Just sat through a disheartening video from my former drum-teachers at Drumeo, about how AI is inevitable and that musicians that don’t use AI will be left behind, comparing it to when tractors came to farming… wtf?
Just sat through a disheartening video from my former drum-teachers at Drumeo, about how AI is inevitable and that musicians that don’t use AI will be left behind, comparing it to when tractors came to farming… wtf?
Hmmh. I think we’re already past posting some SUNO crap and getting flack. I mean reportedly, there’s already a lot of “AI music” on Spotify. We had the first “AI artists” on some billboards for R&B, country, pop, christian music(?)… And I get “AI music” on YouTube. And I’m fairly sure some small minority of retail stores here have (very nasty) “AI music”.
But it’s not like it’s good? To this date it’s some very bland shit you’d play in the elevator or on the loo. I’ve never felt anything when listening to it the same way I feel when listening to some old Pink Floyd album or whatever. And I doubt people will go to a music festival and there’s ChatGPT on stage… I’m fairly sure AI will have a hard time displacing proper art. I mean sure, pop music, the billionths love song text, samples, it’ll creep in to music. But we already have drum computers, electronic music. And to be fair, bands like The Prodigy never needed any drummer. But I really think from a perspective of someone who listens to music intentionally, there’s no chance AI will take over the entire thing. It’s just neither good, nor can it play concerts, nor does the music mean anything.
And from the hobby musician’s perspective, I’d say music is entirely for humans. It’s your personal enjoyment to play folk songs on the accordion, pop covers on the acoustic guitar at the fireplace or bring your fiddle and flute to the session at the irish pub. Or meet with your band mates in the practice room every week to play some punk rock and drink a lot of beer. AI can’t ever take that away.
I don’t have anything against using tools to do a job, I worked in a analog recording studio back in the 90’ when computers for real started to made their entrance in music, and I welcomed the changes with open arms, I even thought that the LinnDrum was a cool instrument, but AI is not just a tool, at best it’s giving away your creativity, at worst it’s giving away your work so that someone who knows how to “prompt” can make a “better” version.
Guess I’m a bit more pessimistic about it than you, I know there will always be people like me who likes to make music without the use of AI, but I have seen what stuff like autotune have done to the industry, and I fear that AI will become the only thing people hear.
Guess I’m making some sort of distinction between “the industry” and what kind of music I listen to… I’d agree. In the realm of commercial music, if the point of your band is to sell a lot of music… you’d probably use all the tools available. And it’s definitely a thing. Most modern pop artists on the radio have some other people write the music for them or at least the harmonics and general layout. Designed to appease and have some well tested standard chord progressions. They almost always do autotune. And it’s some self-reinforcing feedback cycle with the audience. We also have music genres which rely on (audible) autotune as some stylistic element. I more or less don’t consider it art anyway. There’s a select few songs of that kind I consider original and nice. Other than that it’s some mass-produced homogenous mainstream shit. So I just don’t know if I consider it a loss once it’s designed or sung by AI… It might happen, though.
All I can say is, the last music festival I attended had a vast majority of bands with more genuine music. A minimum of autotune, the audience generally doesn’t want playback either. No AI and a lot of declaring war against the fascists in politics 😁 I’m a bit too old to tell what teenagers listen to these days. But I suspect from the perspective of people who really like music on a level which surpasses mainstream radio… Idk… There still seems to be some broad majority who doesn’t like overproduced music. At least that’s the bubble I’m at.
Same. Except software development.