I have a very pragmatic view on music: all I care about is whether it sounds good or not. That’s it. That’s literally it. And from that standpoint the advent of AI music has been a major net positive for me.
You can choose to ignore that and come tell me about the ethics of using AI or how you care about the story behind the song and so on and that’s all fine but just note that you’re no longer addressing what I’m actually saying here.
I’m also not claiming it’s great - only that it’s good. I’ve yet to discover an AI song that I go back to like I do with many human-made songs but if I want to put on a playlist playing in the background then one consisting of entirely AI-made music reliably provides me well above average track after another whereas with organic music I need to sift through a ton of absolute crap to stumble upon the occasional good track that still rarely exceeds what AI is able to output. I can go on YouTube and put on a 2 hour playlist of Jazz House or similar and I don’t get the urge to skip a single track.
Currently I feel like where AI still trips is lyrics - they still are only plausible sounding nonsense once you actually start paying attention to it but especially for instrumental music it has far exceeded the level of a good average human artist.
Few examples of what I’m refering to: with vocals and without.
Well, we’ve got a truly unpopular one, kudos for that
The fun thing about this being tightly bound to the subjective is there’s not really any golden argument that can be made; some people are going to keep ordering pizza hut and saying they love it, even if literally any option is better from everyone else’s perspective.
In your choice of using it for background music, I personally would always choose an actual curated list, ideally mixed by an actual DJ. There’s a lifetime of that content on YouTube already, so I never have to have the same one on twice, and usually if you like the vibe at the start of the mix, the DJ carries it through. Also a great way to discover new music that you can then go and look into the artist and find more stuff, maybe even go and see a show.
With an AI playlist, that’s it, there’s nothing further that can happen, it’s literally just filling the space. Which is fine, but I guess I just see that as a wasted opportunity if anything
Well yes, but this AI music scenario is more like if people loved Regurgo-Hut™ rather than Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut at least have humans making their pizzas.
Regurgo-Hut™ is the hot new pizza franchise, backed by all of your favourite investment bankers, that strives to eliminate food waste by taking every scrap of uneaten (and sometimes lightly eaten and/or stolen) pizza from any source we can find around the world. We then form it into 8"-30" discs and re-bake for Hot Flavory Goodness™ delivered to the vicinity of your door.
I see you don’t consider pop tarts or anything you buy in a box or a bag or a wrapper to be food.
All things that are good once in awhile but you probably shouldn’t make a diet out of.
To again improve an analogy: imagine making Pringles exclusively out of potatoes stolen from people’s gardens and pantries, using all of those people’s water supply to process them, then going “but why don’t you like my Pringles?”
You’d have been better served to pick something like Nutella with the palm oil, I think. Huge destruction of natural resources including orangutan habitats. You’ve moved the goalposts here from your original argument that “people don’t make it”, but fine. More aptly for the analogy, people still like it even if you object, and the appeal to nature argument of it is fairly strong even though odds are low that it actually directly affects you.
The pantry raiding falls flat because, as everyone sailing the high seas will tell you, it’s not stealing if you still have your potatoes at the end, right?
Ok so let’s call it Nutella, exactly like it is now except there are tiny bits of shit mixed in (percieveable to the eye, nose and tongue) and we also shoot 10 orangutans every time you buy a jar. But this time “we are providing jobs to prop up the economy”, so if you let our company fail the stock market tanks and we cause the next great depression. People could only be happy about that product, otherwise they must be trolls.
That imaginary Nutella is starting to sound a lot like this thread as you crash out. OP has provided a reasonable use and also true unpopular opinion.
If you think AI sucks for every application, good for you; I would disagree and different opinions are allowed. If you think the way AI has come about and been served up to us is morally questionable as well as outrageous in comparison to resources involved (water, money, electricity) I agree.
If you’re going to argue “they stole our shit” I’m going to laugh at you for expecting privacy on the Internet, and then point to every argument anyone on Reddit or Lemmy has ever used before installing the arr suite.
Your opinion is well established, you don’t need to take every comment to double down on it: OP likes background music nobody explicitly made, and I like not writing my own SQL queries 🤷.
I feel like you missed all the nuance, because my top notch analogies seem to be “crashing out”, so let me break it down for you:
Ok so this is the delicious base, created by humans for humans. Artisanal, words, sounds and images that you can consume every day.
This is the AI part where it has mashed a bunch if existing stuff together based only on patterns and made something music-ish, with whatever it could scrape from wherever.
This is the part where you’re right about stealing shit being totally fine, like Nestlé selling peoples drinking water (that I can only assume you are all for). Commerical LLMs both take people’s private resources and also damage the resources of the rest of the planet, whatever you use them for. So maybe I should have said 100 orangutans to be more accurate.
This is a little joke I threw in about capitalism where big companies always say this to make any shitty thing they do seem worthwhile.
This is an evidence based assertion based on previous examples of forced bailouts for shitty businesses because they were propping up whole economies with their inflated values. Which can be directly compared to the current state of the AI bubble.
This is a little commentary on you and your “different opinions”. You can’t be ok with AI while recognising the impact. It’s not actually like Nutella, which is a calorie dense and cheap food which people ignore the environmental impact of because it’s a cheap and delicious product and they need to eat to live. Yeah you probably need it specifically but I can forgive people buying cheap food. Generative AI is not a necessity. It’s a luxury product that provides literally nothing to keep anyone alive or advance anything of value.
And comparing piracy to LLM training is also a weak take. You can see with Disney strong arming companies that this is doing nothing to impact copyright law and you, as a private citizen, will still be arrested if you download books and try to sell them on as a new product. All it does is shift all of the wealth from individual creators to large corporations.
But you already know all this and I don’t need to keep doubling down. I forgot.
Definitely crashing out. Go lay down.
That’s what I’ve done so far. If those were able to provide me with the same consistent high quality tracks then I wouldn’t have had the need to switch. However they don’t. With AI music it’s like a pizza buffet: it’s not the best food there is but all of it is good.
Is a pizza buffet universally good? I’d say if you were having a pizza buffet every day, it’s going to leave you pretty malnourished before long
We happened upon a pretty nice allegory here
Izzy’s pizza buffet no longer exists.
Music doesn’t carry utility beyond how it makes you feel in the moment so the analogy falls apart when you start discussing the nutritional content of it - it’s all about taste.
Bro I think you just don’t like music.
“this machine kills facists”
I question the claim that music “has made” anyone. Nobody can take credit for the kind of taste they have in music. A metalhead might credit the music for having become who they are but I would argue the opposite: that’s who they were all along and being that way is what made them gravitate towards this specific genre of music. They picked the music - not the other way around.
do you believe in free will?
No. Not in the sense that you could have acted otherwise.
then you’re going to find that you’re on the opposite side of an intractable line in a bunch of conversations. almost everyone has a deep, fundamental belief in their own free will, and the vast majority of those will extend that belief to others.
you will never see eye-to-eye on a disagreement so profound.
Well that’s not really true, music has a lot of utility beyond brain chemicals.
I mean there’s what I already mentioned in it just giving more options for stuff to do. If you find a new artist you like, there’s generally shows you can go to, at those shows you might meet some like minded people and maybe even gain some new friends. That whole life experience is impossible with AI music.
Following from that there’s the general broadening of horizons, music is very often a window into other lives & cultures. It might not be overt in any given piece, but brains love to notice patterns, so over time even tiny glimpses add up. You can make the anthropological case that cultures that share music historically end up growing closer. There’s no other culture you’re really getting exposed to via AI music.
Then broader than that, and admittedly the most dubious part of argument, there’s the vanilla-isation of music this causes. If this becomes a popular view, we’re just going to be flooded with beige. This stuff is zero effort to create, so there’s not really going to be anything to stop people from creating infinite copies of the same thing. For business and commercial folk, it’s cheaper to cut humans out, especially if hypothetically most people are happy enough with the pizza hut buffet. It’s not hard to see how this will drown out the actual artists and choke them out of the industry entirely. Pizza Hut every day whether you like it or not.