Only time will show if the next step will happen anyway. My gut feeling tells me that AI art will gain acceptance over time, and we will just think of it as "art" or "music", just as we did with recorded mysic and synthetic sounds.
I see little value to humanity in tools that are able to generate an endless amount of music derived from existing music, specifically designed to neatly slot into the place of human artists. We gain little in return from that.
Some people will make an argument like, this lets people generate lots of low-quality music for use in elevators or grocery stores. Well, there is already a massive oversupply of completely free music which can do that. Do people pretend to not know this?
The other weak argument is that it lets people express themselves who haven't studied or practiced music. But, it doesn't, because the interfaces (text prompts or "upload an existing file") are designed to take the place of a human being given instructions for criteria to fill, as if they were a worker, not an expression of the person giving the instructions. If the person giving the instructions were expressing themselves, most of the AI tool would not be redundant. It's as expressive as telling another person to write a song for you with some instructions. Hardly expressive at all.
And the quality of music generated by AI is increasing geometrically. Be careful to consider that any music heard today will be among the least quality generated by AI. Because it will get better with practice, at the speed of light.
That first comment I can get behind, but probably not in the way intended. Recording technology made performers less valuable, so fewer could make a living. The AI composers (and performers) will go further down that road. My conclusion? Get used to it. Just like human-adding-machines got replaced by calculators. And a generation of weavers, replaced by looms guided by punched cards.
This phenomenon is not new, and will go down a well-worn path.
For augmenting comoposers, sure, GenAI can be a tool like others. Musicians have been incorporating rhythms and melodies shipped with their electronic instruments for ages.
Entire genres have been defined by sounds and synth presets, too.
So I do see a bit of the similarities that you describe, but I think this is largely misleading.
The argument is that each technology advance accompanied resistance followed by adaptation. "Recorded music" was arguably as paradigmatically disruptive over "live music" as "AI generated music" will be.
Another side of it is that it will enable the creation of more music around more topics than before, by non-musicians. The accessibility bar is lower.
For a lot of people, music is a way to express their emotions, and not just by creating/playing it, but by listening to it. Now, you'll be make your own hyper-specific music with lyrics around topics specific to you, without learning any of the underlying skills yourself.
I've certainly wanted some kinds of music/representation in music of some of my experiences to exist, but not enough to go out and learn to make it myself. Now/soon I should be able to do that with AI tools, and I think that's actually neat!
For a normal person, whether something is art or not, is a mix of 1) whether they like it, 2) whether they can, or conceivably could, enjoy it together with other people, and 3) whether they're supposed to enjoy it or call it art, because other people claim they do (social proof).
Examples:
- Pop songs are strongly 1, 2 and 3a (enjoyment), but not necessarily 3b (considered High Art). Most people don't care, or couldn't even tell, if the songs they like were written and performed by actual humans or by machines; they experience them through some machine anyway.
- Paintings. I recently visited a Van Gogh exhibition, and I can't honestly say I liked most of it. Most paintings, in general, are ugly. We call them art because we're supposed to call some paint scribbles on a canvas art, particularly when they're framed and put in a museum (as opposed to bought off the street!) and decreed Art by People In Authority Over What Is or Isn't Art. For this exhibit in particular, my ability to enjoy the paintings was proportional to how much I knew about Vincent van Gogh's life - for those paintings I had some context for, I enjoyed them even though they're otherwise pretty bad to me. But most people, most of the time, don't have any context for paintings they're viewing, and they still call them art.
Hell, arguably, the best "paintings" in that exhibit were a couple that were obviously AI-generated - like Vincent wearing VR goggles, or animated Vincent inviting the patrons to the exhibit.
Nah, what I think is death of art for regular people is quantity and personalization. The most important aspect of day-to-day art experience is that you can enjoy it together with people around you. It's a problem for TV shows and books these days, and even more with "Internet original" videos - there's just so many of them, and with everyone's getting their own personalized feed, it's getting hard to find common creative works you and your conversational partners both seen. Everyone's experience is becoming disjoint from everyone else's (except for occasional superhero or wizard movie) - at which point you eventually realize that enjoying unique art no one else has is pointless waste of life.
The prompt can be detailed, creative, and innovative. Kinda like a composer comes up with an idea for a new piece. But now the composer won't need the technical ability to translate it into musical notation.
All of these had immense impact on the way we create (or make art). And despite all this, we still use waterpaint, perform music on ancient instruments, make furniture with minimalistic tools, or use clay to make objects.
I'm not pessimistic about generative AI. If anything, It'll allow more people to create. Allow new and unprecedented art forms. It will have an effect on the way people make money with art. But so did photoshop, digital audio mixers, a table saw, and a CAD/CAM machines.
Not a lot of individuals, to be honest. Only a handful of people make any kind of living from composing. Millions try it, but have to be content with performing for their friends. Which will continue unchanged.
So the actual economic impact of AI music will be different from the scenarios being described. What is true is, we will all have a lot more musical listening choices. Which is a net good for the rest of us?
Algorithmic music has already been around for decades and it never became popular. In the 90's it was of interest only to a small group of academic music nerds. The same is true today. Avant-garde shit for nerds. No one wants to listen to it.
> we got the synthesizer. Again we got the same complaints
I honestly don't believe this happened. Citations?
You make it sound like one day there was no recording and then bam! flac quality recordings of musicians, out of the blue. You do realize it started with exceedingly shitty wax cylinders that sounded absolutely atrocious by today standards (and by the past standards as well)
>After the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, all bets were off for live musicians who played in movie theaters. Thanks to synchronized sound, the use of live musicians was unnecessary — and perhaps a larger sin, old-fashioned. In 1930 the American Federation of Musicians formed a new organization called the Music Defense League and launched a scathing ad campaign to fight the advance of this terrible menace known as recorded sound.
>The Music Defense League spent over $500,000, running ads in newspapers throughout the United States and Canada. The ads pleaded with the public to demand humans play their music (be it in movie or stage theaters), rather than some cold, unseen machine.
>Joseph N. Weber, the president of the American Federation of Musicians, made it clear in the March, 1931 issue of Modern Mechanix magazine that the very soul of art was at stake in this battle against the machines.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/musicians-wage-war-ag...
It is a test that selects for the ability to deceive.
1. We tell a human (test subject) that they will be a judge but they are a test subject. We will tell them that there will be two chats -- one will have a human and the other will have a computer and they need to decide which is which.
2. We will then give them access to two real time chats but the twist is both of them will be humans.
3. Our test subject needs to rebel against the experiment and say they are both humans.
What percentage of the population will be able to say both chats are humans? Is this a humane experiment? Will any ethics board clear it? Does it have any scientific value?
Dunno, but it could probably get published and I'd at least read the comments when it gets posted to HN.
Tricky bit is the design in the signaling and instructions so as to avoid biasing the results while still allowing the desired 'both are human' response. Something like a check box for each chat if that chat was a robot. If you have the budget I'd also run the control Turing test, human x computer, as well as a computer x computer test.
About a third of people are highly suggestible and agreeable, they readily follow authority, fall for scams and can be hypnotised. About a third cannot be easily conned or hypnotised, are vigilant, "disagreeable" and likely to go their own way.
Even of that highly sceptical, independent third, it takes a lot of courage to say "I totally know this is bullshit, and I'm done". Only a handful of Migram's subjects were able, not just to assert a moral objection to hurting a fellow human being, but to question or see through the whole ruse of fake scientists and stooges. Even if you can spot that, it takes rather a rare human to act on it, to call it out and walk away - or rather escape the parameters (get outside the box) you've been placed within.
Maybe there will be a change of feeling, it's starting to come to me, instead of seeing this AI generated content as "soulless" etc I'm starting to see it as an extension of OUR human generated work. It's more like an endless remix of HUMAN talent.
All of that is boring though. The exciting stuff is all that will be displaced, and how we will solve the myth or meritocracy.
