a creation and cannot be dismissed.
I think we're a long way away from 100% algorithmically created content. This far all I've seen is content that is created based on human inputs and ideas. I'm not aware of the Instagram incident you mentioned, but it too seems like the brain child of a human if I'm not mistaken.
There have been trending AI generated videos floating around lately for example. Which I found surprising at first. But they still had a human script writer (prompt writer?), director and a human editor. Someone who had a vision of what they wanted to create and share. My prediction is that this human-directed tool-like usage will be the standard for a long time, so I'm not particularly worried about humans getting removed from the process.
Art is always some form of human interaction.
When we talk about AI music, I think we do not talk about art anymore, so this isn't human interaction as this isn't art too. The creation of the AI itself, could be considered as art, but not the outcome of the AI. We have to be careful in our discussions not to mix the things up. A lot of confusion happens in recent discussion.
For example: If someone walks out into the wilderness and encounters a particularly fascinating rock formation or plant, something that was created completely by accident and without a artist or designer, but they find that the sight instills in them strong emotions or deeper thought, I believe they should be allowed to call that art.
Maybe this is just petty linguistics and semantics though, in which case we're drifting away from the topic at hand, and I'm sorry.
If someone walks out into the wilderness there's nobody to disallow anyone to call something art anyway. It's a free person. Hope you turned off networking then. :-)
But as a society we committed on specific words to have a specific meaning and the process of _creating_ art clearly involves humans as creators.
The thing is that in this century the creative interaction seems to be moving up the value chain- it wasn't long ago that people would say that being a DJ wasn't creative. Simply selecting songs wasn't creative. Now lots of people consider DJs to be creative artists that are communicating something with their human will of selecting and mixing tracks.
Unless the whole thing moves to a random AI generated slop stream app, whoever turns the knobs of the AI that creates the music will become the new "artist". Right now it doesn't seem like the AI creator "does" anything, but maybe future people will think that.
Agreed. This is a fair take. But I am still very skeptical. :-) When being a DJ you are still in the center of the attention of your audience as a human. "What's laid next on the turn table?" And also very important, the DJ is putting music from real humans onto the turn table. So if you go down the ladder, you still consume art from humans. With AI music this is only the case for a very small extend, the training set, and no-one recognizes the real contributors to the training set.
Great take. A mixtape can be greater than the sum of its parts!
I believe that a lot of the judgement is also connected to the quality of the works. "Slop", while doubtlessly accurate for today, may be a rather weird description in a couple of year if the rate of progress continues to accelerate like it has.
Although I've already heard people starting to refer to DeviantArt and the like as full of "human slop" so perhaps this is just modern language that's evolving and completely unrelated to AI.
The interest in ai music generation is lower than I initially thought. I jumped in but felt the exercise lacked the joy of making music physically or with software like pro tools. With pro tools you control the thousands of knobs which gives you more control. These AI models take away that connection. You can play around with different words to get different results but it's like painting with a shotgun.
No one wants to hear other people's ai songs because they lack meaning and novelty.
AI image and short video generation can create novelty and interest. But when the medium require more from the person like reading a book or watching a movie the level of AI acceptance goes down. We'll accept an AI generated email or ad copy but not an ai generated playlist and certainly not a deepfake of someone from reality. That's what people want from AI, a blending of real life into a fantasy generator but no one is offering that yet.
The impact of AI on creative fields will be pretty nuanced I feel. I don't think we will end up in a world where everyone is just AI generating the media they want. In some cases we will, for example stuff like lo-fi beats on YouTube are already started to be bulk made by AI because really it's just fancy white noise for people to use to work.
Actual music (like what you find on Spotify) I think won't be impacted very much. People strongly identify with the art they consume, and that identity comes from the people who make the art. Those folks might be using AI under the covers for elements of their creative work, but ultimately what people care about is the humanity behind the art. It's the same with film, and traditional art people hang on their walls. We like the actors, the director, the artist, their taste, and who they are. It's why we have celebrities, because we get invested in the people behind the art.
Video games I think will be interesting... I feel they will be more susceptible to being accepted as AI generated. I don't think people identify with them as strongly.
Pop music is so simple, yet so difficult to make a hit. For some artists the music can be mediocre or even fairly bad, and still be a massive hit because pop music is essentially theater and their persona and mystique carries the day.
Some bands were terrible touring artists and rarely put on concerts yet made great careers as studio acts. Steely Dan would be one that produced many hits yet rarely toured, mostly later in their career.
The fundamentals of pop are totally understood. Yet what makes a hit is so fickle and difficult, the bar is extremely high
I could see myself listening to AI music in Spotify, not as the main act but at least as a Plan B.
For example, I like a specific music genre, Italodance, which was popular in the 90s and then disappeared. The problem is that I have listened to all of it, as far as I know. No more is being made. If an AI model could make more for me, with decent quality, I'd probably listen to it.
If you listened to all of it chances are ai will not be able to generate anything that sounds remotely different than what you already are familiar with.
> We like the actors, the director, the artist, their taste, and who they are. It's why we have celebrities, because we get invested in the people behind the art.
But we can't know any of these celebrities as people. We only engage with their images created by marketing. Their stories are as curated and fabricated as the artworks they produce. Transferring these simulacra to AI personalities is merely another marketing problem to be solved.
>The interest in ai music generation is lower than I initially thought. I jumped in but felt the exercise lacked the joy of making music physically or with software like pro tools. With pro tools you control the thousands of knobs which gives you more control. These AI models take away that connection. You can play around with different words to get different results but it's like painting with a shotgun.
You can still pull AI stuff into your music editor and tweak it, although it's harder because it's already mixed. But ironically, this is the exact same problem you have with AI coding to avoid learning how to code - unless you know what you need and how to do it, you're basically relying on AI to one-shot it for you. The nice thing with music and visual art is that it's subjective, so you're the only judge of what's correct. That's why people get super impressed with images in GenAI when it generates 1001 human faces in that setting vaguely resembling what was asked. If you had to generate a very specific thing, it's basically impossible to get it correct.
> No one wants to hear other people's ai songs because they lack meaning and novelty.
Not true. No one wants to pay for other people's ai songs. There are so many AI songs on youtube (mostly lofi or traditional Japanese instrumental) and they cumulatively have quite a lot of view.
The thing is for quite a lot people, music is just something they put in background while doing their office desk jobs. It's just there to make chores a bit more tolerable and nothing more.
> The thing is for quite a lot people, music is just something they put in background w
You are absolutely right. These people only listen to music passively and so it doesn't make a big difference who/what made these tracks. Same for lots of commercial music (cheap TV show soundtracks, commercials, jingles, playlists for restaurants or shops).
But for anyone who actively listens to music and appreciates the style and evolution of certain artists, AI music is not acceptable. The very premise just feels wrong, if not outright insulting.
I like active listening. I can easily spend two hours sitting or lying down comfortably in my headphones, eyes closed, so that I can focus on the music alone. The kind of music I want for that is not (yet) something that AI can generate.
But that same kind of music is also distracting when I'm actually trying to do something, because I keep overfocusing on it. So when I work, I listen to different kind of music. Having AI generate that doesn't feel wrong or insulting in the slightest, nor is it relevant to the other kind of music.
Although I will say that if and when AI is actually able to generate music good enough for active listening, I wouldn't be insulted by that, either.
I think that the tech exists for more interactive AI generation, it's just gonna take time to implement.
I foresee something like your standard production software with heavy AI integration, where you prompt it to make the song you want, but it is made fully step by step in the production environment. You can then manually tweak it or ask the AI to fine tune whatever parameter or slice you want.
Kinda like sitting over the shoulder of someone who knows what they are doing, and working collaboratively with them to accomplish the idea you have in your head. Meanwhile you have practically no idea what all those buttons/lines/glowly bits/sliders do.
Back in the day nobody wanted to hear my FL Studio songs either. Not saying this as a joke, it's just that most people don't care about most people's amateur art from what I've seen.
Identity of the creator and the piece has always been a big part of music appreciation. Imagine how dystopian would be if you ask someone their favorite and the answer is "the music that HitAI generated when promoted 'sad song for happy people' when I was 17, but their model has since changed and my subscription didn't include offline ownership, it's lost forever."
Also image generation, particularly with latest GPT, can be finetuned a lot more than music generation which is nowadays limited to "here's something with those lyrics and genre".
> No one wants to hear other people's ai songs because they lack meaning and novelty.
That's not true. I already found a few tracks that I like. It's actually impressive what Udio can produce. Also ElevenLabs demoed their music generator, and their demo tracks were all quite cool.
I do agree with you that fine controls are missing, and also splitting instruments/voices into separate tracks.
I've made a few tracks using Suno to scratch my own itch / desire for music that covers certain themes.
The best use of Suno for has been the ease with which you can generate diss tracks: I ask Gemini to make a diss track lyrics related to specific topics, and then I have Suno generate the actual track. It's very cathartic when you're sitting at home in the dark because the power company continues to fail.
Anyway, I hope I can get access, I think it would be fun to vibe some new music. Although this UI looks severely limited in what capabilities it provides. Why aren't the people who build these tools innovating more? It would be cool if you could generate a song and then have it split into multiple tracks that you can remix and tweak independently. Maybe a section of track is pretty good but you want to switch out a specific instrument. Maybe describe what kind of beats you want to the tool and have it generate multiple potential interpretations, which you can start to combine and build up into a proper track. I think ideally I'd be able to describe what kind of mood or vibe I'm going for, without having to worry about any of the musical theory behind it, and the tool should generate what I want.
The power grid in my country has been failing and unstable long before GenAI became a thing. We also don't have any AI data centers here that would be taxing said grid. But sure, enjoy making your glib drive by snarky comment.
> Why aren't the people who build these tools innovating more?
We’re getting access to generative AI tech and people are looking for innovation in the UI? I mean I get the need for UX but it’s probably coming man, what with MVPs and all
I think producing new and interesting music with AI tools will require models that allow for far more granularity, tweaking multiple tracks / layers, and this has to be exposed through a more professional and capable UI. It has to go hand-in-hand if it's going to be treated as anything other than a novelty or a toy.
Vibe coding has improved significantly in tandem with UI innovations that provide a more intuitive interface to the workflow. Although in the vibe coding space there's still a lot of room for innovation and exploration, especially when doing detailed task development.
> Why aren't the people who build these tools innovating more?
Perhaps these tools are being built by the LLMs? Why would only you be entitled to easy low-effort gains? Google's programmers like to vibe while sipping coctails in the dark, too. ;)
Ai music has been awesome for me, not because the music is that good, but because it gives me the ability to do something that I couldn’t have done myself. I use it all the time for my DnD group, songs about characters, funny moments, backstories, it’s a great tool that our players have found to increase engagement with the game
Just imagine private model (own, little spech-to-text model) listening to the people playing DnD feeding to the bigger brother that in turn controls the music generation and feeds it back to the speakers as the story progresses.
My theoretical perfect wireless headphone will detect interruptions and play a lofi instrumental version at low volume without skipping a beat and ramp up to original. Bonus points if it can detect my brain straining as an interruption.
I've just recently re-discovered the joy of writing my own songs, and playing them with (actual) instruments. It's something I get immense pleasure from, and for once, I'm actually getting some earned traction. In another life, I may have been a musician, and it's something I fantasize about regularly.
With all these AI-generated music tools, the world is about to be flooded with a ton of low-effort, low-quality music. It's going to to absolutely drown out anyone trying to make music honestly, and kill budding musicians in their crib.
I suppose this is the same existential crisis that other professions/skills are also going through now. The feeling of a loss of purpose, or a loss of a fantasy in learning a new skill and switching careers, is pretty devastating.
People also said similar things in the past (I'm a musician as well: guitar, piano and bass) about Synths and Drum machines (and things like GarageBand which can do backing drums and even basslines semi-automatically now).
Some of those things enabled others to create new types of music or express themselves in different ways.
People have said that about robots and computers in the workplace, and indeed, since the 60s, more and more jobs have been automated. And there are less musicians now. Film scores and albums are produced with samples instead of bands or orchestras, reducing demand for session players, leading to less income for musicians, leading to less musicians.
And while automating dangerous jobs is a good thing, generating AI music isn't. It's not as unethical as generating deepfakes, but it's useless, and bad for society.
I feel its already hit the tipping point. I used to listen to mixes on youtube liberally, but I've now had to filter all searches to pre-2023 due to the flood of slop that's appeared. I used to finds loads of great up-coming musicians, but the amount of effort required to do so has increased considerably. I am tired of filtering out the slop.
Find some good independent online radio stations that you like. There are successful ones out there, nts.live and rinse.fm in the UK for example. Obviously they exist in other countries too.
I say independent as most radio is stacked with adverts, but the above two seem successful without needing them.
I find the human curation far more satisfying than an algorithm, and most DJs want to support human artists not bland AI nonsense as they have a stake in the music industry.
SEARCH TIP: As the default search prioritizes newer content, it's quite tedious to find older takes on youtube.. there's a workaround though: web search for site:youtube.com and set a custom date range (ddg: click on "Any time", g: "Tools" on the right side) to sidetrack the big tech attention economy brainrot algorithm.. : D
> It's going to to absolutely drown out anyone trying to make music honestly
The world is saturated with low quality everything already. Has been for a long time, even before AI. If you're genuinely good you'll be able to stand out
The answers to your questions are in the comment you replied to. Part of their love is music is sharing it with others. They also like to fantasize about becoming a full-time musician. Both of those things are less likely if there is 100x the current volume of music from unknowns.
It's not about validation, it's about expression and communicationw with other humans. That's one of the key beauties of art and it's being flooded away with artificial, empty content
Spotify does have a lot of AI generated music, yes. What is the purpose of your comment? Do you believe there is some filtering mechanism that is going to keep AI slop off of these platforms? Is that what we've seen happening with writing and art?
Let me tell you that the world has been flooded with low-effort, low-quality music for decades already. Most of the popular music relying on the same 3 chords, dull lyrics etc. While I'm a fan of music generators like Udio, I'm pretty sure the best music is still going to be created by humans. I also believe that while AI slop is bad, human slop is even worse.
I don't think it's going to drown people out. I think it's going to make recommender systems much less useful, so the people who care will simply return to the older methods of curation, and the people who don't care will get the slop they want.
The problem with all these AI companies and products is that they all over-value the content itself. The content is not the thing that is valuable, its the person who creates it and the community and culture that forms around it. These are things that require people, a lot of time, luck, and can never be automated. You see this all the time with people who spend huge amounts of money and effort making things that may even be great and high quality but never gain any real value. Companies do it all the time too. It's very hard to predict what will become valuable, and what will not. Just because AI will let you create more of something, or do it faster or cheaper -- it doesn't matter as long as you are missing some external factor that makes something high quality popular or valuable. And yes, there is always an external factor at work, a lot of times many factors. This is further evidenced by the fact that quality itself of something valuable sometimes doesn't need to be there (although it is more likely to be there, than not).
Just by magically dropping the content price or effort to $0, doesn't matter because the content itself has no or little to no intrinsic value. There isn't suddenly going to be an expanded market of people who will listen to your AI generated music or buy your AI-enabled product.
If tomorrow, I could make a random kid on the street sing just as well as Taylor Swift, or even if an exact perfect copy of her emerged somewhere, it doesn't mean she has any relationship to the value of Taylor Swift.
"Country of residence (this current phase of the experiment is only available to users based in the U.S. for now, but feel free to submit interest and stay tuned for updates):
"
I remember when they made some generative AI chess demo and when I went to visit it, it said it's not available to users under 18 or outside US. And I had to do a double-take at the idea of chess that is 18+ and georestricted
As a musician with infirmities and other hindrances, I have dreamed of this for many years. Consider the DJ, particularly the variety that remixes music. While a skill in itself to manage the h/s/ware, such an artist is largely exhibiting their taste in music, excerpting, rearranging and altering existing music to accomplish a sound otherwise missing. I've found many such remixed versions vastly superior to the originals.
Now imagine, without mastering a specific instrument or skill, you can now create the music in/of your own mindspace, which for me is rarely the music I hear, and often a deviation of what I do hear.
I'm sure this isn't quite what's being offered yet, but every time I grasp my instruments with my trademark touch of inevitable futility, I hope I make it to a time when I can produce what my lack of virtues presently prohibits. It's not the physical acrobatics or mathematical showcasing of great music that I want - it's the end result of the music itself.
I thought AI is supposed to free up my time by taking my job so I can unleash my musical creativity on an empty stomach? It is going to make music too?
I expect this type of stuff to be used for elevator and telephone hold music. Or even perhaps indie video games where they don’t have a budget for music.
Strong opinion ahead: the very moment people will finally realize that music is in the microscopic nuances of the human touch, breath and taste(literally for every instrument), hopefully we will get disinvested in this useless technology. Yes, I am aware of software like pro tools, but that can ba used well for touch up all tue nueances
It seems inevitable now. I used to think AI music would always sound compromised in term of audio quality, but the tech seems to have crossed a threshold, kind of like Retina displays did for screens.
Soon, hiring people for commercial background music might be rare. Think AI for jingles, voiceovers, maybe even the models and visuals. Cafes can use AI-generated music too – in a way, the owner curates or "creates" it based on their taste.
But there are still interesting parts to human music making: the unpredictability and social side of live shows, for example. Maybe future music releases could even be interactive, letting listeners easily tweak tracks? Like this demo: https://glicol.org/demo#ontherun
Cafes CAN use AI generated music, but WHY would they use it? Last time I checked there's millions of hours of human-produced music. The only reason might be the price, but AFAIK cafes have to pay a flat price to national music associations regardless of the actual music that they play. The downside is that AI-generated music might be cringe and chase away the customers. At best, cafes have no upside and no downside. At worst, they close the doors.
Is there a model which can generate vocals for an existing song given lyrics and some direction? I can't sing my way out of a paper bag, but I can make everything else for a song, so it would be a good way to try a bunch of ideas and then involve an actual singer for any promising ideas.
I'm very happy to see that they're prioritizing making tools for musicians, rather than making AI music generators to replace musicians. Everything else I've come across so far was trying to do the latter.
The end effect will be the same, I'm afraid: one "AI composer" in a TV studio or a marketing shop will be able to create most of the needed music on demand, removing the need to record and mix new tracks and putting a lot of musicians out of business.
> That is not a water bottle, it's a domesticated puddle.
Many (most?) people don't care about the artists behind songs (even less so about their culture). They care about the "organised sound" being enjoyable to hear. And to them, AI music is just as valuable as manual music.
Gangam style didn't become popular because people cared about PSY. It didn't become popular because of its thoughtful lyrics and insightful message. It became popular because it sounds good.
If 60% of people don't care about the artist's image/culture/story, and 40% do, then 100% of artists are gonna try to make their image/culture/story look good.
Hence, I don't consider the popularity of such artists to be a counter-argument to my statement.
However, my statement is based solely on anecdotal evidence, so I won't claim to have solid pro-arguments either; hence why I put a question mark after the "most".
> They care about the "organised sound" being enjoyable to hear.
"Enjoyable to hear" is a problem that has been solved since the paleolithic. Musical scales and modes have always been a thing, making sounds that are nice and harmonic is a straightforward mathematical problem.
It's kinda like Suno, except Suno sounds pretty good sometimes. Even so, I played with Suno for a few days and lost interest. There are some amazing examples on Suno, though: https://suno.com/song/9a7fd58e-132c-4ac5-9a25-f40d7f6f8c9f. This is one of the early tunes, it probably can do better now.
It seems to struggle to create music with a strong identity. It is great if you want to make a poor imitation of top 40 hits. But the thing about top 40 type music is that the best music is already in the Top 40. It remains to be seen if there is as strong a demand for a music chart filled with slop as there is demand for a music chart filled with pop tunes by celebrities.
I don't think audio files are the right output for deep learning music models. It'd be more useful to pro musicians to describe some parameters for synths, or describe a MIDI baseline, or describe tunings for a plugin and then have the model generate these, which can then be tweaked similar to how we now code with LLMs. But generating muddy, poorly mixed WAVs with purple prose lyrics is only an interesting deep learning demo at this point, not an advancement in music itself.
Since we've already evaluated - let's exaggerate - that "most Top 40 songs are slop", maybe lyrics are a big factor in creating identity? I mean, it's true for books, right? I could easily imagine an AI-generated Top 40 song that people would still describe as having a unique identity.
I'm not super into the topic, but let me give you two niche examples that are definitely not Top 40 material, yet are considered to have a strong identity within their communities.
I guess one of the reasons the game Yasuke Simulator has like 10x more sales (don't pin me down on that) on Steam than the actual game Assassin's Creed: Shadows is its very catchy soundtrack, with lyrics that are funny and strongly aligned with the content. [0]
Another example, not focused on lyrics and from a completely different niche genre, is this jazzy death metal song that was particularly well received, not only because of the intentionally hallucinatory video. One could even argue that the hallucination is perceived as a feature, not a bug. So why shouldn't the same be true for audio? [1]
I think very simply we need a persona to bind our feelings on the music too. This is why Hatsune Miku is so big even though "she" uses many "slop" like elements in her work. Slop often is quite high quality when measured objectively but objective measurements struggle to take soul into account.
I actually built a very crude python app that could generate basic melodies with MIDI. It can serve as a fun starting point if you want to remix common songs. But it wasn't a very fun project to set up. It's like this technology is out there but nobody really wants to develop it.
If I had to guess there are already a handful of fake record labels generating at tons of AI slop to just post on Spotify. Even if each song only gets something like two or three views over time they can still generate a modest amount of revenue. Oh wait Spotify has been caught doing that themselves
"Democratization of ___" (fill in with your favorite word). This is what it also does look like. I'm not saying that this is anything good or bad, but when I usually hear that sentence, it's associated with something positive, empowering.
Music models are not interesting to me unless I can use them to edit and remix existing music. Of course none of them let you do that to avoid being sued by the labels.
Agreed to some extent, but I don't think you'll have too long to wait before that comes to pass. It can't possibly be that hard to build a model that will disassemble a given song into its original tracks, like a Fourier transform that yields drums, strings, keyboards, and vocals rather than sines and cosines. Equally unlikely that such a model will be too large to run locally.
We will get some very cool tools -- and some very cool remixes - when that happens.
Yes, why are deep learning models so effective relatively at writing code? It's because programmers have been making their work copyleft for decades, and continue to do so.
Musics only lagging because of the legal threat of labels, at some point in the near future music models will have their SDXL moment and from then on you'll be able to do all things like style transfer or make something very similar to this but different.
Suno and similar are purposefully limiting their models on the public side.
a machine doing any of this would be not causing a meltdown by musicians in the 80s. A punk rock band would not feel threatened by this neither would be Prince.
the sad truth is human output is so averaged out now, that most of it will be replaced.
I am interested in using AI-driven music composition tools in new ways, and Lyra 2 sounds impressive, but
a) so far, using these tools leaves me feeling a little meh, and
b) we are in between the before and after times right now, witnessing the transition to the world of AI content and we're definitely losing something.
Prompt: Hazy, fractured UK Garage, Bedroom Recording, Distorted and melancholic. Instrumental. A blend of fractured drum patterns, vocal samples that have been manipulated and haunting ambient textures, featuring heavy sub-bass, distorted synths, sparse melodic fragments.
Disappointed, until now DeepMind seemed like genuinely being a company working on important, AGI-directed models. Not the latest money-grabbing automation. Might be Google's influence. Most probably.
That's weird. I just learned about a new music generation model called Lyra today, based out of Luxembourg. What's the odds on a similar sounding name in the same field appearing in the same week? I've got to say I don't think I'd relish going up against Google in a brand fight though. https://blog.aiva.ai/.
Nobody is out seeking to destroy the lives of artists. Companies and people are just pushing the frontier of AI anyway they can, and it just turns out that images and audio are two directions the frontier can be expanded.
> Companies and people are just pushing the frontier of AI ...
in the way that seems most profitable to them.
They may not be 'seeking to destroy the lives of artists', but that's a false dichotomy. The outcome may very well be that they will. They know, and they don't care.
Lots of people want to express themselves. They're wholly under-served in this world.
There's no reason someone who didn't pay the opportunity cost to learn to draw or to learn to play guitar shouldn't be able to make art and express themselves.
Figure out an AI to do my dishes, laundry and clean my home. Not the fun parts of life please.
Everyone wants the futuristic star trek future but we all forget that there is only one Captain Kirk and his small crew. Most of us will be sitting around at home doing laundry and cleaning the workplaces of the robots that is owned by large corporations.
You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-Al is? Wrong direction.
I want Al to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for Al to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.
- Joanna Maciejewska
You could add music
The reason you don’t have more time for music is not technological, it’s social. We have enough technology to offer a basic life for everyone for free, but we have not agreed that doing so is worthwhile.
I think there’s an even bigger issue than this.
Many people would not know how to live under such a system. By this, I mean that I strongly believe people would become severely depressed or insanely stir crazy.
I’ve been on an extended sabbatical after 20 years in tech. The first year was magical. “I could do this forever” I told myself, and actually considered it.
The second year was more complicated. I could feel myself drifting away from myself. The structure of work and the rewards of working on big projects were now fully missing, and I could feel this growing emptiness that needed to be filled.
For health reasons, I entered the 3rd year, and by that point I needed more major psychological intervention. I’d become severely depressed and while I knew that getting back to work might help, I was now in a position where going back to work sounded impossible.
I’m not claiming that my experience is universal. But I’ve started to find more accounts that are similar to mine. I’m also not saying it’s impossible to replace work as a form of necessary challenge and satisfaction. But the societal structures do not exist to fill the void.
For better or worse, we’ve been a species that relies on “work” in some form to live. I use quotes because clearly this has looked different ways over time. Hunter/gatherers certainly had a different set of tasks than the modern city dweller.
But ultimately I’m not convinced that we’re equipped to live satisfying lives without some form of striving for survival. In a post-work era, I think a lot of us will go some kind of crazy or experience depression.
I don’t think most people are aware of how awful things can feel after enough time away from work has stacked up.
It reminds me of that feeling when going on vacation somewhere nice. “I could just live here forever”. But the reality is that the thing that makes the vacation feel incredible is the contrast from normal life. Remove the contrast, and things become pretty flat.
Edited to change “most” to “many” in the 2nd paragraph because that better reflects my belief.
As Carl Sagan said, we’re a species that needs a frontier. We need to explore. That’s how hunter-gatherers actually survived, by following the animal migration and pushing outwards when population pressure or ecological change demanded it.
I don’t see how our modern incarnation of plantation jobs is in anyway equivalent to that natural instinct. I don’t think that the vast majority of people would have as much trouble as you finding meaning in their lives without work - especially since 99% of them don’t even have a sliver of a chance at “fuck you money” like you did.
> especially since 99% of them don’t even have a sliver of a chance at “fuck you money” like you did.
I didn’t have “fuck you money”. Just enough to live a moderately frugal life on the equivalent of median income as long as the market didn’t tank.
The thing about your point that doesn’t make sense to me is that you’re describing a scenario in which 99% of people suddenly are in the same situation I was.
> The second year was more complicated. I could feel myself drifting away from myself. The structure of work and the rewards of working on big projects were now fully missing, and I could feel this growing emptiness that needed to be filled.
If you don't mind sharing — why did you not choose to do a big project? I've always imagined that if I were lucky enough to have a sabbatical/retire early, it's not that I wouldn't work, it's that I'd choose to work on stuff that is really important, but undervalued by society (which is the reason I can't do it as a living right now): e.g. activism & lobbying or volunteer work in the community.
I’ve asked myself the same question, because before taking the break I also had visions of working on important/meaningful/undervalued things on my own terms.
I think there were multiple factors. I hadn’t accounted for how much I relied on the work environment for social contact, and I didn’t have the social habits in place to maintain a healthy social life. This felt fine at first because I was also recovering from burnout, and solo road trips and adventures in the mountains felt great.
But every time I’d think about working on something, it felt insurmountable to my brain, and I just got stuck. I’d led huge projects in enterprise environments, but felt incapable of getting something going without some of the structure surrounding that.
I suppose it boils down to a skills issue. Had I realized I’d get so stuck, I may have prioritized a different set of activities. But one thing led to another and I was sliding down the depression slope at which point everything got exponentially more complicated.
I have to conclude that I could have done things differently and that could have led to a better outcome. But all of my professional success hadn’t prepared me for the personal habit changes I needed to implement to have a better outcome.
Completely understand that feeling, even with small things so get where your coming from. Thanks for sharing your experience.
This is what they keep telling us. My hunch is that people will find plenty of "work" to do in their families, their communities, in creative pursuits. Let's find out.
We have found out, it's just that the people who do the finding out generally have money, so their opinion is automatically discounted.
It's a bit like forever single people getting so lost in the ideas of a relationship, intimacy. That everything will be great once they have someone, once they have connection, that life will be amazing and nothing else will matter. Their life sucks because they don't have a relationship. People in relationships don't know what it's like and their opinion is invalid.
Then they get in a relationship and learn that it's actually comparatively banal and requires a lot of work and compromise, and definitely was not the insanely-built-up-over-many-years-magical-life-cure-all.
There are -endless- stories of people who made it rich early on, retired, and ended up in a mental health crisis despite having everything. That fact should be taken as a reality check to calibrate your own perceptions.
Two things here:
I have no data either way but I can imagine that there are many more people who are wealthy and quietly having a great time with it. Most of the retired people I've known, early or not, also enjoyed it. Some have definitely taken up work-like pursuits on their own terms.
Secondly the wealth being the means to achieve this is itself a confounding variable. I don't think it's good for your mind or soul to "have everything," no. Life isn't and shouldn't be merely a series of your own preferences. That doesn't indicate to me that lacking confidence in your mere survival is necessary for human thriving. As far as I know research indicates the opposite.
My point is that I was firmly in the “I want to retire early” category, found myself with the means to do so, and that this wasn’t theoretical for me.
But the thing I imagined is not the reality that I found.
I realize “they” have other motives for convincing people such a future is a problem. But that doesn’t remove what I truly believe would be a hellish reality for many.
I’m all for pushing society in a less work-centric direction and think current work culture is toxic. That’s a big part of the reason I burned out and went on sabbatical.
But I’m also pretty worried about what a sudden shift without careful planning may bring about. I know I certainly didn’t have the habits/skills in place to navigate it in a healthy way.
If you switch from (forced) workaholism and burnout to the opposite, you're going to have whiplash. And perhaps PTSD.
I think the concept of personal freedom is hugely misunderstood. The US model seems to be some combination of wealth, privilege, and absence of social/financial obligation to others.
But we're seeing over and over that the people who attain that kind of freedom are often deeply unhappy, and sometimes deeply toxic.
Which is reflected all the way through work culture.
What would a non-toxic economy and work culture look like? Not just emotionally and personally, but in terms of social + economic structures and collective goals?
I've not seen many people asking the question. There's been a lot of oppositional "Definitely not like this", much of which is fair and merited.
But not so much "We could do try this completely new thing instead." Answers usually fall back to standards like "community" but there doesn't seem to be much thinking about how to combine big planet-wide goals with individual challenges and achievements with supportive social middleware that has to bridge the two.
I agree with this comment. If I’d started from a position where I had a better relationship with work, maybe the whiplash wouldn’t have been so severe and I could have transitioned to something better before getting stuck.
My worry is that so many people around me - from all walks of life and across a wide range of pay scales - have a similarly unhealthy relationship with their work and would experience the same whiplash.
My deeper worry is that the rate of technological progress is far outpacing any efforts to implement a less toxic economy and culture, and that such changes to economy and culture must necessarily be gradual to avoid massive societal upheaval and chaos.
Ultimately I want to work on big world-impacting problems whether I’m getting paid for it or not. I know this is possible, but spent most of my early life training for the toxic work culture that burned me out.
I think we need off-ramps and on-ramps, not cliff dives.
I was basically unemployable due to health problems for several years before covid made work from home normal. It's not really theoretical for me either.
It was, all things considered, great. I have never been more involved in the communities and connections that I find valuable and fulfilling. I learned several complex skills that continue to benefit me and the people around me, I taught and mentored young people some of whom are now adults entering professional careers based on that momentum.
I don't believe either of our individual experiences are really a good predictor of universal human experience in this area. Do you?
> I’m not convinced that we’re equipped to live satisfying lives without some form of striving for survival
If we're all struggling for survival, some of us will fail. I invite you to dream bigger about what we're "equipped for." One of the very few universal human traits across time and culture is refusal to be bound by our biological history.
> I don't believe either of our individual experiences are really a good predictor of universal human experience in this area. Do you?
No, and I said as much in my comment. My point was not that my experience is universal, but that I have direct experience with the failure mode of such an arrangement. Am I 50% of the population? 75? 5? I don’t know. But as I went though it, I met more people who’d gone through something similar, and I learned a lot about myself that made me realize my previous imagination about a life without work were mostly fantasies. Again, this isn’t to say there aren’t productive ways to navigate it. Just that the ways I imagined this working were very different from reality.
The bottom line is that we don’t know what such an arrangement would bring about at mass scale, and if people are more likely to have an experience like yours or like mine. There’s probably a spectrum of experiences between them. I just think we should approach such a future thoughtfully and carefully.
Diving in head first with a “let’s see what happens” attitude seems dangerous and ill advised.
> No, and I said as much in my comment.
You had that disclaimer but most of the rest of the comment was about your prediction that most people would be affected in the same way. Some friendly feedback for your future writing on the subject, I guess.
That’s fair, and I edited “most” to “many” shortly after I wrote it because the truth is that I don’t know what exact proportion of people will have the same issues. I had hoped the extensive context throughout the rest of my comments made that position clear.
I do feel confident that the number is higher than some of us think. Certainly I did not expect this to unfold in my own life, and through the experience I became aware of the many others who’d gone through something similar and were similarly caught off guard.
All of this will hinge on personal upbringing, background, support systems, life experiences, locale, etc. At some point I hope to write in more detail about the factors in my own life that I believe led me here after I’ve gotten fully to the “other side” of the experience.
What I find so incredibly frustrating about comments like this is the assumption that this is how it has to be. Human liberation is a bad idea because you had a bad experience during sabbatical and that’s the way it has to be.
People and society adapt.
This is not what I took away from the experience or what I’m trying to communicate with my comment.
I’ve elaborated in various sibling comments, but my point is closer to this: regardless of what is possible, many people simply don’t have the skills for a rapidly and drastically altered social arrangement.
To your point, people can gain those skills. Society will adapt. But the worrying thing to me is the rate of change. Whatever we can imagine about a future in which we’re not bound to our jobs, there is also the harsh reality that we have to collectively agree about an awful lot of things to get there, and that agreement isn’t happening at the same rate as technological progress.
If anything, some forms of “progress” (social media) are grinding healthy collaboration and agreement to a halt while big tech ushers in a new era of tools despite the fact that we haven’t adapted to the last major advancements.
None of this is assuming this is how things must be. It’s more about the very real problems that will come with such a transition and the fact that we’re already doing a pretty bad job of ushering in such a future in a way that is actually beneficial to people.
We're currently going backwards in terms of progress and you're worried about going too far forward too quickly.
Progress is not evenly distributed, nor are all forms of progress beneficial.
In my mind, it is exactly because of the areas of regression that other areas of progress are problematic if we don’t place enough focus on solving the new problems such progress creates.
e.g. many of the worst aspects of modern social media discourse boil down to people with an extremely limited understanding of complex problems believing in overly simplistic solutions and forming strong world views based on that lack of understanding.
Much of the technological progress recently involves abstraction on top of abstraction on top of abstraction making extremely complex things appear simple. The further down this road we go, the further the technology moves the average person out of contact with the underlying reality.
Push a button and shoes show up at your door. Nevermind the thousands or hundreds of thousands of people involved in making that happen or the many harms that occur along the way ranging from ecosystem destruction to child labor.
I don’t see the concerns I have about certain forms of progress as having any bearing on the areas of obvious regression. I’d even argue that some of the progress has directly caused that regression. The law of unintended consequences and all that.
This is literally me, but Im half way through year two and I feel like the ground is slowly getting thinner beneath me.
The thing I would tell my former self is this: pivot now. Waiting may make things harder. Don’t assume it will sort itself out. And if you can find a good therapist, it can be extremely helpful.
Actively seek out something that provides structure and consistency, even if that’s not work. Something that keeps you in regular contact with other people.
I had started to look into various volunteering opportunities but didn’t take action before my major slide. In retrospect I think I’d have been better off if I did.
> Many people would not know how to live under such a system
People will learn just like they learned how to live under the alternate system.
I do think people will learn/adapt. I’m in the middle of that now. The question/concern is more about what happens during that learning process, and whether or not society has structures in place to facilitate it at scale.
e.g. my journey involved quite a bit of professional psychological help, and I feel lucky that I found good care given the shortage of good care in this category.
Just get a child and you have more than enough to do for roughly twenty years.
You have to retire at some point so prepare for it. Some people do indeed not cope well.
Absolutely. But most retirement planning doesn’t cover 40-60 years of time. Most retirement planning also assumes a period of time when a person is gradually losing their ability to fully engage with society.
It’s a whole different ballgame when the period of time involves a person’s “peak” years. Many people have a drive that they haven’t yet satisfied in their 20s/30s/40s. This isn’t to say this drive can’t be channeled into something other than a traditional job. I’m just saying we don’t currently have societal structures and norms such that an entire population will know what to do.
Who is "we"? The entire human race?
Expecting all humans across different cultures and languages to come together and figure out basic income for 9 billion people is absurd. This kind of cooperation never happened and probably never will. People are completely unable to cooperate at the massive scale this requires, let alone solve far smaller challenges like mitigating outbreaks or making an effort to avert climate change.
"We" is not a thing.
We as in, it's not a social cooperation thing, many people's individual moral ethics make it so they themselves would be uncomfortable with the idea of not working to earn a living. Currently, society as a whole generally believes that it's each individual person's prerogative to find paying work and most people don't really examine this belief. There's nothing to cooperate on yet.
I think the idea of a society where work is optional and people having their needs met by the society they live in is actually well explored. It's a Utopia. The problem is human nature is competitive and just being provided with everything you need to live, even being given ample time to create art and enjoy life, is not enough for many people. Utopian ideas all look great on paper but when meeting reality you cannot build Utopia around greed and elitism and you can't abolish them either.
The first step towards this is a UN resolution.
That's an interesting take. Is there any historical precedent for an international change that started with a UN resolution? Because my cynical take is that UN resolutions are typically either ineffective, or made post-hoc.
It's difficult, but not impossible. "We" decided to offer everyone a covid vaccine and achieved that.
And as a result of "we" being divided, we have the resurgence of many vaccine preventable diseases, because that achievement was flat out rejected by part of humanity.
I wonder what part of that was actual rejection of the vaccines vs a rejection of collective action itself as an idea.
The rejection itself was a collective action. It wasn't passive, anti-vaxxers did work spreading propaganda, protesting and undermining vaccination efforts. They made it a part of their identity and culture.
If it was a rejection of anything, it was of any assumption of good faith on the part of either government or scientific institutions. Why that happened, as quickly and thoroughly and as polarized along clear partisan lines as it was, is a mystery.
> If it was a rejection of anything, it was of any assumption of good faith on the part of either government or scientific institutions. Why that happened, as quickly and thoroughly and as polarized along clear partisan lines as it was, is a mystery.
It isn't a mystery, it was the bullshit and lies that happened the first month of covid in USA, many people then stopped listening even when the bullshit and lies stopped. I remember the cases in New York exploding and the local democrat told people to continue as normal since its nothing to worry about, and that masks doesn't prevent spread so don't go buy masks, that was how it all started.
They say they had to tell those lies to save resources for those who needs it, but that made people stop trusting them and that counts for so much more. I hope they learned their lesson, but likely they didn't as they never said "Sorry we lied to you, we shouldn't have done that".
Except if you understand they were being misleading, and you understand why, you also understand Covid was a real problem and that there were serious infrastructure and logistics problems that had to be dealt with. You get angry with the government for fumbling the effort, but you still get vaccinated. That doesn't justify believing Fauci and Biden cooked up Covid in a lab or that the vaccines were spiked with microchips or that masks give you brain cancer or half the stuff antivaxxers actually wound up claiming.
People literally formed resistance organizations and were warning of a global fascist takeover, we were entering an eternal police state in which the unvaccinated would become a slave underclass and if you didn't have your vaccine card you would get shot dead in the street.
All of it went far beyond simple mistrust in the government's PR.
You forgot the flip side of the predictions: that the vaccinated would end up bleeding out in the streets. I believe there were a large number of such predictions, which should have already happened.
I think this only strengthens your observation that anti-vaxxing went far beyond simple mistrust.
The idea that we no longer need labor is preposterous. Where are the machines to take care of children or the sick, or to build and maintain housing?
What kind of science fiction world do you think you live in?
The idea that those jobs can only be done by desperate individuals so society needs desperate individuals is your logic here. I am not sure I can even counter it, I lack the imagination to see an alternative.
Helping people is not desperate work. It’s meaningful.
Sure, but one shift as a nurse in a hospital will open your eyes to just how difficult a job that can be, and not one many people would do unless "forced" to.
I’m not sure what your scare quotes mean, but nurses don’t work for free and traveling nurses in particular make good money.
“Forced labor” originally meant things like slave labor, but some people have it backwards.
I think anyone will agree that being able to walk away is important for negotiations. How much you’re paid has little to do with that. Having alternative job offers or the savings to do without a job for a while is more important.
There's many incentives encouraging people to work in America. Many of them are positive ones (pride, a sense of community, ambition) and many of them are negative (inability to pay rent, health insurance, food otherwise).
A lot of terrible jobs are required in our society to be done by people from negative encouragement. The belief that all jobs can be done purely through positive encouragement I think is potentially naive. Maybe nurse was a bad example but people who work from this negative encouragement are in many ways "forced" to.
For illustration some of the worst farm labor jobs in America are done by illegal immigrants, and it's not obvious legal citizens would do those jobs at any rate that makes economic sense. The economic engine that gets us food in our grocery store runs on their desperation.
I broadly agree that the economy works that way, but I’m somewhat doubtful that “running on desperation” is quite the right way to describe it. It seems a bit reductive.
Consider joining the military. Most Americans would never consider enlisting. There are people who consider possibly getting shot at or killed to be worth it. Maybe some of them were desperate when they joined, but often not.
Similarly, people who decide to immigrate to the US have a variety of motivations. Is hoping for a better life desperate? It depends.
Sometimes people regret their choices in life, which means they had choices and the other choice wasn’t obviously worse, in retrospect.
More generally, there are a lot of ways that people can get into situations that feel like a trap, and a bad job could be one of them.
I don't think I've ever met a nurse who felt well compensated for their work, but they continued to do it because they were passionate about providing care to those who needed it.
They’re not suggesting no-one has to work. They’re suggesting that no-one has to live without necessities like food, shelter or medical insecurity.
"For free" implies no forced labor or time commitment. So yes, they're suggesting no-one has to work.
If everyone has a basic life for free, how do we decide who still has to harvest crops?
> We have enough technology to offer a basic life for everyone for free
Not literally "everyone". Someone still has to make the food you eat and the house you sleep in.
That's what automation is for. And there will always be people who want a much more expensive lifestyle than a "basic life".
That's the point, there's no automated solution to my laundry but apparently there is now an automated solution for my musical passions.
> I want Al to do my laundry
Do you want a washing machine with Alexa built-in? Be careful what you ask for.
(I know what you meant, but the only laundry-related AI you can hope for, is a cloud connected smart speaker telling you it can't wash with unapproved third party detergent pods)
I guess automatic sorting, washing at the right temperature, drying and maybe folding is what someone who washes their own clothes would wish for.
Talking to the appliance is probably not that high on their list.
The Jetsons future.
> the only laundry-related AI you can hope for, is a cloud connected smart speaker telling you it can't wash with unapproved third party detergent pods
This seems unnecessarily fatalist.
Laundry folding machines exist[1] and there were attempts to create a consumer friendly one, so far unsuccessful. Technology advancements could make that happen. At least that's what I'm hoping for.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laundry-folding_machine
Someone (probably from here) would develop a local inference model probably - or hopefully.
> I want Al to do my laundry
Do you want a washing machine with Alexa built-in? Be careful what you ask for.
https://www.samsung.com/uk/washers-and-dryers/bespoke-ai-lau...
Well you know, all those fun and creative parts in software engineering has been taken over by vibe coding and now humans are supposed to do only tedious works, so probably the same thing applies here.
Perhaps much of what humans be doing in this regard is - validation, and the physical work left. But we're not there yet, of course. Vibe coding takes a lot of manual labor, and it's nowhere near for the actually complex tasks such as... multi-part CTEs munching gigs of spatial-temporal data.
Speaking of AI in music - well, perhaps many will welcome some tools when you have to:
- clear hissing - process levels in tedious clearing - auto-removal of aaah, oooh, eeerrmm and similar - podcast restoration, etc.
but of course, nobody wants darn model singing in the mornings, and composers definitely don't need anyone to make up melodies, drum rolls, or bass lines for them.
I see deepmind advance their offering, still I find it difficult to imagine any of my producer friends embracing such abomination, and particularly giving it is a remix tool before all else, and not a composition tool. People love details the same way a painter loves details.... dilettantes think all this irrelevant, they really can't be wrong more.
I’ve been writing software for 25 years and am “vibe coding” a fairly complex game in my spare time. It saves time on boilerplate but it is absolutely not capable of doing all the work. There’s still some assembly required and doing so requires domain knowledge and expertise. Also, prompting properly requires the same. If I were to compare the experience to building a house, I’m now the foreman—and no longer doing the manual labor. There’s a real risk of systems making it to production that nobody understands, but we have that today.
There’s no such thing as vibe composing music, even though experimenting with knobs is not writing notes, and even though writing notes seems like writing programs.
À music score may be complete since very first attempts at it, while arrangement and sound désign may be added later. Writing actually catchy music is much more difficult than writing a todo app even though they may seem similar in engineering complexity.
Coding is not composing and vice versa. Code which produces music scores is not what audio models do.
The scary thing is while a construction labourer knows how to properly lay bricks, an AI's output is reliably unreliable. Does the foreman have to go round checking every little thing on the site? That would be a waste of time. Using these AI tools for anything important is too high risk.
There exist many problems for which it's easy to verify the inputs-outputs, but much harder to write the functions to convert the inputs into the outputs.
Just write an executable spec and have the AI generate the code that fulfills it. Where is the risk?
I guess the risk would be that the cost of compute would explode out of control long before you got a viable solution.
To give a bit of an absurd example, I imagine there's a reason it's not currently worth it to generate the code with a random character generator, even though hypothetically that would get you there eventually. If we consider AI a much, MUCH better version of a random character generator (let's say it's a million times faster. No, let's say that it'll get you the solution in quadratic time instead of factorial time), that doesn't necessarily mean it's actually worth it now.
Just time box it then?
Ok in that case I guess the risk would be that it simply wouldn't work and you'd lose whatever time and compute happened in the time box. Which would be a pretty cheap price to pay, but I imagine you'd only try it a few times before giving up and using a different strategy.
> Does the foreman have to go round checking every little thing on the site?
Uh, is that not half of the foreman’s job? They’re there to direct and coordinate the work, resolve unforeseen issues, and to enforce the required quality of work.
I'm certain they don't check every brick. In the same way I shouldn't have to check simple maths. Today's "AI" can't even reliably add two numbers, it's ridiculous.
Are there any tools that do that better than our existing tools? Are there any companies that are working on that sort of thing?
If so, great. If not, then I think the parents point stands.
> Well you know, all those fun and creative parts in software engineering has been taken over by vibe coding and now
Maybe on your YouTube shorts playlist but not in real life. People doing real work are not vibe coding. The previous perpetual react learner turned ai vibe coder certainly is doing vibe coding, but not for money from a job.
> Well you know, all those fun and creative parts in software engineering has been taken over by vibe coding
What? In what way? Fun and creative parts are thinking about arch, approach, technologies. You shouldn't be letting AI do this. Typing out 40 lines of a React component or FastAPI handler does not involve creativity. Plus nobody is forcing you to use AI to write code, you can be as involved with that as you'd like to.
> Plus nobody is forcing you to use AI to write code, you can be as involved with that as you'd like to.
I had management "strongly encourage" me to use AI for coding. It will absolutely be a requirement soon for many people.
The more generative AI you use the more dependent you become of it. Code bases need to be structured different to be friendly to LLM's. So even if you might work somewhere where you technically don't have to use AI, you will need it to even make sense of the code and be competitive.
The job of an software engineer for the most part will change fundamentally and there will be no going back. We didn't know how good we had it.
Using AI does not mean Vibe Coding though. You can use it in a variety of ways to make yourself more productive that fall short of vibe coding.
These are actually just the problems easier for researchers to solve, mostly due to a lot of readily available data.
Everyone shares music and art they make but nobody ever shares videos and motion capture of themselves doing laundry and vacuuming their house. Maybe we need to start sharing that instead
The UMI gripper project is working on this. they have a handheld gripper device full of sensors that they use to record doing things in the field, like picking Starbucks, which they then use as training data.
https://umi-gripper.github.io/
The other thing to note is part of the aloha project isn't just to record people folding laundry and loading the dishwasher, but to take that data and plug it into a simulator with a physics engine, and use a digital twin to get 10x the amount of data to be used in training the model than if they'd just used real world data. So yes we need that data, but not as much as we would otherwise.
https://mobile-aloha.github.io/ https://github.com/tonyzhaozh/aloha
Check out the Epic Kitchens project, there are labeled video data sets of cooking, doing dishes, etc.
https://github.com/epic-kitchens
Meta has several first person pov datasets available
https://ai.meta.com/datasets/
Even teleops are janky as hell, robots needs bodies
That's indeed the second worst issue with current model architectures. For a model to be trained to something nearing usability for an actual task it needs an amount of data that is far beyond what can be obtained. Companies like Facebook and OpenAI downloaded pirated copies of every single book humans have written to reach the current level of text generation, and even with that, it's not like those models are perfect or that intelligent.
It is going to severely limit the possibilities of building actual agentic AIs. We do not have an endless amount of data of humans performing menial chores. And normal people will probably more hostile than the kool aid drinking software developers when it comes to being spied on, who's going to agree to wear a camera while working so as to help train their own replacement? Yet it's kinda what devs are doing gleefully adopting software filled with telemetry and interacting with copilot.
There will be no difficulty equipping people in minimum wage jobs with cameras. You could probably even get companies to pay to give you training data, if you sell it as an AI-powered system for reducing shrinkage or avoiding liability. The most likely source of pushback (that companies will care about) is likely to be from customers interacting with people wearing cameras, so it might be limited to non-customer-facing roles.
Another good source of data would be exoskeletons, though I don't know that any of those have actual seen real commercial success yet.
This isn’t the reason at all and comes across a weak attempt to make researchers stealing the work to train come across as blameless and helpless to circumstance.
They’re doing it because there is a lot of value to extract in making it so anyone can do these things regardless of talent or skill.
AI is going to do jobs like radiologists, so humans can work at McDonald's or be bartenders! I mean, the pouring drinks part of it, the conversational skills of an AI bartender will be superior to those of humans!
If only, their work is already taken by robots.
https://rbtx.com/en-US/solutions/igus-robot-arm-bartender-co...
https://smyze.com/en/discover/
https://www.kuka.com/en-de/industries/solutions-database/202...
Really we are going into a dystopian society, but hey AI can complete my code, hurray!
The underlying problem is that humans consistently underestimate how difficult some of our "lowest" functions are, like sorting out socks and folding the laundry.
Canonical rant on the subject from a previous AI wave: https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/elephants.pdf
It's called Moravec's paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox (he is cited by the Elephants dont play chess paper)
Nothing stops you from doing art and writing, just like nothing is stopping someone today from riding a horse, running a marathon or rowing a boat.
Unless you are someone that has chores to do like say... Most people? Yes we could technically leave our dirty dishes on the sink while we do art but that decision bites you next time you want to cook lol.
Obviously we mean we want to use that time of doing dish towards art instead, like how automation has always worked?
Chores are just a convenient excuse because of fear of failure. How is it that some people are "too busy" for decades on end? There is time for making art if you want to.
Nothing privileged about that response. Tell that to the single parent working two jobs to make ends meet.
I will. There are people in much worse situations who still manage to make time for art. I'm happy to be "privileged" to have some spare time. Medieval serfs and cavemen also had that same privilege. Most animals have that privilege.
You could buy a dishwasher.
Presumably, the idea is that AI drives down the cost (and thus, value / career prospects) of art and writing.
I'm gonna be honest... Very few people are artists for the pay
I'm not sure how this contradicts what they said. AI would likely lower the number of paid opportunities.
Additionally, art requires practice. Sure, some "lower-tier" artists may produce work that AI could replace without anyone noticing. But by removing that step, we risk having fewer truly great artists emerging.
The paid artist is, in fact, the outlier.
I will also be honest, if you expect to live off your art, you are doing it wrong.
You may not be able to be rich, but at least until recently it was possible to make a living and not be homeless/require patronage.
If you expect to live off typing letters and numbers on a keyboard, (or off the labour of others, while you siphon up the lion's share of their productive surplus), you are doing it wrong.
Absolutely ridiculous to assume that only some careers allow the makers to live off them.
That's the point: for almost everyone it's not a career. It's a hobby. Like some people have a career researching physics because they're extremely good at it and society has decided it makes sense to have a few. Then there's people like me who learn what they can of it in their free time, but I do something else as a career because realistically very few people have need of someone who's familiar with the Dirac equation or whatever. Among the general population I'm probably in the 99th percentile of math/physics knowledge/ability, but I don't do that for work because we don't need 1% of the population working on such things. And that's for a skill that causes most people to get anxiety; the demand mismatch is probably even greater for things that average people actually enjoy.
But it also has the potential to make the experience of creative pursuits better. e.g. have it listen to your playing of an instrument and give feedback on how to improve your technique. Or have it be an always available multi-instrumentalist partner for a jam session. You start playing and it just rolls with it and maybe inspires you in a way you wouldn't have thought of alone.
People are so weird about how to view ML/advanced signal processing. Don't look at things thorough the myopic lens of "prompt ChatGPT and it responds poorly". Look at it as an auto-complete, or a better form of on-the-fly procedural generation. Remember e.g. Audiosurf creating levels from your music? Make it happen on the fly. Maybe you could even create an interactive game where one person plays an instrument and the other does some kind of beat-sabre or dance-dance-revolution thing based on it analyzing and anticipating what's going to be played. The game scores you on how well the group was able to get into a groove together or something.
It feels to me like people get upset about ML encroaching on creative endeavors because they're not sufficiently creative to see how it could augment those fields and be a tool to make these things more interesting instead. Corporations will use it for cheaper slop, but slop was already what they wanted from humans anyway. For people that are actually interested in the artistic or social side, they'll have new tools.
Here's an example of something entirely off-the-wall/fun/creative enabled by these ML tools: Plankton covering Tool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc-PymIfv8M
Unless of course you have bills to pay.
Stops you monetising it.
The last 5 years have been a supersized lesson in Moravec’s paradox [1]. More people need to hear about this: the tech world doesn’t have some kind of conspiracy against the creative class, it literally is the lowest hanging fruit as predicted 30 years ago.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
Many keep forgetting programming is also creative work, but yeah whatever.
It is creative to the same extent as any other kind of engineering is: somewhat, but not really.
Keep beliving it, software factories are not much different from other factories, even if some engineering is required.
Who said anything about conspiracies?
For the last year I have been generating music heavily with Udio. For few years before that I was creating music by hand, trying to get into all aspects of music creation (theory, composition, sound design, mixing, arrangement, etc.) and let me tell you - this last year was the most fun I had with music. Generation isn't just a big button to push to get the output. It's completely separate creative process that opens a plethora of possibilities which you can mix & match with all the other skills you had before.
One other aspect of art generation is that it can complement your other creative process. You may need illustration for a book you're writing, or assets + music for your game. So let the AI help you where you need help and you yourself focus on the things that matter to you the most or where you are having the most fun.
I found AI music generation was more about production.
You're the Rick Rubin or Brian Eno shaping the song out of the music, not to musician.
Here's another good quote from Kurt Vonnegut's highly relevant "Player Piano" from 1952:
“The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings," said Paul, "not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.”
We already have machines that do laundry and dishes.
Who ever says this have not done laundry :)
Who ever says this hasn't done laundry without machine assistance :)
Ugh, why can't AI fold my clothes so I can spend more time on Hacker News writing comments?
Because AI can do the commenting better than you...?
But, can AI fold clothes better than I...? This 'tis the question.
I recall they asked some elderly women what the greatest invention they saw in their lifetime was a few years back and they said the laundry machine. Before the laundry machine, it was an all day, physical chore with a washboard. Hours of your life devoted to just doing laundry versus putting it in a machine and coming back in an hour
Incorrect :)
Try doing it without the machine, see if you can spot the difference.
Still a chore with the machine. It is implied that AI will take over the machines, collect your socks and shirts from around the house, put them in the machine, dry them out, iron them and put them back in the drawer in an energy efficient and hygienic way while you are happily painting.
Yep, the beloved image of Aristotle gazing out at the slaves in the fields and saying that someday robots will do the labor and people will be at leisure, and not slaves looking toward the pagoda discussing how someday robots will own us all.
It's still creative work to make music using AI too. In both cases, the machines just made it a lot easier
I am not too sure about that. Isn't the whole thing about art and music is that you can convey something that words cannot? Of course, these models start to support image and audio inputs as well, but the most interesting mixing step that happens in the artist's head seems missing in the generated output. If you have some vision inside your head, making something out of it by hand is still the best way to convey it. Just as writing something down refines the thoughts and reveals holes in your thinking - drawing something is visual thinking that reveals holes in your imagination. You can imagine some scene or an object pretty easily, but if you try to draw it into existence, you will immediately notice that a lot of detail is missing, a lot of stuff you didn't think through or didn't even notice was there at all. The same applies to creating music and programming. Using generative AI certainly has some artistic component to it, but I feel like using these models you give up too much expressive bandwidth and ability to reflect and take your time on the whole endeavor.
Who is the work for? If I lived in the automated future (or could afford private staff in the present) I would do more creative stuff just because I enjoy it and with no expectation of having an audience. For context, I'm an occasionally-published photographer, and I like playing piano but I'm not at a level anyone else would want to listen to.
But photography is not art, you didn't paint it! You literally pointed a device at something, twiddled a few knobs and pushed a button. Literally anyone with a smartphone can do that!
/s of course, but basically that's the argument people make nowadays related to AI and art (of any form).
See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs3ocG5yW88
Get a clothes dryer.
Whoever says this has never washed laundry by hand =)
Loading and unloading them and folding clothes makes it not good enough yet. There are so many things a humanoid robot could do around a house.
Laundry, dishes, picking up clutter, taking out the trash, wiping down surfaces and dusting, pulling out weeds etc. I actually think we’re somewhat close to gettin g like that relatively soon.
Humanoid or not, anything that can do these things and understand you when you ask to do them, in a useful way that's not like 'white mutiny' but actually like a proper servant…
…deserves to sit on the back porch playing guitar if it likes.
If it's a superintelligence way superior to its human masters, it deserves that MORE than if it's a hapless, semi-useless mechanism.
I wouldn’t say an LLM needs time to relax and it can do all of the above atleast in the virtual space already.
As always, the last mile is the most difficult. To me 'doing laundry and dishes' encompasses putting them away (and folding in the case of laundry).
> You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-Al is? Wrong direction.
> I want Al to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for Al to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.
This implies a zero-sum where resources put into LLMs are resources taken away from robotics, and having to choose between one or the other.
The reality is that we can have both, and people are working on both. And I'd bet that advancing LLMs will help to advance useful robotics.
So I really dislike that sentiment.
I like to practice my improv solos to backing tracks. Having an AI band that is listening and reacting to my playing, much like a good band would, would make it a lot easier than trying to get jam sessions going. Good drummers with availability are somewhat hard to find!
This particular direction is over 180 years old at this point.
"[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine...Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."
Lovelace, Ada; Menabrea, Luigi (1842). "Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq".
I don't think there would be any art or writing to do if there was absolutely no "laundry and dishes", conflict, either. The Wall-e future seems more consistent with that honestly, but maybe I'm just revealing an ugly part of my own personality
This is contradicted by the fact that, throughout history, there have been tons of rich people who not even once had to do laundry or any other menial tasks.
Many of them were interested in art or produced it. And many led fulfilling lives without getting depressed from not working as some people fear.
Ok yes very good point you're right. What often happened in the olden times was that science took the shape of art, or religious or ideological conviction drove tireless creation.
Let's say science is left to the robots and the lack of "laundry" never leads to people's suffering, never leads to people asking the big questions about life, etc (I was making big assumptions about AI-keeps-us-as-pets, life in abundance, lack of common threats or conflicts etc). What art is there to create, sans banana stuck to the wall? Somebody in the thread joked about being fed through a tube in a pod or something
But yeah in such a case there will probably still be some fire art about the alienation implied by merely being a human. In the end, no AI can experience being a human that was replaced by AI. Given the vestigial remains of our by then atrophied intelligence can appreciate it
Selection bias, and few are smart and talented enough to become successful artists or scientists. Money cannot buy that.
There are people who inherited significant wealth and it ruined them. It destroyed their motivation and they became depressed drug addicts. A life without purpose. Debauchery and depression.
Well the difference is those rich people didn't have to work for money, so had the time and energy to devote to those passions
I'm not sure what society would look like if and when AI takes over all artistic and creative work. People that would otherwise have a fulfilling career pushed to do menial tasks just to earn an income?
> I want Al to do my laundry
Stanisław Lem has told us about the grave dangers of such a development decades ago.
This is a good summary, summary quoted below, full article linked on the page (requires a login - but reading Lem's story itself is better than reading about it anyway):
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/11/30/the-washing-ma...
"Shortly after Ijon Tichy's return from the Eleventh Voyage, newspapers made much of the competition between two washing machine manufacturers. They were producing robot washers of increasing complexity. They came out with sex-pot washers, washers that seduced women, carried on intelligent conversations, etc. A man named Cathodius Mattrass started a religious cult called the cybernophiles, which believed the Creator had intended humans to be a means toward creating electrobrains more perfect than itself. He turned himself into a giant robot and established himself in outer space. A series of court cases ensued. Finally, a special plenary session was held to decide if Mattrass was a planet, a human, a robot, or what, and Tichy was invited to attend. Suddenly, after much argument and deliberation, cries rang out that electronic brains disguised as lawers were present. The Chairman went through the room with a compass and an x-ray machine was brought in. Eventually everyone was kicked outNthey were found to be made of all sorts of thingsNcotton wool, machinery of all kinds. Ijon was the only human, and then he turned the compass on the chairman and found that he, too, was a robot. He kicked out the chairman, paced the empty hall for a while, and then went home."
One problem is, you have to make them into real capable robots, since you want them to pick up what needs washing by themselves. That then leads to feature-creep and ever increasing abilities that have little or nothing to do with washing, and it escalates from there. The story also had gangs of abandoned intelligent washing machines robbing parts from still owned and in use ones, and more.
The story is part of "Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88321.Memoirs_of_a_Space...
The original Polish book was first published in 1957.
I think out of everything Lem has written, the idea of seductive washing machines that lead the way to a semi conscious cyborg planet is not the best example for actual tangible dangers o AI.
That is not a good representation of the story. I added a few sentences to show you the parts we can already relate to.
In addition to that, we already had discussions here about emails and ads and other things where it is conceivable we end up with AI both creating and consuming the content, with the humans out of the loop (just yesterday: one part email users using AI to create nice long emails, other users using AI to condense them back into the summary).
We also have the kind of feature creep that adds more and more stuff that has nothing to do with the original purpose of the device or the software.
That 1957 story already talks about those kinds of developments.
We need to recognize the reason. It is about scale and cost. Pseudo-art and pseudo-writing can be done completely in the cloud and scale easily. Having a robot to fold even a single towel requires millions of physical robots instead of dozens of servers. Physical products are hard to scale and they break more easily plus they have to live in an uncontrolled invironment.
I think you're missing the point of that statement a bit.
All these art producing AIs are a byproduct of the research progress towards AGI and AI that can do your chores. It is inevitable that somebody has made image or music generating AI in a world where household robots exist. So I don't see any problem with DeepMind trying what they can do with current technology. It's just a reality of the world we have to live with.
Or even have a prompt work on multiple files --- why isn't there an LLM front-end which will accept as input a folder of files, and then run a working/tested prompt on each file in that folder, then return the collected output as a single process/result?
I'm getting a little tired of hearing this quote at this point.
What about humoring the opposite?
I want AI to automate art so I can spend more time doing dishes and doing laundry. Dishes and laundry are purely analog human experiences. Art, at this point, is essentially digital, and digital is the domain of machines so we can let machines do that now.
What's to humor here? Do you have a passion for laundry and dishes? Do you spend your free time gleefully dirtying dishes just so you can wash them again? Is art or music something you feel forced to do but don't want to?
I am struggling to understand what's really the opposite here. I don't think anyone views art as the same sort of burden as people view dishes. It's not something you're forced to do (even in the situations you do need it it's pretty trivial to buy).
> What's to humor here?
Analog human experiences.
I want AI to automate everything, so that I can exist in a pod, fed intravenously, in a permanent vegetative state.
I want AI to be able to do everything so the I can choose to do anything.
If it can do everything, then you will be redundant.
I keep coming back to this thought. Maybe it’s how I was raised, but knowing that I’m doing something useful to other people / humanity is the entire point.
When a machine can do everything better than we can, then what do we derive meaning from?
I usually get out of the existential dread by thinking that we’re still some time away from the issue, and that there will still be some pursuits left, like space colonization. But it’s not fully satisfying.
> Maybe it’s how I was raised, but knowing that I’m doing something useful to other people / humanity is the entire point.
Exactly. The thought of spending hours on something that an AI could do in minutes sounds horrible to me.
He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry, or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who’d taken a notion to help out for a while.
“Of course I don’t have to do this,” one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. “But look, this table’s clean.”
He agreed that the table was clean.
“Usually,” the man said. “I work on alien – no offense – alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that’s my specialty… like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalog, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But… the job’s never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get reevaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled… but” – he slapped the table – “when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement.”
“But in the end, it’s still just cleaning a table.”
“And therefore does not really signify anything on the cosmic scale of events?” the man suggested.
He smiled in response to the man’s grin, “Well, yes.”
“But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway” – the man laughed – “people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,” the man said with a smile, “it’s a good way of meeting people. So where are you from anyway?”
(Iain M. Banks, "Use of Weapons")
AI will never be able to actually express and reveal my own self to my own self or to others.
That's what art _is_.
Sometimes, it produces something that could be aesthetically pleasing but that's a different matter.
And how it is monetised is a different matter again.
We can join the Amish and reject all technology based on AI.
There may be a war against Big Tech. Terrorist attacks on data centers and robot factories.
Guess who wins in a war where one side has killer drone swarms with thermal vision, and the other one doesn't?
The only way to win this fight is to embrace the tech and put it to good use, not to shun it.
If “put it to good use” means the value of human labor drops to zero, and everyone loses their job to ASI, then violent resistance is inevitable.
It definitely is (and I would encourage that even).
But such resistance cannot be luddite if it actually wants to win. Therefore, its goal cannot be "no AI", but rather "AI used for the benefit of society".
With ASI there is no way that we can control it with absolute certainty.
Controlling something that is vastly more intelligent than humans is fundamentally difficult.
I'm not worried about controlling ASI acting on its own behalf.
What we need is to prevent humans in position of power from using the fledging AI that they control to entrench themselves and stomp on the rest of us.
ASI can not be reliably controlled by any humans.
It makes as much sense as chimpanzees or rats controlling humans.
The technologists have no qualms about encroachment on your space.
Someone has been watching Netflix.
As long as we have a choice.
Not that long ago you would lose your job because you refused to take an experimental vaccination that didn’t prevent transmission.
Were there a lot of jobs that required vaccinations? I expect health care and military, but that comes with the job. Mine certainly didn't.
My elderly relatives strived to remain useful.
My grandmother-in-law especially enjoyed our visits, engaging her in conversation, she delighted in serving us a lovely hot pot of tea. We would give her a few days notice so she could bake a cake, later she just bought one.
Sounds like the useful thing to do now is to come up with a way to automate laundry and dishes. Are you doing that?
Thanking of yourself as "redundant" limits your view of a human to that of a machine, and in doing so you are doing humanity a great disservice. I'd recommend reading the Culture series for a vision of a future where AI has essentially taken over and humans can live out their lives as they want instead of as they need to.
What if you WANT to have a career or a job which is now done exclusively by AGI?
There are still blacksmiths today, selling artisanal products. I dont believe it to be any different with the advent of AGI.
What you don't get of course, is the economic benefit of previously.
If AGI takes my job as a software developer, my career is finished. I don't know what else to do.
Companies won't give a shit about "artisanal" code.
Use your imagination a little... There are endless things you can do. I don't understand this mindset. Especially if you are intelligent enough to be a competent software developer, you have the capacity to do a LOT or at least in my experience you probably do.
I am using my imagination. I am talking about a future scenario where the value of human labour drops to zero.
ASI. Artificial Super Intelligence. All jobs replaced by machines.
Many people derive a sense of purpose from their hard work, skill mastery, and its contribution to society.
You don't need "companies". You need enough customers to buy/support your work so that you get a living out of it.
Being a software developer is a _facet_ of your work. You (unconsciously perhaps) do many other things around/with it that the most efficient AI today cannot do alone. And AGI is still far on the horizon, if not a mirage.
Hey we're talking about a future scenario where AGI actually exists and is vastly better at software development than any human, and can do it much cheaper than current developer salaries.
We're talking about science fiction which may become true much sooner than most people expect.
I would be competing with cheap AGI services so it makes no difference whether I am a freelancer or not.
> Being a software developer is a _facet_ of your work. You (unconsciously perhaps) do many other things around/with it
The non-development parts of my job are not interesting at all. If that's gone then my career is finished. I'm done.
> scenario where AGI actually exists and is vastly better at software development than any human
then humans deservedly should no longer be doing software development, and those who were doing it would necessarily be the economic sacrifices. This has happened to many industries before, and shall continue to happen to others. I don't think there's any necessity to stop it - just ease the transition via taxpayer funded schemes.
However, none of this stops anyone from persuing an artisanal craft - because otherwise, they would be persuing it for economic reasons rather than artistic reasons.
> then humans deservedly should no longer be doing software development
Then you could argue that humans won't "deserve" to exist when aliens show up with superior military technology. This isn't a matter of technology becoming obsolete. It's a matter of human beings becoming obsolete.
No need to call to aliens for that, this happened within human history several times... towards other humans, and towards other species (which some were considered as pest, until it was discovered they were crucial to the ecosystem balance).
That's definitely where the danger of some AI builders is, one more example of how technology _is political_ and the reason it's not so surprising some tech leaders are totally aligned with Trump/Project 2025 (if not funding it).
(all while there is a _real_, _documented_, _non fictional_, _short term_ ubiquitous threat that is global climate change)
You sound really jaded and close minded to me in your posts. If AI replaces software development, the only reason you are "done" is because you are jaded and close minded and seemingly unwilling to adapt to the world and life.
You are totally misunderstanding the point. I am talking about the hypothetical AGI/ASI scenario where ALL jobs are replaced by machines. Not just software development. The economic value of human labour drops to zero. This is not just about me and my own little career. It would impact everyone.
This is a serious topic that is being discussed and debated at a high level. It is an existential threat to human society. It could be catastrophically disruptive. No one knows how it would play out. There could be severe economic inequality and stratification of society unlike anything we have seen in the past.
IMO there's no point in average people worrying about something like that.
That's like worrying about the Yellowstone supervolcano erupting.
No matter how much you worry and prepare, it's all over, so why worry or prepare?
IMO it's like a doomsday prepper. Sure you may live a little longer in your bunker, but who even wants to live like that for very long?
I am actually not worried about my situation. ASI is unlikely to arrive that soon.
HN is a place for nerds to discuss technology and its future impact. Nothing has more disruptive potential than AI.
"Governments worldwide (e.g., US AI Executive Order, UK AI Safety Summit, EU AI Act), international organizations (UN), leading AI researchers (including pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio who have voiced strong concerns), major tech companies, and dedicated research institutes (like the Future of Life Institute, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk) are actively discussing, researching, and debating the implications and safety of advanced AI."
"If ASI concentrates wealth and power in the hands of those who own or control it, while simultaneously rendering most human labor economically valueless, the resulting inequality could dwarf historical examples based on land, capital, or industrial technology ownership. It raises fundamental questions about resource distribution and societal structure in a post-labor world."
> What if you WANT to have a career or a job which is now done exclusively by AGI?
> If AGI takes my job as a software developer, my career is finished. I don't know what else to do.
Do you want to have a software developer career for the sake of having a software developer career (because you enjoy it), or are you worried about your livelihood?
It's what I've always been interested in doing, and it's how I make a living.
I don't want free money just handed out like UBI. That would be depressing. I also don't want retirement.
Many people don't want to be forced into early retirement.
But there are people who already doing what you are currently doing. Also they do it waaaay better. If this does not make you redundant, why would AI do it?
> they do it waaaay better
No they don't. There is a very limited supply of developers who are better than me.
I am talking about a future where we have a practically infinite supply of cheap AGI software developers that are vastly superior to the smartest human being who ever lived.
And where do you find the energy technology required for that to happen?
Hint: it's not on the radar, but if you account for several fundamental breakthroughs in energy production, storage and transport, and all that while having positive side-effects on Earth's ecosystem, within the next 50 years.
I'm not talking about current primitive technology with these power hungry LLMs.
The human brain runs on only 0.3 kWh per day. There is much room for optimization for artificial intelligence.
They don't need many super intelligent systems to replace the relatively small number of software developers.
Just build a few nuclear power stations. Cheaper than millions of developer salaries.
Totally agree, IF an AGI can fully replace/improve on the work of developers, it's definitely cheaper.
But: 1/ cheaper isn't always affordable either.
2/ who will engineer/maintain/steer AGI once AGI takes the job? once you make that leap, there's no way back, no one to understand the machine that makes the stuff we rely on.
And that circles back, in some way, with the debate about AI-generated art: there's no human component in it, there's no understanding, no feedback loop, no conversation.
> who will engineer/maintain/steer AGI once AGI takes the job?
Yeah that's the question. A reduced number of human developers may be privileged to work in these companies.
It's hard to imagine a world with cheap artificial super intelligence. It's like we are introducing a new artificial life form into society, whether it's actually conscious or not.
> debate about AI-generated art
I hope there will always be a majority of people who reject AI generated music.
Or retired.
One is a bad future. The other one may or may not be, as per SMBC being philosophy disguised as humour:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/leisure
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/touch-2
(Can't find the one I was after comparing retirement to UBI, but did find two identically scripted haiku jokes).
> Art, at this point, is essentially digital,
Essentially? No.
Does digital art reduce analog art in the world? Not even. There’s still more and more, courses, workshops, live performances and physical artefacts.
> and digital is the domain of machines so we can let machines do that now.
Art by machines for machines to understand machines (to the extent they would have a notion of self and of other), fine, do your thing as long as the energy you need does not deprive humans needs.
As for me and many others, life happens in the analog realm, so does art.
I go to art museums regularly and look at framed canvas hanging on the walls. It’s an entirely analog experience minus the occasional digital exhibition. I use this experience as an escape from the digital world and hope it stays this way.
You don't need AI for that. Just come to my house, I can allow you to spend time in analog human experiences like dishes and laundry for free. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.
> Art, at this point, is essentially digital
Are you serious with this?
"essentially" is, regrettably, a misplaced word. I meant "basically" or "generally".
But if the art is expressed as a sequence of bytes/tokens (ex. a song on spotify, a movie on amazon prime, a png, etc.), then it is by definition digital. I think it's reasonable to assume this is how most art is produced and consumed today.
Is there a point to this other than trolling, or is it legitimate philistinism?
I enjoy gardening, but use a hedge trimmer. Capital Investment in productivity enhancement so I can manage a larger, more complex garden.
I mean I guess In this obtuse, maybe someone's joy In life is doing dishes and that is their art, then idk maybe but not even then.
First, this just misunderstands what is being said here. For most people, chores like the dishes is a menial task that we will be happy for any reduction in time/effort. In addition, dishes and laundry are considered necessary for modern life.
By contrast, art like music and visual mediums is often associated with joy and the creative act of building something out of making art rather than getting a task done.
To misunderstand this contrast is to misunderstand why we automate things in the first place, to minimize the unnecessary toil and maximize human flourishing. This does the opposite frankly.
A nice thing about doing dishes over creating art is that it's something you can work hard in and get a predictable amount of work done which is gratifying. Meanwhile you can stare at a blank sheet of staff paper in frustration for an hour not knowing the best way to evolve your music composition and it's a really bad experience. That's my experience often. Personally, it's not too difficult for me to invert it / humor the opposite. My context is that I got a degree in music composition and also had several jobs washing dishes. It often goes with having a music degree :)
Obviously the original quote deliberately creates an unfair fight in the arena by matching a conventionally dull-sounding analog task such as "washing dishes" with a sophisticated digital task such as making art (digital since LLMs do it, and that's what the complaint is about).
I could also create an unfair fight by saying "I'd rather have machines organize my spreadsheets (boring digital task) so I can have more time to hang out with other humans I love (appealing analog task)."
For me, by inverting it, I've come to realize it's not about art or dishes, but more about analog and digital. If one is partaking in any digital activity, then the trend of machines entering and taking over that space is inevitable. I think humans will revert more towards prioritizing and finding meaning in purely analog endeavors. Human art will shift back to analog. That's just my personal prediction.
I love your perspective here. I don't agree with all of it, but it really made me think.
I do a lot of photography as a semi-amateur hobby (semi because I occasionally get paid but my goal is not to be a professional.) Often when I'm going out shooting in a city, thousands, maybe even millions have observed the same sight I'm seeing. I'm not snapping the first picture of the Hindenburg or the unveiling of the Empire State Building. But it's my unique perspective that makes my art. People like and recognize my pictures because of my personal composition. In general I think most portrait and street photographers have come to terms with this, and an increasing number of landscape and event photographers in the age of smartphones.
With art there's no "right answer", it's the soul found within the work.
Unfortunately the things we think make us human turn out to be trivial to copy and drudgery might be our true destiny. Moravec's paradox writ large.
Have you heard that AI music? It's absolute shite. AI is a much better boilerplate coder than a musician.
As with all things AI this is the worst it will ever be. It will be better next year and the year after and the year after...
We don’t currently have manufacturing scale and precision to make this work.
AI is in the thing.
It’s too expensive to take it out of the thing and put it in the world.
However, Holywood might like the idea of producing an endless stream of content/music/movies/etc. with little human intervention.
I will never ever ever knowingly consume media written by AI. Worst case, I will only consume media written before some cutoff, 2020 say.
I feel the same. I really wish there was a uBlock for AI content.
Music is a form of Art, so the quote checks out.
While robots mature, analog arts and one time IRL art events are safe and might be the emphasis.
That's a crummy quote to be honest. Not everybody has the ability to be creative on their own, so AI can help expand the demographic of creativity to those who may not have the basic skills. In the same way that word-processors help those who may not be able to write 'proper' English create prose that is acceptable. It may never be great art, but if it fulfils a a personal need, then why not?
[dead]
Doesn't matter what you want. AI is going to do everything that humans do, and probably better, faster and cheaper.
But that's a senseless endeavour. We create art not for money, but for fun and expression.
You forgot the most important and most common use of art: viewing and listening.
AI can already produce good music, good images. At least I found some that I liked.
And AI doesn't stop you from making art and having fun doing so.
The entire point of art is about human experience. If we’re really going to automate humans out of art (I don’t believe we will), and you really just want to look at some AI pictures that you like, why stop there? Why don’t we just go straight to the brain stem and have AI-administered doses of dopamine?
That's not the entire point of art. There are many points of art: inspiration, expression, fun, interior design, exterior design, etc.
AI can create art that covers all of the above, except maybe expression.
Interior and exterior design are applications of art/design, not reasons. The other three things are human experiences. I’m not saying a human cannot create art using gen AI. In fact, whoever thought of making Gemini generate a “17th century British monarch eating watermelon” created a piece of art as provocative commentary on gen AI itself. But if we remove the artists and just have machines churning out materials to consume, maybe based on some signal of consumer preferences, I do not believe that is art. What fun, inspiration, or expression would be enjoyed by either creator or consumer?
Just give everyone anti depressants!
Still welcome to do so. Pottery remains a very popular hobby despite the fact that you can buy factory-made cookware.
Even "better" is a wild statement about art in general. A gigantic part of art is the expression itself.. exactly what this takes away.
With all due respect, even if you are Thom Yorke (actually definitely if you are Thom Yorke) I would probably be bored by your music if it is unwilling to expand and grow with the nascent possibilities of technology. While AI music creation tools tend toward vapid imitation at worst and noble democratization of hit songs at best, Google is providing a more sophisticated interface here which may allow the truly creative to discover viably unique and new music. I live for that. While I support those who want to grab an acoustic and sing at open mike, it would be a loss if all music had to sound like that and it never further evolved.
I would dispute that what is happening with AI music is well described by the phrase "expand and grow". In my view "democratzation" s a weasel word, meaning the removal of skill and effort from the process of production. The operator of such a system inevitably becomes more like a client, choosing between options served up to them. You could plausibly replace the human with a random number generator, and an external observer would not tell the difference.
I'm not sure music will evolve further. Computers are able to mimic every instrument's sound, what new instruments will be invented? What more can be done?
Popular music evolved and developed rapidly post WW2 cause of invention (instruments and distribution channels) and economics (disposable income among youth giving rise to youth culture). That is a product that may be at the end of its S curve.
When digital recording became a thing, there was a huge backlash against it from the artists and studios who had invested obscene amounts of money into full analog recording studios, saying that it made the process too easy and would fill the world with amateur slop.
Records were released with labels proudly saying that the albums were recorded fully analog.
When Autotune became a thing, there were artists complaining that it was inauthentic and cheating, allowing talentless hacks to sound like they have more natural talent than actually talented human beings, and released albums proudly saying that they used no autotune.
Even now, the hint that a natural sounding singer is using autotune is a common insult among recording musicians, even though almost everyone does.
Whether you agree with the original analog non-autotuned musicians or not, (which, honestly, I think they were correct to a certain degree, but that's its own discussion), AI music generation is almost certainly here to stay.
That being said, digital recording made making music possible for people who would have never had the opportunity otherwise, and had generated a lot of good stuff that would have otherwise never have existed.
Autotune has enabled people to express themselves the way they want to express themselves even though they didn't otherwise have the talent or skill to do so.
AI "might" make it so that people who can imagine a song they could never spend the time and energy needed to create such a song to create the songs they hear in their heads they way they imagine them.
AI "might" give people the ability to express themselves in ways they never could before.
It doesn't yet do that, it only remixes what it's heard before. But combine that with people then tweaking/reprocessing that output, doing other things to it, making AI mashed potato music into crisp potato chip music, it can be a good thing.
Doesn't mean the au-naturale artists are obsolete or wrong, I would rather listen to 1 mediocre human musician than a SOTA AI music box, but if the music box is used as part of the total, I'm ok with that.
The creation of music by AI brings to mind a quote from David Bowie:
“Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So take advantage of these last few years, because this will never happen again. Get ready for a lot of touring, because that's the only unique experience left.”
While Bowie had different reasoning for making that statement, it's interesting to think that with AI-generated music, his idea of "music like water or electricity" might finally come true.
> his idea of "music like water or electricity" might finally come true
That was already the case with Spotify & Co. where music has become an anonymous commodity. People order by mood or playlist and rarely care about who composed, produced or played the music, even if the meta data are available. From the user's perspective, AI makes mostly the selection process more precise. I don't think people will care much whether the music itself was a human-made recording or just AI generated.
But making music is still fun (I speak from experience, see e.g. http://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1317); people just won't care, unless you have a big name; all this was already the case before AI generated music became good enough. So by the end of the day, AI is just another act in a rationalization and anonymization process which started a long time ago.
I think nightcore versions of your pieces would be of interest...
Just try to do so. The music is CC licensed, which explicitly allows you to remix, tweak, and build upon the original work, which includes creating derivative works like nightcore versions. Send me a link of the result ;-)
[dead]
And here's the thing: the invention of recorded media also had a big impact on musicians
Talks of "nobody will need musicians anymore" were overblown, while having a modicum of truth
Well, the number of working musicians absolutely cratered, so it wasn’t really overblown, even though a few artists became extremely wealthy.
Musicians are actually a lot poorer than they should be, the label system is a complete scam and syphons off almost all the value created before the artist sees any for close to no benefit.
If labels offer so little benefit, why have they not become obsolete? Nowadays artists can self-publish with minimal cost, so why haven't we been seeing independent artists that are massively popular?
>If labels offer so little benefit, why have they not become obsolete?
Because artists are preyed upon early in their career into signing contracts that encompass the most profitable years of their lives and often the output of those years forever for small loans and promises of success.
The way these label deals are structured, if VCs in the tech world did the same it would be like having the investor of your very first failed company idea still taking money from you for startup attempt four that actually was successful and owning a chunk of that by default.
Of course I don't think musicians are blameless, they signed the deals and often regret it or go to huge expense of time and money (e.g Taylor Swift) to pull their work back into their own ownership.
> why have they not become obsolete? Nowadays artists can self-publish with minimal cost
You cannot self publish to Spotify without giving money to the major labels via arms of the majors like DistroKid. Spotify has no "Upload" button.
> so why haven't we been seeing independent artists that are massively popular?
There are: Frank Ocean, Tyler The Creator, Macklemore, Chance the Rapper, etc.
But if you're independent you're swimming against the tide because major labels own and scoop cream at all levels, from LiveNation to DistroKid to being signed on the label itself.
Doesn't DistroKid (or CDBaby) cost like $20? Last time I looked to upload something, that's the price I saw.
Why does it cost anything? Imagine if to upload to YouTube you had to pay a company that's an arm of Paramount Pictures $20.
But that's not the same as "you need a label because you can't self-publish on Spotify". You can if you have $20, so that's not a reason why we don't see more successful self-published artists.
You still need to solve the problem of having your self-published album be actually heard by more people than your mom and partner.
Either labels are a scam and useless, or they're useful and worth their money, it can't be both.
I'm a musician and honestly I often feel that the music boat already left in many ways before the generation Bowie grew up in. The best musical experiences I've ever had have been in quiet houses playing music with people I care deeply about, playing for dancers or impromptu public meetings with other musicians. I think that ever since the first wax cylinder was pressed those experiences have become harder and harder to find as most people forgo learning instruments in favour of the record player. Sitting at a party with a David Bowie record on already didn't feel like a musical experience for me in many ways, this is just another step in that evolutionary chain.
He effectively predicted all the paradigm shifts that the internet entailed. I've thought about his interviews many times as it was a very optimistic view compared to the alternatives -- one being the internet as a generalized tiktok (or what is called brainrot) and the other being the internet being totally subsumed by existing media corporations. While these exist to a large extent, they have not been able to stop the change in relationship between artist and audience, the meaning of "critique", the status symbol of culture, etc. It has also been argued that he anticipated cryptocurrencies and NFTs with his Bowie bonds. Similarly, even if you strongly dislike the current state of this tech, they complete the puzzle of this positive worldview.
I think the same is happening with video games. Especially with Xbox game pass or whatever it's called. I've done it to myself with roms. Everything available so none of it valuable to me.
There are things which are just "musician things". An AI just can't replace it.
Like the performance of "Hania Rani live at Invalides in Paris, France for Cercle" [0]
This is what makes a musician.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5oZ80Daduc&t=2145s
In my opinion the referenced music fragment of that video is fairly "unmemorable", it is "just" a sequence of harmonized textures. And that is precisely what AIs (LLMs) are good at.
(I listened for ≈7 min from the reference point.)
(I am talking about the music, not the live performance itself.)
That what most people don’t care about
Actually from what I've heard from musicians is that digital made living just from music really hard. First it was piracy and now it is streaming, the days where an average whole band could live off playing and creating music are gone.
AI will be the nail to the coffin where it'll almost completely becomes a hobby.
The anouncement of the "death of the band" is premature.I dont believ this for a second, nothing can replace live music played by humans, as the experience and the very real positive benifits of an audience comming together can not be digitised, in spite of the many attempts to package high tech simulated environments. There are hundreds of thousands of full time touring musical groups world wide, and millions of music festivals every year. Just because the bar is high, very high, to become a working musician, and has been forever, does not give credence to the notion that some nameless randoms get to make the call because there tube vid got 3 views.
> nothing can replace live music played by humans, as the experience and the very real positive benifits of an audience comming together can not be digitised
I wish it were true but I'm also very aware of how many people I see in audiences today are scrolling instagram while the band plays.
> There are hundreds of thousands of full time touring musical groups world wide, and millions of music festivals every year.
Those figures seem very high, do you have a source for these? Or even how you worked it out as a guesstimate?
8 billion people, maybe 9 billion...200000 bands that gives one band for every 42500 people..... 23 bands in a city of a million was a pure guess, but low right
But most bands aren't touring, right? Where does a million+ festivals come from?
all bands tour at one point or another, unless they are "housebands" million + festivals is from my definition of "festive",a million, is a low estimate, again
That sounds like a comment about streaming and artists getting basically nothing from it ?
I think music AI in live music would actually be interesting - theoretically it can react to crowds better than any human could. A group music editing session with the AI weaving it to music - sounds like a fun art project.
> theoretically it can react to crowds better than any human could
That's one area I'd expect AI to do poorly. Performance is a two-way dialog between performers and the crowd, with facial expressions and body movements from both the stage and the audience in communication. I'd expect any AI that's not attached to a humanoid robot to be less exciting to a crowd.
However, I am very excited about AI in some of the other contexts you mentioned, like as a music-writing or editing partner.
Imagine a club where the people dancing are wearing, for example, heart rate monitors amongst other things. In that scenario they already weren't looking at the DJ and the AI would have a steady stream of information to work with.
It foresaw streaming, but it was a direct response to Napster and file sharing.
I think recorded music is already a utility, billed monthly and available on demand.
> Get ready for a lot of touring, because that's the only unique experience left
Until someone makes an AI guitar pedal that corrects sloppy playing.
We've had that for years in the DAW and autotune and snapping to grid.
The result's pretty boring and interchangeable, and that's largely what AI music is trained on. Accuracy is not novel here. Ever since the 80s it's been increasingly possible to augment musical skill or lack of, with technology.
I don't think we're very close to correcting for sloppy intentionality. Only to correcting 'mistakes', or alternately adding them in the belief that doing stuff wrong is where the magic is.
I know I've seen a video where somebody takes part of a Led Zeppelin song and snaps all the notes to a grid. What started off wonderful became sterile and boring.
You can snap while still maintaining arbitrary levels and styles of swing. I suspect the video was intentionally framing the correction software as soulless (of course it is, but the limit of its expression is the human technician using it).
Is there any big difference between using that and instead doing playback lip syncing and fake playing the guitar, like already happens sometimes at concerts?
You can convert your guitar signal to midi and quantize it.
Not sure that would have helped Jimmy "sloppy" Page getting famous though.
It has been the case for at least 15 years with the rise of Spotify/Deezer and we could even argue that it started with the first mp3 players with pirated music libraries.
This sounds like the kind of things painters said after good photography because widespread.
Instead we got aesthetically original avant-garde art to replace the thousands of low-quality slop portraits that were common in the mid-19th century.
aesthetically original, avant-garde, and bad.
Some modern art is certainly not to my taste, but I don't think most people would call (for example) the Impressionists "bad".
The person I replied to was not talking about impressionists, and I would not call them bad either.
Bad how?
Bad in the sense that it is at it's core a denial that there exists something such as good, and even something such as bad — in almost every sense of the word, whether it be aesthetically or morally.
The human race, according to religion, fell once, and in falling gained knowledge of good and of bad. Now we have fallen a second time, and not even that remains to us.
One of the core contentions of the Christian faith, is that there is something more abhorrent than doing something bad, and that is the denial that it is possible to do something bad. Yet, this is about the only article of faith for our modern insanity.
How much of this has to do with art facilitating money laundering, I ask, rhetorically.
What an extraordinary take!
How is it that?
The musicians of the 19th century were free to produce anything they liked. They were free to write a "Missa Solemnis" where the very silence is breathtaking, where one does not merely hear that God has died, but where one feels His rebirth. And what have they done? Have they produced in their liberty anything grander or more beautiful than the scrawling of the deaf composer? Have they summoned sounds more jubilant than those conjured by the consumptive Romantic, the limping Dresden Kapellmeister? We know that they have produced only a few forgetful tunes.
Whether cultural libertinism be better than cultural rigidity may be discussed, but that the cultural libertinism of the 20st century amounted to less than the cultural rigidity of earlier century will be difficult to deny.
People will remember Bowie for his words longer than they will remember him for his music because his music is as hollow and unmeaning, by design. He believed the world is an unmeaning wilderness, or at least that he was the most meaningful thing in it, at least in the sense that the only meaning of it derived from himself. But an egoist in a mere unmeaning wilderness is not impressive.
In Bowie's theology, life is something much more grey, narrow, and trivial than many separate aspects of it. The parts seem greater than the whole. If his cosmos is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos. The thing has shrunk.
Bowie could not make any music that was joyful because he could not understand joy. The modern philosopher has told Bowie again and again that he was in the right place, and he had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But those that came before him had heard that they were in the WRONG place, and their souls sang for joy, like a bird in spring.
If you stay hung up on an intellectual interpretation of what Bowie's doing, firstly you're right where he wants you, he'll play with you like a toy and in so doing, he'll have a grand time, he loved that even at times when his life was faltering.
Secondly, you overlook the glee with which he collaborated with people to jointly express their humanity, and who inspired him to do this. You can read the lyrics and parse them all you like, but what does it FEEL like when you've soaked up the whole song and are at that moment of…
"Ain't there one damn song that can make me…"
That's not even getting into my personal faves like Station to Station, Scary Monsters, where he's venting some really personal stuff and turning it into sound-as-art and also hellacious good funk, with the most gifted companions you could wish for.
Bowie liked to record vocals in one take, just fling himself into expressing and run with whatever he had in the tank that day, and it communicates like mad. He's maybe the canonical example of the opposite to AI music. In bringing that to fruition, I'm certain he understood countless joys. You gotta express many other things than just joy to have hit records, but then Beethoven excelled at that as well.
I've doubtless taken more trouble than I needed to, rebutting what could have been a GPT-extruded troll of an argument, but it was fun :)
> I've doubtless taken more trouble than I needed to, rebutting what could have been a GPT-extruded troll of an argument, but it was fun :)
Yet failed to address even one of my contentions, which if I had to summarise them for you again are:
- Music of the 20th century falls short of music of the 19th century, and it's not particularly close.
- Having no boundaries and standards does not make for better art.
- Bowie's music cannot convey meaning or wonder because he did not believe there is any meaningful or wonderful in the universe other than him, even if he held this view "humbly".
- Bowie could not write joyful music because his world view made it impossible for him to have joy.
(quoted) The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people who did believe in the Inner Light. Their dignity, their weariness, their sad external care for others, their incurable internal care for themselves, were all due to the Inner Light, and existed only by that dismal illumination. Notice that Marcus Aurelius insists, as such introspective moralists always do, upon small things done or undone; it is because he has not hate or love enough to make a moral revolution. He gets up early in the morning, just as our own aristocrats living the Simple Life get up early in the morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games of the amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land. Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. He is an unselfish egoist. An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion. Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within. Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain. The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.
> - Bowie could not write joyful music because his world view made it impossible for him to have joy.
> [Marcus Aurelius, Christianity, Inner Light stuff]
Been a while since I've seen someone suggest an outwardly healthy adult might be incapable of one of the standard human emotions.
Anhedonia is a thing, but it's rare and associated with clinical depression.
Given your choice of quote, would it be fair to suggest that you believe that only Christians can truly experience joy?
I don't think you can be joyful if you think the universe means nothing, or at least nothing but what you yourself impose on it.
If we are to be truly joyful, we must believe that there is some eternal joy in the nature of things. Bowie did not believe this.
I can't tell if that's "yes because …" or "no actually I mean …"; but in either case it is droll to witness someone disregarding a human artist the way many disregard AI.
Bowie disregarded everything but himself. It's not difficult to disregard this outlook on the world, because it is not even an outlook on the world, it's more akin to a denial of the world.
"The man who destroys himself creates the universe. To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea. When he looks at all the faces in the street, he does not only realize that men are alive, he realizes with a dramatic pleasure that they are not dead."
Yet, Bowie could not ever quite make a convincing case that he believed other people are not dead, or at least that their existence was anything more significant than their non-existence because for him, all significance came from him and him alone.
Well, then he gave up cocaine and had lots of happy years of further creativity. I think you're mistaking the Thin White Duke for the guy who survived portraying the Thin White Duke. I guess he's throwing darts in haters' eyes, too :)
> People will remember Bowie for his words longer than they will remember him for his music
I know nothing of his quotes, but there're a few of his songs I will remember for the rest of my life (and I'm not even a big fan).
To quote the wikipedia article:
> When Danse macabre was first performed on 24 January 1875, it was not well received and caused widespread feelings of anxiety. The 21st century scholar, Roger Nichols, mentions adverse reaction to "the deformed Dies irae plainsong", the "horrible screeching from solo violin", the use of a xylophone, and "the hypnotic repetitions", in which Nichols hears a pre-echo of Ravel's Boléro.
And Bowie's been covered in space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo
It's impossible to forecast what future generations will and won't like.
Those who can't do, poorly write jejune art critiscism.
That's a lot of words on a very overarching tangent. If one may ask, what music, exactly, do you consider joyful and worthy?
Some examples:
- Carl Maria von Weber - Missa Sancta No.2 in G-major, Op.76, J.251 "Jubelmesse" (1819) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mlNqpl-YJI&t=239s
- Mass No. 2 (Schubert) - https://youtu.be/AUMp0OJ66s8?si=40k7LZ9pqCzMbHJy&t=256
- Mendelssohn: Elijah, Op. 70, MWV A2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w99KSSFj-aU
- Beethoven: Missa solemnis in D major, op. 123 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umXYWd25hgQ&t=2382s
Thanks. These are soul touching and complex.
Have you seen that classical accordian player? To coin a phrase, he breathes new life into some classic pieces.
I'm loathe to link because I'm on mobile and this will be hasty, but: https://youtu.be/9SE222v1eyM at least most people will have heard a movement in this.
Probably the only virtuoso of a non-standard instrument I know, readily.
"Starman" is much better than "Missa Solemnis". Due all my respect to Beethoven.
Your contention would have been more believable if Bowie actually believed the star man he sang about was real. He did not. He did not believe that there was a starman waiting in the sky who told us not to blow it 'Cause he knows it's all worthwhile. Bowie did not believe it's all worthwhile.
(quoted) Once in the world’s history men did believe that the stars were dancing to the tune of their temples, and they danced as men have never danced since. With this old pagan eudaemonism the sage of the Rubaiyat has quite as little to do as he has with any Christian variety. He is no more a Bacchanal than he is a saint. Dionysus and his church was grounded on a serious joie-de-vivre like that of Walt Whitman. Dionysus made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. Jesus Christ also made wine, not a medicine, but a sacrament. But Omar Khayyam makes it, not a sacrament, but a medicine. He feasts because life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad. “Drink,” he says, “for you know not whence you come nor why. Drink, for you know not when you go nor where. Drink, because the stars are cruel and the world as idle as a humming-top. Drink, because there is nothing worth trusting, nothing worth fighting for. Drink, because all things are lapsed in a base equality and an evil peace.” So he stands offering us the cup in his hand. And at the high altar of Christianity stands another figure, in whose hand also is the cup of the vine. “Drink” he says “for the whole world is as red as this wine, with the crimson of the love and wrath of God. Drink, for the trumpets are blowing for battle and this is the stirrup-cup. Drink, for this my blood of the new testament that is shed for you. Drink, for I know of whence you come and why. Drink, for I know of when you go and where.”
Trying to look at the bigger picture for a moment. A lot of the philosophical debate about art I see here, and elsewhere on social media, is often very shallow and can be reduced to:
Does one believe that the value of the art-piece (be is music, paintings, film, or whatever) is created in the mind of the artist, or is it created in the mind of the consumer?
If you believe only in the former, AI art is an oxymoron and pointless. If you believe only the later, you're likely to rejoice at all the explosion of new content and culture we can expect in the coming years.
As far as I can tell though, most regular people think that the truth is somewhere in between these two extremes, where both both the creator and the consumer's thoughts are important in unison. That culture is about where the two meet each other, and help each other grow. But most of the arguments I've seen online seem to ignore or miss this dichotomy of views entirely, which unfortunately reduces the quality of the debate considerably.
You are on to the key insight here.. what is emerging is the creative consumer. I.e. I know what I want when I hear it. Or I know what I want when I see it.
This means you can hear something and say.. you know this is nice, but I would like it more if it were different in this way.
With generative tools you can do that. Personally I really like to listen to music, but I generally dislike the lyrics. I want uplifting songs, maybe about what I am doing right now to motivate me. Well with something like Suno.com.. I can just make one. Or I can work with claude or chatgpt to quickly iterate on some lyrics and edit them to create an even higher fidelity song.
The key here is that I can give a rat's ass if anyone in the world likes or cares about my song.. but I can listen to it while I work. It is exactly what I wanted to listen to or close enough.
My theory is that as the quality of these generative tools increase, we'll see the public opinion of them slowly shift. Regardless of philosophy (although discussing it is always fun), it just seems inevitable since there are so many more consumers than producers. And as you say, consumers are the ones that will primarily benefit from this new technology. As a consumer we care primarily (some could argue solely) about our own emotional reaction to the music —or more generally put, art-piece.
In practical terms I also believe that this will give rise to a lot of new consumer behavior, and, as you so aptly puts it "creative consumers" will become normal.
The ability to on-demand create more content to fill out some very narrow niche is a great example ("Today I want 24 hours of non stop Mongolian throat singing neo-industrial Christmas music"). Or maybe to create covers of songs in the voices of your favorite long dead artist. Anything from minor tweak of existing works ("I wish this love song was dedicated specifically to ME", to completely new works (Just look at how much the parody-music genre has grown since Suno and the like first appeared). The possibilities are near endless.
[dead]
In the age of the social feed things are currently tipped more towards the selector/curator/consumer, where before, when all you could do was listen to songs on the radio, it wasn't really possible to participate.
But culture will always be fundamentally about 1:many - we have to collectively agree on liking something- algo-based feeds are making the number of people that agree smaller and more siloed, but the dynamic is still the same.
In that sense I don't think truly 100% algorithmically created and promoted content could ever truly become cultural- at the very least humans will always ascribe some meaning or motive to it, e.g., when instagram launched AI generated accounts some people pointed their finger at Mark Zuckerberg, tracing something back to a human they could ultimately hold responsible.
I agree, the story behind the work is part of how we humans view a creation and cannot be dismissed.
I think we're a long way away from 100% algorithmically created content. This far all I've seen is content that is created based on human inputs and ideas. I'm not aware of the Instagram incident you mentioned, but it too seems like the brain child of a human if I'm not mistaken.
There have been trending AI generated videos floating around lately for example. Which I found surprising at first. But they still had a human script writer (prompt writer?), director and a human editor. Someone who had a vision of what they wanted to create and share. My prediction is that this human-directed tool-like usage will be the standard for a long time, so I'm not particularly worried about humans getting removed from the process.
Meta wanted to have 100% algorithmic accounts: https://www.contentgrip.com/meta-deletes-ai-generated-accoun...
They got rid of them already- it makes sense that no one wanted them.
Art is always some form of human interaction. When we talk about AI music, I think we do not talk about art anymore, so this isn't human interaction as this isn't art too. The creation of the AI itself, could be considered as art, but not the outcome of the AI. We have to be careful in our discussions not to mix the things up. A lot of confusion happens in recent discussion.
Personally I don't like to gatekeep art.
For example: If someone walks out into the wilderness and encounters a particularly fascinating rock formation or plant, something that was created completely by accident and without a artist or designer, but they find that the sight instills in them strong emotions or deeper thought, I believe they should be allowed to call that art.
Maybe this is just petty linguistics and semantics though, in which case we're drifting away from the topic at hand, and I'm sorry.
If someone walks out into the wilderness there's nobody to disallow anyone to call something art anyway. It's a free person. Hope you turned off networking then. :-) But as a society we committed on specific words to have a specific meaning and the process of _creating_ art clearly involves humans as creators.
The thing is that in this century the creative interaction seems to be moving up the value chain- it wasn't long ago that people would say that being a DJ wasn't creative. Simply selecting songs wasn't creative. Now lots of people consider DJs to be creative artists that are communicating something with their human will of selecting and mixing tracks.
Unless the whole thing moves to a random AI generated slop stream app, whoever turns the knobs of the AI that creates the music will become the new "artist". Right now it doesn't seem like the AI creator "does" anything, but maybe future people will think that.
Agreed. This is a fair take. But I am still very skeptical. :-) When being a DJ you are still in the center of the attention of your audience as a human. "What's laid next on the turn table?" And also very important, the DJ is putting music from real humans onto the turn table. So if you go down the ladder, you still consume art from humans. With AI music this is only the case for a very small extend, the training set, and no-one recognizes the real contributors to the training set.
Great take. A mixtape can be greater than the sum of its parts!
I believe that a lot of the judgement is also connected to the quality of the works. "Slop", while doubtlessly accurate for today, may be a rather weird description in a couple of year if the rate of progress continues to accelerate like it has.
Although I've already heard people starting to refer to DeviantArt and the like as full of "human slop" so perhaps this is just modern language that's evolving and completely unrelated to AI.
The interest in ai music generation is lower than I initially thought. I jumped in but felt the exercise lacked the joy of making music physically or with software like pro tools. With pro tools you control the thousands of knobs which gives you more control. These AI models take away that connection. You can play around with different words to get different results but it's like painting with a shotgun.
No one wants to hear other people's ai songs because they lack meaning and novelty.
AI image and short video generation can create novelty and interest. But when the medium require more from the person like reading a book or watching a movie the level of AI acceptance goes down. We'll accept an AI generated email or ad copy but not an ai generated playlist and certainly not a deepfake of someone from reality. That's what people want from AI, a blending of real life into a fantasy generator but no one is offering that yet.
The impact of AI on creative fields will be pretty nuanced I feel. I don't think we will end up in a world where everyone is just AI generating the media they want. In some cases we will, for example stuff like lo-fi beats on YouTube are already started to be bulk made by AI because really it's just fancy white noise for people to use to work.
Actual music (like what you find on Spotify) I think won't be impacted very much. People strongly identify with the art they consume, and that identity comes from the people who make the art. Those folks might be using AI under the covers for elements of their creative work, but ultimately what people care about is the humanity behind the art. It's the same with film, and traditional art people hang on their walls. We like the actors, the director, the artist, their taste, and who they are. It's why we have celebrities, because we get invested in the people behind the art.
Video games I think will be interesting... I feel they will be more susceptible to being accepted as AI generated. I don't think people identify with them as strongly.
Pop music is so simple, yet so difficult to make a hit. For some artists the music can be mediocre or even fairly bad, and still be a massive hit because pop music is essentially theater and their persona and mystique carries the day.
Some bands were terrible touring artists and rarely put on concerts yet made great careers as studio acts. Steely Dan would be one that produced many hits yet rarely toured, mostly later in their career.
The fundamentals of pop are totally understood. Yet what makes a hit is so fickle and difficult, the bar is extremely high
Even music found on Spotify is artificially generated, carefully disguised as human curated
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461530
I could see myself listening to AI music in Spotify, not as the main act but at least as a Plan B.
For example, I like a specific music genre, Italodance, which was popular in the 90s and then disappeared. The problem is that I have listened to all of it, as far as I know. No more is being made. If an AI model could make more for me, with decent quality, I'd probably listen to it.
If you listened to all of it chances are ai will not be able to generate anything that sounds remotely different than what you already are familiar with.
> We like the actors, the director, the artist, their taste, and who they are. It's why we have celebrities, because we get invested in the people behind the art.
But we can't know any of these celebrities as people. We only engage with their images created by marketing. Their stories are as curated and fabricated as the artworks they produce. Transferring these simulacra to AI personalities is merely another marketing problem to be solved.
>The interest in ai music generation is lower than I initially thought. I jumped in but felt the exercise lacked the joy of making music physically or with software like pro tools. With pro tools you control the thousands of knobs which gives you more control. These AI models take away that connection. You can play around with different words to get different results but it's like painting with a shotgun.
You can still pull AI stuff into your music editor and tweak it, although it's harder because it's already mixed. But ironically, this is the exact same problem you have with AI coding to avoid learning how to code - unless you know what you need and how to do it, you're basically relying on AI to one-shot it for you. The nice thing with music and visual art is that it's subjective, so you're the only judge of what's correct. That's why people get super impressed with images in GenAI when it generates 1001 human faces in that setting vaguely resembling what was asked. If you had to generate a very specific thing, it's basically impossible to get it correct.
> No one wants to hear other people's ai songs because they lack meaning and novelty.
Not true. No one wants to pay for other people's ai songs. There are so many AI songs on youtube (mostly lofi or traditional Japanese instrumental) and they cumulatively have quite a lot of view.
The thing is for quite a lot people, music is just something they put in background while doing their office desk jobs. It's just there to make chores a bit more tolerable and nothing more.
> The thing is for quite a lot people, music is just something they put in background w
You are absolutely right. These people only listen to music passively and so it doesn't make a big difference who/what made these tracks. Same for lots of commercial music (cheap TV show soundtracks, commercials, jingles, playlists for restaurants or shops).
But for anyone who actively listens to music and appreciates the style and evolution of certain artists, AI music is not acceptable. The very premise just feels wrong, if not outright insulting.
It's not necessarily different people.
I like active listening. I can easily spend two hours sitting or lying down comfortably in my headphones, eyes closed, so that I can focus on the music alone. The kind of music I want for that is not (yet) something that AI can generate.
But that same kind of music is also distracting when I'm actually trying to do something, because I keep overfocusing on it. So when I work, I listen to different kind of music. Having AI generate that doesn't feel wrong or insulting in the slightest, nor is it relevant to the other kind of music.
Although I will say that if and when AI is actually able to generate music good enough for active listening, I wouldn't be insulted by that, either.
I think that the tech exists for more interactive AI generation, it's just gonna take time to implement.
I foresee something like your standard production software with heavy AI integration, where you prompt it to make the song you want, but it is made fully step by step in the production environment. You can then manually tweak it or ask the AI to fine tune whatever parameter or slice you want.
Kinda like sitting over the shoulder of someone who knows what they are doing, and working collaboratively with them to accomplish the idea you have in your head. Meanwhile you have practically no idea what all those buttons/lines/glowly bits/sliders do.
Back in the day nobody wanted to hear my FL Studio songs either. Not saying this as a joke, it's just that most people don't care about most people's amateur art from what I've seen.
> No one wants to hear other people's ai songs because they lack meaning and novelty.
And hear I was thinking that many people listen to songs because they like the sounds of it, but apparently it needs to have "meaning".
Identity of the creator and the piece has always been a big part of music appreciation. Imagine how dystopian would be if you ask someone their favorite and the answer is "the music that HitAI generated when promoted 'sad song for happy people' when I was 17, but their model has since changed and my subscription didn't include offline ownership, it's lost forever."
Also image generation, particularly with latest GPT, can be finetuned a lot more than music generation which is nowadays limited to "here's something with those lyrics and genre".
> No one wants to hear other people's ai songs because they lack meaning and novelty.
That's not true. I already found a few tracks that I like. It's actually impressive what Udio can produce. Also ElevenLabs demoed their music generator, and their demo tracks were all quite cool.
I do agree with you that fine controls are missing, and also splitting instruments/voices into separate tracks.
I've made a few tracks using Suno to scratch my own itch / desire for music that covers certain themes.
The best use of Suno for has been the ease with which you can generate diss tracks: I ask Gemini to make a diss track lyrics related to specific topics, and then I have Suno generate the actual track. It's very cathartic when you're sitting at home in the dark because the power company continues to fail.
Anyway, I hope I can get access, I think it would be fun to vibe some new music. Although this UI looks severely limited in what capabilities it provides. Why aren't the people who build these tools innovating more? It would be cool if you could generate a song and then have it split into multiple tracks that you can remix and tweak independently. Maybe a section of track is pretty good but you want to switch out a specific instrument. Maybe describe what kind of beats you want to the tool and have it generate multiple potential interpretations, which you can start to combine and build up into a proper track. I think ideally I'd be able to describe what kind of mood or vibe I'm going for, without having to worry about any of the musical theory behind it, and the tool should generate what I want.
> cathartic when you're sitting at home in the dark because the power company continues to fail
Ironical remark about the power drawn by IA assisted creation left to the reader.
> > cathartic when you're sitting at home in the dark because the power company continues to fail
> Ironical remark about the power drawn by IA assisted creation left to the reader.
Thanks for pointing that out, was scratching my head on that
The power grid in my country has been failing and unstable long before GenAI became a thing. We also don't have any AI data centers here that would be taxing said grid. But sure, enjoy making your glib drive by snarky comment.
> Why aren't the people who build these tools innovating more?
We’re getting access to generative AI tech and people are looking for innovation in the UI? I mean I get the need for UX but it’s probably coming man, what with MVPs and all
I think producing new and interesting music with AI tools will require models that allow for far more granularity, tweaking multiple tracks / layers, and this has to be exposed through a more professional and capable UI. It has to go hand-in-hand if it's going to be treated as anything other than a novelty or a toy.
Vibe coding has improved significantly in tandem with UI innovations that provide a more intuitive interface to the workflow. Although in the vibe coding space there's still a lot of room for innovation and exploration, especially when doing detailed task development.
> Why aren't the people who build these tools innovating more?
Perhaps these tools are being built by the LLMs? Why would only you be entitled to easy low-effort gains? Google's programmers like to vibe while sipping coctails in the dark, too. ;)
Ai music has been awesome for me, not because the music is that good, but because it gives me the ability to do something that I couldn’t have done myself. I use it all the time for my DnD group, songs about characters, funny moments, backstories, it’s a great tool that our players have found to increase engagement with the game
Sounds like a new genre: live music generated on the fly depending on each user’s context.
Just a new possibility!
Just imagine private model (own, little spech-to-text model) listening to the people playing DnD feeding to the bigger brother that in turn controls the music generation and feeds it back to the speakers as the story progresses.
:)
"Twitch plays (generates) music" goes brrr.
iMUSE on steroids. It will come for sure.
My theoretical perfect wireless headphone will detect interruptions and play a lofi instrumental version at low volume without skipping a beat and ramp up to original. Bonus points if it can detect my brain straining as an interruption.
Instead of making music together with human musicians, you're now doing this process with a machine. Yay!
I find this to be profoundly depressing.
I've just recently re-discovered the joy of writing my own songs, and playing them with (actual) instruments. It's something I get immense pleasure from, and for once, I'm actually getting some earned traction. In another life, I may have been a musician, and it's something I fantasize about regularly.
With all these AI-generated music tools, the world is about to be flooded with a ton of low-effort, low-quality music. It's going to to absolutely drown out anyone trying to make music honestly, and kill budding musicians in their crib.
I suppose this is the same existential crisis that other professions/skills are also going through now. The feeling of a loss of purpose, or a loss of a fantasy in learning a new skill and switching careers, is pretty devastating.
People also said similar things in the past (I'm a musician as well: guitar, piano and bass) about Synths and Drum machines (and things like GarageBand which can do backing drums and even basslines semi-automatically now).
Some of those things enabled others to create new types of music or express themselves in different ways.
People have said that about robots and computers in the workplace, and indeed, since the 60s, more and more jobs have been automated. And there are less musicians now. Film scores and albums are produced with samples instead of bands or orchestras, reducing demand for session players, leading to less income for musicians, leading to less musicians.
And while automating dangerous jobs is a good thing, generating AI music isn't. It's not as unethical as generating deepfakes, but it's useless, and bad for society.
I mean you say that.. but the counter point.. is maybe I don't like your lyrics and I want to make my own.
Then write your own. Maybe you're no good at it, but you're not going to improve by just copying them from the chatgpt console.
Right, I write my own and plug them into a song generation service. With as little trial and error, I get a song I listen to.
Good art is not going out of fashion. Tools may change but part of an artists job is to adapt.
For example, when you learn instruments you also train your ear and taste. These are things one cannot take shortcuts in.
I wouldn’t worry about it, but approach new tools (once they actually arrive and are not just advertisements like this one) with curiosity.
Good art requires a huge reservoir of artists. When AI music drives musicians out of work, it shrinks the reservoir, thus leading to lesser art.
> With all these AI-generated music tools, the world is about to be flooded with a ton of low-effort, low-quality music
We've reached that point long before AI entered the scene. All the rest are drops in the ocean of mediocre music.
I feel its already hit the tipping point. I used to listen to mixes on youtube liberally, but I've now had to filter all searches to pre-2023 due to the flood of slop that's appeared. I used to finds loads of great up-coming musicians, but the amount of effort required to do so has increased considerably. I am tired of filtering out the slop.
Find some good independent online radio stations that you like. There are successful ones out there, nts.live and rinse.fm in the UK for example. Obviously they exist in other countries too.
I say independent as most radio is stacked with adverts, but the above two seem successful without needing them.
I find the human curation far more satisfying than an algorithm, and most DJs want to support human artists not bland AI nonsense as they have a stake in the music industry.
SEARCH TIP: As the default search prioritizes newer content, it's quite tedious to find older takes on youtube.. there's a workaround though: web search for site:youtube.com and set a custom date range (ddg: click on "Any time", g: "Tools" on the right side) to sidetrack the big tech attention economy brainrot algorithm.. : D
> It's going to to absolutely drown out anyone trying to make music honestly
The world is saturated with low quality everything already. Has been for a long time, even before AI. If you're genuinely good you'll be able to stand out
> I've just recently re-discovered the joy of writing my own songs
Good for you man, how will AI stop you? Are you writing songs for the pleasure of writing songs or for getting validation from other people?
The answers to your questions are in the comment you replied to. Part of their love is music is sharing it with others. They also like to fantasize about becoming a full-time musician. Both of those things are less likely if there is 100x the current volume of music from unknowns.
It's not about validation, it's about expression and communicationw with other humans. That's one of the key beauties of art and it's being flooded away with artificial, empty content
What sites are full of AI music? Spotify? Bandcamp?
Yup, both, and YouTube (for mixes) as well.
Spotify does have a lot of AI generated music, yes. What is the purpose of your comment? Do you believe there is some filtering mechanism that is going to keep AI slop off of these platforms? Is that what we've seen happening with writing and art?
Let me tell you that the world has been flooded with low-effort, low-quality music for decades already. Most of the popular music relying on the same 3 chords, dull lyrics etc. While I'm a fan of music generators like Udio, I'm pretty sure the best music is still going to be created by humans. I also believe that while AI slop is bad, human slop is even worse.
I don't think it's going to drown people out. I think it's going to make recommender systems much less useful, so the people who care will simply return to the older methods of curation, and the people who don't care will get the slop they want.
"Art" is not a career, sorry.
https://deepmind.google/technologies/lyria/
Lyria 2 is currently available to a limited number of trusted testers
Yep not going to bother reading these hype advertisements about things that are not even available. This sucks so much from Google.
TBH at this point HN should have a flag for "No Demo"
"Releases" is a strong word, as in typical google fashion, the actual thing that was released was a waitlist form.
don't be so cynical, maybe 10 of us on the waiting list can actually use it before it gets discontinued again
$10 they have no product, just a wait list and a note to embrace and extinguish some random music ai startup at some point in the nebulous future.
Are there any particularly good samples anyone can point out?
The 2-3 clips I listened to in the article sounded awful (my own subjective opinion).
The problem with all these AI companies and products is that they all over-value the content itself. The content is not the thing that is valuable, its the person who creates it and the community and culture that forms around it. These are things that require people, a lot of time, luck, and can never be automated. You see this all the time with people who spend huge amounts of money and effort making things that may even be great and high quality but never gain any real value. Companies do it all the time too. It's very hard to predict what will become valuable, and what will not. Just because AI will let you create more of something, or do it faster or cheaper -- it doesn't matter as long as you are missing some external factor that makes something high quality popular or valuable. And yes, there is always an external factor at work, a lot of times many factors. This is further evidenced by the fact that quality itself of something valuable sometimes doesn't need to be there (although it is more likely to be there, than not).
Just by magically dropping the content price or effort to $0, doesn't matter because the content itself has no or little to no intrinsic value. There isn't suddenly going to be an expanded market of people who will listen to your AI generated music or buy your AI-enabled product.
If tomorrow, I could make a random kid on the street sing just as well as Taylor Swift, or even if an exact perfect copy of her emerged somewhere, it doesn't mean she has any relationship to the value of Taylor Swift.
Only available in the US
"Country of residence (this current phase of the experiment is only available to users based in the U.S. for now, but feel free to submit interest and stay tuned for updates): "
I remember when they made some generative AI chess demo and when I went to visit it, it said it's not available to users under 18 or outside US. And I had to do a double-take at the idea of chess that is 18+ and georestricted
The world will wait for the Deepseek version.
As a musician with infirmities and other hindrances, I have dreamed of this for many years. Consider the DJ, particularly the variety that remixes music. While a skill in itself to manage the h/s/ware, such an artist is largely exhibiting their taste in music, excerpting, rearranging and altering existing music to accomplish a sound otherwise missing. I've found many such remixed versions vastly superior to the originals.
Now imagine, without mastering a specific instrument or skill, you can now create the music in/of your own mindspace, which for me is rarely the music I hear, and often a deviation of what I do hear.
I'm sure this isn't quite what's being offered yet, but every time I grasp my instruments with my trademark touch of inevitable futility, I hope I make it to a time when I can produce what my lack of virtues presently prohibits. It's not the physical acrobatics or mathematical showcasing of great music that I want - it's the end result of the music itself.
I thought AI is supposed to free up my time by taking my job so I can unleash my musical creativity on an empty stomach? It is going to make music too?
Music on iPod or a Walkman or a radio is great.
But have you ever attended live music shows ? Have you ever ‘felt’ the music ? Even someone at a local bar singing feels and hits different.
AI can never bring feelings. That will never change. Even science fiction agrees with that.
So bring all the AI you want everywhere, some things are irreplaceable by electronic world.
I expect this type of stuff to be used for elevator and telephone hold music. Or even perhaps indie video games where they don’t have a budget for music.
Strong opinion ahead: the very moment people will finally realize that music is in the microscopic nuances of the human touch, breath and taste(literally for every instrument), hopefully we will get disinvested in this useless technology. Yes, I am aware of software like pro tools, but that can ba used well for touch up all tue nueances
It seems inevitable now. I used to think AI music would always sound compromised in term of audio quality, but the tech seems to have crossed a threshold, kind of like Retina displays did for screens.
Soon, hiring people for commercial background music might be rare. Think AI for jingles, voiceovers, maybe even the models and visuals. Cafes can use AI-generated music too – in a way, the owner curates or "creates" it based on their taste.
But there are still interesting parts to human music making: the unpredictability and social side of live shows, for example. Maybe future music releases could even be interactive, letting listeners easily tweak tracks? Like this demo: https://glicol.org/demo#ontherun
Cafes CAN use AI generated music, but WHY would they use it? Last time I checked there's millions of hours of human-produced music. The only reason might be the price, but AFAIK cafes have to pay a flat price to national music associations regardless of the actual music that they play. The downside is that AI-generated music might be cringe and chase away the customers. At best, cafes have no upside and no downside. At worst, they close the doors.
AI slop is cringe. You don't want that kind of optics when marketing your product or company.
No, it won't "get better". AI slop is slop not because of technical limitations.
Is there a model which can generate vocals for an existing song given lyrics and some direction? I can't sing my way out of a paper bag, but I can make everything else for a song, so it would be a good way to try a bunch of ideas and then involve an actual singer for any promising ideas.
I'm very happy to see that they're prioritizing making tools for musicians, rather than making AI music generators to replace musicians. Everything else I've come across so far was trying to do the latter.
The end effect will be the same, I'm afraid: one "AI composer" in a TV studio or a marketing shop will be able to create most of the needed music on demand, removing the need to record and mix new tracks and putting a lot of musicians out of business.
Maybe they're playing the long game and using this to train on musician's input to prepare for the final blow.
This is not actually music.
Music is a cultural practice, this is just organised sound.
Maybe one day AIs will be able to participate in cultural practices like humans do, as sentient beings, but current generative AI models do not.
> That is not a water bottle, it's a domesticated puddle.
Many (most?) people don't care about the artists behind songs (even less so about their culture). They care about the "organised sound" being enjoyable to hear. And to them, AI music is just as valuable as manual music.
Gangam style didn't become popular because people cared about PSY. It didn't become popular because of its thoughtful lyrics and insightful message. It became popular because it sounds good.
> Many (most?) people don't care about the artists behind songs
This seems an absurd take to me when you consider the popularity of, say, Taylor Swift, or various rappers.
If 60% of people don't care about the artist's image/culture/story, and 40% do, then 100% of artists are gonna try to make their image/culture/story look good.
Hence, I don't consider the popularity of such artists to be a counter-argument to my statement.
However, my statement is based solely on anecdotal evidence, so I won't claim to have solid pro-arguments either; hence why I put a question mark after the "most".
> They care about the "organised sound" being enjoyable to hear.
"Enjoyable to hear" is a problem that has been solved since the paleolithic. Musical scales and modes have always been a thing, making sounds that are nice and harmonic is a straightforward mathematical problem.
> It became popular because it sounds good.
That's a pre-requisite for becoming popular, but not why it became popular.
Just because many people don't know or understand anything about music doesn't mean music doesn't exist.
It's kinda like Suno, except Suno sounds pretty good sometimes. Even so, I played with Suno for a few days and lost interest. There are some amazing examples on Suno, though: https://suno.com/song/9a7fd58e-132c-4ac5-9a25-f40d7f6f8c9f. This is one of the early tunes, it probably can do better now.
It seems to struggle to create music with a strong identity. It is great if you want to make a poor imitation of top 40 hits. But the thing about top 40 type music is that the best music is already in the Top 40. It remains to be seen if there is as strong a demand for a music chart filled with slop as there is demand for a music chart filled with pop tunes by celebrities.
I don't think audio files are the right output for deep learning music models. It'd be more useful to pro musicians to describe some parameters for synths, or describe a MIDI baseline, or describe tunings for a plugin and then have the model generate these, which can then be tweaked similar to how we now code with LLMs. But generating muddy, poorly mixed WAVs with purple prose lyrics is only an interesting deep learning demo at this point, not an advancement in music itself.
> It is great if you want to make a poor imitation of top 40 hits.
generation models in a nutshell
Since we've already evaluated - let's exaggerate - that "most Top 40 songs are slop", maybe lyrics are a big factor in creating identity? I mean, it's true for books, right? I could easily imagine an AI-generated Top 40 song that people would still describe as having a unique identity.
I'm not super into the topic, but let me give you two niche examples that are definitely not Top 40 material, yet are considered to have a strong identity within their communities.
I guess one of the reasons the game Yasuke Simulator has like 10x more sales (don't pin me down on that) on Steam than the actual game Assassin's Creed: Shadows is its very catchy soundtrack, with lyrics that are funny and strongly aligned with the content. [0]
Another example, not focused on lyrics and from a completely different niche genre, is this jazzy death metal song that was particularly well received, not only because of the intentionally hallucinatory video. One could even argue that the hallucination is perceived as a feature, not a bug. So why shouldn't the same be true for audio? [1]
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hkh38jhILec
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzXafFUekl0
I think very simply we need a persona to bind our feelings on the music too. This is why Hatsune Miku is so big even though "she" uses many "slop" like elements in her work. Slop often is quite high quality when measured objectively but objective measurements struggle to take soul into account.
I actually built a very crude python app that could generate basic melodies with MIDI. It can serve as a fun starting point if you want to remix common songs. But it wasn't a very fun project to set up. It's like this technology is out there but nobody really wants to develop it.
If I had to guess there are already a handful of fake record labels generating at tons of AI slop to just post on Spotify. Even if each song only gets something like two or three views over time they can still generate a modest amount of revenue. Oh wait Spotify has been caught doing that themselves
Some of the artists of the top 40 use some form of auto-tune to generate pleasing music. Can that be considered a slop-y?
Some? All of them use pitch correction and timing correction. And that's just what we do to the vocals!
Well, auto-tune used to be (or still is) considered quite controversial.
"Democratization of ___" (fill in with your favorite word). This is what it also does look like. I'm not saying that this is anything good or bad, but when I usually hear that sentence, it's associated with something positive, empowering.
Music models are not interesting to me unless I can use them to edit and remix existing music. Of course none of them let you do that to avoid being sued by the labels.
Agreed to some extent, but I don't think you'll have too long to wait before that comes to pass. It can't possibly be that hard to build a model that will disassemble a given song into its original tracks, like a Fourier transform that yields drums, strings, keyboards, and vocals rather than sines and cosines. Equally unlikely that such a model will be too large to run locally.
We will get some very cool tools -- and some very cool remixes - when that happens.
https://github.com/deezer/spleeter
https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs
This is called "stem separation"
It was added to FL studio in 2023 and I don't think they were the first to do it.
Of course there are music models that let you edit and remix music, just add a bit of Audacity:
https://github.com/adefossez/demucs
Yes, why are deep learning models so effective relatively at writing code? It's because programmers have been making their work copyleft for decades, and continue to do so.
Musics only lagging because of the legal threat of labels, at some point in the near future music models will have their SDXL moment and from then on you'll be able to do all things like style transfer or make something very similar to this but different.
Suno and similar are purposefully limiting their models on the public side.
the biggest thread to music is the audience.
a machine doing any of this would be not causing a meltdown by musicians in the 80s. A punk rock band would not feel threatened by this neither would be Prince.
the sad truth is human output is so averaged out now, that most of it will be replaced.
>Waitlist
They still haven't learned, wow.
Someone in there really wants to drive Google to the ground.
Leadership wrote the requirement "launch by X date if you want to get promoted".
Rank and file said "absurd".
Middle management figured out a way to claim success to leadership while keeping rank and file from quitting.
Usually that's the Iceland rollout.
Classic google approach to AI.
"We made something really fancy"
"Oh you wanted to try it out for yourself instead of just reading our self-congratulatory tech demos article? How about fuck you!"
Yeah fuck you too Google, this is why your AI competitors are eating you alive, and good riddance
is there a way for AI music to become an "instrument" the way synths and drug machines became in the 70s/80s...
I am interested in using AI-driven music composition tools in new ways, and Lyra 2 sounds impressive, but a) so far, using these tools leaves me feeling a little meh, and b) we are in between the before and after times right now, witnessing the transition to the world of AI content and we're definitely losing something.
Prompt: Hazy, fractured UK Garage, Bedroom Recording, Distorted and melancholic. Instrumental. A blend of fractured drum patterns, vocal samples that have been manipulated and haunting ambient textures, featuring heavy sub-bass, distorted synths, sparse melodic fragments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNog4qB-mHQ&t=5s&pp=2AEFkAIB
US only.
If you missed it, check out this MusicFX DJ: https://labs.google/fx/tools/music-fx-dj
It's pretty fun :)
https://imgur.com/a/ohTZXZ0
Disappointed, until now DeepMind seemed like genuinely being a company working on important, AGI-directed models. Not the latest money-grabbing automation. Might be Google's influence. Most probably.
That's weird. I just learned about a new music generation model called Lyra today, based out of Luxembourg. What's the odds on a similar sounding name in the same field appearing in the same week? I've got to say I don't think I'd relish going up against Google in a brand fight though. https://blog.aiva.ai/.
Another breathless press release with no demo. Typical DeepMind. Nothing to see here.
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[dead]
Nobody is out seeking to destroy the lives of artists. Companies and people are just pushing the frontier of AI anyway they can, and it just turns out that images and audio are two directions the frontier can be expanded.
> Companies and people are just pushing the frontier of AI ...
in the way that seems most profitable to them.
They may not be 'seeking to destroy the lives of artists', but that's a false dichotomy. The outcome may very well be that they will. They know, and they don't care.
Consciouslly or unconsciouslly is the subject's problem not ours. It doesn't change the nature of the consequence of their actions.
Lots of people want to express themselves. They're wholly under-served in this world.
There's no reason someone who didn't pay the opportunity cost to learn to draw or to learn to play guitar shouldn't be able to make art and express themselves.
Well they’re not. And a lot of real artists are happily replacing portions of their own work using them.
[flagged]
Figure out an AI to do my dishes, laundry and clean my home. Not the fun parts of life please.
Everyone wants the futuristic star trek future but we all forget that there is only one Captain Kirk and his small crew. Most of us will be sitting around at home doing laundry and cleaning the workplaces of the robots that is owned by large corporations.