A provoking thought i keep having.
Since “ai” (id rather call it just an aggregator/scraper but yeah) is just taking input from everything humans have done on the internet and spitting out an amalgamation, how exactly can we say its any different from an average musician who has influences from hundreds if not thousands of bands?
There’s many, many, songs out there that you can tell are inspired by others. How can you differentiate this from prompting the slop generator to “make a song similar to x artist and throw in some drum parts similar to y artist”. I myself definitely know the music I write has a sound to it that can be traced to a lot of groups I listen to, even if I just sit down and start writing I will naturally sometimes come up with something that sounds similar to music id been really into that week, for example. Of course I notice this and then work to change it up if possible, and many times others dont even hear the same influence I did in the end!
The only difference i can think of is, if you took a human baby, put them on an island with no music and a caretaker, and gave them a piano, they would create something. Of course a computer could never do this.
Peaceful discussion if we can. 🙂
This is not a provoking thought. This is tediously well-worn ground that was tossed out on its ass as facetious in the early days of AI slop intruding into things.
The difference is one of intentionality. The human work has intent. It may badly reflect that intent because of lack of physical skills or compositional incompetence or such, but in the end, even in the bad art, there was intent.
LLMbeciles and other degenerative AI forms have no ability to formulate intent. They’re not putting in “drum parts like Freddie Gruber” because his distinctive swing adds an undefinable swagger to the guitar riffs. They’re mechanically imitating kinda/sorta a Freddie Gruber line because the key words “Freddie Gruber” were tied to a pattern in their maths and they slavishly pulled it out.
As for the “artist” using the LLMbecile or other degenerative AI, they aren’t artists either. They’ve created nothing. At best they’re an art director and a pretty shit one at that.
Intent is a big part, art is a means of communication and while it may reference or take inspiration from other works there is a message the artist is conveying with their own work.
The same isn’t true of AI, it is incapable of housing intent or making works unprompted.
An average musician knows what sounds good. These models have no clue what sounds good and need a handler to curate the generated responses. That’s already a pretty big difference, don’t you think?
Thats true. But the 99% dont know whats good, and they cant tell the difference. Thats whats worrying.
That’s just misanthropy. 99% don’t know the technical details of what’s good, but they know what gets boring after the second or third listen - and that’s just the curated stuff. The unfiltered slop with zero curation is much worse, they’re not going to be interested.
You guys have so much positivity in humanity, im glad, but i dont believe that one bit. Normal people (the ones not on lemmy, the ones using Spotify, Netflix, and Hulu, x, tiktok) are slurping up slop left and right and cant tell the difference.
Oh, it’s always fun to find an elitist.
Please, oh great Swami. Tell us what is “good”.
Then I’ll kick your ass with things that are “better”.
Because in the end it is the listener, not the performer, who decides what’s good or not.
Well the vast majority of humanity prefers the slop, so we’re cooked i guess.
One of the big differences is that it takes talent (typically from years of practice) to create something good–it’s far more than just the input of other art.
For example, most people listen to plenty of music. We all have a ton of influences to pull from. But writing a song is difficult, even if all the individual elements can be traced to different influences. To write a good song, it usually takes skill deveoped with practice. And if it really is just a few other ideas merged together with nothing original or compelling, it will likely be criticised as derivative and unoriginal.
AI has two big issues: 1. It’s only capable of creating unoriginal derivatives without originality or “soul”, and 2. Its usage is detrimental to the art community that it relies on. As people attempt to replace artists with AI, being an artist becomes and even less viable living (something that was already difficult). And without human artists, we’re culturally stuck recycling the same drivel for eternity, which in turn deteriorates (think of a document that is copied, then that copy is copied, and so on until the contents are barely legible).
I could counter with an argument I keep hearing though. This same argument was made against synthesizers, against daws vs tape, etc, forever.
When drum machines were invented they were called soulless. Would you call Prince, An avid user of them, soulless?
For example a synth can play a major arppeggio at 200 bpm perfectly. It would take a human many years of practice to do that on a piano. So is one worse than the other? Hard to say.
Also, there’s millions of musicians who cant even sing that are releasing song after song because they can endlessly edit it in a DAW and make it perfect, autotune or using vocoding. How is that different ? They dont have traditional talent either.
Especially if you like to listen to any electronic music (as i do early 2000s dnb sometimes) it pains me that this will all be ai music in 5 years or less. It sucks to have to restrict all music listening to pre 2018…or only listen to folk music. But they can replicate that too.
There are a couple ways to approach the argument: we can talk about the art LLMs can produce (and whether it should be called art), and we can also talk about the long-term ramifications.
The arguments about what LLMs can produce are weaker. Art is subjective, and trying to quantify things like “originality” and “soul” is difficult. Plus, as you mentioned, there are plenty of successful artists that are arguably untalented. Ultimately, LLMs can produce something that some people want, at least somewhat. That being said, I would argue that a drum machine on its own is soulless–and I think Prince would agree. It’s the other pieces that make it something more.
The stronger argument is the other one–the long term ramifications. Unlike everything that has come before (synths, sampling, etc), art has always cost someone something. If nothing else, it takes time and effort for a person to create something, and there’s some measure of skill involved (EDM, for example, takes skill in composition rather than performance).
LLMs can produce “art” for negligible (immediate) cost. This is pretty new. And it’s undercutting an already slim market. The likely long-term effects include thinning it further, to the point where “artist” is untenable as a career.
What makes that different from other areas where technology has replaced human efforts? The big difference is that LLM art depends on the human artists creating art. The more prominent LLM art becomes, the less human art is created, and the worse LLM art becomes. It’s like a snake eating its own tail, or a factory that uses its own foundation as raw materials–it’s a self-destructing system.
Another argument to be considered is motivation: the people who are gung-ho about LLM art are typically so because it means they don’t have to pay humans to do the same thing. Which is less problematic in other industries, but given that art is often a form of emotional expression (as opposed to something like a manufacturing job), there’s a stronger argument that maybe the art should be left to humans.
I think it was summed up nicely by someone who posted something along the lines of, “I want AI to do the mundane tasks so I can spend time making art, not the other way around.”
Totally agree.
I’ve heard this sentiment expressed a few times in recent years and I gotta say, it’s not the same.
What we are talking about here is removing the person and the novel inputs they can contribute to the process of creation.
I would argue that a lifetime of honing skill and soaking one’s mind in various art forms, coupled with an individual’s intellectual and emotional experiences create feedback loops between the creator and their creations that result in new things outside of existing frameworks because there is a special ingredient: someone’s life, their way of thinking and being as a result of so many factors.
Generative tools that have the appearance of creating something are just chopping up what exists and rearranging it.
People do that too, but they often end up unintentionally putting something of themselves in there, because they can’t help it. That’s how we get new art.
The thing is, if we remove the experience how to become a musician completely, we also remove our selves from the equation more completely. Generative tools can “make me a composition in the style A with influences from genre B, with song subject C” but that’s not the entirety of artistic practice. There’s more to it than that, and only by suffering through the process and making it a part of ourselves and so our selves a part of it, do we get something special and new.
If we decide that is not necessary anymore, then I think we will render ourselves incapable of making new art on a personal level, and live out a dreary existence in thrall to a content mill of increasingly bland, recycled tropes…perhaps only the rich and privileged will ever have the opportunity to dedicate enough time in their lives to making new art that is distinct, or perhaps nobody will consider these art forms as worth investing any time in at all.
I think we are going to kill our own creativity and deskill ourselves as a population and destroy how artists get made. if we keep buying into this shit it’ll be like the issue with “moving manufacturing jobs back to the US”. There’s not even enough skilled workers left to support such an idea. Try making an original film feature that isn’t 99% slop or having a real orchestra when everyone has given up on actually being an artist/musician as a job long ago.
It’s not the same as DAWs or synthesizers or drum machines or cameras or whatever. We are talking about killing art as a human endeavour because we are stupid and lazy and think Gen “AI” is “good enough”.
Yeah, it is sad. Ive always enjoyed older movies my whole life, but even more so now because I can look at them and go, wow, they did that for real! Same reason I still listen to a lot of 70s/80s rock. It was for the most part, real (even though a lot of the time it was corporate, you still had acts like Kansas and Rush that wrote amazing music, recorded to tape, and worked their asses off playing 250 shows a year)
I think going forward, we wont have talent like that anymore. Unless maybe the kids rebel against slop and we have a revolution of human music and art (id be fine getting rid of quantizing and melodyne myself, never liked it).
Heck, the band im in is in a very small minority that does not use backing tracks and we use real amps. Its all real and performed. People ask us what we use for backing tracks, is the guitarist using looping pedals too? Nope. Its all us and how we wrote the music to sound good live.
But then we have the other kids, the ones who will pump out slop songs and call themselves an artist. And the worst part, people will probably like the slop songs more than the human created ones. If we can even tell a difference in 5 years.
how exactly can we say its any different from an average musician who has influences from hundreds if not thousands of bands?
I would say your own talent kinda influences your work. Because an “AI” can’t really take a shortcut or change things if they are too hard for it to replicate. But you can do that.
Human art is a product of lived experiences and emotions. A generative AI doesn’t have a life it can experience, nor does it have emotions.
This is why when you tell it to sing some nonsensical lyrics it will sing it with the exact same “passion” as reasonable lyrics. It doesn’t even know that it’s being an idiot.
But by derivating from human work, wouldn’t AI also bring the “human” part of the work when generating new contents? Even tho it doesn’t have a lived life, it may mimic the meaning of it by many means.
It provides a sort of amalgamation of the products of Human experiences, but that means it loses the uniqueness of a single Human being.
I feel like this sentiment only applies to music like art rock, bluegrass etc, basically “music peoples music”. There’s a massive amount of music that could all be ai generated and no one would notice.
