Funny to see this right now. Spotify's promotion of AI music bothered me so much that it has actually pushed me to Bandcamp and the practice of buying music again. It's really fun to build a collection knowing you're supporting the artists, download FLAC files, organize your little "collection" page ... Feels like a renaissance in my relationship with music, the most fun I've had since what.cd. Anyway, love this stance they're taking.
Same for me! Switched to Bandcamp + Navidrome and have decided that one of my goals for the year is to find at least 2 albums per month I want to buy.
I will shamelessly promote the bandcampsync [1] CLI tool for automating downloads of your bandcamp library and bandcamp-sync-flask [2] wrapper that I built so I could invoke it from the web on my phone after I buy an album.
This is great. If you packaged it as a docker-compose YAML and maybe added a periodic task to poll automatically id drop it into Container Station in my NAS today.
I had been using a combination of aria2 and a link scraper plugin for years to download bulk out of bandcamp because of how fast their API will time out.
You stream the music you own, it uses the subsonic protocol/API, and so is compatible with countless clients, letting your enjoy your lossless music on fancy hardware at home or cached on your mobile device when on the go.
Better Plex than plex for music built by people who know what they're doing that uses a common API among different servers and clients, including ones that glue to Sonos, etc.
I’ve been doing the same over the last few months.
The best part for me is going to record stores again. CDs are SO cheap now, especially used ones. I’ll usually pick a few out of the dollar bin just based on vibes and the cover and rip them when I get home. I’ve found some cool stuff. It’s like a treasure hunt.
I can't remember the artist but there's a fun song about how they used to pick up second hand LPs really cheap and then they got popular and too expensive, then discovered second hand CDs are really cheap now.
Frank turner-ish vibes but I don't think it was actually him.
It's completely un-googlable though, and even the LLMs aren't much help on this one.
The people who really want to stop paying for streaming are going to turn to piracy, don't worry. Physical media will still be accessible for people who are willing to pay with space instead of money.
Aren't CD players just reading digits? I'm not anywhere close to a hifi expert but it must be all about the DAC, no? Or do you mean the ones with a built-in DAC?
Yes, it is (unless the CD player is so bad that it can't do adequate error correction). What I do is rip the CD to my music server, which is where I listen to the music from. Then the quality of the CD player isn't important, as long as it works correctly.
I second this strategy. My suggestion is keep an eye out for soundtracks and “sampler” type promo discs - some quirky gems! Record labels and their relationships with Hollywood did demonstrate money and drugs and music to great together…see: Spawn the movie soundtrack (1990s).
Also my library card is much better for legacy music exploration. It scales too.
I just wanted to say, thanks for saying this. I actually have been writing music and using Distrokid to publish to the normal streaming services (Spotify/Apple Music) and your comment actually pushed me to sign up for and put music on Bandcamp.
I've been reading about Spotify pushing generated music but haven't seen that myself so I'm interested to know in what context it happens. Is it certain music styles? Spotify's own playlists? That smart shuffle feature?
I listen mostly in the old school way, full albums of my favourite artists, so I suppose it would be quite unexpected to stumble into AI music this way.
I believe if you go down the rabbit hole of "mood playlists" and spotify created playlists, then you'll get a lot of tracks that they don't need to pay royalties for and that could probably include AI generated music.
If you are explictitly looking for music by specific artists, then you get their music obviously.
Is there a good way to know if what you are listening to is AI? I listen to a lot of outrun and synthwave type stuff and it isn’t as easy as googling the artist’s name, a lot of it is made by artists that don’t tour and are quite small etc.
> then you'll get a lot of tracks that they don't need to pay royalties for
I love this conspiracy theory. Which track doesn't Spotify pay royalties for? Considering that it licenses 100% of its music from external distributors.
> The program, according to Pelly’s reporting in Harper’s Magazine, is designed to embed low-cost, royalty-free tracks into Spotify’s most popular mood- and activity-based playlists. Produced by a network of “ghost artists” operating under pseudonyms, the tracks are commissioned with the intent to reduce the company’s royalty payouts to artists, per Pelly.
There are artists that Spotify has different deals with. Spotify promotes their music in their playlists, but the artists get a much smaller cut of the profits in exchange. Win-win for everybody.
This only happens in genres where most listeners don't care about the artists they're listening to, think "chillout", "focus" or "easy listening." That kind of music is a commodity, Taylor Swift (or Metallica or Mozzart or whatever) is not. This has been proven.
My hypothesis is that those genres would otherwise lose Spotify the most money, as people often play that kind of music and never turn it off. Because Spotify pays per listen, the user who attentively listens to their favorite artist a few times a week is much better for them than somebody who has "chillout" playing on their echo 24/7.
I'm not saying they are doing it now, but what's stopping them from generating their own tracks? What's to stop them from creating some bullshit company to generate AI slop and then licensing music from themselves at fractions of what they'd pay a real artist just to keep up the illusion so that real artists don't leave their platform?
If a corporation can do something that will make them more money than they'd make not doing it you should expect them to do the profitable thing. Corporations don't care about ethics or even the law. Maximizing shareholder value is their purpose. They exist only to take from the many and give to the few. It's not a conspiracy theory to assume that they'll be doing exactly what they are designed to do.
It's not really a conspiracy theory. YouTube users can use royalty-free music, it stands to reason Spotify would have the same (potentially internally) to decrease costs.
"Why pay royalties if it's just going to be BGM for a massage parlor?" could be their reasoning.
I only go to massage parlors that display their ASCAP or BMI license in the window. I wouldn't be happy getting an ending if some musician is being ripped off.
Yet another person who plays the bogeyman card of "conspiracy theory" when what is described is garden variety corruption, only takes a trivial amount of secret coordination in a group smaller than your average terrorist cell, and could probably even be defended as legal with a small legal team (Spotify probably has a big one).
There are a billion ways you could cash in on this. A dead easy one is "music written for hire by a company you own".
Even if Spotify is not doing the slightest thing like this, suggesting that they might is not a conspiracy theory. Quit trying to tar every proposed view of the world you disagree with with that label. You're just making it easier for the actual grand conspiracy theorists.
After an album ends Spotify keeps playing some related music. It's expected to include some tracks that are new to you. Then suddenly you notice "artists" you've never heard of with empty descriptions and "albums" from 2025 only.
This. Lazy/mindless consumption without any discernment has been leading to various rabbit holes for quite a while. Ever saw youtube content which algorithm brings toddlers to if left alone with a device?
I’m the same as you, I search for artists I like and then listen to albums, saving them in my library. I never see any AI generated music or podcasts because I just listen to music.
I have more than enough music made by humans to listen to for the rest of my life without ever turning to algorithmic recommendations.
Best part of owning music is importing them to an old version of iTunes and sync'ing to your iPod.
I am vindicated in my choice to use an ipod with an aux jack every time Android Auto can't decide whether to connect over USB or bluetooth and just doesn't play audio until I restart the phone and the car...
I switched to Bandcamp a while back because I was sick of Spotify playing the same 100 songs forever. It feels like they have about 2 songs for every artist that they will actually play in any generated playlist.
Bandcamp continues to be the best place to organically discover new artists. If I'm ever bored I go to their front page and browse by genre. It feels like the digital version of Sam Goody or whichever 90s record store had the headphone kiosks where you could listen to songs before buying the record.
Spotify, on the other hand, induced a level of visceral disgust I'd never felt before when I stumbled across an AI-generated album supposedly made by an artist I enjoy. In this case it was somebody that had been dead for 15 years - they were hijacking her Spotify page to promote it as a new release. I'm not an AI reactionary but I found this absolutely fucking gross. Having AI-generated music for four-hour YouTube videos of anime girls sitting in apartments on a rainy day is fine. Desecrating the body of work of a departed musician is decidedly not.
Spotify failed and continues to fail to verify the provenance of the music on their platform. They also routinely allow bedroom EDM and trap producers to associate their releases with older artists just because they have the same name. If they have hundreds of millions of dollars to sign podcasters to exclusive deals then they certainly have the resources to respond to these egregious cases of misclassification. Unfortunately their report submission system will only allow this class of problem if you can verify that you're the copyright holder. This therefore means (unless I'm missing something) that it's easier to submit fraudulent music than it is to take it down.
Do not shift blame here. Spotify is actively complicit in this. Hell, they could sic a few crafty data scientists on this and build an ML model to weed these bad tracks out. It'd be great PR for them ("we're saving artists from stolen revenue and preserving the sanctity of their work") and would be a novel contribution to the field of fraud prevention. The problem is that they're not incentivized to do so.
And, by the way, card transaction fees exist to cover the exact case you're talking about. Card companies make you whole in the case of fraud.
> It's like being mad at your bank that somebody stole your credit card on the subway and made purchases with it.
It's being mad that a store sold me a counterfeit rolex, actually. Spotify might claim to just be a "marketplace" like every other platform these days, but they're still the ones hosting that page that passes off slop as legitimate work by another artist. Spotify has a responsibility to govern what is hosted and sold on their platform.
>It's like being mad at your bank that somebody stole your credit card on the subway and made purchases with it, and then your bank is like "oh, sorry man, we can't do anything about that, guess they have your card forever now"
Is it easy to get in as a former what cd power user rank? I found my old rippy stickers from what.cd and missed that community so much. Ptp is great and alive though.
If the person behind it pretends to have produced it themselves, or (this actually happened) put themselves in AI-generated photos with celebrity artists in their cover/album art, then I will sour on them and stop listening to their uploads.
This has only happened once. The rest of the time, I will be listening to a radio playlist as I work when a song comes on that makes me go "Wait a minute." Checking the song's cover art, clearly AI. Artist page? 30 singles in 2025, every one with AI cover art. The bio reads like a Suno prompt (and probably is). The uploader then gets tossed in the proverbial bin.
The above has been happening more and more often. To the point where it's about 30% of the songs I hear on the radio playlist, as of this week. I'm in the process of migrating over to Deezer as a consequence. They label AI-generated music and do not recommend them or include them in radio playlists.
Edit:
Not the exact same artist, but I searched a generic song name to find an AI slopper. This one AI-inserting himself into pictures with women for cover art is the same idea as the one putting himself in pictures with celebrities like Ariana Grande. https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kEPAFHKkMPF1...
If you saw a video of a person doing something cool, and later found out it was AI generated, would you still be impressed?
Of course, it's not exactly the same situation, but if I listen to a song and appreciate that the vocalist sounds cool and they're doing some technically difficult things, I am definitely less impressed to find out it's a computer program. And it also means I can't find other songs with that vocalist's same artistic sense because they don't have one, they're a computer program who can sound like anything.
Of course I do. But what gives me joy with art is that it's a communication from one person to another. It's not about pretty sounds (or pictures, or whatever the medium is). If that communication isn't there, then the art has no real value to me regardless of how pretty it is.
If I think I'm talking with a person and it turns out that I'm talking with a machine, I've been duped and will likely be angry about it.
Another way to think about it is that when it comes to art, "the ends justify the means" doesn't really work because the whole point is more the means than the ends.
>But what gives me joy with art is that it's a communication from one person to another
Maybe if a person generated 50,000 songs, not even listening to them, you could have a point. Although, even in that case, regardless of the lack of an "artist's intention," there is the interpretation of what people will take from that thing. And that interpretation is often different from what the author originally had in mind. Hell, most people don't know the author of most movies, TV shows, and the like they watched. In other words, to me, it's more about what people take from that thing, as opposed to "Oh, what that sentient being was trying to communicate?"
And I do believe a sufficiently advanced AI model would be able to mimic or synthesize human knowledge/worries/dramas in such a profound way that, regardless of "intention to communicate," it would be able to create things that people would relate to and take deeper meaning from.
Also: the very dataset where that thing was trained wasn't trained on an alien dataset, with an alien culture and the like, all originating from poems written by real people, movies by real people, etc., etc. The model learned from human culture; therefore, whatever it produces is a reflection of that culture, which people could and most likely will relate to, and, hell, they are already doing that.
But even taking the argument at face value, "Oh, human creation," someone might have used AI, but they were still involved in all parts of the creation process, like writing the lyrics, curating the data, and the very fact of them choosing a song and saying, "Hey, I liked that, I will share it with people," would already be a communication.
> Although, even in that case, regardless of the lack of an "artist's intention," there is the interpretation of what people will take from that thing.
Of course. My interpretation is an important part as well, but that comes from me, not the artist, so is a bit different. Well, maybe I should say that the meaning and importance of a song is in the confluence of the artist and myself. I did want to clarify something, though -- I'm not really talking about the "artist's intention" here. That's a different thing, too.
The emotional communication I'm talking about happens even if I have no idea what the artist's conscious intention was, or even if I don't know who the artist is.
> And I do believe a sufficiently advanced AI model would be able to mimic or synthesize human knowledge/worries/dramas in such a profound way that, regardless of "intention to communicate," it would be able to create things that people would relate to and take deeper meaning from.
Perhaps so! But that kind of simulacrum is something I have absolutely no interest in. In fact, I find the idea of it a bit repulsive.
> someone might have used AI, but they were still involved in all parts of the creation process, like writing the lyrics
If an artist actually created the thing, then it's not an AI generated song. It's a human created song that may have involved AI as a tool. I'm talking more about if a human just describes the song they want to an AI and the AI creates the rest.
That said, I'm particularly averse to AI vocals, because vocals are particularly intimate for me. A song that has a machine as a singer is a song I'll reject even if the rest was created by a human.
> the very fact of them choosing a song and saying, "Hey, I liked that, I will share it with people," would already be a communication.
Technically true, but that's nowhere near the kind of communication I'm talking about. That has little value to me unless the person sharing it and myself know each other very, very well. Then, it's a communication/connection between that person and me, which can make it a great thing even if the song wouldn't resonate with me on its own.
I mean, art is inherently about human experience and emotion. Each of us resonates with certain types of art and doesn't resonate with other types. All I'm trying to do here is explore and maybe explain what resonates or not with me. I am in no way saying that anybody else should share my tastes.
This happened to me last month. After the first song, I suspected so I checked the cover and the artist profile. It was AI generated. I enjoyed the album nevertheless. You can find AI music enjoyable. People also hated DJ music before. And recorded music before. And electro amplified live music performances before that. This is just another category of music. Doesn't take away from human music. What people are right to be angry is that the tech was made on the backs of other people's non-remunerated work. Whether a human made a song or not shouldn't be as important as actual living artists being taken advantage of.
I agree entirely. Well, not entirely. I think anger would also be an understandable response if the music were misrepresented as being by human musicians if it weren't. Like it would be understandable if people got mad if they thought they bought easy listening and actually got acid metal. Or vice versa.
I'm a musician, but am also pretty amused by this anti ai wave.
There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own. Even if its just creative prompting, or perhaps custom trained models, someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai.
I'd pay for some app which allows be to dump all my ableton files into, train some transformer on it, just to synthesize new stuff out of my unfinished body of work. It will happen and all lines will get blurred again, as usual.
Also a musician and I don't think it's that amusing. IMO this isn't an "AI can't be art" discussion. It's about the fact that AI can be used to extract value from other artists' work without consent, and then out-compete them on volume by flooding the marketplace.
And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?
AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs.
Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument. Auto tune made it so you didn’t have to learn how to sing on key. There are many innovations in music over time that make it easier and less gatekeepy to make music.
We are just moving from making music as a rote activity similar to code, to making music like a composer in much the way that you can create software without writing code. It’s moving things up a level. It’s how the steady march of innovation happens.
It won’t work to put the genie back in the bottle, now it’s to find what you love about it and makes it worth it for you and to focus on that part. Banning the new types of art is only going to last as long as it takes for people to get over their initial shock of it and for good products to start being produced with it.
> Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument.
This is cliche. Most celebrated artists in the electronic music world can play several instruments, if not expertly, than at least with enough familiarity to understand the nuances of musical performance.
Electronic musicians are more akin to composers and probably have more in common with mathematicians and programmers in the way that they practice their craft, whereas musical performers probably have more in common with athletes in the way that they practice their craft.
You also need to understand how instruments make sound at an engineering level if you want to make timbre-perfect synthesizers which sound like said instrument, for instance
Electronic music is also very closely related to computer animation. Animated film technology is much more advanced, but a lot of techniques are similar.
Probably a good analogy too. Pixar's creative process is quite different from drawing it frame by frame and at least some aspects of it will use have used some sort of generative process, but it's incredibly involved and conscious in a way that typing "video of cute cartoon cat, Pixar style" into a prompt isn't.
Same applies to Bandcamp not having any issues with people making music in a DAW
>And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?
Personally, I don't buy this "AI models are learning just like we do." It's an appeal to ignorance. Just because we don't fully understand how a human brain learns, one can't claim it's the same as a statistical model of ordered tokens.
But even if it were true, I'm alright with drawing a line between AI learning and human learning. The law and social conventions are for humans. I want the ability to learn from others and produce original works that show influences. If this right is allowed to all humans, there is a chance one learn from and outperform me. That would suck for me, but I can accept it because it came from a universal human right I also enjoy. But an AI model doesn't have human rights. For models, the law and social conventions should still favor humans. The impact on the creative community and future creative endeavors should be balanced against the people who create and use the models.
I don't know how to do that with LLMs in a way that doesn't prevent the development of these amazing models. Maybe the government should distribute a portion of the revenue generated by the models amongst all citizens, to reflect how each model's value came from the written works of those citizens.
> If this right is allowed to all humans, there is a chance one learn from and outperform me. That would suck for me,
This is a rather sad take. If someone learned from my art or music and did something new and more popular, I would be happy! I had influence, I mattered. That new more popular work takes nothing away from my previous work. In fact, when I do science I'm doing it explicitly for this reason, to build on.
For me, creating music is not about "being the best" or "making more money than some other artist." It's about telling the stories I want to tell. An AI would not tell my stories, ever. It might produce things that somewhat similar, but it won't tell a human story, just a shallow imitation.
On the flip side, AI can be immensely useful. For example, stemming means that DJs or visualizer applications can do more with music. Perhaps AI can be used to create interesting new effects, or interesting new instruments or sounds. It can give ideas and help with inspiration.
I honestly have a hard time seeing AI actually driving musicians out of business because it can't tell a story. And it can't do that because it hasn't lived a life. Yes, I can see it producing low quality ad-jingles or low quality filler tracks like you see in spotify, so some people will be impacted. But we're long past time for some form of universal basic income to deal with this. It's not just artists that need a basic income at this point.
> Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument. Auto tune made it so you didn’t have to learn how to sing on key.
Neither of those things are really true, though. They made it possible to make poor music without learning those things, I suppose, but not make good music.
> Banning the new types of art
Nobody is seriously talking about banning AI generated music. What you're seeing is a platform deciding that AI generated music isn't something that platform is into. There are a lot of different platforms out there.
> Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?
Yes, when I make music, I am taking inspiration from all of the other artists I've listened to and using that in my music. If someone listens to my music, they are getting some value from my contribution, but also indirectly from the musicians that inspired me.
The difference between that and AI is that I am a human being who deserves to live a life of dignity and artistic expression in a world that supports that while AI-generated music is the product of a mindless automaton that enriches billionaires who are actively building a world that makes it harder to live a life of stability, comfort, and dignity.
These are not the same thing any more than fucking a fleshlight is the same as being in a romantic relationship. The physical act may appear roughly the same, but the human experience, meaning behind it, and societal externalities are certainly not.
> It won’t work to put the genie back in the bottle
It's not about putting the genie back in the bottle, it's about helping folks realize that the vague smell of farts in the air IS the genie--and this particular genie only grants costly monkey paw wishes that ultimately do more harm to the world than good.
> AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs.
I guess the difference is proprietary code is mostly not used for training. It's going to be trained on code in the public. It's the inverse for music, where it's being trained on commercial work, not work that has been licensed freely.
> AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs.
Not necessarily apples-to-apples here. Full songs generated from AI prompts don't crash like a computer program would. You could simply upload the garbage to Spotify and reap the rewards until it got removed (if it even does).
Some of the worst (best?) AI "artists" on Spotify have millions of views. It's tragic what it says about us. That most of us not only can't tell, but actually prefer this kind of uni-tone, blase, on-the-nose, emotionally manipulative crap.
There's music and there's music. When I want to listen to Music then I pick an artist and album manually. But 99% of the time, I just need something to play in the background when I'm working or cooking or cleaning - then it just has to sound pleasant, the value of that for me is exactly zero. Some of the best mixes I find for that are ai generated because they have a uniform pleasant sound for a long time, without anyone trying to impart anything on them.
The sterility of AI generated music will lead to a sterility in creativity of humans if "AI" generated music ever becomes dominant. The world is messy, and human music reflects that. But good for you if your life is so uncomplicated that human-created music seems offensive to you, I guess?
Humans are humans, computer programs aren't. A computer program learning doesn't matter, and it's not comparable to human learning. I have no empathy, sympathy or any sort of allegiance to computer programs.
I would imagine the vast majority of other humans agree with me. I'm not just gonna betray humankind because some 1s and 0s "learned" how to write music. Who cares, it's silicon.
> And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?
For me, one key difference is that I can cite my stylistic influences and things I tried, while (to my knowledge) commercial musical generation models specifically avoid doing that, and most don't provide chord/lead sheets either -- I would find it genuinely sad to talk to a musician about their arrangement/composition choices, only to find they couldn't
> I would find it genuinely sad to talk to a musician about their arrangement/composition choices, only to find they couldn't
So much of music composition is what "feels right" and is instinctual. Artists aren't consciously aware of probably most of their influences. They can cite some of the most obvious ones, but the creative process is melding a thousand different vibes and sounds and sequences you've heard before, internalized, and joined into something new, in a way only your particular brain could.
Let music historians work on trying to cite and trace influences. That's not something artists need to worry about.
Thus already doing much better than the average Suno producer
E: More seriously, this strikes me as a motte-and-bailey where "Artists cannot list every single influence they have or provide an explicit motivation for every single creative choice" is treated the same as "artists cannot list influences or justify creative choices at all"
> And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?
But the parent poster is, presumably, human! Humans have the right to take inspiration like that from other humans (or machines)! Why do we seem so keen on granting machines the right to take from us? Are we not supposed to be their masters?
Only if the human is actually making the music. If a machine is just generating the song at a human's request, then the human isn't making music, the machine is.
>We are just moving from making music as a rote activity similar to code
From this statement, I doubt you've written any music worth listening to, or any code that's not trivial.
Don't confuse music with muzak. What you get from an "AI" is muzak. It will never, ever have the same depth, warmth, or meaning as a human translating human emotions and experience into music and lyrics.
Is "gatekeepy" how we're referring to skill now? "Man I'd like to make a top-quality cabinet for my kitchen, lame how those skilled carpenters are gatekeeping that shit smh"
Wasn't it Picasso that said "good artist borrow, great artists steal?"
I've never heard an artist confident in their own ability complain about this because they're not threatened by other competent human artists knocking them off never mind an AI that's even worse at it.
AI not going to out-compete anyone on volume by flooding the marketplace because switching costs are effectively zero. Clever artists can probably find a way to grease controversy and marketing out of finding cases where they are knocked off, taking it as a compliment, and juicing it for marketing.
But I liked the Picasso quote when I was younger and earlier on in my journey as a musician because it reminded me to be humble and resist the desire to get possessive -- if what I was onto was really my own, people would like it and others could try to knock it off and fail. That is a lesson that has always served me very well.
I'm starting to think more and more in my older age that being 'great' isn't a good thing. I might actually prefer being good. We'll see how that thought plays out though; give me a couple more years
The whole idea of outcompeting on volume doesn't add up for music. It's a power law game not a commodities game. Spotify is playing a dangerous game trying to pretend that it is but I have little faith it won't destroy their business long term and turn them into a future Blockbuster or Macy's.
> It's about the fact that AI can be used to extract value from other artists' work without consent, and then out-compete them on volume by flooding the marketplace.
I didn't even think about the analogy to sampling (and the prior controversy) but that is an even better analogy. Ultimately, the different between what's creative re-use and what's a ripoff is a matter of how skillfully it's done and there's a lot of controversy in the middle!
It's like the reverse of the product that advertises itself as "AI driven." As if that's supposed to be a selling point. OK, it's AI driven, but is it good?
There may be short term emotional strings to pull. "AI driven!" or "AI free!"
But ultimately, no one will care if it's AI or not if it's good.
AI takes all of that old school idm and electronic music and repackages it without a human story to tell, ripping off actual musicians in the process. AI didn’t magically ‘make old IDM its own.’ It scraped decades of artists’ work, stripped out the context and intent, and reassembled the surface features. There’s no human arc, no lived constraint, no risk and no culture.
What’s being repackaged isn’t a new instrument, it’s other people’s careers. I’m not sure what part of that is supposed to be amusing.
I'm honestly not getting the human story thing when it comes to music and maybe art in general. I mean I get what it means, but I don't think it describes why people enjoy art.
To me, it seems more like people place their own meaning in art. A particular song might remind one individual of the good times they had in their teens, while the actual meaning of the song is completely different.
Bachs 5th symphony (or whatever) might be extremely annoying to someone because they had to listen to it every day at work.
And what exactly is the meaning of jazz fusion? I really like a good solo, but a lot of people hate it, they need to hear a voice. (though I don't particularly like the signature Suno or Udio solo..)
I found this ai track on Spotify that I unironically enjoyed. I listened to it every day while working on reviving an old passion project, which became its meaning to me. The tune, a long with its album with random disparate suno generations was taken down.
I'm not sure if I have a point here, but something is off with the story thing in art to me from a consumers point of view. Maybe from other artists as consumers point of view?
Your point echoes the "death of the author" concept in literature, where the work is independent of the creator, full stop. It's a useful concept up to a point, but if you really have no idea what it means to have a deep connection to music that is wrapped up in some idea of the creator as a human being, you should trust others when they say they do and it's important to them. For those of us with that value, AI slop is offensive, and to be clear, it has precedents in history with Muzak, early schlager music etc -- what they all share is a desire to use the power of music for non-artistic ends, which sucks from any number of viewpoints. If music has non-artistic utility, that doesn't justify a concerted effort to take away artist-made music from those who may not be paying attention.
except that what you’re describing is the CONSUMER SIDE of meaning, not the SOURCE of it.
yes, listeners project their own memories onto music, no one’s disputing that. but that doesn’t make the creator, context, intent, or labor irrelevant. treating music as interchangeable stimulus is how you end up defending systems that strip human work of attribution, risk, and livelihood while still feeding on the cultural residue artists created in the first place.
I think maybe we're talking past each other then. I'm saying I don't agree with the argument that music necessarily needs to have a story to be widely consumed in a positive way.
While I personally like it when people put their heart and soul into something, even if the result is technically not very great, it's society who is the ultimate judge of whether that creation benefits them or not.
I know that the track I'm currently listening to is superior in every way to some modern pop song. The artists have practiced for decades, they have their own unique style I can recognize in other tracks. But I also know that 99.999% of people don't give a shit and think it's noisy music, and depending on your perspective, they're correct.
The issue is not so much an artist that will use it as a tool, even though there is much to say about it, it's the hundred of thousands of people with no interest in music whatsoever, that will flood the platforms in order to make a quick buck.
Musicians who are being threatened by AI impersonating them, flooding the market with music like theirs, and otherwise actually harmed by this would disagree with you. Benn Jordan speaks at length about it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVXfcIb3OKo
> As a new artist you have to compete against 60+ years of music history
Kinda, sorta. Good music is reflective of the society and era it was produced in and that matters. I regularly listen to music, from all over the world, that was composed (and some, recorded) 100+ years ago, music that was recorded 50+ years ago, and music that was recorded last month. None of them are a substitute for the other because each has a unique voice expressing things that were unique about the time and place they were made in.
So, in a sense, they aren't in competition with each other. But also, there are only so many hours in a day and there isn't enough time in your life to listen to all the worthy music that humans have made. Hard choices are necessary. In that sense, they are in competition with each other.
You're right, but for EDM this was pretty much already the case. The scene survives in large part thanks to DJs who wade through countless mediocre tracks looking for the few hidden gems to deploy at the right moment. I think AI means that DJs will become much more important in all genres.
How many engineers are using ai-generated software libraries at this point? This could be all over github, but the software mostly sucks (because the AI doesn’t do architecture and real engineering, that has to be input into it right now). Increasing the volume of production doesn’t necessarily lead to the abandonment of the “good stuff”. You still have to compose the music and write the lyrics, the AI is not sophisticated enough to competently do that right now
> demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own
I'm pretty sure the people at Bandcamp agree with you and that's why they mention future "updates to the policy as the rapidly changing generative AI space develops".
Perhaps that's because there's an enormous difference between fine art and computer programs.
Also, there's quite a lot of pushback against AI-generated code, but also because unlike music, normal people have no interest in and aren't aware of the code.
Devs are quite used to using others peoples work for free via packages, frameworks and entire operating systems and IDE’s. It’s just part of the culture.
Music has its history in IP, royalties, and most things need to be paid for in the creation of music or art itself.
It’s going to be much easier for devs to accept AI when remixing code is such a huge part of the culture already. The expectation in the arts is entirely different.
This doesn't make sense to me. I mean, the term "remix" literally comes from the music scene.
Artists are constantly getting inspiration from one another, referencing one another, performing together or having their works exhibited together...
While there are some big name artists who are famously protective of the concept of IP, those artists have made headlines exactly because when they litigate they seem so unreasonable compared to the bedroom musicians and pub bands and church choirs and school teachers and wedding DJs and millions of other artists and performers whose way of participating in "the culture" is much less tied to ownership.
I won't merge anything AI generated in any of my FOSS projects, unless I'm successfully deceived.
In the first place, I do not regard a copyright notice and license on AI generated code to be valid in my eyes, so on those grounds alone, I cannot use it any more than I could merge a piece of proprietary, leaked source code.
The copyright office agreed with you about the non-copyrightability of AI generated media so in that sense you can safely ignore copyright claims on anything AI-generated.
Most code people interact with are creations shat out by soulless corporations, why would they care? Being honest here, the vast majority of people have their code experience dictated by less than a handful of companies; at their jobs they are told to use these tools or get file for welfare. The animosity has been baked into the industry for quite a while, it's only very very recently that the masses have been able to interact with open source code and even that is getting torn down by big tech.
Compare this to music where you are free to choose and listen to whatever you want, or stare at art that moves you. IF you don
At work most people are force to deal with code like SalesForce or MSFT garbage, not the same experience at all.
Why would people care about code coming from an industry that has been bleeding them dry and making their society worse for nearly 20+ years?
I think a key factor there is that programmers (in the actual sense, rather than so-called “vibe coders”) are more likely on average than (current) artists and musicians to have intimate knowledge of how AI works and what AI can and can't do well — and consequently, the quality of their output is high enough that it's harder to notice the use of AI.
Eventually that'll change, as artists and musicians continue to experiment with AI and come up with novel uses for it, just as digital artists did with tablets and digital painting software, and just as musicians did with keyboards and DAWs.
AI music from suno sounds indistinguishable to non-ai generated music to me.
In terms of how well it works, the quality of AI music is far better than art or code. In art there are noticeble glitches like multiple fingers. For code, it can call non existent functions, not do what it is supposed to do, or have security issues or memory leaks. From what I can tell, there is no such deal breaker for AI music.
The tells in music are there. The most common being: vocals have a subtle constant hiss to them, voices and instruments sound different in the second half than they did in the first, the hiss filter gets more prominent and affects all instruments towards the end of the song, auditory artifacts like volume jumps or random notes/noises near transitions.
More subjective tells: drums are hissy and weak, lyrics are generic or weird like "Went to the grocery store to buy coffee beans for my sadness", weirdly uniform loudness and density from start to finish, drops/climaxes are underwhelming, and (if you've listened to enough of them) a general uncanny feel to them.
I've generated about 70 hours of AI music and have listened to all of the songs at least once, so it's become intuitive for me to pick them out.
Every thread on HN that touches on the topic has countless people talking about how LLM generated code is always bad, buggy and people that utilize them are inexperienced juniors that don't understand anything.
And they're not completely wrong. If you don't know what you're doing, you'll absolutely create dumster fires instead of software
Sure, I am one of the people who will say that. But where are the people calling for it to be banned? Where are the stores and websites that are banning AI generated software?
I feel like part of the difference is how art vs code is viewed. You could make the argument code is art, though most don't have that stance. Visual art and music tend to be made by a few people, there is ego involved, you care who the artist is. Code tends to be made by shops and consumers don't know who the coders are. Programmers are already faceless.
I think it's also about money. Places code and code samples are stored tend to be large companies that are in tech and on the AI hype wagon. Bandcamp is not one of those places.
There's one popular platform that requires disclosing whether and how AI was used (Steam), and if you search anything about it, all you can find is like a sea of articles opposing it.
Music is art, code is engineering. "Hackers and painters"[1] was always wishful fluff, unfortunately.
When it comes to code, I don't think anyone cares how the sausage is made, and only very rarely do people care by whom. The only question is "does it work well?"
Art is totally different. Provenance is much more important - sometimes essential. David is a beautiful work, but you could 3d print or cast a replica of "David". No one would pretend that the copy is the same as the original though - even if they're indistinguishable to the untrained eye - because one was painstakingly hand sculpted and the others were cheaply produced. This sense of provenance is the property that NFTs were (unsuccessfully) trying to capture.
The main differentiator I've noticed is: how much work is the tool doing, and how much work is the artist doing? And that's not to say that strictly more effort on the part of the artist is a good thing, it just has to be a notable amount to, IMHO, be an interesting thing.
This is the primary failure of all of the AI creative tooling, not even necessarily that it does too much, but that the effort of the artist doesn't correlate to good output. Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful.
Any other toolset I can become familiar and better equipped to use. AI-based tools are uniquely unpredictable and so I haven't really found any places beyond base concepting work where I'm comfortable making them a permanent component.
And more generally, to your nod that some day artists will use AI: I mean, it's not impossible. That being said, as an artist, I'm not comfortable chaining my output to anything as liquid and ever-changing and unreliable as anything currently out there. I don't want to put myself in a situation where my ability to create hinges on paying a digital landlord for access to a product that can change at any time. I got out of Adobe for the same reason: I was sick of having my workflows frustrated by arbitrary changes to the tooling I didn't ask for, while actual issues went unsolved for years.
Edit: I would also add the caveat that, the more work the tool does, the less room the artist has to actually be creative. That's my main beef with AI imagery: it literally all looks the same. I can clock AI stuff incredibly well because it has a lot of the same characteristics: things are too shiny is weirdly the biggest giveaway, I'm not sure why AI's think everything is wet at all times, but it's very consistent. It also over-populates scenes; more shit in the frame isn't necessarily a good thing that contributes to a work, and AI has no concept at all of negative space. And if a human artist has no space to be creative in the tool... well they're going to struggle pretty hard to have any kind of recognizable style.
There is an AI plugin for krita that lets you define regions, selection bounds, sub-prompts, control nodes, and lots more control over a given image generation model than standard Automattic or comfyUI workflows...down to 'put an arm wearing armor here' for example in my RPG NPC token writing.
It has full image generation mode, it has an animation mode, it has a live mode where you can draw a blob of images and it will refine it 2-50 steps only in that area.
So you are no longer doing per line stroke and saved brush settings, but you are still painting and composing an image yourself, down to a pixel by pixel rate. It's just that the tool it gives is WAY more compute intensive, the AI is sort of rendering a given part of a drawing as you specify as many times as you need.
How much of that workflow is just prompting a one-shot image, vs photoshopping +++ an image together until it meets your exact specifications?
No, the final image cannot be copyrighted under current US law in 2026, but for use in private settings like tabletop RPGs...my production values have gone way up and I didn't need to get a MFA degree in The old Masters drawing or open a drawing studio to get those images.
> Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful.
That's normal for any kind of creative work. Some days it just happens quickly, other days you keep trying and trying and nothing works.
I spent some of the 90s and 00s making digital art. There was a lot of hostility to Photoshop then, and a lot of "That's not really art."
But I found that if I allowed myself to experiment, the output still had a unique personality and flavour which wasn't defined by the tool.
AI is the same.
The requirement for interesting art is producing something that's unique. AI makes that harder, but there's a lot of hand-made art - especially on fan sites like Deviant Art - which has some basic craft skill but scores very low on original imagination, unusual mood, or unique personality.
The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique. AI-made art mechanises the mash-up, but it's still up to the creator to steer the process to somewhere interesting.
Some people are better at that than others, and more willing to dig deep into the medium and not take it at face value.
That's normal for any kind of creative work. Some days it just happens quickly, other days you keep trying and trying and nothing works.
Usually this means I have forgotten to eat, or that I need to take a step back and consider whatever I’m doing at a deeper level. Once I recognized that the “keep trying and trying and nothing works” days vanished for good.
> The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique
Yeah, no. Competent artists are not generalizable as "unconscious", solely "mashing up" influences or input, or even working with "signifiers": many are exquisitely aware of their sources; many employ diverse and articulated methodologies for creation and elaboration; many enjoy working with the concrete elements of their medium with no concern for signification. Even "technique" does not have a uniform meaning across different fields and modes.
> That's normal for any kind of creative work. Some days it just happens quickly, other days you keep trying and trying and nothing works.
For me, the artist, sure. I've not yet had a day where Affinity Photo just doesn't have the juice, and I don't see the appeal. Photoshop, for all it's faults, doesn't have bad days.
That's the difference between the artist and the artists' tool. A difference so obvious I feel somewhat condescending pointing it out.
> I spent some of the 90s and 00s making digital art. There was a lot of hostility to Photoshop then, and a lot of "That's not really art." ... But I found that if I allowed myself to experiment, the output still had a unique personality and flavour which wasn't defined by the tool.
"People were wrong about a completely different thing" isn't the slam dunk counterpoint you think it is.
Also as someone else in that space at that time, I genuinely haven't the slightest idea what you mean about photoshop not being real art. I knew (and was an) artists at that time, we used Photoshop (of questionable legality but still) and I never heard this at all.
> The requirement for interesting art is producing something that's unique. AI makes that harder,
Understatement of the year.
> The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique. AI-made art mechanises the mash-up, but it's still up to the creator to steer the process to somewhere interesting.
The difference is the lack of intent. A "person" mashes up what resonates with them (positively or negatively) and from those influences, and from the broader cultures they exist in, creates new and interesting things.
AI is fundamentally different. It is a mash up of an average mean of every influence in the entire world, which is why producing unique things is difficult. You're asking for exceptional things from an average machine (mathematical sense not quality sense.).
>someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai
And in the mean time, AI will continue to clutter creative spaces and drown out actual hardworking artists, and people like you will co-opt what it means to be an artist by using tools that were trained on their work without consent.
Along the same lines, the anti-AI attitude among musicians today reminds me quite a bit of the anti-synthesizer attitude of the 60's and 70's, down to the same exact talking points: fears of “real” musicians being replaced by nerds pushing buttons on machines that can imitate those musicians.
I think the fears were understandable then, and are understandable now. I also think that, just as the fears around synthesizers didn't come to fruition, neither will the fears around AI come to fruition. Synthesizers didn't, and generative AI won't, replace musicians; rather, musicians did and will add these new technologies into their toolsets and use them to push music beyond what was previously understood to be possible. Synthesizers didn't catch on by just imitating other instruments, but by being understood and exploited as instruments in their own right; so will generative AI catch on not by just imitating other instruments, but by being understood and exploited as an instrument in its own right.
The core problem right now is that AI (even beyond just music) ain't being marketed as a means of augmenting one's creativity and skills, but as a means of replacing them. That'll always be misguided, both in the practical sense of producing worse outputs and in the philosophical sense of atrophying that same creativity and skills. AI doesn't have to produce slop, but it will inevitably produce slop when it's packaged and sold and marketed in a way that actively encourages slop — much like taking one of those cheap electric keyboards with built-in beats and songs and advertising it as able to replace a whole band. Yeah, it's cool that keyboards can play songs on their own and AI can generate songs on their own, but that output will always be subpar compared to what someone with even the slightest bit of creativity and skill can pull out of those exact same tools.
> generative AI catch on not by just imitating other instruments,
but generative AI didn’t catch on by "imitating instruments." It caught on by imitating artists, which streaming platforms and record labels then repackage and outsell you with. false analogy.
This argument won't get you anywhere because "imitating artists" and "outselling artists" aren't actually the same thing.
i.e. complaining about training on copyrighted material and getting it banned is not sufficient to prevent creating a model that can create music that outsells you. Because training isn't about copying the training material, it's just a way to find the Platonic latent space of music, and you can get there other ways.
you're dodging the point by retreating into silly abstractions. I’m talking about cultural and economic displacement of artists, not a pedantic debate about latent spaces. "Training isn’t copying" is the cynical AI shill statement that doesn’t address the fact that systems trained on artists are then packaged and monetized to outsell them. why is this part so complicated for you? or are you just being obnoxious...
dropping wiki links and math jargon avoids the ethical / market reality here.
> "Training isn’t copying" is the cynical AI shill statement that doesn’t address the fact that systems trained on artists are then packaged and monetized to outsell them.
No, that's the whole problem. The systems are capable of outselling the artist whether or not they're trained on the artist. So you can't prevent it by complaining about the training data.
This is not a super well thought out position, but I've been leaning towards really disliking AI art in general (without having an opinion on any strong policy action yet).
First, art is, I think, one of the most enjoyable activities we have. One evidence is a lot of people forego higher salaries to choose an art job (although being a job carries additional responsibilities and some inconveniences compared to doing it as a hobby). It's a shame to see it diminished, when I believe we should be diverting efforts to automate other stuff.
Second, most AI art I've seen has been quite substandard compared to human art. We still don't know very well what human emotions are, the origin of sentience and qualia, etc.. But I think humans still lead here in having and probably understanding emotions. While for other tasks most implementation detail is irrelevant (e.g. in code, that it works tends to be most important, vs. minute choices in style), in art every detail is particularly relevant. Knowing this, it bothers me usually when I see this art that it doesn't carry the same knowledge of context and nuance a human would have.
Third, There's also the effect of making me question whether each piece of artwork was made by a human or AI, that didn't exist before. It does carry a bit of a magical feeling I think knowing a real person made every piece of artwork prior to 2018 or so (I think algorithmic art[1] is fine in this regard, because it tends to be more clearly algorithmic, and the involvement of the artist in coding is significant), that is now gone or at risk. Even the thought of imagining say their work day or what they had for lunch or talked to coworkers or friends is pleasant to me (at the risk of romanticizing it too much).
I suppose if AI art actually understood human nature, and specially the specific context of each art piece, better than us some of my arguments might be diminished. But the negatives so far seem to outweigh the positives, and I would like to e.g. give preference to content that doesn't use AI art.
(It is, admittedly, also the case that we lost a similar amount of craftsmanship when the industrial revolution happened, and in return we were able to support a larger population, and greater material conditions for most people. Every object now isn't carefully handcrafted. I think it's different because well, now material conditions are relatively abundant, and second there's no such insatiable, significant and irreplaceable demand for art as there were to common industrialized objects (take shoes for example), at least not to the same extent or vital significance. That is, the ability to have a shoe at all far outweighs it being carefully handcrafted, I believe; while experiencing a poorly made AI movie or artwork might be actually worse than none at all (or simply an older human made movie), and it also gets more cumbersome to evaluate for ourselves whether AI was employed or not. Also, while say shoes only last a limited time and need to be constantly produced, good artwork can last indefinitely (using digital storage), and even if you account for cultural change and relevance, can still last a really long time, motivating investing more into it.)
I'm quite sure that if we're still around in 500 or so years, we'll still be enjoying say Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh (probably as a digital reproduction). Current AI art will probably be largely discarded, so seems largely an unwise investment. Actually this kind of applies to code as well. It seems plausible Linux could still be used in 500 years from now (see how we still value finding Unix v4 50 years after), or at least of some interest. Those durable intellectual goods don't seem like wise places to invest anything but the best of us :) (at least in the cases it's not disposable)
The arguments above also don't seem to apply say in concept stages, or say for bland corporate diagrams that will be disposed of in 1 day, and which a huge quantity is needed. I think the main criteria I would evaluate is (1) Was it enjoyable to produce (for the artist(s))?; (2) Will it have a significant (artistic) impact on who is experiencing it?; (3) Will it last a long time?
[1] W.r.t. algorithmic art (and digital in general) (take bytebeat[2] for example), which is a field I really love, I am not any kind of absolutist about it. I know there tends to be extremely more degrees of freedom for human expression in a manual piece than in an algorithmic piece, so I see it more as a complement and not a substitute for more conventional art. I'd never give up ever hearing human musician player music for bytebeat, just bytebeat is a lovely experimental other dimension of expression. Writing a prompt seems a too few degrees of freedom and context, and too much of an uniform context that is less rich than humans can provide.
This is something people spent a lot of time on, is trained lovingly on only their own stuff, and makes for some great music.
It's "AI" but in an almost unrecognizable way to us now: its not attached to some product, and its not about doing special prompting. It is definitely pop/electronic music, but it follows from a tradition of experimentation between what we can control and what we can't, which is here their bespoke stochastic program.
It is not about how the computer or the model enables us, which is so silly. (As if art is simply about being able to do something or not!) Its about doing something with the pieces you have that only those pieces can do.
Sure, you just can't upload the resulting track directly on Bandcamp, but you're free to "creatively prompt" on SUNO all you want, they'll even host your "music".
It's also a matter of resources. People uploading gigabites of AI generated slop a day isn't really what Bandcamp is about.
People don't listen to music because it sounds good, most music sounds downright awful, they listen to it for the human stories and connection. 99% of the music I listen
Nobody listens to techno - Eminem
AI needs to make music that sells. The same way Scorsese and Brando sell the Godfather. until it can do that literally nobody will care.
> I'm a musician, but am also pretty amused by this anti ai wave.
Let me guess: you're an amateur musician. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it makes it much easier to be amused about this topic.
> There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own.
What are you talking about? Which "tech kit" got demonized by whom? Of course, there were always controversies around techniques like sampling or whatever, or conservatives in the UK demonizing rave culture, but otherwise, I have no idea what you're referring to.
There was no "demonization" about these things even remotely comparable to what we are witnessing now w.r.t. AI generated music (and I'm old enough to remember most of these things). Of course there was intense dislike from certain groups representing the "old-school" around new styles of music and new techniques. However, at the same time, you also had the "new-wave" which loved it and made it successful. For instance, a ton of people hated Disco music, at the same time, you had a ton of people who genuinely loved it. Same with practically any kind of electronic music. This simply does not exist with GenAI music. People listen to GenAI music because they either don't care, or don't know, not because they genuinely prefer it. There's absolutely nothing new about GenAI music that would make it exciting.
A few months ago I spoke with the frontman of a local Boston band from the 1980s, who recently re-released a single with the help of AI. The source material was a compact cassette tape from a demo, found in a drawer. He used AI to isolate what would've been individual tracks from the recording, then cleaned them up individually, without AI's help.
Does that constitute "wholly or in substantial part"? Would the track have existed were it not for having that easy route into re-mastering?
I understand what Bandcamp's trying to do here, and I generally am in support of removing what we'd recognize as "fully AI-generated music", but there are legitimate creative uses of AI that might come to wholly or substantially encompass the output. It's difficult to draw any lines line on a creative work, by just by nature of the work being creative.
(For those interested - check out O Positive's "With You" on the WERS Live at 75 album!)
No I don't think that really qualifies because it's solving an engineering problem. I hang out on an electronic music creators' forum which is stringently anti-AI, but nobody objects to things like stem separation. People are skeptical about AI 'mastering' but don't really object for similar reasons.
What people get mad about is the use of AI to generate whole tracks. Generating rhythms, melodies, harmonies etc via AI isn't greeted warmly either, but electronic musicians generally like experimenting with things like setting up 'wrong' modulation destinations in search of interesting results. I don't think anyone seriously objects to AI-produced elements being selected and repurposed as musical raw material. But this is obviously not happening with complete track generation. It's like playing slot machines but calling yourself a business person.
That's not AI generated at all. Using acoustic models to stem out individual sections from a recording is not creating new material (and I wouldn't even describe that as "AI" despite what I'm sure a lot of the tools offering it want us to believe).
Sorry, that's AI. So is OCR, so is voice recognition, and many other things you probably use and take for granted. I'd suggest you focus on use cases not trying to redefine definitions for an entire area of science and technology based on your own preferences.
Saying "I'm against fully AI generated music" is at least precise, and doesn't throw out detecting cancer along with the AI bandwagon term.
AI and voice recognition were using "machine learning" for several decades, which is basically just brute force statistics.
ML voice recognition is still far superior to AI-based voice recognition. At its best, Gemini is still less accurate at parsing speech than Dragon Naturally Speaking circa 2000.
We've been using software to fix grammar for a long time, and AI does it also. The question is valid: if I get an LLM to fix a few grammar errors in my own writing, am I ripping anyone off? We can't just dismiss the question just because grammar fixing is something we did without machine-learning AI trained on vast numbers of other people's texts.
The output does depend on training works, even if you are just fixing grammar errors. But the document is obviously a derivative of your own writing and almost nothing else. A grammatic concept learned from vast numbers of worsk is probably not a copyright infringment.
Similarly, a part extraction concept learned from training sets such as pairs of mixed and unmixed music, and then applied to someone's own music to do accurate part extraction, does not seem like an infringing use. All features of the result are identifiable as coming from the original mixed audio; you cannot identify infringing passages in it added by the AI --- and if such a thing happened, it would be an unwanted artifact leading us to re-do the part extraction in some other way to avoid it.
The question doesn't feel legit to me though. The OP somehow found the one justifiable example among a sea of AI slop.
Justifiable because there were some filters. That may not even have been "AI". They may have been some deterministic algorithms that the software maker has to label "AI" because they otherwise think it won't sell...
I've done audio engineering as a hobby. Even a decade ago, verbiage like "ai noise reduction" was very common. Of course that was RNNs, not transformers. But I think they have a valid point. I googled and found this 2017 post about iZotope integrating machine learning: https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/what-the-machine-learning-i...
I don't know. I think there's a tendency to look at things as pure or impure, as all black or all white. If it was touched by AI, it's AI. If not, it's pure.
I'm not familiar with the music business, but I'm a Sunday photographer. There's an initiative to label pictures that had "generative ai" applied. I'm not a professional, so I don't really have a horse in this race. I also enjoy the creations of some dude I follow on Instagram which are clearly labelled as produced by AI.
But in between, the situation isn't as clear cut. As photographers, we used to do "spot removal", with pretty big "spots" for ages [0]. You just had to manually select the "offending" "spot", try to source some other part which looked close enough. Now you can use "object removal" which does a great job with things like grass and whatnot but is "generative ai". These are labelled AI, and they are.
I can understand someone arguing that what required a lot of skill is now more accessible. And I guess that's true? But that just sounds elitist.
So what's the issue with "AI"? Do you enjoy the result? Great! Do you hate it? Move to the next one. Does that particular "artist" produce only thins you hate? Skip them!
--
[0] my point is about "artistic" pictures, not photojournalism or similar where "what was" is of utmost importance. Note that even in those cases, selective cropping only requires your feet and nobody would label as "edited". But I specifically don't want to open that can of worms.
I think any line is necessarily going to be arbitrary, a blanket ban on any ML model being used in production would be plainly impossible -- using Ozone's EQ assistant or having a Markov chain generate your chord progressions could also count towards "in substantial part", but are equally hard to object to.
But we also live with arbitrary lines elsewhere, as with spam filters? People generally don't want ads for free Viagra, and spam filters remain the default without making "no marketing emails" a hard rule.
The problem isn't that music Transformers can't be used artfully [1] but that they allow a kind of spam which distribution services aren't really equipped to handle. In 2009, nobody would have stopped you from producing albums en masse with the generative tech of the day, Microsoft's Songsmith [2], but you would have had a hard time selling them - but hands-off distribution services like DistroKid and improved models makes music spam much more viable now than it was previously.
I think it makes some sense to allow leeway for intelligent "signal processing" using AI (separating out individual tracks, clean-up, etc) vs generating new content with AI.
Similarly, say, for video editors, using AI to more intelligently rotoscope (especially with alpha blending in the presence of motion blur - practically impossible to do it manually), would be a great use of AI, removing the non-creative tedium of the process.
It's not clear where the line is though. I was quite impressed with Corridor Crew's (albeit NVidia+Puget-sponsored) video [1] where they photographed dolls, motion-captured human actors moving like the dolls, and transferred the skeletal animation and facial expressions to those dolls using GenAI. Some of it required nontrivial transformative code to accommodate a skeleton to a toy's body type. There's a massive amount of tedium being removed from the creative process by GenAI without sacrificing the core human creative contribution. This feels like it should be allowed -- I think we should attempt to draw clearer lines where there are clearly efficiency gains to be had to have less "creative" uses be more socially acceptable.
It may be a tedious job to spend days rotoscoping but I personally know people who get paid to do that, and as soon as AI can do it, they will have to go find other work (which they already do, on the side, because the writing is on the wall, but there's a ton of people worldwide who do this kind of work, and that's not the only process being delegated to AI).
So, I'm not pretending that certain kinds of jobs aren't going to be obsoleted. Lots of responsibilities went by the wayside as a lot of things were automated with technology and algorithms - I mean, this is not just an AI thing. But I also see it as many people not even executing certain creative visions that would be out of reach due to the mechanical (not creative) cost of doing things. That's where Jevons Paradox really shines and I do think that's where the explosion will happen. Of the (very few) people I know who do editing and have to rotoscope, rotoscoping is one of the things they really don't enjoy, but they do it anyway.
If the Beatles can use AI to restore a poorly recorded cassette tape of John Lennon playing the piano and singing at his dinner table, I think it's alright if other bands do it, too.
One is trained with a set of pairs which match words with images. Vast numbers of images tagged with words.
The other is trained on a set of photographs of exactly the same scene from the same vantage point, but one in daylight and the other at night. Suppose all these images are copyrighted and used without permissions.
With the one AI, we can do word-to-image to generate an image. Clearly, that is a derived work of the training set of images; it's just interpolating among them based on the word assocations.
With the other AI, we can take a photograph which we took ourselves in daylight, and generate a night version of the same one. This is not clearly infringing on the training set, even though that output depends on it. We used the set without permission to have the machine extract and learn the concept of diurnal vs. nocturnal appearance of scenes, based on which it is kind of "reimagining" our daytime image as a night time one.
The question of whether AI is stealing material depends exactly on what the training pathway is; what it is that it is learning from the data. Is it learning to just crib, and interpolate, or to glean some general concept that is not protected by copyright: like separating mixed audio into tracks, changing day to night, or whatever.
> With the one AI, we can do word-to-image to generate an image. Clearly, that is a derived work of the training set of images
> The question of whether AI is stealing material depends exactly on what the training pathway is; what it is that it is learning from the data.
No it isn't. The question of whether AI is stealing material has little to do with the training pathway, but everything to do with scale.
To give a very simple example: is your model a trillion parameter model, but you're training it on 1000 images? It's going to memorize.
Is your model a 3 billion parameter model, but you're training it on trillions of images? It's going to generalize because it simply doesn't physically have the capacity to memorize its training data, and assuming you've deduplicated your training dataset it's not going to memorize any single image.
It literally makes no difference whether you'll use the "trained on the same scene but one in daylight and one at night" or "generate the image based on a description" training objective here. Depending on how you pick your hyperparameters you can trivially make either one memorize the training data (i.e. in your words "make it clearly a derived work of the training set of images").
The example you present seems fairly straightforward to my intuition, but I think your point is fair.
A harder set of hypotheticals might arise if music production goes the direction that software engineering is heading: “agentic work”, whereby a person is very much involved in the creation of a work, but more by directing an AI agent than by orchestrating a set of non-AI tools.
Ya, "AI" is too broad a term. This was already possible without "AI" as we know it today, but of course it was still the same idea back then. I get what you're saying, though: would he have bothered if he'd have to have found the right filters/plugins on his own? idunno.
thats sounds more like unsupervised learning via one of the bread and butter clustering algorithms. I guess that is technically AI but its a far cry from the transformers tech thats actually got everyone's underwear in knots.
> It's difficult to draw any lines line on a creative work, by just by nature of the work being creative.
If you want to be some neutral universal third party sure. If you're OK with taking a position, the arbitrariness actually makes it much easier. You just draw the line you want.
Creativity demands limitation, and those limitations don't have to be justified.
Where does it stop. My dad is a decent guitarist but a poor singer (sadly, I'm even worse). He has written some songs, his own words, some guitar licks or chords as input material and AI turning it into a surprisingly believable finished piece. To me it's basically AI slop but he's putting in a modest amount of effort for the output.
That's not "generating" the music with AI - that's isolating the tracks of existing music. Probably not generative AI at all, and depending on who you ask, not even AI.
This is why it is to these generative AI companies' benefit that 'AI' becomes a catchall term for everything, from what enemies are programmed to do in video games to a spambot that creates and uploads slop facebook videos on the hour.
I had this opinion for a long time, but only recently was I personally affected, but that made me even more convinced.
I was listening to my new releases playlist on Apple Music and listened to a track that sounded nice, but also a little generic. I don’t know exactly what prompted me to check, but it had all the signs of something fishy going on like generic cover image, the artist page showed a crazy output of singles last year (all the same generic images), unspecific metadata and - to my surprise - I found other Reddit posts about this artist being AI.
Now, a lot of music is generic and goes through so many hands you can hardly call it a personal piece of art. But even then, there’s always some kind of connection.
I guess that’s why I felt betrayed.
I thought AI generated art was wrong before, but I didn’t expect to feel this mix of anger and disappointment.
For me, music (like all fine art) is about human connection. It's the artist telling me something human and personal. It's not entirely about the aesthetics of the music. The provenance of the art is very important. If I feel that connection with a song and it turns out that the song wasn't made by a person (it hasn't happened yet as far as I know), I have been deceived and would be furious.
A song made by a person using AI as tool (rather than to generate the music) is different. What matters is that the song is actually an expression of humanity, not the tools used to make it.
However, the presence of AI-generated music means that I am not really willing to buy music anymore unless it's either a few years old or I'm buying it at the merch table the artist has at a live performance.
I'm not ideologically opposed to making music with AI, but the dream would be new songs which which showcase the new sounds and musical forms that AI enables, like Believe for autotune, or Rumble for electric guitar, or Autobahn for synths.
I want a friend to message me like "Hey, there's some interesting stuff happening in the AI music scene, check out these tracks".
But everything I've seen is pastiche, either novelty songs (hit song as different genre, or famous monologue from popular movie as pop song) or generic background music meant for algorithmic streaming playlists.
I'm a moderately frequent user of Suno and have encountered some unusual AI-generated effects that I've not come across before in more traditionally synthesized music.
One is when it attempts to generate vocals without a lyrics prompt. It's gibberish but just on the edge of comprehensibility. Sometimes it'll be entirely spoken word with no accompaniment. Very uncanny.
Another is transitioning between vocals and instrument in the same melody line. Like a humanesque voice holding a steady note at the end of a verse which seamlessly transitions into a saxophone sound and proceeds into a solo. Or vice versa, an instrumental morphing into a voice.
Finally is when the generation goes wrong and it starts spitting out absolute nonsensical sounds with no rhythm or melody, in a uniquely fragmented way I can't really describe. It feels like seeing the musical matrix, the inner thoughts of the AI.
Now I've written all that out and had a think about it, I'm tempted to sample these oddities and try to make something more structured out of them.
Yes, it's really easy to argue against AI music and find that you're making exactly the same argument that was used against DJs and sampling in the 90s. "Real musicians" thought they were being ripped off by "non-musicians" who didn't know how to play an instrument, just a turntable or an AKAI. But it turns out that turntables and samplers are instruments if you allow people to get creative with them, and now we have entire genres of music that exist because sampling is legitimate (though the copyright wars did make it more expensive than the original guerrilla days). I mean, do we seriously think DJ Shadow isn't a musician?
You could regard AI as being literally just a very advanced form of sampling. I've seen and heard some very creative uses of AI tools, and it would be a terrible shame if that baby got thrown out with the bathwater.
Yeah, I want the Paul's Boutique of AI music, but I'm not interested in wading through the AI equivalent of a hundred thousand acoustic guitar covers of Wonderwall
I mean, even if it's just a pastiche machine, I do believe that people could use it to make new and interesting music, just like they did with sampling.
But yeah, music is so accessible and there is so much new music all the time that if all, or most, of what AI is being used for is to make even more of the same stuff we're already awash in then banning it is necessary curation.
What I'm hoping for is a (good) musician to take a small music model, train it on a selection of their influences and existing music and then add on a prompt tracklist. Something like a NN album that the fan can add their own prompts and get new music in the style the artist meant for that album.
I don't know if this really counts as art but there are existing AI music that are at least though provoking funny like https://kommandointernet.bandcamp.com/
It is German but there is really funny remixes combining Mallorca Party music (a German music genre of its own) with anti fascist themes. They manage to make fun of both without being IMHO totally alienating both subcultures, which could count as art. IMHO such things would not really be possible without AI. Would be really disappointed if this disappeared from BC.
Most human derived goods markets need to filter low effort attempts at monetization in general. I'm tired of going to Renn. Faire / Farmer Markets / Artist Alley Markets only to find they've started letting in "Joe Blow with a poorly configured 3d printer #35." These places have become infested with people selling the exact same piles of thingverse trash in a rainbow of colors.
It sucks that a lot of these types of markets are suffering from low numbers of shoppers. They open themselves up to these plastic peddlers in desperation only to drive away customers even more.
After 3D-print slop infested craft fairs, and fake AI-slop products infested Etsy, it's got me to wondering: is this just an evolution in an existing scummy business model?
Consider how easy it would have been, any time in the last decade, to get a booth at any "local hand-made goods craft fair", selling "hand-made" copper jewelry... that you happened to buy in bulk lots off Alibaba. The jewelry was "hand-made"... kind of... by someone else, making far too little money, in sweatshop conditions, following techniques and using machines that enable them to produce hundreds at once, with no QC whatsoever.
Nobody would ever guess you hadn't made the stuff yourself. They would read the lack of QC as evidence for your claim that "each piece is distinct and made to match my artistic vision in the moment." You'd put one or two of each type of piece out on the table at a time, as if those are all you have; yet as soon as one sells, you'd pull another out from the box of hundreds.
I can't say for sure that this ever happens, but judging by the number of people willing to be scummy in the more modern ways... it certainly feels like it could. Honestly makes me hesitant to buy anything from a craft fair. Which is a shame.
> any time in the last decade, to get a booth at any "local hand-made goods craft fair", selling "hand-made" copper jewelry... that you happened to buy in bulk lots off Alibaba.
I've seen exactly this a few times in Madrid already, right next to the "dude with bad 3D printer #35"-type stands. A friend of mine loves finding the Aliexpress product page right in front of them.
With regard to Etsy, hand-made crafts don't scale so a VC-backed startup around them was never going to be able to resist this. Only hope would be a highly moderated and curated Craigslist-style website that was happy to pay the bills, pay some salaries and keep the lights on while maintaining integrity.
Craft fairs, though, no excuse or reason. There should not be profit maximizing at local craft fairs. They're a bellwether for the degradation of culture.
People want to feel a meaningful connection to others. One facet of that is wanting to own objects that were made by an actual person who put craft into creating the object and who cares about the owner being happy with it.
Virtually everyone, not just rich hipsters, wants this. People seek it out and are happy to pay a lot extra for it.
However, "made with care" (and not just "by hand possibly in a sweatshop") is a fairly intangible property and hard to distinguish from just looking at the object. Instead, you really need some amount of provenance tracking to tell the "made by someone who gives a shit" from the slop.
Maker fairs, Etsy, farmer's markets, and many other venues exist basically to offer up that claim of trusted provenance. But the very large price difference between what you can sell a made-with-care object for versus the very low price you can make an indistinguishable object using factories, sweatshop labor, or AI makes those venues a honeypot for scammers who want to sell, essentially, fake meaning.
I keep feeling like the ultimate answer to everything going on in the current zeitgiest is some kind of real trust tracking system so you know where a piece of media or object actually came from.
This kind of thing already existed for a long time, but not as a scam. The people selling these products were selling their ability as "tastemakers". They knew about all the various distributors who could provide "artisanal" products from around the world, they took the time to leaf through all the catalogs and find the best knick-knack that they felt would fit with the theme of their stall and do good business in their local market. And then on the day of the market they would chit-chat with the customers about the process.
The funny thing is that what makes the scammer version a scam is that they go through exactly the same process but then try to pass the products off as their own artisinal work, presumably because they think that will net them more money. But in reality most people browsing for tat at a market aren't going to pay more or less for local artisinal versus imported artisinal versus mass produced, they just enjoy the experience of browsing the different stalls and chatting with vendors and feeling like they have connection with their local merchants. So the scam was wholly unnecessary, the vendor didn't need to make up a story, they just needed to be open to chatting with their customer. They're shooting themselves in the foot by lying about their products because if/when they're found out then they lost the trust, which is the actual product they are selling. People who choose local markets over chain stores or online shopping are doing it exactly because they are looking for a more trustworthy experience, so when you take that away you have nothing to sell.
This platform sees high front page placement / hundreds of votes for AI-written … uh sorry I mean “I used the AI to clean up my notes” … content daily.
I have an allergic reaction to it and flag, but clearly a majority of the hn voting population appreciates it, so if it isn’t banned it will continue.
At first I was just curious, and unimpressed with the horridly bland shite coming out of these AI music generators. But then I made a prompt that sparked some kind of magic, so now I want to finish off that track just to see if I can end up with something that I consider good.
I don't hold it much hope for this track because everything else I've heard on suno and udio are rubbish, but the 1 minute preview I have is enticing me to spend 8 bucks just so I can experiment a bit more.
I feel somewhat conflicted by my fascination because I have a great love for music and I wholeheartedly support efforts to restrict AI music crap.
But as the tools mature, the creative possibilities to make new sounds with finer control and granularity will make the process more ... creative - with greater human input.
I'm sure we'll end up with new styles and maybe even new genres that originate from prompts, and hits too. Is this a good thing to look forward to? I can see my future listening habits become strictly human only, but dang, the start of my new track sounds so dope!
I applaud Bandcamp's stance here and I will always look for ways to meaningfully support real musicians.
I've been having fun making stuff in Suno, I'm not a musician but I've always enjoyed "producing tracks" using Abelton and find the Suno + Abelton combo to be real magic on the weekends. I think some of the stuff I made isn't too bad and I'd love feedback on it. For a few weeks I went back and forth about uploading them to my soundcloud and resolve with this: I wouldn't have insisted we only allowed art made with MS paint on deviantART, we didn't even enforce quality (tho we highlighted) - we enforced the type of kindness that leads to learning and growth. I hope we can have places for professionals and places for people to display and play with creativity and art irrespective of the tooling. :)
Whenever I see defences of AI "art" people very often reduce the arguments to these analogies of using tools, but it's ineffective. Whether you use MS Paint, Photoshop, pencil, watercolor etc. That all requires skill, practice, and is this great intersection of intent and ability. It's authentic. Generating media with AI requires no skill, no intent, and very minimal labor. It is an approximation of the words you typed in and reduces you to a commissioner. You created nothing. You commissioned a work from a machine and are claiming creative authorship.
A: This post is part of an eternal debate about art: Do we appreciate the finished work, or the artist? This post is firmly in the latter camp. There are also solid arguments for the other extreme.
B: Having spent some time trying to make songs with Suno, I can assure you it takes more skills than I have...
Sure, but you also just disregarded a whole swath of people who use the tools/abstractions as a component of the composition of a final work. If I download a free vector of a premade sun to put into my final multimodal image, how is that any less authentic to me and my work? You feel like I cheated? Not how you would do it? This reminds me of when the film industry moved to digital and the pro associations said for contest submissions, first no digital at all, then it was ok for you to use digital post production but not a digital camera.
Obviously it's a sliding scale, but suno is allllll the way on one end. It's no more work than me contacting an artist and just asking him to write and produce me a song. I didn't do anything, I commissioned it.
I mean my camera has a full auto setting I don't use it that way, same with Suno, you can get the stems out of suno, you can gen just one instrument, just a sound, just an a cappella, I use it to gen things to put onto my OP1, does that count? This is My lyrics + Suno + OP1 + KOII + Abelton + 20hours or so?: https://soundcloud.com/john/golden
I'm a professional artist. I don't use AI as it's just not there yet.
But I don't consider using AI all that different to using a camera. A photographer still has plenty of work to do with composition and framing, the lighting, the subject mater, even timing. I still consider a photographer an artist.
I think an AI artist will have a lot to consider as well. To distinguish themselves from other AI artists.
Update: When I say the AI tools are not there yet, its precisely because I can't seem to get the AI to take feedback or instructions. I can't adjust the lighting to create the mood I want, I can't tweak the framing.
Well said. The credit is with the model; you commissioned it but did not create it.
With AI art... there is no passion, there is no pain, there is no emotion, there is no sex, there is no feeling, there is no reason. When Blaze Foley sang If I Could Only Fly or Nina Simone sang Stars or Bardot sang Je t'aime or Morricone wrote Se telefonando or Vermeer painted Zicht op Delft or Orozco painted his Epic of American Civilization or Maugham wrote Of Human Bondage or Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or Cheever wrote The Swimmer there was a magnificent concentration of real feeling and a real reason that each of these things were made.
Could you imagine someone prompting a model, receiving the result, and then saying, as Cheever did about The Swimmer:
>It was a terribly difficult story to write. I couldn't ever show my hand. Night was falling, the year was dying. It wasn't a question of technical problems, but one of imponderables. When he finds it dark and cold, it has to have happened. And by God, it did happen. I felt dark and cold for some time after I finished that story.
---
To me, the reason for art is feeling, and the problem is that most things don't really provide feeling - if they do, it is a cheap and one-dimensional feeling. Almost all art and music and literature (and food, wine, architecture, poetry, photography, theatre, dance) that people consume today is _good enough_. It is correct, it satisfies. You listen to some hours of good-enough music on Spotify and the music is all correct and you come across "Chill77"'s AI-generated Papaoutai cover and you think that it is good. After all, it seems to have fooled a number of genuine Stromae fans. But the real function of art is not to satisfy. It is to reduce you to tears or silence or lust or anger or some beautiful cocktail of feeling. Of course, in the right context, with enough supporting factors, anything can produce emotion, but the best art needs little or nothing to make you feel. Bad art and good art are all around us, but the great is rare. That rarity is why people enjoy AI art: they forget the last time they felt, the AI is good, and that is enough.
The sad thing, of course, is that to make the great you must make a hell of a lot of bad and a fair amount of simply good art. And then there are those who have no delusions of grandeur but just make art for the sake of it. AI art cheapens those things; it makes them a trivial undertaking. The architect who would have become great on the completion of his two hundred and seventh building can now generate the first two hundred and six with the push of a button. The woman making fliers for her dance club - each one no great work of art, but certainly made with care and love, sees now that her work is useless and stops. We all lose.
You're barking up the wrong tree. You're trying to tell artists about "skill", when they've spent lots of time (potentially thousands of hours!) getting good at their craft.
Your snobbery will be short-lived as tools eclipse our "art", and creativity is revealed as nothing inherently unique to humans.
Creativity, fundamentally, is overlapping memories of what you have seen already. Literally no different than any diffusion or transformer model.
You painting a piece of art or composing a song was really the functional output of billions of cells coordinating in unison, 100% subconsciously, and the thoughts that arose out of your subconscious were entirely (or mostly, to avoid free will debate) out of your control. Your output was the product of billions of years of stellar and biological evolution on top of millennia of human history and influence. You created nothing.
Soon you will have to grapple with the reality of what really drives your enjoyment of media, and part of that will be realizing that the human-ness never mattered at all.
Is beautiful nature scenery not beautiful because it wasnt hand-crafted painstakingly by a creative human? Of course it is. There is no intuition for the vast swaths of time it took to form, that is a modern human conceptualization that came long after we already found nature to be beautiful.
We have a biological pattern recognition tuned for beauty regardless of its origin. And there is nothing inherently unbeautiful about elegant software that can produce beautiful "art". Nor is there any justifiable, defensible, or intellectually honest way to argue that the human/effort element in art matters in any way besides perhaps portraying and conveying social status.
> Creativity, fundamentally, is overlapping memories of what you have seen already. Literally no different than any diffusion or transformer model.
Every individual has a unique experience, and assimilates different things from their experiences depending on their personal tastes and culture. That is profoundly different from a model which assimilates the output of hundreds of thousands of individuals. A model has no creative, or artistic voice. Your argument is anti-humanistic, nihilistic nonsense, and also trivially verifiably wrong given no model today has produced music or art of any value.
Do you really think a human creating something isn't the output of assimilating the outputs of countless humans that came before them?
Your argument implies creativity is confined to humans or brains. So no creativity existed before that? Weird. Lucky for us that evolution spawned creativity then!
If you could answer that question then that should help me understand, since you say it is trivial to verifiably prove my position wrong
The dean of the art school I went to regularly used to say "The most creative people simply to the best job of hiding the source of their creativity". - in fact he invoked it once directly to me when I protested about how one of my peers went about their final assignment, and again when the whole program revolted over a submission that won honors. I learned a lot about art in that art program, but mostly I learned art wasn't that I thought it was. :)
I am a musician, in the “accomplished amateur” category. For me, music is a never-ending journey of learning and skill-building, and I’ve come to appreciate that journey as much or more than the destination (= recording or live performance). If you gave me a one-click button to improve my skills, I’m not sure I would click it— I’d rather get there myself.
I’d encourage you to dig deeper into why and how the music that is being created by those tools works.
"If you gave me a one-click button to improve my skills, I’m not sure I would click it— I’d rather get there myself." - Me too! :) I use suno to gen vocals, I use my regular teenage engineering workflow + Abelton to mix and master, I'm WAY better in Abelton than I was even 6 months ago - people have always been able to download photoshop actions and filters etc, as you said, it's more about the creative journey.
The whole problem with this is that the people using generative AI tools are trying to co-opt what "art" is. They're barging into creative spaces and demanding that the real artists treat them as equals. I hope you understand that no group of people would treat you kindly for doing that.
Sure except half my classes in art school ended up in debates on what "art" even is/means - some people thought if it involved commerce at all it's not art, some people about the process, some people about the human, some people about the final work itself, is it high or low brow, fine art or emotive? So when you say "co-opt what "art is." - sure, but...not sure.
On barging into creative spaces and how that should be viewed, I suspect you and I would find we feel the same. I was personally involved in building and shaping deviantart and how we tackled these ideas, so what you see there today is influenced by my(and scott, eric angelo etc) thinking on this matter.
I was there in the beginning getting it off the ground, I've not looked in a very long time but dA is owned by WiX now so I'm not surprised. A lot of people left when we started to highlight vector art/pop art, a big wave left when we started to support suzi9mm and co, this wave will be AI. Here is the idea we built it on: https://x.com/dissenter_hi/status/2011183228154188111
Exactly! :) When I was going through my back and forth on if I should upload it to soundcloud I thought a few times "I should just build SlopART" - if I had more time I probably would, because it's a place I wouldn't mind hanging out. :)
Typed a prompt and hit generate. No response after waiting some time. I scrolled down to existing sample music to get a sense of what it creates and hit play. Not one of the play buttons worked. Ok load up Chrome instead of Firefox, maybe they did some Chrome specific thing? Nope site's still broken and none of the samples under "Suno AI Music Gallery" actually work. There's a javascript error "invalid client" on clicking it. I'm not logged in i guess?
It did work on mobile but that seems like it presents a completely different site.
I think the URL should be suno.com, the link you posted is a different thing? Suno.com is the one I've used, I generally use it for DND type campaigns when I need custom music for scenes or background noises. It does pretty good sound effects and spoken word so sometimes I use it for that as well.
Mostly using it to gen vocals, sometimes stems, sometimes gen samples, then as you'd expect -> wav out -> lay it up in Abelton, add in my teenage engineering stuff - filters -> mix and master -> out
https://soundcloud.com/john/eager - I put over 16 hours into this track, I'm sure someone who knows about music can point to loads of errors in it, I'm sure it's sloppy in parts, but I put real effort into it and I'm proud of that effort.
So I've used Suno a bit in my own musical creations, but would never release something with any sound that was generated via AI. What I do is write and record a song (I'm also in Ableton), then when I'm unhappy with something or don't know where to go next, I throw it into Suno and have it generate some ideas. I use those ideas just as you would use ideas from a writing partner. If I like them, I transcribe them, play them on real instruments, and record them. So no actual sound from Suno ever makes it into my compositions - just some of the musical ideas here and there. That way it's still me playing and still sounds like me.
To me, this is the most legitimate way for music makers to use AI. If you go look at the credits for almost any professional recording artist, they all work with one or more writers and producers to get their music dialed in. Us normies can't really afford to have Max Martin come over and write with us, and I think using AI in the way I mentioned is a suitable alternative. I really fail to see the difference, honestly.
Yeah! I think how you are doing it is great! For me making music is about spacing and...I dunno, the sound stage I guess? Sometimes I don't even listen to lyrics I like getting lost in the flow of it, I'm not interested in improving my own singing abilities, but I am interested in improving as a song writer, suno really helps me hear what my words sound like. I can also gen stuff real quickly to throw into my OPZ or OP1 to put together into tracks, it's a lot of fun.
If I have an exact idea of what I want something to sound like, and I'm able to use an automated system to create that, is that creative expression? Obviously AI isn't entirely capable of that, but eventually with BCI devices it might be.
I've spent many hours learning to play guitar and ukulele but I'm really not very good, and probably never will be - but I can hear the music in my head I want to create. I'm not interested in monetary gain at all, just being able to hear it for real and maybe share it with some people.
>I've spent many hours learning to play guitar and ukulele but I'm really not very good, and probably never will be - but I can hear the music in my head I want to create. I'm not interested in monetary gain at all, just being able to hear it for real and maybe share it with some people.
Luckily there are hundreds of MIDI editor DAWs available. Open the piano roll, and write down the music note by note. Surely, it's not that hard if you can hear it in your head.
AI is not the only way to make synthetic music. If you have an exact idea, you can use virtual instrument plugins for software like Ableton Live to produce music.
That's how I feel about it too. I play piano well enough to get my ideas out and have used synthesizers and digital audio workstation software for years. I can sit down and carefully craft the music I have in my mind if I want to. Though I don't often have the time or the mental space to do so.
Or, I can make a barebones recording of musical ideas - of melodies, harmonies and the overall song structure - then upload it to Suno and inspire its robotic session musicians to play it in the style I ask. Quicker to make, faster to iterate upon, and can even be used as the basis for resynthesizing the track using more traditional methods.
Half-finished tracks, ideas that were only in my mind or existed only as badly recorded piano-bashed drafts, now (almost) fully fleshed out. It's immensely satisfying, and has made me even more creative as I use this tool to understand and explore musical styles I'm less familiar with.
It sounds to me like you just need to try creating electronic music, not using generative AI. If you really have an exact idea of what the music should sound like, you should be able to realize your vision this way, and you can use realistic instrument samples if you want. It may not sound the way a person would have played it, since you can't fully replace a human performer, but it can still sound really good, and there's a huge body of video game music from the last 30 years or so to vouch for that.
I’m a founder of one of these AI music companies and that noise you’re describing (it differs between co’s for us it’s loud vocals, for Suno it’s vocal aliasing/sandiness and mushy instrumentals, etc) is exactly why I think these songs should not be going on Spotify/etc.
We’ll have this (and the corny lyrics issue) mostly fixed in a month or so, then it mostly becomes a recommendations problem. For example, TikTok is filled with slop, but it’s not a problem - their algorithm helps the most creative/engaging stuff rise to the top. If Spotify is giving you Suno slop in your discover weekly (or really crappy 100% organic free range AI-free slop) blame Spotify, not the AI or the creators. There are really high effort and original creations that involve AI that deserve to be heard, though.
I suggest going back and listening to some of the first experimental electronic music. The tools have improved a lot since then and people have used them to do really cool things, even spawning countless genres.
Thankfully, most of it doesn't reach your Spotify feed. I think most of it is garbage, but I'd fight for the right of people to continue posting it. All things algorithmic have this exploration/exploitation, diversity/fidelity tradeoff and Spotify has theirs tuned very heavily toward exploitation/fidelity. I think there is a cool opportunity for someone to put the tradeoff dial into users hands.
> If I have an exact idea of what I want something to sound like, and I'm able to use an automated system to create that, is that creative expression?
i say this without malice (more as an encouragement to you to do whatever you like): nobody cares about your individual consumption choices. if you want to consume content from a machine that produces the thing you want to consume, that in and of itself has no impact on anyone but you. but you might be missing out on good music (either by someone else, or by your own hand) and ultimately, i wonder if you will value the end product of a musical vending machine.
I think the real distinction is whether the output came from the artist's human intention, or whether someone just said "let's just see what happens!"... it's sort of impossible to reach inside the artist's brain to find out where that line is. I suppose the only test is to start with that same intention multiple times and see how widely the output varies.
Wasn't your intention whatever you typed in? That doesn't make you an artist and I don't want to hear the music AI made that you happened to type some words to and hit enter.
Not really. If I plug up and frob-a-knob (real or emulated) eurorack at random to just see what happens, the resulting hour long noise will be described as experimental, boring, profound, piece of trash etc. (e.g. check reviews on Beaubourg by Vangelis) It is not going to be put on the same spot as AI slop.
While intent of course is important, the quantity and manner of taking others' work and calling it my own, I thing, plays even bigger role. If I go "hey check out this Bohemian Rhapsody song I just created using Google Search", I do not think much regard will be given to my intent.
Can’t imagine this policy lasts more than a year or two given the rate that AI tools for music are improving. Once the tech can reliably create high quality dry stems of instruments, backing tracks etc. and automate professional-sounding production work (which most musicians do not currently have access to) everyone is going to be using it even if they won’t admit it publicly.
Why would quality matter, You make a image from Google AI and its instantly marked as Synth ID. It can be easily detected and thrown out if you want to keep the site AI free.
We would need AI free places now that AI is so easy and cheap to produce.
This seems like a good decision, although, is there a good way to tell if music is AI-generated? I assume that some of the music that's showing up in my Spotify feed is AI-generated but I've never noticed.
So there's really accurate ways to detect "pure AI".
The AI music detectors out there are mainly looking out for production things:
-a flatness to the EQ spectrum that you wouldn't get out a properly mixed and produced piece of audio
-no good stem separation, so no per-source eq (relates to above point)
-change BPM mid-song
-unnatural warbles at the end of every phrase
-vocals will have these weird croaky voice cracks, or sound scratchier and raspier
There definitely are tell-tale signs of "pure AI" in audio, but it becomes a lot more nuanced when any sort of secondary mixing/mastering/compression happens (which is the case 90% is the time in the real world- anything on YouTube/Spotify get's compressed).
> I assume that some of the music that's showing up in my Spotify feed is AI-generated but I've never noticed.
A lot of it is now, and it's frustrating to me. The worst part is that I'm not actually anti-AI-music. There's one or two "groups" ("producers"?) I've found where it's clearly AI but they've put a lot of work into making something worth listening to, but Spotify seems to have a "this sucker will listen to the cheap stuff" flag and now I'm drowning in tracks from people who paid for Suno and think that's enough.
I'm not sure about the flag :D but I've had pretty good results with always making sure to flag every artist in AI suggestions with "don't play". You have to visit the artist profile pages to do it though, so it remains a cat and mouse game, but I think that as long as they don't prevent it by force, doing this tends to improve the AI suggestions (of non-AI music).
Similar to YouTube slop.
If that would stop working, I'd cancel Spotify again.
Speaking of YouTube slop, I think Spotify has had its own system of preferring cheap muzak from labels they support since before GenAI music even took off, I think. Example label: Firefly entertainment (IIRC)
At least for the current AI music generators, it's pretty easy to tell by ear that it's AI generated. Everything is just a little off, especially the higher frequencies. Vocals often sound indistinct, like an unholy amalgamation of thousands of people are singing instead of a single person.
I think it would be very difficult for most people to tell that songs are generated by Suno 5. There are some interesting anomalies I can see in the spectrum and mid/side channels, like Suno music often has very little information in the side channel (what happens when you subtract the left and right channels from each other). You also commonly see the eq curve of the rhythm section shift over time throughout the song - like drums will sound normal at the beginning but end up sounding kind of under water by the end, but they are quickly improving these things. But to the layperson, many of these things are completely invisible. The most obvious tell, IMO, is the cadence of the lyrics.
Does this apply to all genres or just highly produced popular music? I would not be surprised if I failed to detect an AI song as background in a television commercial, but it is difficult to imagine that anyone could fail to pick out an AI impersonation were you to slip one in to a record like 'João Voz e Violão.'
It really depends on the style, yes. You could probably slip one into any modern pop/dance/club/EDM album and no one would know as long as the vocals sounds like the performer. For styles which are very unique with that sort of imperfect human touch that makes music so enjoyable, it would likely be obvious, at least at the moment.
Currently it sounds like it's been through an allpass/comb filter. Complex parts, while spectrally there, do not make much sense as a real sound. Probably audio analog of the "finger salad" of early image models. I do not count of being able to tell one from another in a few months.
It sounds like a moral stance on its face, but honestly they probably wouldn't care if someone posted a reasonable amount of AI-generated music that was high quality enough to gain a following of listeners.
This is likely a stance to prevent an individual from producing thousands of AI generated tracks and attempting to flood the zone for anyone browsing and searching.
There's a lot of music on Spotify for example that tries to latch on to current trends in an attempt to get pulled into search results and recommendations.
One day soon many musicians will be using AI assistance, and many won't tell you for fear of judgment.
It's like that with code and art.
Purely AI anything is garbage. But AI tools in the hands of people who know what they're doing are just faster scaffolding and better plywood to build with. The framing is still mostly human expert.
The same argument applies to AI generated or assisted music. Anyone can write a prompt and get a song. It takes judgement and taste to pick a good song and choose to publish it.
"New technologies have the tendency to replace skills with judgement – it's not what you can do that counts, but what you choose to do, and this invites everyone to start crossing boundaries." - Brian Eno
Not a musician (dabble with the guitar from time to time but I do absolutely love music) and don’t make music but one of my best friends growing up has been playing instruments forever. He writes songs and song lyrics. He has started a YouTube channel and shares some of the music he makes, and it sounds really great. I am amazed sometimes how great. But he puts in lots of effort to craft these songs and lyrics. They are not “one-shot” prompts.
If we look at this through the lens of making software with ai, which also allows for creativity, blanket bans may keep lots of quality stuff from being made.
How will the tracks be distinguished? Any ai and you’re out?
This is just a fad. The platforms will soon learn that the vocal minority is not necessarily their best customer. And then they'll slowly / quietly revert their bans or stop enforcing them.
If people listen to music, they like the music, and it can come from wherever. Gatekeeping never works.
How would this be a vocal minority on a website like Bandcamp, whose whole mission statement is to let people support their favorite artists directly?
I'm sure there genuinely are lots of people out there who would enjoy AI-generated music, but I very much doubt there's a huge crowd of them on Bandcamp, if for no reason other than ideological.
They can get their "AI" music in many other places, there's no reason for Bandcamp specifically to provide it.
As of yet Bandcamp hasn't tried to become an 'everything is here' kind of distributor, but rather more tailored to small, niche, quality &c. artists, and not consumers. Kind of the opposite to Spotify.
This isn't true, there's a wide array of reasons people might listen to the music.
The most obvious problem here is that, since AI allows creation with zero effort or time, it has the ability to absolutely flood every creation market it touches.
It's not possible to find out that you actually hate AI generated music and actually love Queen when you're forced to listen to 1.2 million songs before you find Queen. Or, whatever new artist equivalent.
It's the same issue on video platforms. Is there non-slop content on Instagram Reels? Yes. Can you find it? Uh... no. So you're gonna be watching slop and you're gonna like it, because that's all you know.
For an example of an AI generated song that's gone viral in the last few days, getting millions of views on Spotify / Youtube, see this post from earlier today:
"Tell HN: Viral Hit Made by AI, 10M listens on Spotify last few days" [1]
I've been micro-sampling AI "covers" or "re-imaginations in a new genre" of certain pieces of music.
For making house/4x4 type music, it's actually pretty fun. Once you chop something and repitch it enough, no algorithm can pick up on what song it is you are sampling if the AI track is way off from the original piece.
No way would I actually try to monetize it, though.
It will be interesting to see how/where the line is drawn on "in substantial part", considering that Logic Pro lets you click a button and adjust some sliders to add an (awful, imo) drum/instrument played by AI to your track.
But that's absolutely not generative AI (which bandcamp explicitly stated the policy is for) and it's not even classifiable as traditional AI. The session tracks are just some base patterns selected by sliders attached to options adjust stuff like "play these notes in an inverted chord".
Hmm, a few years ago, such a feature would have been called "AI" in marketing materials, no? Aren't all current GenAI tools in some way "just some base patterns selected by sliders attached to options adjust stuff" - only the 'base patterns' are some weights in a neural network.
This is IMHO an impossible line to draw. If an established artist uses a GenAI music tool it would be accepted. If somebody unpublished does the same it wouldn’t. Assuming they can even tell the difference, which they can’t.
It's not always obvious anymore what music is AI generated. And it will likely get harder to determine. I wonder if this kind of policy is going to lead to artists who are not using AI to be accused of doing so?
Understandable. But the question I don't see anyone asking, and I really want answered, is how will they identity? I'm not a good singer at all. Recently I wrote a song, uploaded the music to Suno and it created nice music and composition. I downloaded the individual layers of music, sent the vocal to another app that changed it to my voice. Put everything together and it sounds like me singing.
Some of the AI applications may sign the data in a purposefully detectable way.
Other than that no idea.
With this said, this may be more of a reason to get rid of the AI trash slop that scammers use to attempt to make money, gum up the platform with, and not actually ban people that make decently good AI based songs.
We now sort of accepted the idea of “vibe coding”, and, even shared appreciation from people who are using it to resuscitate side projects and things they wanted to do but required a lot of work. (Heck, even Linus Torvalds is doing it).
Is “Vibe Music / Art” any different? For example, I am not a drummer, say I use Suno to program some drums for me so I can record my guitar on top, and finally release that track I’ve been procrastinating.
I think the analogy here holds. Not all vibe coding is good, and not all vibe art is bad.
The difference is that code is functional, and the product is the output of the code, not the code itself, whereas music is the thing in itself. I'm not inherently anti ai-creations, but the bar is higher for style in aesthetic domains than functional ones, so AI art/writing/music/etc needs to be heavily filtered/massaged/etc. Plenty of writers/artists/musicians are using AI like an idea generator/scaffold then recreating/enhancing the outputs and going under the radar, it's just the low effort people that everyone sees.
Sure, the analogy applies. Vibe music, vibe art, and vibe coding, for the original specific use of "vibe" meaning "take whatever the computer spits out and don't try to understand it or make it human-serviceable at all", are all low-effort, and they don't belong alongside the corresponding human work without a clear warning label.
(I also think that "AI-assisted" work should have a clear warning label, but I don't automatically equate "AI-assisted" with full "primarily AI-written".)
What do you mean by warning? Transparency I get it, what made you pick the word warning specifically? I wouldn’t mind disclosing that my drums were AI generated for example, but what would a “warning” text be?
In the labeling sense, it's a warning label, in that it serves to tell people who may wish to avoid something that it is present in the product, much like warnings saying "may contain tree nuts" on products that are potentially cross-contaminated. (As compared to a label that people are likely to seek out, like "100% juice", which is regulated differently to prevent people from using it when it doesn't apply.)
In the computing sense, it's a warning, in that it doesn't stop you from ignoring it if you want to, but some people may wish to `-Werror` / `-D warnings`.
That was precisely what I meant with the use of "sort of". Sorry it wasn't clear to you, I did not mean to take words from those that disagree and I do understand that!
The use of the AI drums would pollute your original guitar work with sounds that, interpreted as music, are necessarily derivative and unsentimental. I agree that the technological aspect is a red herring, but art and coding are dissimilar in their aims.
My impression is that BandCamp is not inherently against using new technology to generate new sounds. This decision seems to be not about "what is art" but about "what is good for BandCamp right now".
As a small platform like BandCamp you do not want to be flooded by cheaply generated AI copies of existing songs / genres - this would alienate both artists and customers and could endanger the whole platform. You also don't want to expose yourself to internal complaints and external copyright claims because someone uploaded hundreds of "Popular work X in the style of popular band Y" songs.
The AI slop avalanche will pass by and probably leave behind some cool stuff. In the meantime, it seems like a sensible option for BandCamp to step aside and evaluate their position in a year or two.
If it solves a problem, good for you but I don't think people should put their vibe coded projects online. They don't have any value.
There are delusional people who create vibe coded pull requests to open source projects and they believe they are actually contributing value. No they only create work for the maintainers that have to review the subpar code.
As for your use case, are there really no royalty free drum beats that you could use? Not to mention you could probably learn to create your own beats in Ableton in one weekend. You are cheating yourself.
Personally, I feel like tech companies have already taken over so much of our lives and culture that I don't want them to take more. Corporations have weaseled their way into almost every facet of our lives at this point. Letting them take over human expression and become a substitute for human creativity just feels beyond the pale. When do people say enough is enough?
A stonemason who creates pieces by hand gathers more respect than one who delegates their craft to a cnc machine. No person who respects their craft will use tools that devalue their relation to their craft. Only those who seek to maximize personal gain of wealth would use such tools. Such a person, who sees merit only in the ends produced, rather than in the means themselves, does not participate in the shared history of their craft, in artistry, or in their own personal development.
For a real musician, AI is already too much. For there to be meaning and soul in their music, is must be derived from the intersection of their skills and imagination, whereby the unconscious can make itself manifest in the utilization of ones virtues. Delegating this process to a black box deprives the art of its unique individual perspective that can only arise out of the finitude of human experience and learning. For though the black box may have superficial knowledge of generalizations of many such perspectives, it smooths out all paths into bland sameness. Thus no real artist of merit has any use for AI, for it is always of a lower degree than the more powerful tool that is their mind.
I confess I am torn by your comment. I myself wouldn't choose AI for guitar, given that's where I have perfected my craft, and I am able to relate to what you said. However, not as an artist, but as a listener, I have no trouble with a guitar composition made by a machine.
John Dewey's famous book talks about shifting the focus from the maker to the experience and that the value of something is not about the artist's inner struggle but about the work's capacity to generate lasting experiences. This also ties well into Roland Barthes' essay about reading and how language is a living thing. He puts forward the notion that meaning lives in the reader, not in the writer. Audiences is what turns it into an experience.
Again, this isn't to devalue the effort or that the inner struggle isn't commendable, this is to say that artistic value can exist beyond that.
The making of art is a personal experience, and the beholding of art is another type of personal experience. If we suggest that the two can be separated such that we can behold art without knowledge of the production of it, well I would consider that wrong. There is a reason each piece in a museum is given a plaque telling its medium and brief background. This is because the meaning of a piece is derived from its context and cannot be separated from it without making art an arbitrary sensory stimuli.
The issue with the reduction of art to experience is that it ignore that our knowledge shapes our experience, and so the more we know about an artist and their process, the more different our experience of their art will be.
If one sees the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, they might not think much of it if all they know is that it's very popular. Another who knows why the Mona Lisa is particularly popular, because of its historic theft, has a different experience of it. And the person who knows of Da Vinci's life, who has read his journals, knows of his elaborate painting process and sophisticated details and meaning supplied in his paintings, why that person derives much more joy out of the work than one who merely sees it as a visual appearance producing merely a arbitrary liking/disliking.
Perhaps you might enjoy an AI composed track, but would you not enjoy it more if instead that track were human produced, particularly if you held more knowledge of the people making it?
As for meaning living in the reader, that cannot be true, for a person can find meaning in tea leaves or moving clouds. True meaning, as intentional, is not derived, but supplied, and it is the goal of every reader to behold the authors vision. That one fashions a different interpretation for themselves over the authors intentions is of necessity, for no two minds will see alike, but to look only for the reflection of oneself in art and not look beyond, why that is the death of art, for art is the revelation of the soul.
We don't have to agree, but the biggest problem I find with this take you're now bringing is that it leads to an infinite regress, you can forever expand your knowledge about the origin of something. Then, not to mention, that often we construct from evidence which is already an interpretation with data loss.
The Mona Lisa example actually supports both our positions in my opinion: someone can have a profound experience of it knowing nothing of Leonardo, while someone else has a different profound experience knowing his biography. Neither experience is 'false', they're just different modes of engagement with the same work. Personally, I have even experienced the inverse throughout my life.
Growing up not speaking English, and being flooded with American culture through radio, I was deeply moved by lots and lots of music made by foreigners that sounded like absolute gibberish to me. Later in life, after learning about the meaning of certain songs, I, unfortunately, lost some of my appreciation for it. Some may call that alienation, but to me it was a form of naivety of a child that enjoyed just sound in its pure form without it being tainted by any derived or supplied meaning from its creator that was attached to it through accompanied lyrics.
But then do we not agree, for if your experience of the music has changed upon learning the meaning of the songs, then it was true knowledge of the meaning of the piece which in the end determined your appreciation for it. And that our experience is not a fixed thing at one moment in time, but can re-occur and is in flux and subject to change in its quality based on knowledge gained. So from this you cannot return to the naivety of a child unless you reject from your mind the notion that knowledge determines quality and that the meaning supplied from its makers influences our experience of it.
Who is more correct, the child or the adult? If you suggest the child, then what do you say to the adult who objects on the grounds of the meaning of the sounds uttered? The adult would say that though the sounds are pleasant to the ear, they are not good to the mind. Thus, rather than affirming the child's vision, they would reject the pleasant sounds with poor meaning in favor of higher quality ones which are as equal in their harmonic value as with the greater quality in their meaning.
As for the infinite regress, that only proves the value of knowledge all the greater, for if we can expand our knowledge on the origins of something continually, so too can our appreciate of the thing grow in proportion. This only leads to a richer and deeper appreciation for life. In this way I can reread or rewatch a show in time and see more and know more than in my first experience, and so grows my appreciation for the details that I missed the first time. And this may only occur if the subject at hand is of good quality in the first place, for else when we descend further into the details and meaning we would be dissapointed at its lack. But that which is rich in meaning lacks none and may reveal itself new with every experience. This is why knowledge of the good is required, and why AI and lackluster artists may only produce pleasant sounds.
"I neither know nor think that I know," as Socrates said. Perhaps that's where we must leave it.
You see knowledge of origins as the path toward deeper appreciation, an asymptotic approach to the artist's soul. I see each encounter with art as its own beginning, where meaning emerges fresh in the meeting of work and listener, never fully exhausted by what came before.
Maybe both are true in their way. The child and the adult don't cancel each other, they're different movements in the same ongoing piece. I lost something when I learned those lyrics, and I gained something too. Neither experience was false.
There is no end to this question, for there is only beginning.
The debate about where meaning lives may itself be unsolvable, which is perhaps why we've been having it for millennia.
Thank you for the exchange. It's sharpened my thinking, even where we remain apart. :)
I would have no problem with that. I wouldn't maybe call the AI an artist though, it wouldn't have sentient knowledge to be an artist. It would be art made by a machine. In fact, we have several of those examples already, and there's lots there are really fun and appreciated out there. This new one just happens to be quite more complex and eerie to digest at first.
A little shocked. The biggest issue with music streaming right now is, imo, discovery. Algorithmic discovery is cute, but there’s a perverse incentive for companies who provide discovery services (ie Spotify) to funnel users to artists that cost less (ie AI generated in-house).
There’s also the fact that flooding the market with AI music slop _also_ makes discovery even harder.
Tried-and-true methods for discovery over the past decades are network effects (artists featuring and collaborating), and niche label A&R. However, Spotify has no interest, or incentive, to allow users to explore these avenues for discovery.
So, kudos to Bandcamp. But with better discovery this wouldn’t be necessary.
Finally, anecdotally, as someone in the top percentile of listeners for several niche genres on Spotify, I’ve yet to hear AI generated music that isn’t crap. Whenever it gets recommended to me by Spotify I reach for my phone, see that I don’t recognize the artist, and then see that they’re self-published on Spotify with a few hundred listeners. I guess if you don’t have any taste you might not notice, but it’s painfully obvious for anyone who is familiar enough to recognize themes, callbacks, and instrumentation within a genre.
I feel like the thing like you can easily divide things along the lines of 'art' vs 'consumption'.
A lot of people including myself enjoy music because it's so intimately human, the flaws and all. It's someone putting a bit of themselves into every piece they create, and people look for things that resonate with them.
AI music however is purely about consumption. It's not something made to be remembered or cherished. And the more you integrate it into your music, the less and less of yourself you put into it and the less reason for anyone to bother. I could just ask whatever AI to generate generic rock music inspired by the beatles and remove you from the equation entirely and have the same experience. Everything gets amalgamated into the exact same thing with all of the imperfections sheared away.
I think we need to start distinguishing between art-music and utilitarian-music.
Art-music is made by humans as a way of expressing yourself and making human connections.
Utilitarian-music can be made by humans or machines and is there to serve a purpose. Background music for the elevator or while you’re on hold. An ambient soundscape that you play in an airport terminal. It’s not meant to move people, it’s just there to fill silence.
Ok maybe you have the opinion that it's all crap right now. That's fine. But pretend it gets good. Pretend that instead of bothering with bands at some point in the future you just generate music to your tastes on the fly all the time.
Where does that leave Bandcamp? Do they market themselves as "fresh organic music" and live in that niche? What good does all the rights music companies own do if music generates on the fly?
I suspect a huge amount of lobbying incoming asap to stop this. Perhaps a law against AI generated music that's not owned by the RIAA? You might not like AI generated music but you should be very very cautious of those fighting it.
> Pretend that instead of bothering with bands at some point in the future you just generate music to your tastes on the fly all the time.
As someone who enjoys live music, I would still need a live band to play this on-the-fly generated music. I guess then you'll trot out AI holograms! but that sounds still as unappealing as your base case.
I worry that as technologists we are over indexing on accusing things of being AI. I worry about policies like this where they will remove suspected AI content without investigation.
Case in point, the other day I made a comment on reddit. I spent about 10 minutes writing it. I used proper grammar, bullet points, clean formatting, and em dashes, as I've been doing for many years.
I immediately got downvoted and sent multiple PMs about "not posting AI slop".
I didn't use AI at all to write that comment. It just looked like AI because it was well formed and researched. So am I supposed to add errors just to make it look "human"? But also, how do I even prove I wrote it without AI?
This is dumb. The solution for all music platforms should be to add a label for AI-generated tracks or artists so users clearly can disambiguate. It's frivolous to prevent someone from enjoying a piece of art whether AI or human. Furthermore, the line is blurred between what constitutes human vs AI development of music. Most producers today use pre-packaged samples, sequencers, and tracks to generate derivatives. Sure, they might manually have to mess around with Ableton to do so, but the line is already blurred.
I am not against AI art but this would better to be contained in specific platforms, you could browse Suno for AI music and Bandcamp for human music.
You would'nt display some generative art piece next to a Rembrandt. Also, Bandcamp could enshittified by a flood of AI music and change the fees or terms, so please no.
I've encountered a few artists who partially used AI in their music making process and the results have been incredible, I would hate to see them banned when grouped with people making completely AI-generated slop... Perhaps a middle ground could be reached? Allow AI generated audio as long as it undergoes significant processing by humans, for example.
Good decision. Bandcamp makes money from people who consciously avoided the streaming shitfest in favor of directly supporting the artists. Hardly surprising that their have a strong aversion to AI slop.
> Our guidelines for generative AI in music and audio are as follows:
> Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp.
> Any use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles is strictly prohibited in accordance with our existing policies prohibiting impersonation and intellectual property infringement.
Which is balanced. It means that you can still use Illugen to generate a drum sample for instance, but you can't just generate a whole track on SUNO and just upload it on Bandcamp.
How would they know? A lot of the new stuff is pretty indistinguishable from regular music with the AI adding imperfections like a recorded album would have.
Irrelevant platform says irrelevant thing. Also let people like or dislike things. Maybe we could pick if we want AI content or not. (it’s a no from me personally ) but I feel like the ban hammer is the tool of petty tyrants and lacks creativity and nuance
It's their platform, they can do whatever they want. Not everything has to be everything for everybody. And if you think they're irrelevant why would bother wasting your time commenting?
They handle a lot of sales [1], I do not think they can be called irrelevant under any reasonable definition of the word:
> In the past year alone, [customers] spent $208 million on 14.6 million digital albums, 11.2 million tracks, 1.55 million vinyl records, 800,000 CDs, 250,000 cassettes, and 50,000 t-shirts.
I wish youtube would also take action. So much of my recommendations for music is just AI slop now. I'd be OK if they flagged videos as AI and let me block them. At first I was open to the idea of AI synthwave as a thing but now it's just gotten out of hand and every day i am flagging new channels to not be recommended.
AI-generated music is novel, but like images and videos, I think of it almost exclusively as a novelty. I haven't heard any AI-generated music that I like in a real way. Just stuff that sounds like something I like.
The real value AI has for music is discovery. I've been using Gemini and ChatGPT to build playlists based on music I already like, and discovering lots of fun new tracks. I can be really specific about what kind of music I like and don't like. I can show it a playlist I already made, and ask it to make one like it, but with completely different artists. It's insanely useful!
But these kinds of tools would just expand how many different artists Spotify has to pay from my streaming, and that doesn't do the same thing as shoving cheap mass-produced slop down our throats, so it isn't surprising what they offer us.
Funny to see this right now. Spotify's promotion of AI music bothered me so much that it has actually pushed me to Bandcamp and the practice of buying music again. It's really fun to build a collection knowing you're supporting the artists, download FLAC files, organize your little "collection" page ... Feels like a renaissance in my relationship with music, the most fun I've had since what.cd. Anyway, love this stance they're taking.
Same for me! Switched to Bandcamp + Navidrome and have decided that one of my goals for the year is to find at least 2 albums per month I want to buy.
I will shamelessly promote the bandcampsync [1] CLI tool for automating downloads of your bandcamp library and bandcamp-sync-flask [2] wrapper that I built so I could invoke it from the web on my phone after I buy an album.
[1] https://github.com/meeb/bandcampsync
[2] https://github.com/subdavis/bandcamp-sync-flask
This is great. If you packaged it as a docker-compose YAML and maybe added a periodic task to poll automatically id drop it into Container Station in my NAS today.
oh my god thank you for showing me that
I had been using a combination of aria2 and a link scraper plugin for years to download bulk out of bandcamp because of how fast their API will time out.
What's the navidrome pitch?
You stream the music you own, it uses the subsonic protocol/API, and so is compatible with countless clients, letting your enjoy your lossless music on fancy hardware at home or cached on your mobile device when on the go.
Better Plex than plex for music built by people who know what they're doing that uses a common API among different servers and clients, including ones that glue to Sonos, etc.
I’ve been doing the same over the last few months.
The best part for me is going to record stores again. CDs are SO cheap now, especially used ones. I’ll usually pick a few out of the dollar bin just based on vibes and the cover and rip them when I get home. I’ve found some cool stuff. It’s like a treasure hunt.
Don’t miss Spotify one bit.
Yes. But shhhhh about cds, don’t want people to realise…
Also the price of decent (Sony hifi grade, not ES) CD players used is great too.
I did just realize after posting maybe touting how affordable CDs have become is maybe not the best idea.
I can't remember the artist but there's a fun song about how they used to pick up second hand LPs really cheap and then they got popular and too expensive, then discovered second hand CDs are really cheap now.
Frank turner-ish vibes but I don't think it was actually him.
It's completely un-googlable though, and even the LLMs aren't much help on this one.
Oh! I know this one! You're thinking of Jeffrey Lewis & The Voltage's LPs from 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3urXygZXb74'
Nice one, thanks!
The people who really want to stop paying for streaming are going to turn to piracy, don't worry. Physical media will still be accessible for people who are willing to pay with space instead of money.
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" - Gabe Newell
:'D
Aren't CD players just reading digits? I'm not anywhere close to a hifi expert but it must be all about the DAC, no? Or do you mean the ones with a built-in DAC?
> all about the DAC, no?
Yes, it is (unless the CD player is so bad that it can't do adequate error correction). What I do is rip the CD to my music server, which is where I listen to the music from. Then the quality of the CD player isn't important, as long as it works correctly.
it's surprising difficult to rip from audio CDs in a error free manner
most tools do it badly and just accept what the drive gives them in default mode, often with glitches
I second this strategy. My suggestion is keep an eye out for soundtracks and “sampler” type promo discs - some quirky gems! Record labels and their relationships with Hollywood did demonstrate money and drugs and music to great together…see: Spawn the movie soundtrack (1990s).
Also my library card is much better for legacy music exploration. It scales too.
I just wanted to say, thanks for saying this. I actually have been writing music and using Distrokid to publish to the normal streaming services (Spotify/Apple Music) and your comment actually pushed me to sign up for and put music on Bandcamp.
In case you'd like to take a look, shameless self promotion: https://aaronholbrook.bandcamp.com/music
I have to go through my back catalog, and add all my music, but I appreciate your perspective and for wanting to support artists!
I've been reading about Spotify pushing generated music but haven't seen that myself so I'm interested to know in what context it happens. Is it certain music styles? Spotify's own playlists? That smart shuffle feature?
I listen mostly in the old school way, full albums of my favourite artists, so I suppose it would be quite unexpected to stumble into AI music this way.
I believe if you go down the rabbit hole of "mood playlists" and spotify created playlists, then you'll get a lot of tracks that they don't need to pay royalties for and that could probably include AI generated music.
If you are explictitly looking for music by specific artists, then you get their music obviously.
Is there a good way to know if what you are listening to is AI? I listen to a lot of outrun and synthwave type stuff and it isn’t as easy as googling the artist’s name, a lot of it is made by artists that don’t tour and are quite small etc.
> then you'll get a lot of tracks that they don't need to pay royalties for
I love this conspiracy theory. Which track doesn't Spotify pay royalties for? Considering that it licenses 100% of its music from external distributors.
> The program, according to Pelly’s reporting in Harper’s Magazine, is designed to embed low-cost, royalty-free tracks into Spotify’s most popular mood- and activity-based playlists. Produced by a network of “ghost artists” operating under pseudonyms, the tracks are commissioned with the intent to reduce the company’s royalty payouts to artists, per Pelly.
https://edm.com/news/spotify-using-ghost-artists-minimize-ro...
Spotify hires musicians to churn out content that fits certain criteria. see https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
Spotify doesn't hire any artists because if it did, major labels would immediately pull their contracts.
No one actually understands what's written in this article, including the authors themselves.
Also note how you didn't provide a single track that Spotify allegedly pays no royalties for.
You’re missing the concept of session musicians that can improvise for hours. No license, flat fee.
Internally, they refer to it as “perfect fit content” (pfc).
It used to just be stuff like white noise and rain sounds, but it has expanded to essentially be a modern Muzak replacement.
For situations when people don really want “music” and just need “contextually appropriate aesthetically pleasing sound”
That makes all the sense in the world to me. I'd call that an entirely legitimate use for AI generated music.
There are artists that Spotify has different deals with. Spotify promotes their music in their playlists, but the artists get a much smaller cut of the profits in exchange. Win-win for everybody.
This only happens in genres where most listeners don't care about the artists they're listening to, think "chillout", "focus" or "easy listening." That kind of music is a commodity, Taylor Swift (or Metallica or Mozzart or whatever) is not. This has been proven.
My hypothesis is that those genres would otherwise lose Spotify the most money, as people often play that kind of music and never turn it off. Because Spotify pays per listen, the user who attentively listens to their favorite artist a few times a week is much better for them than somebody who has "chillout" playing on their echo 24/7.
> There are artists that Spotify has different deals with.
Spotify doesn't have deals with artists because Spotify doesn't have direct contract with artists. Only with distributors.
> My hypothesis is that those genres would otherwise lose Spotify the most money,
How would they "lose Spotify money", and how is this different from top artists on Spotify?
I'm not saying they are doing it now, but what's stopping them from generating their own tracks? What's to stop them from creating some bullshit company to generate AI slop and then licensing music from themselves at fractions of what they'd pay a real artist just to keep up the illusion so that real artists don't leave their platform?
If a corporation can do something that will make them more money than they'd make not doing it you should expect them to do the profitable thing. Corporations don't care about ethics or even the law. Maximizing shareholder value is their purpose. They exist only to take from the many and give to the few. It's not a conspiracy theory to assume that they'll be doing exactly what they are designed to do.
Not a conspiracy theory. Spotify hires session musicians (pre-AI) to pay a flat fee for hours of background music.
Since many high volume Spotify users just want “something jazzy” in the background, it helps them reduce royalties.
It's not really a conspiracy theory. YouTube users can use royalty-free music, it stands to reason Spotify would have the same (potentially internally) to decrease costs.
"Why pay royalties if it's just going to be BGM for a massage parlor?" could be their reasoning.
I only go to massage parlors that display their ASCAP or BMI license in the window. I wouldn't be happy getting an ending if some musician is being ripped off.
Yet another person who plays the bogeyman card of "conspiracy theory" when what is described is garden variety corruption, only takes a trivial amount of secret coordination in a group smaller than your average terrorist cell, and could probably even be defended as legal with a small legal team (Spotify probably has a big one).
There are a billion ways you could cash in on this. A dead easy one is "music written for hire by a company you own".
Even if Spotify is not doing the slightest thing like this, suggesting that they might is not a conspiracy theory. Quit trying to tar every proposed view of the world you disagree with with that label. You're just making it easier for the actual grand conspiracy theorists.
After an album ends Spotify keeps playing some related music. It's expected to include some tracks that are new to you. Then suddenly you notice "artists" you've never heard of with empty descriptions and "albums" from 2025 only.
> After an album ends Spotify keeps playing some related music.
Partially correct. That only happens if you don't have the loop functionality activated.
This. Lazy/mindless consumption without any discernment has been leading to various rabbit holes for quite a while. Ever saw youtube content which algorithm brings toddlers to if left alone with a device?
Autopilot in, autopilot out.
But still fuck this AI slop.
I’m the same as you, I search for artists I like and then listen to albums, saving them in my library. I never see any AI generated music or podcasts because I just listen to music.
I have more than enough music made by humans to listen to for the rest of my life without ever turning to algorithmic recommendations.
Best part of owning music is importing them to an old version of iTunes and sync'ing to your iPod.
I am vindicated in my choice to use an ipod with an aux jack every time Android Auto can't decide whether to connect over USB or bluetooth and just doesn't play audio until I restart the phone and the car...
I switched to Bandcamp a while back because I was sick of Spotify playing the same 100 songs forever. It feels like they have about 2 songs for every artist that they will actually play in any generated playlist.
Bandcamp continues to be the best place to organically discover new artists. If I'm ever bored I go to their front page and browse by genre. It feels like the digital version of Sam Goody or whichever 90s record store had the headphone kiosks where you could listen to songs before buying the record.
Spotify, on the other hand, induced a level of visceral disgust I'd never felt before when I stumbled across an AI-generated album supposedly made by an artist I enjoy. In this case it was somebody that had been dead for 15 years - they were hijacking her Spotify page to promote it as a new release. I'm not an AI reactionary but I found this absolutely fucking gross. Having AI-generated music for four-hour YouTube videos of anime girls sitting in apartments on a rainy day is fine. Desecrating the body of work of a departed musician is decidedly not.
This is not Spotify, it's Spotify fraudsters.
It's like being mad at your bank that somebody stole your credit card on the subway and made purchases with it.
Spotify failed and continues to fail to verify the provenance of the music on their platform. They also routinely allow bedroom EDM and trap producers to associate their releases with older artists just because they have the same name. If they have hundreds of millions of dollars to sign podcasters to exclusive deals then they certainly have the resources to respond to these egregious cases of misclassification. Unfortunately their report submission system will only allow this class of problem if you can verify that you're the copyright holder. This therefore means (unless I'm missing something) that it's easier to submit fraudulent music than it is to take it down.
Do not shift blame here. Spotify is actively complicit in this. Hell, they could sic a few crafty data scientists on this and build an ML model to weed these bad tracks out. It'd be great PR for them ("we're saving artists from stolen revenue and preserving the sanctity of their work") and would be a novel contribution to the field of fraud prevention. The problem is that they're not incentivized to do so.
And, by the way, card transaction fees exist to cover the exact case you're talking about. Card companies make you whole in the case of fraud.
> It's like being mad at your bank that somebody stole your credit card on the subway and made purchases with it.
It's being mad that a store sold me a counterfeit rolex, actually. Spotify might claim to just be a "marketplace" like every other platform these days, but they're still the ones hosting that page that passes off slop as legitimate work by another artist. Spotify has a responsibility to govern what is hosted and sold on their platform.
>It's like being mad at your bank that somebody stole your credit card on the subway and made purchases with it, and then your bank is like "oh, sorry man, we can't do anything about that, guess they have your card forever now"
FTFY.
I miss what.cd, bandcamp almost a replacement
There's is a quite solid alternative to what.cd: https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html
Is it easy to get in as a former what cd power user rank? I found my old rippy stickers from what.cd and missed that community so much. Ptp is great and alive though.
There's also Orpheus.network which is fantastic, gazelle based as well.
Same. I buy music from Bandcamp and Qobuz. I don't stream it though instead opting to sync my massive music collection through Syncthing
Absolutely! Bandcamp has really been phenomenal these past few years for me as well
Amen!
If you came across a song and fell in love with it, only to find out later that it was generated by ai, would you stop loving the song?
If the person behind it pretends to have produced it themselves, or (this actually happened) put themselves in AI-generated photos with celebrity artists in their cover/album art, then I will sour on them and stop listening to their uploads.
This has only happened once. The rest of the time, I will be listening to a radio playlist as I work when a song comes on that makes me go "Wait a minute." Checking the song's cover art, clearly AI. Artist page? 30 singles in 2025, every one with AI cover art. The bio reads like a Suno prompt (and probably is). The uploader then gets tossed in the proverbial bin.
The above has been happening more and more often. To the point where it's about 30% of the songs I hear on the radio playlist, as of this week. I'm in the process of migrating over to Deezer as a consequence. They label AI-generated music and do not recommend them or include them in radio playlists.
Edit: Not the exact same artist, but I searched a generic song name to find an AI slopper. This one AI-inserting himself into pictures with women for cover art is the same idea as the one putting himself in pictures with celebrities like Ariana Grande. https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kEPAFHKkMPF1...
If you saw a video of a person doing something cool, and later found out it was AI generated, would you still be impressed?
Of course, it's not exactly the same situation, but if I listen to a song and appreciate that the vocalist sounds cool and they're doing some technically difficult things, I am definitely less impressed to find out it's a computer program. And it also means I can't find other songs with that vocalist's same artistic sense because they don't have one, they're a computer program who can sound like anything.
Yes, I certainly would. I might even start hating the song, if that discovery left me feeling tricked.
That is such a bizarre opinion to have. Do you not enjoy art because it gives you joy?
Of course I do. But what gives me joy with art is that it's a communication from one person to another. It's not about pretty sounds (or pictures, or whatever the medium is). If that communication isn't there, then the art has no real value to me regardless of how pretty it is.
If I think I'm talking with a person and it turns out that I'm talking with a machine, I've been duped and will likely be angry about it.
Another way to think about it is that when it comes to art, "the ends justify the means" doesn't really work because the whole point is more the means than the ends.
>But what gives me joy with art is that it's a communication from one person to another
Maybe if a person generated 50,000 songs, not even listening to them, you could have a point. Although, even in that case, regardless of the lack of an "artist's intention," there is the interpretation of what people will take from that thing. And that interpretation is often different from what the author originally had in mind. Hell, most people don't know the author of most movies, TV shows, and the like they watched. In other words, to me, it's more about what people take from that thing, as opposed to "Oh, what that sentient being was trying to communicate?"
And I do believe a sufficiently advanced AI model would be able to mimic or synthesize human knowledge/worries/dramas in such a profound way that, regardless of "intention to communicate," it would be able to create things that people would relate to and take deeper meaning from.
Also: the very dataset where that thing was trained wasn't trained on an alien dataset, with an alien culture and the like, all originating from poems written by real people, movies by real people, etc., etc. The model learned from human culture; therefore, whatever it produces is a reflection of that culture, which people could and most likely will relate to, and, hell, they are already doing that.
But even taking the argument at face value, "Oh, human creation," someone might have used AI, but they were still involved in all parts of the creation process, like writing the lyrics, curating the data, and the very fact of them choosing a song and saying, "Hey, I liked that, I will share it with people," would already be a communication.
> Although, even in that case, regardless of the lack of an "artist's intention," there is the interpretation of what people will take from that thing.
Of course. My interpretation is an important part as well, but that comes from me, not the artist, so is a bit different. Well, maybe I should say that the meaning and importance of a song is in the confluence of the artist and myself. I did want to clarify something, though -- I'm not really talking about the "artist's intention" here. That's a different thing, too.
The emotional communication I'm talking about happens even if I have no idea what the artist's conscious intention was, or even if I don't know who the artist is.
> And I do believe a sufficiently advanced AI model would be able to mimic or synthesize human knowledge/worries/dramas in such a profound way that, regardless of "intention to communicate," it would be able to create things that people would relate to and take deeper meaning from.
Perhaps so! But that kind of simulacrum is something I have absolutely no interest in. In fact, I find the idea of it a bit repulsive.
> someone might have used AI, but they were still involved in all parts of the creation process, like writing the lyrics
If an artist actually created the thing, then it's not an AI generated song. It's a human created song that may have involved AI as a tool. I'm talking more about if a human just describes the song they want to an AI and the AI creates the rest.
That said, I'm particularly averse to AI vocals, because vocals are particularly intimate for me. A song that has a machine as a singer is a song I'll reject even if the rest was created by a human.
> the very fact of them choosing a song and saying, "Hey, I liked that, I will share it with people," would already be a communication.
Technically true, but that's nowhere near the kind of communication I'm talking about. That has little value to me unless the person sharing it and myself know each other very, very well. Then, it's a communication/connection between that person and me, which can make it a great thing even if the song wouldn't resonate with me on its own.
I mean, art is inherently about human experience and emotion. Each of us resonates with certain types of art and doesn't resonate with other types. All I'm trying to do here is explore and maybe explain what resonates or not with me. I am in no way saying that anybody else should share my tastes.
Yes, and I would be curious to discover which human artists' works were plagiarized to produce the result I liked in the AI song.
If the players played really well, would you follow an AI generated basketball league?
Absolutely not. Reggae Wars is proof of this.
This happened to me last month. After the first song, I suspected so I checked the cover and the artist profile. It was AI generated. I enjoyed the album nevertheless. You can find AI music enjoyable. People also hated DJ music before. And recorded music before. And electro amplified live music performances before that. This is just another category of music. Doesn't take away from human music. What people are right to be angry is that the tech was made on the backs of other people's non-remunerated work. Whether a human made a song or not shouldn't be as important as actual living artists being taken advantage of.
I agree entirely. Well, not entirely. I think anger would also be an understandable response if the music were misrepresented as being by human musicians if it weren't. Like it would be understandable if people got mad if they thought they bought easy listening and actually got acid metal. Or vice versa.
Now that's a sales pitch! You have my interest.
What do you search for or listen to that gives you ai generated music?
I'm a musician, but am also pretty amused by this anti ai wave.
There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own. Even if its just creative prompting, or perhaps custom trained models, someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai.
I'd pay for some app which allows be to dump all my ableton files into, train some transformer on it, just to synthesize new stuff out of my unfinished body of work. It will happen and all lines will get blurred again, as usual.
Also a musician and I don't think it's that amusing. IMO this isn't an "AI can't be art" discussion. It's about the fact that AI can be used to extract value from other artists' work without consent, and then out-compete them on volume by flooding the marketplace.
And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?
AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs.
Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument. Auto tune made it so you didn’t have to learn how to sing on key. There are many innovations in music over time that make it easier and less gatekeepy to make music.
We are just moving from making music as a rote activity similar to code, to making music like a composer in much the way that you can create software without writing code. It’s moving things up a level. It’s how the steady march of innovation happens.
It won’t work to put the genie back in the bottle, now it’s to find what you love about it and makes it worth it for you and to focus on that part. Banning the new types of art is only going to last as long as it takes for people to get over their initial shock of it and for good products to start being produced with it.
> Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument.
This is cliche. Most celebrated artists in the electronic music world can play several instruments, if not expertly, than at least with enough familiarity to understand the nuances of musical performance.
Electronic musicians are more akin to composers and probably have more in common with mathematicians and programmers in the way that they practice their craft, whereas musical performers probably have more in common with athletes in the way that they practice their craft.
You also need to understand how instruments make sound at an engineering level if you want to make timbre-perfect synthesizers which sound like said instrument, for instance
Electronic music is also very closely related to computer animation. Animated film technology is much more advanced, but a lot of techniques are similar.
Probably a good analogy too. Pixar's creative process is quite different from drawing it frame by frame and at least some aspects of it will use have used some sort of generative process, but it's incredibly involved and conscious in a way that typing "video of cute cartoon cat, Pixar style" into a prompt isn't.
Same applies to Bandcamp not having any issues with people making music in a DAW
>And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?
Personally, I don't buy this "AI models are learning just like we do." It's an appeal to ignorance. Just because we don't fully understand how a human brain learns, one can't claim it's the same as a statistical model of ordered tokens.
But even if it were true, I'm alright with drawing a line between AI learning and human learning. The law and social conventions are for humans. I want the ability to learn from others and produce original works that show influences. If this right is allowed to all humans, there is a chance one learn from and outperform me. That would suck for me, but I can accept it because it came from a universal human right I also enjoy. But an AI model doesn't have human rights. For models, the law and social conventions should still favor humans. The impact on the creative community and future creative endeavors should be balanced against the people who create and use the models.
I don't know how to do that with LLMs in a way that doesn't prevent the development of these amazing models. Maybe the government should distribute a portion of the revenue generated by the models amongst all citizens, to reflect how each model's value came from the written works of those citizens.
> If this right is allowed to all humans, there is a chance one learn from and outperform me. That would suck for me,
This is a rather sad take. If someone learned from my art or music and did something new and more popular, I would be happy! I had influence, I mattered. That new more popular work takes nothing away from my previous work. In fact, when I do science I'm doing it explicitly for this reason, to build on.
For me, creating music is not about "being the best" or "making more money than some other artist." It's about telling the stories I want to tell. An AI would not tell my stories, ever. It might produce things that somewhat similar, but it won't tell a human story, just a shallow imitation.
On the flip side, AI can be immensely useful. For example, stemming means that DJs or visualizer applications can do more with music. Perhaps AI can be used to create interesting new effects, or interesting new instruments or sounds. It can give ideas and help with inspiration.
I honestly have a hard time seeing AI actually driving musicians out of business because it can't tell a story. And it can't do that because it hasn't lived a life. Yes, I can see it producing low quality ad-jingles or low quality filler tracks like you see in spotify, so some people will be impacted. But we're long past time for some form of universal basic income to deal with this. It's not just artists that need a basic income at this point.
>The law and social conventions are for humans.
I don't know about that. America shows us that laws and social conventions are for corporations. Humans are just entities to extract profit from.
> Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument. Auto tune made it so you didn’t have to learn how to sing on key.
Neither of those things are really true, though. They made it possible to make poor music without learning those things, I suppose, but not make good music.
> Banning the new types of art
Nobody is seriously talking about banning AI generated music. What you're seeing is a platform deciding that AI generated music isn't something that platform is into. There are a lot of different platforms out there.
> Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?
Yes, when I make music, I am taking inspiration from all of the other artists I've listened to and using that in my music. If someone listens to my music, they are getting some value from my contribution, but also indirectly from the musicians that inspired me.
The difference between that and AI is that I am a human being who deserves to live a life of dignity and artistic expression in a world that supports that while AI-generated music is the product of a mindless automaton that enriches billionaires who are actively building a world that makes it harder to live a life of stability, comfort, and dignity.
These are not the same thing any more than fucking a fleshlight is the same as being in a romantic relationship. The physical act may appear roughly the same, but the human experience, meaning behind it, and societal externalities are certainly not.
Spot on Sir
> It won’t work to put the genie back in the bottle
It's not about putting the genie back in the bottle, it's about helping folks realize that the vague smell of farts in the air IS the genie--and this particular genie only grants costly monkey paw wishes that ultimately do more harm to the world than good.
> AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs.
I guess the difference is proprietary code is mostly not used for training. It's going to be trained on code in the public. It's the inverse for music, where it's being trained on commercial work, not work that has been licensed freely.
> AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs.
Not necessarily apples-to-apples here. Full songs generated from AI prompts don't crash like a computer program would. You could simply upload the garbage to Spotify and reap the rewards until it got removed (if it even does).
Some of the worst (best?) AI "artists" on Spotify have millions of views. It's tragic what it says about us. That most of us not only can't tell, but actually prefer this kind of uni-tone, blase, on-the-nose, emotionally manipulative crap.
There's music and there's music. When I want to listen to Music then I pick an artist and album manually. But 99% of the time, I just need something to play in the background when I'm working or cooking or cleaning - then it just has to sound pleasant, the value of that for me is exactly zero. Some of the best mixes I find for that are ai generated because they have a uniform pleasant sound for a long time, without anyone trying to impart anything on them.
The sterility of AI generated music will lead to a sterility in creativity of humans if "AI" generated music ever becomes dominant. The world is messy, and human music reflects that. But good for you if your life is so uncomplicated that human-created music seems offensive to you, I guess?
Humans are humans, computer programs aren't. A computer program learning doesn't matter, and it's not comparable to human learning. I have no empathy, sympathy or any sort of allegiance to computer programs.
I would imagine the vast majority of other humans agree with me. I'm not just gonna betray humankind because some 1s and 0s "learned" how to write music. Who cares, it's silicon.
> And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?
For me, one key difference is that I can cite my stylistic influences and things I tried, while (to my knowledge) commercial musical generation models specifically avoid doing that, and most don't provide chord/lead sheets either -- I would find it genuinely sad to talk to a musician about their arrangement/composition choices, only to find they couldn't
> I would find it genuinely sad to talk to a musician about their arrangement/composition choices, only to find they couldn't
So much of music composition is what "feels right" and is instinctual. Artists aren't consciously aware of probably most of their influences. They can cite some of the most obvious ones, but the creative process is melding a thousand different vibes and sounds and sequences you've heard before, internalized, and joined into something new, in a way only your particular brain could.
Let music historians work on trying to cite and trace influences. That's not something artists need to worry about.
> They can cite some of the most obvious ones
Thus already doing much better than the average Suno producer
E: More seriously, this strikes me as a motte-and-bailey where "Artists cannot list every single influence they have or provide an explicit motivation for every single creative choice" is treated the same as "artists cannot list influences or justify creative choices at all"
I am 100% sure you can't cite all of them
Depends - how long do you have, and do you accept answers in CSV, Arrow or Parquet?
> And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do?
But the parent poster is, presumably, human! Humans have the right to take inspiration like that from other humans (or machines)! Why do we seem so keen on granting machines the right to take from us? Are we not supposed to be their masters?
Couldn't you just as well say it's a human taking inspiration from other humans through a machine?
Only if the human is actually making the music. If a machine is just generating the song at a human's request, then the human isn't making music, the machine is.
No. Because the inspiration does not pass through the human, only through his machine.
>We are just moving from making music as a rote activity similar to code
From this statement, I doubt you've written any music worth listening to, or any code that's not trivial.
Don't confuse music with muzak. What you get from an "AI" is muzak. It will never, ever have the same depth, warmth, or meaning as a human translating human emotions and experience into music and lyrics.
> less gatekeepy to make music
Is "gatekeepy" how we're referring to skill now? "Man I'd like to make a top-quality cabinet for my kitchen, lame how those skilled carpenters are gatekeeping that shit smh"
Gatekeepy to not like something that's not to your taste
but if no one is making Linkin Funk, can't I enjoy it just because it's made with AI?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH-BNwBV4EI
Wasn't it Picasso that said "good artist borrow, great artists steal?"
I've never heard an artist confident in their own ability complain about this because they're not threatened by other competent human artists knocking them off never mind an AI that's even worse at it.
AI not going to out-compete anyone on volume by flooding the marketplace because switching costs are effectively zero. Clever artists can probably find a way to grease controversy and marketing out of finding cases where they are knocked off, taking it as a compliment, and juicing it for marketing.
But I liked the Picasso quote when I was younger and earlier on in my journey as a musician because it reminded me to be humble and resist the desire to get possessive -- if what I was onto was really my own, people would like it and others could try to knock it off and fail. That is a lesson that has always served me very well.
I'm starting to think more and more in my older age that being 'great' isn't a good thing. I might actually prefer being good. We'll see how that thought plays out though; give me a couple more years
> then out-compete them on volume by flooding the marketplace
The whole idea of outcompeting on volume doesn't add up for music. It's a power law game not a commodities game. Spotify is playing a dangerous game trying to pretend that it is but I have little faith it won't destroy their business long term and turn them into a future Blockbuster or Macy's.
> It's about the fact that AI can be used to extract value from other artists' work without consent, and then out-compete them on volume by flooding the marketplace.
What do you think about The Prodigy?
I didn't even think about the analogy to sampling (and the prior controversy) but that is an even better analogy. Ultimately, the different between what's creative re-use and what's a ripoff is a matter of how skillfully it's done and there's a lot of controversy in the middle!
It's like the reverse of the product that advertises itself as "AI driven." As if that's supposed to be a selling point. OK, it's AI driven, but is it good?
There may be short term emotional strings to pull. "AI driven!" or "AI free!"
But ultimately, no one will care if it's AI or not if it's good.
AI takes all of that old school idm and electronic music and repackages it without a human story to tell, ripping off actual musicians in the process. AI didn’t magically ‘make old IDM its own.’ It scraped decades of artists’ work, stripped out the context and intent, and reassembled the surface features. There’s no human arc, no lived constraint, no risk and no culture.
What’s being repackaged isn’t a new instrument, it’s other people’s careers. I’m not sure what part of that is supposed to be amusing.
I'm honestly not getting the human story thing when it comes to music and maybe art in general. I mean I get what it means, but I don't think it describes why people enjoy art.
To me, it seems more like people place their own meaning in art. A particular song might remind one individual of the good times they had in their teens, while the actual meaning of the song is completely different.
Bachs 5th symphony (or whatever) might be extremely annoying to someone because they had to listen to it every day at work.
And what exactly is the meaning of jazz fusion? I really like a good solo, but a lot of people hate it, they need to hear a voice. (though I don't particularly like the signature Suno or Udio solo..)
I found this ai track on Spotify that I unironically enjoyed. I listened to it every day while working on reviving an old passion project, which became its meaning to me. The tune, a long with its album with random disparate suno generations was taken down.
I'm not sure if I have a point here, but something is off with the story thing in art to me from a consumers point of view. Maybe from other artists as consumers point of view?
> Bachs 5th symphony (or whatever) might be extremely annoying to someone because they had to listen to it every day at work.
Or Beethoven's 9th. For different reasons...
"little of the old ludwig van"?
Your point echoes the "death of the author" concept in literature, where the work is independent of the creator, full stop. It's a useful concept up to a point, but if you really have no idea what it means to have a deep connection to music that is wrapped up in some idea of the creator as a human being, you should trust others when they say they do and it's important to them. For those of us with that value, AI slop is offensive, and to be clear, it has precedents in history with Muzak, early schlager music etc -- what they all share is a desire to use the power of music for non-artistic ends, which sucks from any number of viewpoints. If music has non-artistic utility, that doesn't justify a concerted effort to take away artist-made music from those who may not be paying attention.
except that what you’re describing is the CONSUMER SIDE of meaning, not the SOURCE of it.
yes, listeners project their own memories onto music, no one’s disputing that. but that doesn’t make the creator, context, intent, or labor irrelevant. treating music as interchangeable stimulus is how you end up defending systems that strip human work of attribution, risk, and livelihood while still feeding on the cultural residue artists created in the first place.
I think maybe we're talking past each other then. I'm saying I don't agree with the argument that music necessarily needs to have a story to be widely consumed in a positive way.
While I personally like it when people put their heart and soul into something, even if the result is technically not very great, it's society who is the ultimate judge of whether that creation benefits them or not.
I know that the track I'm currently listening to is superior in every way to some modern pop song. The artists have practiced for decades, they have their own unique style I can recognize in other tracks. But I also know that 99.999% of people don't give a shit and think it's noisy music, and depending on your perspective, they're correct.
I know a few EDM producers and the culture seems to consist of doing the most drugs of anyone you've ever met. Which is quite risky, true.
and here you thought you said something.
The issue is not so much an artist that will use it as a tool, even though there is much to say about it, it's the hundred of thousands of people with no interest in music whatsoever, that will flood the platforms in order to make a quick buck.
People who won’t invest anything and just want to make a quick buck won’t be successful with AI generated content/music.
You still need to invest significant time and effort to make it work.
Musicians who are being threatened by AI impersonating them, flooding the market with music like theirs, and otherwise actually harmed by this would disagree with you. Benn Jordan speaks at length about it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVXfcIb3OKo
They will be successful in drowning out the artists. Not individually so, but collectively.
They are though by sheer volume. Finding anything half good will be a needle in a planet sized haystack of slop.
This has already been the case way before AI was a thing.
As a new artist you have to compete against 60+ years of music history - much of it really good music too.
> As a new artist you have to compete against 60+ years of music history
Kinda, sorta. Good music is reflective of the society and era it was produced in and that matters. I regularly listen to music, from all over the world, that was composed (and some, recorded) 100+ years ago, music that was recorded 50+ years ago, and music that was recorded last month. None of them are a substitute for the other because each has a unique voice expressing things that were unique about the time and place they were made in.
So, in a sense, they aren't in competition with each other. But also, there are only so many hours in a day and there isn't enough time in your life to listen to all the worthy music that humans have made. Hard choices are necessary. In that sense, they are in competition with each other.
As a listener this is a good thing. Too much good music.
Now it’s that the listener has to compete with 60x absolute slop to find something good.
You're right, but for EDM this was pretty much already the case. The scene survives in large part thanks to DJs who wade through countless mediocre tracks looking for the few hidden gems to deploy at the right moment. I think AI means that DJs will become much more important in all genres.
How many engineers are using ai-generated software libraries at this point? This could be all over github, but the software mostly sucks (because the AI doesn’t do architecture and real engineering, that has to be input into it right now). Increasing the volume of production doesn’t necessarily lead to the abandonment of the “good stuff”. You still have to compose the music and write the lyrics, the AI is not sophisticated enough to competently do that right now
There are plenty of places to publish AI generated music. Why should a platform allow music it's users clearly don't want.
> demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own
I'm pretty sure the people at Bandcamp agree with you and that's why they mention future "updates to the policy as the rapidly changing generative AI space develops".
You can already do this, but the platformised generative AI is sloppy by comparison and not that interesting.
https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE
I find it interesting that there's so much pushback against ai generated art and music while there seems to be very little for ai generated code.
Perhaps that's because there's an enormous difference between fine art and computer programs.
Also, there's quite a lot of pushback against AI-generated code, but also because unlike music, normal people have no interest in and aren't aware of the code.
Musicians and artists are under pressure to make money, but they cant rush it
while programmers have to rush it these days or they lose their jobs. Programmers don't have much of say in their companies.
Devs are quite used to using others peoples work for free via packages, frameworks and entire operating systems and IDE’s. It’s just part of the culture.
Music has its history in IP, royalties, and most things need to be paid for in the creation of music or art itself.
It’s going to be much easier for devs to accept AI when remixing code is such a huge part of the culture already. The expectation in the arts is entirely different.
This doesn't make sense to me. I mean, the term "remix" literally comes from the music scene.
Artists are constantly getting inspiration from one another, referencing one another, performing together or having their works exhibited together...
While there are some big name artists who are famously protective of the concept of IP, those artists have made headlines exactly because when they litigate they seem so unreasonable compared to the bedroom musicians and pub bands and church choirs and school teachers and wedding DJs and millions of other artists and performers whose way of participating in "the culture" is much less tied to ownership.
I won't merge anything AI generated in any of my FOSS projects, unless I'm successfully deceived.
In the first place, I do not regard a copyright notice and license on AI generated code to be valid in my eyes, so on those grounds alone, I cannot use it any more than I could merge a piece of proprietary, leaked source code.
The copyright office agreed with you about the non-copyrightability of AI generated media so in that sense you can safely ignore copyright claims on anything AI-generated.
Most code people interact with are creations shat out by soulless corporations, why would they care? Being honest here, the vast majority of people have their code experience dictated by less than a handful of companies; at their jobs they are told to use these tools or get file for welfare. The animosity has been baked into the industry for quite a while, it's only very very recently that the masses have been able to interact with open source code and even that is getting torn down by big tech.
Compare this to music where you are free to choose and listen to whatever you want, or stare at art that moves you. IF you don
At work most people are force to deal with code like SalesForce or MSFT garbage, not the same experience at all.
Why would people care about code coming from an industry that has been bleeding them dry and making their society worse for nearly 20+ years?
I think a key factor there is that programmers (in the actual sense, rather than so-called “vibe coders”) are more likely on average than (current) artists and musicians to have intimate knowledge of how AI works and what AI can and can't do well — and consequently, the quality of their output is high enough that it's harder to notice the use of AI.
Eventually that'll change, as artists and musicians continue to experiment with AI and come up with novel uses for it, just as digital artists did with tablets and digital painting software, and just as musicians did with keyboards and DAWs.
AI music from suno sounds indistinguishable to non-ai generated music to me.
In terms of how well it works, the quality of AI music is far better than art or code. In art there are noticeble glitches like multiple fingers. For code, it can call non existent functions, not do what it is supposed to do, or have security issues or memory leaks. From what I can tell, there is no such deal breaker for AI music.
The tells in music are there. The most common being: vocals have a subtle constant hiss to them, voices and instruments sound different in the second half than they did in the first, the hiss filter gets more prominent and affects all instruments towards the end of the song, auditory artifacts like volume jumps or random notes/noises near transitions.
More subjective tells: drums are hissy and weak, lyrics are generic or weird like "Went to the grocery store to buy coffee beans for my sadness", weirdly uniform loudness and density from start to finish, drops/climaxes are underwhelming, and (if you've listened to enough of them) a general uncanny feel to them.
I've generated about 70 hours of AI music and have listened to all of the songs at least once, so it's become intuitive for me to pick them out.
Some examples for listening for the hiss filter:
https://suno.com/s/qvUKLxVV6HDifknq (Easiest to hear at 0:00 with the inhale)
https://suno.com/s/QZx1t0aii0HVZYGx (Really strong at 0:09)
Some examples for more hiss and other (subjective) tells like weak drums:
https://suno.com/s/tTYygsVFo88SX6OV
https://suno.com/s/CzFgC6dxSQLWyGSn
What???
Every thread on HN that touches on the topic has countless people talking about how LLM generated code is always bad, buggy and people that utilize them are inexperienced juniors that don't understand anything.
And they're not completely wrong. If you don't know what you're doing, you'll absolutely create dumster fires instead of software
Sure, I am one of the people who will say that. But where are the people calling for it to be banned? Where are the stores and websites that are banning AI generated software?
I feel like part of the difference is how art vs code is viewed. You could make the argument code is art, though most don't have that stance. Visual art and music tend to be made by a few people, there is ego involved, you care who the artist is. Code tends to be made by shops and consumers don't know who the coders are. Programmers are already faceless.
I think it's also about money. Places code and code samples are stored tend to be large companies that are in tech and on the AI hype wagon. Bandcamp is not one of those places.
There's one popular platform that requires disclosing whether and how AI was used (Steam), and if you search anything about it, all you can find is like a sea of articles opposing it.
Yes and it was probably only done because of people complaining about AI art, not AI code.
Really? You've not seen the numerous open source projects banning AI-generated PRs with extreme prejudice?
Positing that AI generated code is always bad and buggy is delusional.
I have dozens of little programs and websites that are AI generated and do their job perfectly.
Companies sell products built on code, not the code itself. Code is a means to an end.
Music is art, code is engineering. "Hackers and painters"[1] was always wishful fluff, unfortunately.
When it comes to code, I don't think anyone cares how the sausage is made, and only very rarely do people care by whom. The only question is "does it work well?"
Art is totally different. Provenance is much more important - sometimes essential. David is a beautiful work, but you could 3d print or cast a replica of "David". No one would pretend that the copy is the same as the original though - even if they're indistinguishable to the untrained eye - because one was painstakingly hand sculpted and the others were cheaply produced. This sense of provenance is the property that NFTs were (unsuccessfully) trying to capture.
[1] https://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
The pushback is motivated by the interests of the petty-bourgeois class, and those are a larger proportion of the former.
Imagine being a Marxist and not respecting the craft and labor required for art production. Couldn't be me.
The main differentiator I've noticed is: how much work is the tool doing, and how much work is the artist doing? And that's not to say that strictly more effort on the part of the artist is a good thing, it just has to be a notable amount to, IMHO, be an interesting thing.
This is the primary failure of all of the AI creative tooling, not even necessarily that it does too much, but that the effort of the artist doesn't correlate to good output. Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful.
Any other toolset I can become familiar and better equipped to use. AI-based tools are uniquely unpredictable and so I haven't really found any places beyond base concepting work where I'm comfortable making them a permanent component.
And more generally, to your nod that some day artists will use AI: I mean, it's not impossible. That being said, as an artist, I'm not comfortable chaining my output to anything as liquid and ever-changing and unreliable as anything currently out there. I don't want to put myself in a situation where my ability to create hinges on paying a digital landlord for access to a product that can change at any time. I got out of Adobe for the same reason: I was sick of having my workflows frustrated by arbitrary changes to the tooling I didn't ask for, while actual issues went unsolved for years.
Edit: I would also add the caveat that, the more work the tool does, the less room the artist has to actually be creative. That's my main beef with AI imagery: it literally all looks the same. I can clock AI stuff incredibly well because it has a lot of the same characteristics: things are too shiny is weirdly the biggest giveaway, I'm not sure why AI's think everything is wet at all times, but it's very consistent. It also over-populates scenes; more shit in the frame isn't necessarily a good thing that contributes to a work, and AI has no concept at all of negative space. And if a human artist has no space to be creative in the tool... well they're going to struggle pretty hard to have any kind of recognizable style.
There is an AI plugin for krita that lets you define regions, selection bounds, sub-prompts, control nodes, and lots more control over a given image generation model than standard Automattic or comfyUI workflows...down to 'put an arm wearing armor here' for example in my RPG NPC token writing.
It has full image generation mode, it has an animation mode, it has a live mode where you can draw a blob of images and it will refine it 2-50 steps only in that area.
So you are no longer doing per line stroke and saved brush settings, but you are still painting and composing an image yourself, down to a pixel by pixel rate. It's just that the tool it gives is WAY more compute intensive, the AI is sort of rendering a given part of a drawing as you specify as many times as you need.
How much of that workflow is just prompting a one-shot image, vs photoshopping +++ an image together until it meets your exact specifications?
No, the final image cannot be copyrighted under current US law in 2026, but for use in private settings like tabletop RPGs...my production values have gone way up and I didn't need to get a MFA degree in The old Masters drawing or open a drawing studio to get those images.
> Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful.
That's normal for any kind of creative work. Some days it just happens quickly, other days you keep trying and trying and nothing works.
I spent some of the 90s and 00s making digital art. There was a lot of hostility to Photoshop then, and a lot of "That's not really art."
But I found that if I allowed myself to experiment, the output still had a unique personality and flavour which wasn't defined by the tool.
AI is the same.
The requirement for interesting art is producing something that's unique. AI makes that harder, but there's a lot of hand-made art - especially on fan sites like Deviant Art - which has some basic craft skill but scores very low on original imagination, unusual mood, or unique personality.
The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique. AI-made art mechanises the mash-up, but it's still up to the creator to steer the process to somewhere interesting.
Some people are better at that than others, and more willing to dig deep into the medium and not take it at face value.
That's normal for any kind of creative work. Some days it just happens quickly, other days you keep trying and trying and nothing works.
Usually this means I have forgotten to eat, or that I need to take a step back and consider whatever I’m doing at a deeper level. Once I recognized that the “keep trying and trying and nothing works” days vanished for good.
> The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique
Yeah, no. Competent artists are not generalizable as "unconscious", solely "mashing up" influences or input, or even working with "signifiers": many are exquisitely aware of their sources; many employ diverse and articulated methodologies for creation and elaboration; many enjoy working with the concrete elements of their medium with no concern for signification. Even "technique" does not have a uniform meaning across different fields and modes.
> That's normal for any kind of creative work. Some days it just happens quickly, other days you keep trying and trying and nothing works.
For me, the artist, sure. I've not yet had a day where Affinity Photo just doesn't have the juice, and I don't see the appeal. Photoshop, for all it's faults, doesn't have bad days.
That's the difference between the artist and the artists' tool. A difference so obvious I feel somewhat condescending pointing it out.
> I spent some of the 90s and 00s making digital art. There was a lot of hostility to Photoshop then, and a lot of "That's not really art." ... But I found that if I allowed myself to experiment, the output still had a unique personality and flavour which wasn't defined by the tool.
"People were wrong about a completely different thing" isn't the slam dunk counterpoint you think it is.
Also as someone else in that space at that time, I genuinely haven't the slightest idea what you mean about photoshop not being real art. I knew (and was an) artists at that time, we used Photoshop (of questionable legality but still) and I never heard this at all.
> The requirement for interesting art is producing something that's unique. AI makes that harder,
Understatement of the year.
> The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique. AI-made art mechanises the mash-up, but it's still up to the creator to steer the process to somewhere interesting.
The difference is the lack of intent. A "person" mashes up what resonates with them (positively or negatively) and from those influences, and from the broader cultures they exist in, creates new and interesting things.
AI is fundamentally different. It is a mash up of an average mean of every influence in the entire world, which is why producing unique things is difficult. You're asking for exceptional things from an average machine (mathematical sense not quality sense.).
>someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai
And in the mean time, AI will continue to clutter creative spaces and drown out actual hardworking artists, and people like you will co-opt what it means to be an artist by using tools that were trained on their work without consent.
Along the same lines, the anti-AI attitude among musicians today reminds me quite a bit of the anti-synthesizer attitude of the 60's and 70's, down to the same exact talking points: fears of “real” musicians being replaced by nerds pushing buttons on machines that can imitate those musicians.
I think the fears were understandable then, and are understandable now. I also think that, just as the fears around synthesizers didn't come to fruition, neither will the fears around AI come to fruition. Synthesizers didn't, and generative AI won't, replace musicians; rather, musicians did and will add these new technologies into their toolsets and use them to push music beyond what was previously understood to be possible. Synthesizers didn't catch on by just imitating other instruments, but by being understood and exploited as instruments in their own right; so will generative AI catch on not by just imitating other instruments, but by being understood and exploited as an instrument in its own right.
The core problem right now is that AI (even beyond just music) ain't being marketed as a means of augmenting one's creativity and skills, but as a means of replacing them. That'll always be misguided, both in the practical sense of producing worse outputs and in the philosophical sense of atrophying that same creativity and skills. AI doesn't have to produce slop, but it will inevitably produce slop when it's packaged and sold and marketed in a way that actively encourages slop — much like taking one of those cheap electric keyboards with built-in beats and songs and advertising it as able to replace a whole band. Yeah, it's cool that keyboards can play songs on their own and AI can generate songs on their own, but that output will always be subpar compared to what someone with even the slightest bit of creativity and skill can pull out of those exact same tools.
> generative AI catch on not by just imitating other instruments,
but generative AI didn’t catch on by "imitating instruments." It caught on by imitating artists, which streaming platforms and record labels then repackage and outsell you with. false analogy.
This argument won't get you anywhere because "imitating artists" and "outselling artists" aren't actually the same thing.
i.e. complaining about training on copyrighted material and getting it banned is not sufficient to prevent creating a model that can create music that outsells you. Because training isn't about copying the training material, it's just a way to find the Platonic latent space of music, and you can get there other ways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
https://phillipi.github.io/prh/
you're dodging the point by retreating into silly abstractions. I’m talking about cultural and economic displacement of artists, not a pedantic debate about latent spaces. "Training isn’t copying" is the cynical AI shill statement that doesn’t address the fact that systems trained on artists are then packaged and monetized to outsell them. why is this part so complicated for you? or are you just being obnoxious...
dropping wiki links and math jargon avoids the ethical / market reality here.
> "Training isn’t copying" is the cynical AI shill statement that doesn’t address the fact that systems trained on artists are then packaged and monetized to outsell them.
No, that's the whole problem. The systems are capable of outselling the artist whether or not they're trained on the artist. So you can't prevent it by complaining about the training data.
This is not a super well thought out position, but I've been leaning towards really disliking AI art in general (without having an opinion on any strong policy action yet).
First, art is, I think, one of the most enjoyable activities we have. One evidence is a lot of people forego higher salaries to choose an art job (although being a job carries additional responsibilities and some inconveniences compared to doing it as a hobby). It's a shame to see it diminished, when I believe we should be diverting efforts to automate other stuff.
Second, most AI art I've seen has been quite substandard compared to human art. We still don't know very well what human emotions are, the origin of sentience and qualia, etc.. But I think humans still lead here in having and probably understanding emotions. While for other tasks most implementation detail is irrelevant (e.g. in code, that it works tends to be most important, vs. minute choices in style), in art every detail is particularly relevant. Knowing this, it bothers me usually when I see this art that it doesn't carry the same knowledge of context and nuance a human would have.
Third, There's also the effect of making me question whether each piece of artwork was made by a human or AI, that didn't exist before. It does carry a bit of a magical feeling I think knowing a real person made every piece of artwork prior to 2018 or so (I think algorithmic art[1] is fine in this regard, because it tends to be more clearly algorithmic, and the involvement of the artist in coding is significant), that is now gone or at risk. Even the thought of imagining say their work day or what they had for lunch or talked to coworkers or friends is pleasant to me (at the risk of romanticizing it too much).
I suppose if AI art actually understood human nature, and specially the specific context of each art piece, better than us some of my arguments might be diminished. But the negatives so far seem to outweigh the positives, and I would like to e.g. give preference to content that doesn't use AI art.
(It is, admittedly, also the case that we lost a similar amount of craftsmanship when the industrial revolution happened, and in return we were able to support a larger population, and greater material conditions for most people. Every object now isn't carefully handcrafted. I think it's different because well, now material conditions are relatively abundant, and second there's no such insatiable, significant and irreplaceable demand for art as there were to common industrialized objects (take shoes for example), at least not to the same extent or vital significance. That is, the ability to have a shoe at all far outweighs it being carefully handcrafted, I believe; while experiencing a poorly made AI movie or artwork might be actually worse than none at all (or simply an older human made movie), and it also gets more cumbersome to evaluate for ourselves whether AI was employed or not. Also, while say shoes only last a limited time and need to be constantly produced, good artwork can last indefinitely (using digital storage), and even if you account for cultural change and relevance, can still last a really long time, motivating investing more into it.)
I'm quite sure that if we're still around in 500 or so years, we'll still be enjoying say Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh (probably as a digital reproduction). Current AI art will probably be largely discarded, so seems largely an unwise investment. Actually this kind of applies to code as well. It seems plausible Linux could still be used in 500 years from now (see how we still value finding Unix v4 50 years after), or at least of some interest. Those durable intellectual goods don't seem like wise places to invest anything but the best of us :) (at least in the cases it's not disposable)
The arguments above also don't seem to apply say in concept stages, or say for bland corporate diagrams that will be disposed of in 1 day, and which a huge quantity is needed. I think the main criteria I would evaluate is (1) Was it enjoyable to produce (for the artist(s))?; (2) Will it have a significant (artistic) impact on who is experiencing it?; (3) Will it last a long time?
[1] W.r.t. algorithmic art (and digital in general) (take bytebeat[2] for example), which is a field I really love, I am not any kind of absolutist about it. I know there tends to be extremely more degrees of freedom for human expression in a manual piece than in an algorithmic piece, so I see it more as a complement and not a substitute for more conventional art. I'd never give up ever hearing human musician player music for bytebeat, just bytebeat is a lovely experimental other dimension of expression. Writing a prompt seems a too few degrees of freedom and context, and too much of an uniform context that is less rich than humans can provide.
[2] https://dollchan.net/bytebeat/
Cf. Holly Herndon's album Proto.
This is something people spent a lot of time on, is trained lovingly on only their own stuff, and makes for some great music.
It's "AI" but in an almost unrecognizable way to us now: its not attached to some product, and its not about doing special prompting. It is definitely pop/electronic music, but it follows from a tradition of experimentation between what we can control and what we can't, which is here their bespoke stochastic program.
https://youtu.be/sc9OjL6Mjqo
It is not about how the computer or the model enables us, which is so silly. (As if art is simply about being able to do something or not!) Its about doing something with the pieces you have that only those pieces can do.
> its just creative prompting,
Sure, you just can't upload the resulting track directly on Bandcamp, but you're free to "creatively prompt" on SUNO all you want, they'll even host your "music".
It's also a matter of resources. People uploading gigabites of AI generated slop a day isn't really what Bandcamp is about.
People don't listen to music because it sounds good, most music sounds downright awful, they listen to it for the human stories and connection. 99% of the music I listen
Nobody listens to techno - Eminem
AI needs to make music that sells. The same way Scorsese and Brando sell the Godfather. until it can do that literally nobody will care.
> I'm a musician, but am also pretty amused by this anti ai wave.
Let me guess: you're an amateur musician. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it makes it much easier to be amused about this topic.
> There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own.
What are you talking about? Which "tech kit" got demonized by whom? Of course, there were always controversies around techniques like sampling or whatever, or conservatives in the UK demonizing rave culture, but otherwise, I have no idea what you're referring to.
He's talking about the demonization of synthesizers, sampling, and digital audio workstations when each were respectively released.
There was no "demonization" about these things even remotely comparable to what we are witnessing now w.r.t. AI generated music (and I'm old enough to remember most of these things). Of course there was intense dislike from certain groups representing the "old-school" around new styles of music and new techniques. However, at the same time, you also had the "new-wave" which loved it and made it successful. For instance, a ton of people hated Disco music, at the same time, you had a ton of people who genuinely loved it. Same with practically any kind of electronic music. This simply does not exist with GenAI music. People listen to GenAI music because they either don't care, or don't know, not because they genuinely prefer it. There's absolutely nothing new about GenAI music that would make it exciting.
nobody demonized afx or idm bro. autotune, yes. but that's different. damn autotune to hell
>someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai
Always has been :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpUj9zpOiP0
(And honorary mention)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYKAOPj_uts
Lobotomywave
A few months ago I spoke with the frontman of a local Boston band from the 1980s, who recently re-released a single with the help of AI. The source material was a compact cassette tape from a demo, found in a drawer. He used AI to isolate what would've been individual tracks from the recording, then cleaned them up individually, without AI's help.
Does that constitute "wholly or in substantial part"? Would the track have existed were it not for having that easy route into re-mastering?
I understand what Bandcamp's trying to do here, and I generally am in support of removing what we'd recognize as "fully AI-generated music", but there are legitimate creative uses of AI that might come to wholly or substantially encompass the output. It's difficult to draw any lines line on a creative work, by just by nature of the work being creative.
(For those interested - check out O Positive's "With You" on the WERS Live at 75 album!)
No I don't think that really qualifies because it's solving an engineering problem. I hang out on an electronic music creators' forum which is stringently anti-AI, but nobody objects to things like stem separation. People are skeptical about AI 'mastering' but don't really object for similar reasons.
What people get mad about is the use of AI to generate whole tracks. Generating rhythms, melodies, harmonies etc via AI isn't greeted warmly either, but electronic musicians generally like experimenting with things like setting up 'wrong' modulation destinations in search of interesting results. I don't think anyone seriously objects to AI-produced elements being selected and repurposed as musical raw material. But this is obviously not happening with complete track generation. It's like playing slot machines but calling yourself a business person.
That's not AI generated at all. Using acoustic models to stem out individual sections from a recording is not creating new material (and I wouldn't even describe that as "AI" despite what I'm sure a lot of the tools offering it want us to believe).
Sorry, that's AI. So is OCR, so is voice recognition, and many other things you probably use and take for granted. I'd suggest you focus on use cases not trying to redefine definitions for an entire area of science and technology based on your own preferences.
Saying "I'm against fully AI generated music" is at least precise, and doesn't throw out detecting cancer along with the AI bandwagon term.
> Sorry, that's AI. So is OCR, so is voice recognition, and many other things you probably use and take for granted
Have you heard of machine learning?
AI and voice recognition were using "machine learning" for several decades, which is basically just brute force statistics.
ML voice recognition is still far superior to AI-based voice recognition. At its best, Gemini is still less accurate at parsing speech than Dragon Naturally Speaking circa 2000.
That feels legit to me. We have been using software to isolate individual instruments from a recording for a while.
We've been using software to fix grammar for a long time, and AI does it also. The question is valid: if I get an LLM to fix a few grammar errors in my own writing, am I ripping anyone off? We can't just dismiss the question just because grammar fixing is something we did without machine-learning AI trained on vast numbers of other people's texts.
The output does depend on training works, even if you are just fixing grammar errors. But the document is obviously a derivative of your own writing and almost nothing else. A grammatic concept learned from vast numbers of worsk is probably not a copyright infringment.
Similarly, a part extraction concept learned from training sets such as pairs of mixed and unmixed music, and then applied to someone's own music to do accurate part extraction, does not seem like an infringing use. All features of the result are identifiable as coming from the original mixed audio; you cannot identify infringing passages in it added by the AI --- and if such a thing happened, it would be an unwanted artifact leading us to re-do the part extraction in some other way to avoid it.
The question doesn't feel legit to me though. The OP somehow found the one justifiable example among a sea of AI slop.
Justifiable because there were some filters. That may not even have been "AI". They may have been some deterministic algorithms that the software maker has to label "AI" because they otherwise think it won't sell...
I've done audio engineering as a hobby. Even a decade ago, verbiage like "ai noise reduction" was very common. Of course that was RNNs, not transformers. But I think they have a valid point. I googled and found this 2017 post about iZotope integrating machine learning: https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/what-the-machine-learning-i...
I don't know. I think there's a tendency to look at things as pure or impure, as all black or all white. If it was touched by AI, it's AI. If not, it's pure.
I'm not familiar with the music business, but I'm a Sunday photographer. There's an initiative to label pictures that had "generative ai" applied. I'm not a professional, so I don't really have a horse in this race. I also enjoy the creations of some dude I follow on Instagram which are clearly labelled as produced by AI.
But in between, the situation isn't as clear cut. As photographers, we used to do "spot removal", with pretty big "spots" for ages [0]. You just had to manually select the "offending" "spot", try to source some other part which looked close enough. Now you can use "object removal" which does a great job with things like grass and whatnot but is "generative ai". These are labelled AI, and they are.
I can understand someone arguing that what required a lot of skill is now more accessible. And I guess that's true? But that just sounds elitist.
So what's the issue with "AI"? Do you enjoy the result? Great! Do you hate it? Move to the next one. Does that particular "artist" produce only thins you hate? Skip them!
--
[0] my point is about "artistic" pictures, not photojournalism or similar where "what was" is of utmost importance. Note that even in those cases, selective cropping only requires your feet and nobody would label as "edited". But I specifically don't want to open that can of worms.
Seems to me like he just wanted to advertise that song.
I think any line is necessarily going to be arbitrary, a blanket ban on any ML model being used in production would be plainly impossible -- using Ozone's EQ assistant or having a Markov chain generate your chord progressions could also count towards "in substantial part", but are equally hard to object to.
But we also live with arbitrary lines elsewhere, as with spam filters? People generally don't want ads for free Viagra, and spam filters remain the default without making "no marketing emails" a hard rule.
The problem isn't that music Transformers can't be used artfully [1] but that they allow a kind of spam which distribution services aren't really equipped to handle. In 2009, nobody would have stopped you from producing albums en masse with the generative tech of the day, Microsoft's Songsmith [2], but you would have had a hard time selling them - but hands-off distribution services like DistroKid and improved models makes music spam much more viable now than it was previously.
[1] I personally find neural synthesis models like RAVE autoencoders nifty: https://youtu.be/HC0L5ZH21kw
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research_Songsmith as ...demoed? in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg0l7f25bhU
I think it makes some sense to allow leeway for intelligent "signal processing" using AI (separating out individual tracks, clean-up, etc) vs generating new content with AI.
Similarly, say, for video editors, using AI to more intelligently rotoscope (especially with alpha blending in the presence of motion blur - practically impossible to do it manually), would be a great use of AI, removing the non-creative tedium of the process.
It's not clear where the line is though. I was quite impressed with Corridor Crew's (albeit NVidia+Puget-sponsored) video [1] where they photographed dolls, motion-captured human actors moving like the dolls, and transferred the skeletal animation and facial expressions to those dolls using GenAI. Some of it required nontrivial transformative code to accommodate a skeleton to a toy's body type. There's a massive amount of tedium being removed from the creative process by GenAI without sacrificing the core human creative contribution. This feels like it should be allowed -- I think we should attempt to draw clearer lines where there are clearly efficiency gains to be had to have less "creative" uses be more socially acceptable.
[1]: https://youtu.be/DSRrSO7QhXY
It may be a tedious job to spend days rotoscoping but I personally know people who get paid to do that, and as soon as AI can do it, they will have to go find other work (which they already do, on the side, because the writing is on the wall, but there's a ton of people worldwide who do this kind of work, and that's not the only process being delegated to AI).
So, I'm not pretending that certain kinds of jobs aren't going to be obsoleted. Lots of responsibilities went by the wayside as a lot of things were automated with technology and algorithms - I mean, this is not just an AI thing. But I also see it as many people not even executing certain creative visions that would be out of reach due to the mechanical (not creative) cost of doing things. That's where Jevons Paradox really shines and I do think that's where the explosion will happen. Of the (very few) people I know who do editing and have to rotoscope, rotoscoping is one of the things they really don't enjoy, but they do it anyway.
That's why we don't use machine to dig ditches, we use spoons, because this planet is a work program.
We also used to pay people to manually copy books. It's not a good argument.
If the Beatles can use AI to restore a poorly recorded cassette tape of John Lennon playing the piano and singing at his dinner table, I think it's alright if other bands do it, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_and_Then_(Beatles_song)
Suppose we have two image-oriented AI's.
One is trained with a set of pairs which match words with images. Vast numbers of images tagged with words.
The other is trained on a set of photographs of exactly the same scene from the same vantage point, but one in daylight and the other at night. Suppose all these images are copyrighted and used without permissions.
With the one AI, we can do word-to-image to generate an image. Clearly, that is a derived work of the training set of images; it's just interpolating among them based on the word assocations.
With the other AI, we can take a photograph which we took ourselves in daylight, and generate a night version of the same one. This is not clearly infringing on the training set, even though that output depends on it. We used the set without permission to have the machine extract and learn the concept of diurnal vs. nocturnal appearance of scenes, based on which it is kind of "reimagining" our daytime image as a night time one.
The question of whether AI is stealing material depends exactly on what the training pathway is; what it is that it is learning from the data. Is it learning to just crib, and interpolate, or to glean some general concept that is not protected by copyright: like separating mixed audio into tracks, changing day to night, or whatever.
> With the one AI, we can do word-to-image to generate an image. Clearly, that is a derived work of the training set of images
> The question of whether AI is stealing material depends exactly on what the training pathway is; what it is that it is learning from the data.
No it isn't. The question of whether AI is stealing material has little to do with the training pathway, but everything to do with scale.
To give a very simple example: is your model a trillion parameter model, but you're training it on 1000 images? It's going to memorize.
Is your model a 3 billion parameter model, but you're training it on trillions of images? It's going to generalize because it simply doesn't physically have the capacity to memorize its training data, and assuming you've deduplicated your training dataset it's not going to memorize any single image.
It literally makes no difference whether you'll use the "trained on the same scene but one in daylight and one at night" or "generate the image based on a description" training objective here. Depending on how you pick your hyperparameters you can trivially make either one memorize the training data (i.e. in your words "make it clearly a derived work of the training set of images").
>The source material was a compact cassette tape from a demo, found in a drawer.
Was this demo his, or someone else’s IP? If he is cleaning up or modifying his own property, not a lot of people have a problem with that.
If it is someone else’s work, then modifying with AI doesn’t change that.
I think they just don’t want AI generated works that only mash up the work of other artists, which is the default of AI generated stuff.
That's not generative AI, just source separation which has existed way before large language models and transformer architecture were big.
This is very similar to, "am I ripping people off if I just get the LLM AI to make a few grammar fixes in my own writing?"
The example you present seems fairly straightforward to my intuition, but I think your point is fair.
A harder set of hypotheticals might arise if music production goes the direction that software engineering is heading: “agentic work”, whereby a person is very much involved in the creation of a work, but more by directing an AI agent than by orchestrating a set of non-AI tools.
Ya, "AI" is too broad a term. This was already possible without "AI" as we know it today, but of course it was still the same idea back then. I get what you're saying, though: would he have bothered if he'd have to have found the right filters/plugins on his own? idunno.
AI unmixing or denoising is not really generating music AI.
thats sounds more like unsupervised learning via one of the bread and butter clustering algorithms. I guess that is technically AI but its a far cry from the transformers tech thats actually got everyone's underwear in knots.
> It's difficult to draw any lines line on a creative work, by just by nature of the work being creative.
If you want to be some neutral universal third party sure. If you're OK with taking a position, the arbitrariness actually makes it much easier. You just draw the line you want.
Creativity demands limitation, and those limitations don't have to be justified.
Where does it stop. My dad is a decent guitarist but a poor singer (sadly, I'm even worse). He has written some songs, his own words, some guitar licks or chords as input material and AI turning it into a surprisingly believable finished piece. To me it's basically AI slop but he's putting in a modest amount of effort for the output.
You don't make it clear whether the music on that tape was "generated" "by AI", only that it was post-processed in such a way.
That's not "generating" the music with AI - that's isolating the tracks of existing music. Probably not generative AI at all, and depending on who you ask, not even AI.
This is why it is to these generative AI companies' benefit that 'AI' becomes a catchall term for everything, from what enemies are programmed to do in video games to a spambot that creates and uploads slop facebook videos on the hour.
Completely understandable.
I had this opinion for a long time, but only recently was I personally affected, but that made me even more convinced.
I was listening to my new releases playlist on Apple Music and listened to a track that sounded nice, but also a little generic. I don’t know exactly what prompted me to check, but it had all the signs of something fishy going on like generic cover image, the artist page showed a crazy output of singles last year (all the same generic images), unspecific metadata and - to my surprise - I found other Reddit posts about this artist being AI.
Now, a lot of music is generic and goes through so many hands you can hardly call it a personal piece of art. But even then, there’s always some kind of connection.
I guess that’s why I felt betrayed.
I thought AI generated art was wrong before, but I didn’t expect to feel this mix of anger and disappointment.
Yeah, I agree.
For me, music (like all fine art) is about human connection. It's the artist telling me something human and personal. It's not entirely about the aesthetics of the music. The provenance of the art is very important. If I feel that connection with a song and it turns out that the song wasn't made by a person (it hasn't happened yet as far as I know), I have been deceived and would be furious.
A song made by a person using AI as tool (rather than to generate the music) is different. What matters is that the song is actually an expression of humanity, not the tools used to make it.
However, the presence of AI-generated music means that I am not really willing to buy music anymore unless it's either a few years old or I'm buying it at the merch table the artist has at a live performance.
I'm not ideologically opposed to making music with AI, but the dream would be new songs which which showcase the new sounds and musical forms that AI enables, like Believe for autotune, or Rumble for electric guitar, or Autobahn for synths.
I want a friend to message me like "Hey, there's some interesting stuff happening in the AI music scene, check out these tracks".
But everything I've seen is pastiche, either novelty songs (hit song as different genre, or famous monologue from popular movie as pop song) or generic background music meant for algorithmic streaming playlists.
I'm a moderately frequent user of Suno and have encountered some unusual AI-generated effects that I've not come across before in more traditionally synthesized music.
One is when it attempts to generate vocals without a lyrics prompt. It's gibberish but just on the edge of comprehensibility. Sometimes it'll be entirely spoken word with no accompaniment. Very uncanny.
Another is transitioning between vocals and instrument in the same melody line. Like a humanesque voice holding a steady note at the end of a verse which seamlessly transitions into a saxophone sound and proceeds into a solo. Or vice versa, an instrumental morphing into a voice.
Finally is when the generation goes wrong and it starts spitting out absolute nonsensical sounds with no rhythm or melody, in a uniquely fragmented way I can't really describe. It feels like seeing the musical matrix, the inner thoughts of the AI.
Now I've written all that out and had a think about it, I'm tempted to sample these oddities and try to make something more structured out of them.
I'd be interested in hearing a few of those samples and what you made out of them!
Yes, it's really easy to argue against AI music and find that you're making exactly the same argument that was used against DJs and sampling in the 90s. "Real musicians" thought they were being ripped off by "non-musicians" who didn't know how to play an instrument, just a turntable or an AKAI. But it turns out that turntables and samplers are instruments if you allow people to get creative with them, and now we have entire genres of music that exist because sampling is legitimate (though the copyright wars did make it more expensive than the original guerrilla days). I mean, do we seriously think DJ Shadow isn't a musician?
You could regard AI as being literally just a very advanced form of sampling. I've seen and heard some very creative uses of AI tools, and it would be a terrible shame if that baby got thrown out with the bathwater.
Yeah, I want the Paul's Boutique of AI music, but I'm not interested in wading through the AI equivalent of a hundred thousand acoustic guitar covers of Wonderwall
> new sounds and musical forms
Has it done this? Or does it just make things that sound like what it's trained on?
That's why it's the dream.
I mean, even if it's just a pastiche machine, I do believe that people could use it to make new and interesting music, just like they did with sampling.
But yeah, music is so accessible and there is so much new music all the time that if all, or most, of what AI is being used for is to make even more of the same stuff we're already awash in then banning it is necessary curation.
What I'm hoping for is a (good) musician to take a small music model, train it on a selection of their influences and existing music and then add on a prompt tracklist. Something like a NN album that the fan can add their own prompts and get new music in the style the artist meant for that album.
I don't know if this really counts as art but there are existing AI music that are at least though provoking funny like https://kommandointernet.bandcamp.com/
It is German but there is really funny remixes combining Mallorca Party music (a German music genre of its own) with anti fascist themes. They manage to make fun of both without being IMHO totally alienating both subcultures, which could count as art. IMHO such things would not really be possible without AI. Would be really disappointed if this disappeared from BC.
Every major platform needs to also do this. They've all become overrun with literal trash.
Most human derived goods markets need to filter low effort attempts at monetization in general. I'm tired of going to Renn. Faire / Farmer Markets / Artist Alley Markets only to find they've started letting in "Joe Blow with a poorly configured 3d printer #35." These places have become infested with people selling the exact same piles of thingverse trash in a rainbow of colors.
It sucks that a lot of these types of markets are suffering from low numbers of shoppers. They open themselves up to these plastic peddlers in desperation only to drive away customers even more.
After 3D-print slop infested craft fairs, and fake AI-slop products infested Etsy, it's got me to wondering: is this just an evolution in an existing scummy business model?
Consider how easy it would have been, any time in the last decade, to get a booth at any "local hand-made goods craft fair", selling "hand-made" copper jewelry... that you happened to buy in bulk lots off Alibaba. The jewelry was "hand-made"... kind of... by someone else, making far too little money, in sweatshop conditions, following techniques and using machines that enable them to produce hundreds at once, with no QC whatsoever.
Nobody would ever guess you hadn't made the stuff yourself. They would read the lack of QC as evidence for your claim that "each piece is distinct and made to match my artistic vision in the moment." You'd put one or two of each type of piece out on the table at a time, as if those are all you have; yet as soon as one sells, you'd pull another out from the box of hundreds.
I can't say for sure that this ever happens, but judging by the number of people willing to be scummy in the more modern ways... it certainly feels like it could. Honestly makes me hesitant to buy anything from a craft fair. Which is a shame.
> any time in the last decade, to get a booth at any "local hand-made goods craft fair", selling "hand-made" copper jewelry... that you happened to buy in bulk lots off Alibaba.
I've seen exactly this a few times in Madrid already, right next to the "dude with bad 3D printer #35"-type stands. A friend of mine loves finding the Aliexpress product page right in front of them.
With regard to Etsy, hand-made crafts don't scale so a VC-backed startup around them was never going to be able to resist this. Only hope would be a highly moderated and curated Craigslist-style website that was happy to pay the bills, pay some salaries and keep the lights on while maintaining integrity.
Craft fairs, though, no excuse or reason. There should not be profit maximizing at local craft fairs. They're a bellwether for the degradation of culture.
The fundamental scam is:
People want to feel a meaningful connection to others. One facet of that is wanting to own objects that were made by an actual person who put craft into creating the object and who cares about the owner being happy with it.
Virtually everyone, not just rich hipsters, wants this. People seek it out and are happy to pay a lot extra for it.
However, "made with care" (and not just "by hand possibly in a sweatshop") is a fairly intangible property and hard to distinguish from just looking at the object. Instead, you really need some amount of provenance tracking to tell the "made by someone who gives a shit" from the slop.
Maker fairs, Etsy, farmer's markets, and many other venues exist basically to offer up that claim of trusted provenance. But the very large price difference between what you can sell a made-with-care object for versus the very low price you can make an indistinguishable object using factories, sweatshop labor, or AI makes those venues a honeypot for scammers who want to sell, essentially, fake meaning.
I keep feeling like the ultimate answer to everything going on in the current zeitgiest is some kind of real trust tracking system so you know where a piece of media or object actually came from.
This kind of thing already existed for a long time, but not as a scam. The people selling these products were selling their ability as "tastemakers". They knew about all the various distributors who could provide "artisanal" products from around the world, they took the time to leaf through all the catalogs and find the best knick-knack that they felt would fit with the theme of their stall and do good business in their local market. And then on the day of the market they would chit-chat with the customers about the process.
The funny thing is that what makes the scammer version a scam is that they go through exactly the same process but then try to pass the products off as their own artisinal work, presumably because they think that will net them more money. But in reality most people browsing for tat at a market aren't going to pay more or less for local artisinal versus imported artisinal versus mass produced, they just enjoy the experience of browsing the different stalls and chatting with vendors and feeling like they have connection with their local merchants. So the scam was wholly unnecessary, the vendor didn't need to make up a story, they just needed to be open to chatting with their customer. They're shooting themselves in the foot by lying about their products because if/when they're found out then they lost the trust, which is the actual product they are selling. People who choose local markets over chain stores or online shopping are doing it exactly because they are looking for a more trustworthy experience, so when you take that away you have nothing to sell.
This platform sees high front page placement / hundreds of votes for AI-written … uh sorry I mean “I used the AI to clean up my notes” … content daily.
I have an allergic reaction to it and flag, but clearly a majority of the hn voting population appreciates it, so if it isn’t banned it will continue.
No one in these threads ever discusses how you would identify and remove AI-generated music.
E.g. how is this worse and needs to be removed: https://youtu.be/L3Uyfnp-jag?si=SL4Jc4qeEXVgUpeC but crap that top pop artists vomit out into the world doesn't
I can think of half a dozen ways to detect AI music in it's current form, btu I'm not sure anyone has actually bothered implementing such a system.
Is anyone here aware of one? I might give it a go if not.
> but crap that top pop artists vomit out into the world doesn't
It should!
I wonder why the head honchos of the music industry haven’t come together and put together an alternative to Spotify’s increasingly AI-slop platform
Boom we did: https://hangout.fm/
> an alternative to Spotify’s increasingly AI-slop platform
> Boom we did: https://hangout.fm/
clicks link, scrolls down one screen
> Let’s get something started! Create your own hangout or craft a new song
> Big purple "(sparkles) Generate music" button
can't see Microslop GitHub banning AI slop
Reddit link is an official announcement, and it's also on their blog
https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/
At first I was just curious, and unimpressed with the horridly bland shite coming out of these AI music generators. But then I made a prompt that sparked some kind of magic, so now I want to finish off that track just to see if I can end up with something that I consider good.
I don't hold it much hope for this track because everything else I've heard on suno and udio are rubbish, but the 1 minute preview I have is enticing me to spend 8 bucks just so I can experiment a bit more.
I feel somewhat conflicted by my fascination because I have a great love for music and I wholeheartedly support efforts to restrict AI music crap.
But as the tools mature, the creative possibilities to make new sounds with finer control and granularity will make the process more ... creative - with greater human input.
I'm sure we'll end up with new styles and maybe even new genres that originate from prompts, and hits too. Is this a good thing to look forward to? I can see my future listening habits become strictly human only, but dang, the start of my new track sounds so dope!
I applaud Bandcamp's stance here and I will always look for ways to meaningfully support real musicians.
I've been having fun making stuff in Suno, I'm not a musician but I've always enjoyed "producing tracks" using Abelton and find the Suno + Abelton combo to be real magic on the weekends. I think some of the stuff I made isn't too bad and I'd love feedback on it. For a few weeks I went back and forth about uploading them to my soundcloud and resolve with this: I wouldn't have insisted we only allowed art made with MS paint on deviantART, we didn't even enforce quality (tho we highlighted) - we enforced the type of kindness that leads to learning and growth. I hope we can have places for professionals and places for people to display and play with creativity and art irrespective of the tooling. :)
Whenever I see defences of AI "art" people very often reduce the arguments to these analogies of using tools, but it's ineffective. Whether you use MS Paint, Photoshop, pencil, watercolor etc. That all requires skill, practice, and is this great intersection of intent and ability. It's authentic. Generating media with AI requires no skill, no intent, and very minimal labor. It is an approximation of the words you typed in and reduces you to a commissioner. You created nothing. You commissioned a work from a machine and are claiming creative authorship.
A: This post is part of an eternal debate about art: Do we appreciate the finished work, or the artist? This post is firmly in the latter camp. There are also solid arguments for the other extreme.
B: Having spent some time trying to make songs with Suno, I can assure you it takes more skills than I have...
You are correct. I wouldn’t waste your time arguing with people who don’t get it.
Those people don’t tend to have a good understanding of what most humans like and why they like stuff like music.
We humans use machines to make art. Robots may use a machine but that imagio deo component is missing.
Sure, but you also just disregarded a whole swath of people who use the tools/abstractions as a component of the composition of a final work. If I download a free vector of a premade sun to put into my final multimodal image, how is that any less authentic to me and my work? You feel like I cheated? Not how you would do it? This reminds me of when the film industry moved to digital and the pro associations said for contest submissions, first no digital at all, then it was ok for you to use digital post production but not a digital camera.
Obviously it's a sliding scale, but suno is allllll the way on one end. It's no more work than me contacting an artist and just asking him to write and produce me a song. I didn't do anything, I commissioned it.
I mean my camera has a full auto setting I don't use it that way, same with Suno, you can get the stems out of suno, you can gen just one instrument, just a sound, just an a cappella, I use it to gen things to put onto my OP1, does that count? This is My lyrics + Suno + OP1 + KOII + Abelton + 20hours or so?: https://soundcloud.com/john/golden
You are assuming a very specific form of generation. There are plenty of levels in between. Simply saying "AI" isn't sufficient to make an argument.
I'm a professional artist. I don't use AI as it's just not there yet.
But I don't consider using AI all that different to using a camera. A photographer still has plenty of work to do with composition and framing, the lighting, the subject mater, even timing. I still consider a photographer an artist.
I think an AI artist will have a lot to consider as well. To distinguish themselves from other AI artists.
Update: When I say the AI tools are not there yet, its precisely because I can't seem to get the AI to take feedback or instructions. I can't adjust the lighting to create the mood I want, I can't tweak the framing.
Well said. The credit is with the model; you commissioned it but did not create it.
With AI art... there is no passion, there is no pain, there is no emotion, there is no sex, there is no feeling, there is no reason. When Blaze Foley sang If I Could Only Fly or Nina Simone sang Stars or Bardot sang Je t'aime or Morricone wrote Se telefonando or Vermeer painted Zicht op Delft or Orozco painted his Epic of American Civilization or Maugham wrote Of Human Bondage or Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or Cheever wrote The Swimmer there was a magnificent concentration of real feeling and a real reason that each of these things were made.
Could you imagine someone prompting a model, receiving the result, and then saying, as Cheever did about The Swimmer:
>It was a terribly difficult story to write. I couldn't ever show my hand. Night was falling, the year was dying. It wasn't a question of technical problems, but one of imponderables. When he finds it dark and cold, it has to have happened. And by God, it did happen. I felt dark and cold for some time after I finished that story.
---
To me, the reason for art is feeling, and the problem is that most things don't really provide feeling - if they do, it is a cheap and one-dimensional feeling. Almost all art and music and literature (and food, wine, architecture, poetry, photography, theatre, dance) that people consume today is _good enough_. It is correct, it satisfies. You listen to some hours of good-enough music on Spotify and the music is all correct and you come across "Chill77"'s AI-generated Papaoutai cover and you think that it is good. After all, it seems to have fooled a number of genuine Stromae fans. But the real function of art is not to satisfy. It is to reduce you to tears or silence or lust or anger or some beautiful cocktail of feeling. Of course, in the right context, with enough supporting factors, anything can produce emotion, but the best art needs little or nothing to make you feel. Bad art and good art are all around us, but the great is rare. That rarity is why people enjoy AI art: they forget the last time they felt, the AI is good, and that is enough.
The sad thing, of course, is that to make the great you must make a hell of a lot of bad and a fair amount of simply good art. And then there are those who have no delusions of grandeur but just make art for the sake of it. AI art cheapens those things; it makes them a trivial undertaking. The architect who would have become great on the completion of his two hundred and seventh building can now generate the first two hundred and six with the push of a button. The woman making fliers for her dance club - each one no great work of art, but certainly made with care and love, sees now that her work is useless and stops. We all lose.
Your comment made me read "The Swimmer" for the first time. Thanks.
If it were so easy to create good AI music, I'd be able to do it all myself instead of following so many artists. But it takes a lot of skill.
You're barking up the wrong tree. You're trying to tell artists about "skill", when they've spent lots of time (potentially thousands of hours!) getting good at their craft.
Your snobbery will be short-lived as tools eclipse our "art", and creativity is revealed as nothing inherently unique to humans.
Creativity, fundamentally, is overlapping memories of what you have seen already. Literally no different than any diffusion or transformer model.
You painting a piece of art or composing a song was really the functional output of billions of cells coordinating in unison, 100% subconsciously, and the thoughts that arose out of your subconscious were entirely (or mostly, to avoid free will debate) out of your control. Your output was the product of billions of years of stellar and biological evolution on top of millennia of human history and influence. You created nothing.
Soon you will have to grapple with the reality of what really drives your enjoyment of media, and part of that will be realizing that the human-ness never mattered at all.
Is beautiful nature scenery not beautiful because it wasnt hand-crafted painstakingly by a creative human? Of course it is. There is no intuition for the vast swaths of time it took to form, that is a modern human conceptualization that came long after we already found nature to be beautiful.
We have a biological pattern recognition tuned for beauty regardless of its origin. And there is nothing inherently unbeautiful about elegant software that can produce beautiful "art". Nor is there any justifiable, defensible, or intellectually honest way to argue that the human/effort element in art matters in any way besides perhaps portraying and conveying social status.
> Creativity, fundamentally, is overlapping memories of what you have seen already. Literally no different than any diffusion or transformer model.
Every individual has a unique experience, and assimilates different things from their experiences depending on their personal tastes and culture. That is profoundly different from a model which assimilates the output of hundreds of thousands of individuals. A model has no creative, or artistic voice. Your argument is anti-humanistic, nihilistic nonsense, and also trivially verifiably wrong given no model today has produced music or art of any value.
Do you really think a human creating something isn't the output of assimilating the outputs of countless humans that came before them?
Your argument implies creativity is confined to humans or brains. So no creativity existed before that? Weird. Lucky for us that evolution spawned creativity then!
If you could answer that question then that should help me understand, since you say it is trivial to verifiably prove my position wrong
The dean of the art school I went to regularly used to say "The most creative people simply to the best job of hiding the source of their creativity". - in fact he invoked it once directly to me when I protested about how one of my peers went about their final assignment, and again when the whole program revolted over a submission that won honors. I learned a lot about art in that art program, but mostly I learned art wasn't that I thought it was. :)
I am a musician, in the “accomplished amateur” category. For me, music is a never-ending journey of learning and skill-building, and I’ve come to appreciate that journey as much or more than the destination (= recording or live performance). If you gave me a one-click button to improve my skills, I’m not sure I would click it— I’d rather get there myself.
I’d encourage you to dig deeper into why and how the music that is being created by those tools works.
> If you gave me a one-click button to improve my skills, I’m not sure I would click it— I’d rather get there myself.
And I would much prefer to hear your music over machine-generated music even if the generated music is technically better performed.
"If you gave me a one-click button to improve my skills, I’m not sure I would click it— I’d rather get there myself." - Me too! :) I use suno to gen vocals, I use my regular teenage engineering workflow + Abelton to mix and master, I'm WAY better in Abelton than I was even 6 months ago - people have always been able to download photoshop actions and filters etc, as you said, it's more about the creative journey.
The whole problem with this is that the people using generative AI tools are trying to co-opt what "art" is. They're barging into creative spaces and demanding that the real artists treat them as equals. I hope you understand that no group of people would treat you kindly for doing that.
Sure except half my classes in art school ended up in debates on what "art" even is/means - some people thought if it involved commerce at all it's not art, some people about the process, some people about the human, some people about the final work itself, is it high or low brow, fine art or emotive? So when you say "co-opt what "art is." - sure, but...not sure.
On barging into creative spaces and how that should be viewed, I suspect you and I would find we feel the same. I was personally involved in building and shaping deviantart and how we tackled these ideas, so what you see there today is influenced by my(and scott, eric angelo etc) thinking on this matter.
Most of the artists I know, including me, have kinda given up on DA after its pivot to AI.
I was there in the beginning getting it off the ground, I've not looked in a very long time but dA is owned by WiX now so I'm not surprised. A lot of people left when we started to highlight vector art/pop art, a big wave left when we started to support suzi9mm and co, this wave will be AI. Here is the idea we built it on: https://x.com/dissenter_hi/status/2011183228154188111
That’s what the sites that generate the music are for. Bandcamp is for musicians.
The community of AI "musicians" should absolutely have a place to share their "music". Just identify it as such so everyone else can avoid it. :)
Exactly! :) When I was going through my back and forth on if I should upload it to soundcloud I thought a few times "I should just build SlopART" - if I had more time I probably would, because it's a place I wouldn't mind hanging out. :)
An aside but https://sunoai-music.com/ seems incredibly broken on my desktop.
Typed a prompt and hit generate. No response after waiting some time. I scrolled down to existing sample music to get a sense of what it creates and hit play. Not one of the play buttons worked. Ok load up Chrome instead of Firefox, maybe they did some Chrome specific thing? Nope site's still broken and none of the samples under "Suno AI Music Gallery" actually work. There's a javascript error "invalid client" on clicking it. I'm not logged in i guess?
It did work on mobile but that seems like it presents a completely different site.
I think the URL should be suno.com, the link you posted is a different thing? Suno.com is the one I've used, I generally use it for DND type campaigns when I need custom music for scenes or background noises. It does pretty good sound effects and spoken word so sometimes I use it for that as well.
That worked. Thanks i just googled suno ai music to check it out and got the seemingly spammy link.
That's not the real Suno site.
What workflow are you using with Ableton/Suno?
Mostly using it to gen vocals, sometimes stems, sometimes gen samples, then as you'd expect -> wav out -> lay it up in Abelton, add in my teenage engineering stuff - filters -> mix and master -> out
https://soundcloud.com/john/eager - I put over 16 hours into this track, I'm sure someone who knows about music can point to loads of errors in it, I'm sure it's sloppy in parts, but I put real effort into it and I'm proud of that effort.
So I've used Suno a bit in my own musical creations, but would never release something with any sound that was generated via AI. What I do is write and record a song (I'm also in Ableton), then when I'm unhappy with something or don't know where to go next, I throw it into Suno and have it generate some ideas. I use those ideas just as you would use ideas from a writing partner. If I like them, I transcribe them, play them on real instruments, and record them. So no actual sound from Suno ever makes it into my compositions - just some of the musical ideas here and there. That way it's still me playing and still sounds like me.
To me, this is the most legitimate way for music makers to use AI. If you go look at the credits for almost any professional recording artist, they all work with one or more writers and producers to get their music dialed in. Us normies can't really afford to have Max Martin come over and write with us, and I think using AI in the way I mentioned is a suitable alternative. I really fail to see the difference, honestly.
Yeah! I think how you are doing it is great! For me making music is about spacing and...I dunno, the sound stage I guess? Sometimes I don't even listen to lyrics I like getting lost in the flow of it, I'm not interested in improving my own singing abilities, but I am interested in improving as a song writer, suno really helps me hear what my words sound like. I can also gen stuff real quickly to throw into my OPZ or OP1 to put together into tracks, it's a lot of fun.
If I have an exact idea of what I want something to sound like, and I'm able to use an automated system to create that, is that creative expression? Obviously AI isn't entirely capable of that, but eventually with BCI devices it might be.
I've spent many hours learning to play guitar and ukulele but I'm really not very good, and probably never will be - but I can hear the music in my head I want to create. I'm not interested in monetary gain at all, just being able to hear it for real and maybe share it with some people.
> [...]just being able to hear it for real and maybe share it with some people.
Your ability to make and share music as you like hasn't been abridged. Bandcamp has chosen not to be a part of it if it's AI-mediated.
> We want musicians to keep making music, and for fans to have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans.
It sounds like bandcamp is not the right place for what you want to do. There's plenty of ways to do what you're looking for though!
Agreed, I'm just pondering the general attitude around the space rather than bandcamp itself
>I've spent many hours learning to play guitar and ukulele but I'm really not very good, and probably never will be - but I can hear the music in my head I want to create. I'm not interested in monetary gain at all, just being able to hear it for real and maybe share it with some people.
Luckily there are hundreds of MIDI editor DAWs available. Open the piano roll, and write down the music note by note. Surely, it's not that hard if you can hear it in your head.
If you are very good at music theory and have good pitch recognition absolutely, but that is a skill that takes quite a bit of effort to train.
AI is not the only way to make synthetic music. If you have an exact idea, you can use virtual instrument plugins for software like Ableton Live to produce music.
That's how I feel about it too. I play piano well enough to get my ideas out and have used synthesizers and digital audio workstation software for years. I can sit down and carefully craft the music I have in my mind if I want to. Though I don't often have the time or the mental space to do so.
Or, I can make a barebones recording of musical ideas - of melodies, harmonies and the overall song structure - then upload it to Suno and inspire its robotic session musicians to play it in the style I ask. Quicker to make, faster to iterate upon, and can even be used as the basis for resynthesizing the track using more traditional methods.
Half-finished tracks, ideas that were only in my mind or existed only as badly recorded piano-bashed drafts, now (almost) fully fleshed out. It's immensely satisfying, and has made me even more creative as I use this tool to understand and explore musical styles I'm less familiar with.
It sounds to me like you just need to try creating electronic music, not using generative AI. If you really have an exact idea of what the music should sound like, you should be able to realize your vision this way, and you can use realistic instrument samples if you want. It may not sound the way a person would have played it, since you can't fully replace a human performer, but it can still sound really good, and there's a huge body of video game music from the last 30 years or so to vouch for that.
People have been doing this for decades already, FL studio, Abelton, etc. Not sure what AI has to do with it.
I feel like there's a difference between AI used as a tool and AI used to make slop. Also, most AI music has weird noise in it that drives me insane.
I have to imagine* that we will figure out what that difference is, but it will be difficult and costly.
* I have to imagine that or else I will lose all hope in the future.
Fear not- there is research in this area~
https://caniphish.com/blog/how-to-spot-ai-audio
https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/help-information/site-modera...
even coded detectors exist https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checker?id=09f25ee7913a415...
If a detector can exist, it can be used adversarially without a human in the loop to defeat itself.
I’m a founder of one of these AI music companies and that noise you’re describing (it differs between co’s for us it’s loud vocals, for Suno it’s vocal aliasing/sandiness and mushy instrumentals, etc) is exactly why I think these songs should not be going on Spotify/etc.
We’ll have this (and the corny lyrics issue) mostly fixed in a month or so, then it mostly becomes a recommendations problem. For example, TikTok is filled with slop, but it’s not a problem - their algorithm helps the most creative/engaging stuff rise to the top. If Spotify is giving you Suno slop in your discover weekly (or really crappy 100% organic free range AI-free slop) blame Spotify, not the AI or the creators. There are really high effort and original creations that involve AI that deserve to be heard, though.
I suggest going back and listening to some of the first experimental electronic music. The tools have improved a lot since then and people have used them to do really cool things, even spawning countless genres.
I'll blame Spotify, and your company.
See here for a truly random sample of human music: https://0xbeef.co.uk/random/soundcloud
Thankfully, most of it doesn't reach your Spotify feed. I think most of it is garbage, but I'd fight for the right of people to continue posting it. All things algorithmic have this exploration/exploitation, diversity/fidelity tradeoff and Spotify has theirs tuned very heavily toward exploitation/fidelity. I think there is a cool opportunity for someone to put the tradeoff dial into users hands.
Ah, when I said "find out what the difference is", I meant more of a cultural understanding than technical.
> If I have an exact idea of what I want something to sound like, and I'm able to use an automated system to create that, is that creative expression?
i say this without malice (more as an encouragement to you to do whatever you like): nobody cares about your individual consumption choices. if you want to consume content from a machine that produces the thing you want to consume, that in and of itself has no impact on anyone but you. but you might be missing out on good music (either by someone else, or by your own hand) and ultimately, i wonder if you will value the end product of a musical vending machine.
I feel like I appreciate good music and I've been into the underground DnB scene in LA for a while.
> nobody cares about your individual consumption choices
Not sure if I agree though - mentioning that I use gen AI for any use case can cause some very hostile reactions.
I think the real distinction is whether the output came from the artist's human intention, or whether someone just said "let's just see what happens!"... it's sort of impossible to reach inside the artist's brain to find out where that line is. I suppose the only test is to start with that same intention multiple times and see how widely the output varies.
Wasn't your intention whatever you typed in? That doesn't make you an artist and I don't want to hear the music AI made that you happened to type some words to and hit enter.
Not really. If I plug up and frob-a-knob (real or emulated) eurorack at random to just see what happens, the resulting hour long noise will be described as experimental, boring, profound, piece of trash etc. (e.g. check reviews on Beaubourg by Vangelis) It is not going to be put on the same spot as AI slop.
While intent of course is important, the quantity and manner of taking others' work and calling it my own, I thing, plays even bigger role. If I go "hey check out this Bohemian Rhapsody song I just created using Google Search", I do not think much regard will be given to my intent.
I understand those distinctions, and I can definitely see people caring about that, although how you would tell seems impossible.
That's why I choose to make the distinction by just not caring about any kind of music that uses any kind of AI.
Can’t imagine this policy lasts more than a year or two given the rate that AI tools for music are improving. Once the tech can reliably create high quality dry stems of instruments, backing tracks etc. and automate professional-sounding production work (which most musicians do not currently have access to) everyone is going to be using it even if they won’t admit it publicly.
Just a couple more months and a couple more trillion dollars to Altman!
Why would quality matter, You make a image from Google AI and its instantly marked as Synth ID. It can be easily detected and thrown out if you want to keep the site AI free.
We would need AI free places now that AI is so easy and cheap to produce.
People can just run it themselves and some tracks would not be detected
Some people are cursed with being able to recognize reuse or samey backing tracks...
This seems like a good decision, although, is there a good way to tell if music is AI-generated? I assume that some of the music that's showing up in my Spotify feed is AI-generated but I've never noticed.
So there's really accurate ways to detect "pure AI". The AI music detectors out there are mainly looking out for production things:
-a flatness to the EQ spectrum that you wouldn't get out a properly mixed and produced piece of audio
-no good stem separation, so no per-source eq (relates to above point)
-change BPM mid-song
-unnatural warbles at the end of every phrase
-vocals will have these weird croaky voice cracks, or sound scratchier and raspier
There definitely are tell-tale signs of "pure AI" in audio, but it becomes a lot more nuanced when any sort of secondary mixing/mastering/compression happens (which is the case 90% is the time in the real world- anything on YouTube/Spotify get's compressed).
> I assume that some of the music that's showing up in my Spotify feed is AI-generated but I've never noticed.
A lot of it is now, and it's frustrating to me. The worst part is that I'm not actually anti-AI-music. There's one or two "groups" ("producers"?) I've found where it's clearly AI but they've put a lot of work into making something worth listening to, but Spotify seems to have a "this sucker will listen to the cheap stuff" flag and now I'm drowning in tracks from people who paid for Suno and think that's enough.
I'm not sure about the flag :D but I've had pretty good results with always making sure to flag every artist in AI suggestions with "don't play". You have to visit the artist profile pages to do it though, so it remains a cat and mouse game, but I think that as long as they don't prevent it by force, doing this tends to improve the AI suggestions (of non-AI music).
Similar to YouTube slop.
If that would stop working, I'd cancel Spotify again.
Speaking of YouTube slop, I think Spotify has had its own system of preferring cheap muzak from labels they support since before GenAI music even took off, I think. Example label: Firefly entertainment (IIRC)
At least for the current AI music generators, it's pretty easy to tell by ear that it's AI generated. Everything is just a little off, especially the higher frequencies. Vocals often sound indistinct, like an unholy amalgamation of thousands of people are singing instead of a single person.
I think it would be very difficult for most people to tell that songs are generated by Suno 5. There are some interesting anomalies I can see in the spectrum and mid/side channels, like Suno music often has very little information in the side channel (what happens when you subtract the left and right channels from each other). You also commonly see the eq curve of the rhythm section shift over time throughout the song - like drums will sound normal at the beginning but end up sounding kind of under water by the end, but they are quickly improving these things. But to the layperson, many of these things are completely invisible. The most obvious tell, IMO, is the cadence of the lyrics.
Does this apply to all genres or just highly produced popular music? I would not be surprised if I failed to detect an AI song as background in a television commercial, but it is difficult to imagine that anyone could fail to pick out an AI impersonation were you to slip one in to a record like 'João Voz e Violão.'
It really depends on the style, yes. You could probably slip one into any modern pop/dance/club/EDM album and no one would know as long as the vocals sounds like the performer. For styles which are very unique with that sort of imperfect human touch that makes music so enjoyable, it would likely be obvious, at least at the moment.
It's getting very hard. At this point, lyrics are the biggest giveaway. AI generated lyrics are always awful and the delivery feels very stilted.
Currently it sounds like it's been through an allpass/comb filter. Complex parts, while spectrally there, do not make much sense as a real sound. Probably audio analog of the "finger salad" of early image models. I do not count of being able to tell one from another in a few months.
AI seems to struggle to produce counterpoint, especially in vocals.
It sounds like a moral stance on its face, but honestly they probably wouldn't care if someone posted a reasonable amount of AI-generated music that was high quality enough to gain a following of listeners.
This is likely a stance to prevent an individual from producing thousands of AI generated tracks and attempting to flood the zone for anyone browsing and searching.
There's a lot of music on Spotify for example that tries to latch on to current trends in an attempt to get pulled into search results and recommendations.
One day soon many musicians will be using AI assistance, and many won't tell you for fear of judgment.
It's like that with code and art.
Purely AI anything is garbage. But AI tools in the hands of people who know what they're doing are just faster scaffolding and better plywood to build with. The framing is still mostly human expert.
> One day soon many musicians will be using AI assistance, and many won't tell you for fear of judgment.
Word on the street here in Nashville is that it's already the case. The songs getting published aren't AI-made, but there's AI assistance.
Auto tune uses a form of "AI", and has been used by most pop singers for a decade.
Auto tune is not what makes a song a hit. What make a song a hit is the fact that the person who injected the use of auto tune has taste.
This seems to fly over the heads of many. art is about taste.
The same argument applies to AI generated or assisted music. Anyone can write a prompt and get a song. It takes judgement and taste to pick a good song and choose to publish it.
"New technologies have the tendency to replace skills with judgement – it's not what you can do that counts, but what you choose to do, and this invites everyone to start crossing boundaries." - Brian Eno
Not a musician (dabble with the guitar from time to time but I do absolutely love music) and don’t make music but one of my best friends growing up has been playing instruments forever. He writes songs and song lyrics. He has started a YouTube channel and shares some of the music he makes, and it sounds really great. I am amazed sometimes how great. But he puts in lots of effort to craft these songs and lyrics. They are not “one-shot” prompts.
If we look at this through the lens of making software with ai, which also allows for creativity, blanket bans may keep lots of quality stuff from being made.
How will the tracks be distinguished? Any ai and you’re out?
This is just a fad. The platforms will soon learn that the vocal minority is not necessarily their best customer. And then they'll slowly / quietly revert their bans or stop enforcing them.
If people listen to music, they like the music, and it can come from wherever. Gatekeeping never works.
How would this be a vocal minority on a website like Bandcamp, whose whole mission statement is to let people support their favorite artists directly?
I'm sure there genuinely are lots of people out there who would enjoy AI-generated music, but I very much doubt there's a huge crowd of them on Bandcamp, if for no reason other than ideological.
These are my thoughts exactly. If people enjoy the music, they will listen to it. If they don't, they wont.
They can get their "AI" music in many other places, there's no reason for Bandcamp specifically to provide it.
As of yet Bandcamp hasn't tried to become an 'everything is here' kind of distributor, but rather more tailored to small, niche, quality &c. artists, and not consumers. Kind of the opposite to Spotify.
why do you think a majority of bandcamp users want AI music?
> If people listen to music, they like the music
This isn't true, there's a wide array of reasons people might listen to the music.
The most obvious problem here is that, since AI allows creation with zero effort or time, it has the ability to absolutely flood every creation market it touches.
It's not possible to find out that you actually hate AI generated music and actually love Queen when you're forced to listen to 1.2 million songs before you find Queen. Or, whatever new artist equivalent.
It's the same issue on video platforms. Is there non-slop content on Instagram Reels? Yes. Can you find it? Uh... no. So you're gonna be watching slop and you're gonna like it, because that's all you know.
Bandcamp literally is the vocal minority of music listeners.
They sent AI generated music away to Bannedcamp.
For an example of an AI generated song that's gone viral in the last few days, getting millions of views on Spotify / Youtube, see this post from earlier today:
"Tell HN: Viral Hit Made by AI, 10M listens on Spotify last few days" [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46600681
This is quite sad, in that the fact that it's AI generated is hidden in the disclaimer and nearly all of the comments think it's a real human.
I've been micro-sampling AI "covers" or "re-imaginations in a new genre" of certain pieces of music.
For making house/4x4 type music, it's actually pretty fun. Once you chop something and repitch it enough, no algorithm can pick up on what song it is you are sampling if the AI track is way off from the original piece.
No way would I actually try to monetize it, though.
It will be interesting to see how/where the line is drawn on "in substantial part", considering that Logic Pro lets you click a button and adjust some sliders to add an (awful, imo) drum/instrument played by AI to your track.
But that's absolutely not generative AI (which bandcamp explicitly stated the policy is for) and it's not even classifiable as traditional AI. The session tracks are just some base patterns selected by sliders attached to options adjust stuff like "play these notes in an inverted chord".
Hmm, a few years ago, such a feature would have been called "AI" in marketing materials, no? Aren't all current GenAI tools in some way "just some base patterns selected by sliders attached to options adjust stuff" - only the 'base patterns' are some weights in a neural network.
This is IMHO an impossible line to draw. If an established artist uses a GenAI music tool it would be accepted. If somebody unpublished does the same it wouldn’t. Assuming they can even tell the difference, which they can’t.
It's not always obvious anymore what music is AI generated. And it will likely get harder to determine. I wonder if this kind of policy is going to lead to artists who are not using AI to be accused of doing so?
Understandable. But the question I don't see anyone asking, and I really want answered, is how will they identity? I'm not a good singer at all. Recently I wrote a song, uploaded the music to Suno and it created nice music and composition. I downloaded the individual layers of music, sent the vocal to another app that changed it to my voice. Put everything together and it sounds like me singing.
Some of the AI applications may sign the data in a purposefully detectable way.
Other than that no idea.
With this said, this may be more of a reason to get rid of the AI trash slop that scammers use to attempt to make money, gum up the platform with, and not actually ban people that make decently good AI based songs.
I have a maybe unpopular opinion to share.
We now sort of accepted the idea of “vibe coding”, and, even shared appreciation from people who are using it to resuscitate side projects and things they wanted to do but required a lot of work. (Heck, even Linus Torvalds is doing it).
Is “Vibe Music / Art” any different? For example, I am not a drummer, say I use Suno to program some drums for me so I can record my guitar on top, and finally release that track I’ve been procrastinating.
I think the analogy here holds. Not all vibe coding is good, and not all vibe art is bad.
The difference is that code is functional, and the product is the output of the code, not the code itself, whereas music is the thing in itself. I'm not inherently anti ai-creations, but the bar is higher for style in aesthetic domains than functional ones, so AI art/writing/music/etc needs to be heavily filtered/massaged/etc. Plenty of writers/artists/musicians are using AI like an idea generator/scaffold then recreating/enhancing the outputs and going under the radar, it's just the low effort people that everyone sees.
Sure, the analogy applies. Vibe music, vibe art, and vibe coding, for the original specific use of "vibe" meaning "take whatever the computer spits out and don't try to understand it or make it human-serviceable at all", are all low-effort, and they don't belong alongside the corresponding human work without a clear warning label.
(I also think that "AI-assisted" work should have a clear warning label, but I don't automatically equate "AI-assisted" with full "primarily AI-written".)
What do you mean by warning? Transparency I get it, what made you pick the word warning specifically? I wouldn’t mind disclosing that my drums were AI generated for example, but what would a “warning” text be?
I mean it in several senses.
In the labeling sense, it's a warning label, in that it serves to tell people who may wish to avoid something that it is present in the product, much like warnings saying "may contain tree nuts" on products that are potentially cross-contaminated. (As compared to a label that people are likely to seek out, like "100% juice", which is regulated differently to prevent people from using it when it doesn't apply.)
In the computing sense, it's a warning, in that it doesn't stop you from ignoring it if you want to, but some people may wish to `-Werror` / `-D warnings`.
> We now sort of accepted the idea of “vibe coding”
speak for yourself please, not all of us have
That was precisely what I meant with the use of "sort of". Sorry it wasn't clear to you, I did not mean to take words from those that disagree and I do understand that!
The use of the AI drums would pollute your original guitar work with sounds that, interpreted as music, are necessarily derivative and unsentimental. I agree that the technological aspect is a red herring, but art and coding are dissimilar in their aims.
My impression is that BandCamp is not inherently against using new technology to generate new sounds. This decision seems to be not about "what is art" but about "what is good for BandCamp right now".
As a small platform like BandCamp you do not want to be flooded by cheaply generated AI copies of existing songs / genres - this would alienate both artists and customers and could endanger the whole platform. You also don't want to expose yourself to internal complaints and external copyright claims because someone uploaded hundreds of "Popular work X in the style of popular band Y" songs.
The AI slop avalanche will pass by and probably leave behind some cool stuff. In the meantime, it seems like a sensible option for BandCamp to step aside and evaluate their position in a year or two.
There is no shared appreciation for vibe coding.
If it solves a problem, good for you but I don't think people should put their vibe coded projects online. They don't have any value.
There are delusional people who create vibe coded pull requests to open source projects and they believe they are actually contributing value. No they only create work for the maintainers that have to review the subpar code.
As for your use case, are there really no royalty free drum beats that you could use? Not to mention you could probably learn to create your own beats in Ableton in one weekend. You are cheating yourself.
Personally, I feel like tech companies have already taken over so much of our lives and culture that I don't want them to take more. Corporations have weaseled their way into almost every facet of our lives at this point. Letting them take over human expression and become a substitute for human creativity just feels beyond the pale. When do people say enough is enough?
No, but some people really hate it for some reason.
I've been attacked for saying I don't hate it, and I witness this everywhere.
It's a tool. Artists and professionals can use tools. They're professionals and know how much is too much.
A stonemason who creates pieces by hand gathers more respect than one who delegates their craft to a cnc machine. No person who respects their craft will use tools that devalue their relation to their craft. Only those who seek to maximize personal gain of wealth would use such tools. Such a person, who sees merit only in the ends produced, rather than in the means themselves, does not participate in the shared history of their craft, in artistry, or in their own personal development.
For a real musician, AI is already too much. For there to be meaning and soul in their music, is must be derived from the intersection of their skills and imagination, whereby the unconscious can make itself manifest in the utilization of ones virtues. Delegating this process to a black box deprives the art of its unique individual perspective that can only arise out of the finitude of human experience and learning. For though the black box may have superficial knowledge of generalizations of many such perspectives, it smooths out all paths into bland sameness. Thus no real artist of merit has any use for AI, for it is always of a lower degree than the more powerful tool that is their mind.
I confess I am torn by your comment. I myself wouldn't choose AI for guitar, given that's where I have perfected my craft, and I am able to relate to what you said. However, not as an artist, but as a listener, I have no trouble with a guitar composition made by a machine.
John Dewey's famous book talks about shifting the focus from the maker to the experience and that the value of something is not about the artist's inner struggle but about the work's capacity to generate lasting experiences. This also ties well into Roland Barthes' essay about reading and how language is a living thing. He puts forward the notion that meaning lives in the reader, not in the writer. Audiences is what turns it into an experience.
Again, this isn't to devalue the effort or that the inner struggle isn't commendable, this is to say that artistic value can exist beyond that.
The making of art is a personal experience, and the beholding of art is another type of personal experience. If we suggest that the two can be separated such that we can behold art without knowledge of the production of it, well I would consider that wrong. There is a reason each piece in a museum is given a plaque telling its medium and brief background. This is because the meaning of a piece is derived from its context and cannot be separated from it without making art an arbitrary sensory stimuli.
The issue with the reduction of art to experience is that it ignore that our knowledge shapes our experience, and so the more we know about an artist and their process, the more different our experience of their art will be.
If one sees the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, they might not think much of it if all they know is that it's very popular. Another who knows why the Mona Lisa is particularly popular, because of its historic theft, has a different experience of it. And the person who knows of Da Vinci's life, who has read his journals, knows of his elaborate painting process and sophisticated details and meaning supplied in his paintings, why that person derives much more joy out of the work than one who merely sees it as a visual appearance producing merely a arbitrary liking/disliking.
Perhaps you might enjoy an AI composed track, but would you not enjoy it more if instead that track were human produced, particularly if you held more knowledge of the people making it?
As for meaning living in the reader, that cannot be true, for a person can find meaning in tea leaves or moving clouds. True meaning, as intentional, is not derived, but supplied, and it is the goal of every reader to behold the authors vision. That one fashions a different interpretation for themselves over the authors intentions is of necessity, for no two minds will see alike, but to look only for the reflection of oneself in art and not look beyond, why that is the death of art, for art is the revelation of the soul.
We don't have to agree, but the biggest problem I find with this take you're now bringing is that it leads to an infinite regress, you can forever expand your knowledge about the origin of something. Then, not to mention, that often we construct from evidence which is already an interpretation with data loss.
The Mona Lisa example actually supports both our positions in my opinion: someone can have a profound experience of it knowing nothing of Leonardo, while someone else has a different profound experience knowing his biography. Neither experience is 'false', they're just different modes of engagement with the same work. Personally, I have even experienced the inverse throughout my life.
Growing up not speaking English, and being flooded with American culture through radio, I was deeply moved by lots and lots of music made by foreigners that sounded like absolute gibberish to me. Later in life, after learning about the meaning of certain songs, I, unfortunately, lost some of my appreciation for it. Some may call that alienation, but to me it was a form of naivety of a child that enjoyed just sound in its pure form without it being tainted by any derived or supplied meaning from its creator that was attached to it through accompanied lyrics.
But then do we not agree, for if your experience of the music has changed upon learning the meaning of the songs, then it was true knowledge of the meaning of the piece which in the end determined your appreciation for it. And that our experience is not a fixed thing at one moment in time, but can re-occur and is in flux and subject to change in its quality based on knowledge gained. So from this you cannot return to the naivety of a child unless you reject from your mind the notion that knowledge determines quality and that the meaning supplied from its makers influences our experience of it.
Who is more correct, the child or the adult? If you suggest the child, then what do you say to the adult who objects on the grounds of the meaning of the sounds uttered? The adult would say that though the sounds are pleasant to the ear, they are not good to the mind. Thus, rather than affirming the child's vision, they would reject the pleasant sounds with poor meaning in favor of higher quality ones which are as equal in their harmonic value as with the greater quality in their meaning.
As for the infinite regress, that only proves the value of knowledge all the greater, for if we can expand our knowledge on the origins of something continually, so too can our appreciate of the thing grow in proportion. This only leads to a richer and deeper appreciation for life. In this way I can reread or rewatch a show in time and see more and know more than in my first experience, and so grows my appreciation for the details that I missed the first time. And this may only occur if the subject at hand is of good quality in the first place, for else when we descend further into the details and meaning we would be dissapointed at its lack. But that which is rich in meaning lacks none and may reveal itself new with every experience. This is why knowledge of the good is required, and why AI and lackluster artists may only produce pleasant sounds.
"I neither know nor think that I know," as Socrates said. Perhaps that's where we must leave it.
You see knowledge of origins as the path toward deeper appreciation, an asymptotic approach to the artist's soul. I see each encounter with art as its own beginning, where meaning emerges fresh in the meeting of work and listener, never fully exhausted by what came before.
Maybe both are true in their way. The child and the adult don't cancel each other, they're different movements in the same ongoing piece. I lost something when I learned those lyrics, and I gained something too. Neither experience was false.
There is no end to this question, for there is only beginning.
The debate about where meaning lives may itself be unsolvable, which is perhaps why we've been having it for millennia.
Thank you for the exchange. It's sharpened my thinking, even where we remain apart. :)
Would you have a problem if AI was no longer a tool but the artist itself (i.e. no human intervention)?
People seem to have an irrational fear of being entertained by AI, equating that to admitting that it is a higher form of intelligence than their own.
I would have no problem with that. I wouldn't maybe call the AI an artist though, it wouldn't have sentient knowledge to be an artist. It would be art made by a machine. In fact, we have several of those examples already, and there's lots there are really fun and appreciated out there. This new one just happens to be quite more complex and eerie to digest at first.
Good news! It just degrades the quality of service. Now its hard to separate AI music in Spotify.
Man, I friggin' love Bandcamp. I hope Apple Music follows suit. (I don't expect Spotify to.)
I am on the opposite side. For the last few months I don't listen to music unless it's AI generate. I can feel the difference.
Do you feel the veins transforming into wires?
Well... they'll have to clean their content because unfortunately there is already lots of AI generated music at Bandcamp
/find in page “discovery”, 0 results
A little shocked. The biggest issue with music streaming right now is, imo, discovery. Algorithmic discovery is cute, but there’s a perverse incentive for companies who provide discovery services (ie Spotify) to funnel users to artists that cost less (ie AI generated in-house).
There’s also the fact that flooding the market with AI music slop _also_ makes discovery even harder.
Tried-and-true methods for discovery over the past decades are network effects (artists featuring and collaborating), and niche label A&R. However, Spotify has no interest, or incentive, to allow users to explore these avenues for discovery.
So, kudos to Bandcamp. But with better discovery this wouldn’t be necessary.
Finally, anecdotally, as someone in the top percentile of listeners for several niche genres on Spotify, I’ve yet to hear AI generated music that isn’t crap. Whenever it gets recommended to me by Spotify I reach for my phone, see that I don’t recognize the artist, and then see that they’re self-published on Spotify with a few hundred listeners. I guess if you don’t have any taste you might not notice, but it’s painfully obvious for anyone who is familiar enough to recognize themes, callbacks, and instrumentation within a genre.
I feel like the thing like you can easily divide things along the lines of 'art' vs 'consumption'.
A lot of people including myself enjoy music because it's so intimately human, the flaws and all. It's someone putting a bit of themselves into every piece they create, and people look for things that resonate with them.
AI music however is purely about consumption. It's not something made to be remembered or cherished. And the more you integrate it into your music, the less and less of yourself you put into it and the less reason for anyone to bother. I could just ask whatever AI to generate generic rock music inspired by the beatles and remove you from the equation entirely and have the same experience. Everything gets amalgamated into the exact same thing with all of the imperfections sheared away.
I think we need to start distinguishing between art-music and utilitarian-music.
Art-music is made by humans as a way of expressing yourself and making human connections.
Utilitarian-music can be made by humans or machines and is there to serve a purpose. Background music for the elevator or while you’re on hold. An ambient soundscape that you play in an airport terminal. It’s not meant to move people, it’s just there to fill silence.
Artists of worth can do both, like Brian Eno with Music for Airports https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNwYtllyt3Q
We already have a term for this: muzak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzak
Bandcamp is my main source of music online, and this makes me love it even more.
I suspect it's honestly a huge threat.
Ok maybe you have the opinion that it's all crap right now. That's fine. But pretend it gets good. Pretend that instead of bothering with bands at some point in the future you just generate music to your tastes on the fly all the time.
Where does that leave Bandcamp? Do they market themselves as "fresh organic music" and live in that niche? What good does all the rights music companies own do if music generates on the fly?
I suspect a huge amount of lobbying incoming asap to stop this. Perhaps a law against AI generated music that's not owned by the RIAA? You might not like AI generated music but you should be very very cautious of those fighting it.
> Pretend that instead of bothering with bands at some point in the future you just generate music to your tastes on the fly all the time.
As someone who enjoys live music, I would still need a live band to play this on-the-fly generated music. I guess then you'll trot out AI holograms! but that sounds still as unappealing as your base case.
I worry that as technologists we are over indexing on accusing things of being AI. I worry about policies like this where they will remove suspected AI content without investigation.
Case in point, the other day I made a comment on reddit. I spent about 10 minutes writing it. I used proper grammar, bullet points, clean formatting, and em dashes, as I've been doing for many years.
I immediately got downvoted and sent multiple PMs about "not posting AI slop".
I didn't use AI at all to write that comment. It just looked like AI because it was well formed and researched. So am I supposed to add errors just to make it look "human"? But also, how do I even prove I wrote it without AI?
I'm not entirely sure how to solve this problem.
This is dumb. The solution for all music platforms should be to add a label for AI-generated tracks or artists so users clearly can disambiguate. It's frivolous to prevent someone from enjoying a piece of art whether AI or human. Furthermore, the line is blurred between what constitutes human vs AI development of music. Most producers today use pre-packaged samples, sequencers, and tracks to generate derivatives. Sure, they might manually have to mess around with Ableton to do so, but the line is already blurred.
I support this.
However, what if I use AI to generate a simple sine wave. Then I map it to a keyboard and play it with different notes.
Who's going to define what's ok.
I am not against AI art but this would better to be contained in specific platforms, you could browse Suno for AI music and Bandcamp for human music. You would'nt display some generative art piece next to a Rembrandt. Also, Bandcamp could enshittified by a flood of AI music and change the fees or terms, so please no.
I've encountered a few artists who partially used AI in their music making process and the results have been incredible, I would hate to see them banned when grouped with people making completely AI-generated slop... Perhaps a middle ground could be reached? Allow AI generated audio as long as it undergoes significant processing by humans, for example.
They are free to use AI and they are free to post their music on other sides that allow AI.
I think you need hard rules to make it not completely subjective.
From the original post:
Sounds completely subjective if you ask me.Nah
Good decision. Bandcamp makes money from people who consciously avoided the streaming shitfest in favor of directly supporting the artists. Hardly surprising that their have a strong aversion to AI slop.
Good. Although It's gonna be tough to enforce.
> Our guidelines for generative AI in music and audio are as follows:
> Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp.
> Any use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles is strictly prohibited in accordance with our existing policies prohibiting impersonation and intellectual property infringement.
Which is balanced. It means that you can still use Illugen to generate a drum sample for instance, but you can't just generate a whole track on SUNO and just upload it on Bandcamp.
How would they know? A lot of the new stuff is pretty indistinguishable from regular music with the AI adding imperfections like a recorded album would have.
Hell yes, I love this and bandcamp so much more for this stance!
So many creator platforms are becoming slop factories.
wohooo!
Irrelevant platform says irrelevant thing. Also let people like or dislike things. Maybe we could pick if we want AI content or not. (it’s a no from me personally ) but I feel like the ban hammer is the tool of petty tyrants and lacks creativity and nuance
It's their platform, they can do whatever they want. Not everything has to be everything for everybody. And if you think they're irrelevant why would bother wasting your time commenting?
They handle a lot of sales [1], I do not think they can be called irrelevant under any reasonable definition of the word:
> In the past year alone, [customers] spent $208 million on 14.6 million digital albums, 11.2 million tracks, 1.55 million vinyl records, 800,000 CDs, 250,000 cassettes, and 50,000 t-shirts.
[1] https://bandcamp.com/about
I wish youtube would also take action. So much of my recommendations for music is just AI slop now. I'd be OK if they flagged videos as AI and let me block them. At first I was open to the idea of AI synthwave as a thing but now it's just gotten out of hand and every day i am flagging new channels to not be recommended.
AI-generated music is novel, but like images and videos, I think of it almost exclusively as a novelty. I haven't heard any AI-generated music that I like in a real way. Just stuff that sounds like something I like.
The real value AI has for music is discovery. I've been using Gemini and ChatGPT to build playlists based on music I already like, and discovering lots of fun new tracks. I can be really specific about what kind of music I like and don't like. I can show it a playlist I already made, and ask it to make one like it, but with completely different artists. It's insanely useful!
But these kinds of tools would just expand how many different artists Spotify has to pay from my streaming, and that doesn't do the same thing as shoving cheap mass-produced slop down our throats, so it isn't surprising what they offer us.
We banned AI slop in 2022, and whilst it has been challenging, I believe that only allowing authentic human-created content is the future.