> his idea of "music like water or electricity" might finally come true

That was already the case with Spotify & Co. where music has become an anonymous commodity. People order by mood or playlist and rarely care about who composed, produced or played the music, even if the meta data are available. From the user's perspective, AI makes mostly the selection process more precise. I don't think people will care much whether the music itself was a human-made recording or just AI generated.

But making music is still fun (I speak from experience, see e.g. http://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1317); people just won't care, unless you have a big name; all this was already the case before AI generated music became good enough. So by the end of the day, AI is just another act in a rationalization and anonymization process which started a long time ago.

> Get ready for a lot of touring, because that's the only unique experience left

Until someone makes an AI guitar pedal that corrects sloppy playing.

That sounds like a comment about streaming and artists getting basically nothing from it ?

I think music AI in live music would actually be interesting - theoretically it can react to crowds better than any human could. A group music editing session with the AI weaving it to music - sounds like a fun art project.

He effectively predicted all the paradigm shifts that the internet entailed. I've thought about his interviews many times as it was a very optimistic view compared to the alternatives -- one being the internet as a generalized tiktok (or what is called brainrot) and the other being the internet being totally subsumed by existing media corporations. While these exist to a large extent, they have not been able to stop the change in relationship between artist and audience, the meaning of "critique", the status symbol of culture, etc. It has also been argued that he anticipated cryptocurrencies and NFTs with his Bowie bonds. Similarly, even if you strongly dislike the current state of this tech, they complete the puzzle of this positive worldview.

I think recorded music is already a utility, billed monthly and available on demand.

This sounds like the kind of things painters said after good photography because widespread.

Instead we got aesthetically original avant-garde art to replace the thousands of low-quality slop portraits that were common in the mid-19th century.

And here's the thing: the invention of recorded media also had a big impact on musicians

Talks of "nobody will need musicians anymore" were overblown, while having a modicum of truth

The musicians of the 19th century were free to produce anything they liked. They were free to write a "Missa Solemnis" where the very silence is breathtaking, where one does not merely hear that God has died, but where one feels His rebirth. And what have they done? Have they produced in their liberty anything grander or more beautiful than the scrawling of the deaf composer? Have they summoned sounds more jubilant than those conjured by the consumptive Romantic, the limping Dresden Kapellmeister? We know that they have produced only a few forgetful tunes.

Whether cultural libertinism be better than cultural rigidity may be discussed, but that the cultural libertinism of the 20st century amounted to less than the cultural rigidity of earlier century will be difficult to deny.

People will remember Bowie for his words longer than they will remember him for his music because his music is as hollow and unmeaning, by design. He believed the world is an unmeaning wilderness, or at least that he was the most meaningful thing in it, at least in the sense that the only meaning of it derived from himself. But an egoist in a mere unmeaning wilderness is not impressive.

In Bowie's theology, life is something much more grey, narrow, and trivial than many separate aspects of it. The parts seem greater than the whole. If his cosmos is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos. The thing has shrunk.

Bowie could not make any music that was joyful because he could not understand joy. The modern philosopher has told Bowie again and again that he was in the right place, and he had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But those that came before him had heard that they were in the WRONG place, and their souls sang for joy, like a bird in spring.

The reason you don’t have more time for music is not technological, it’s social. We have enough technology to offer a basic life for everyone for free, but we have not agreed that doing so is worthwhile.

Well you know, all those fun and creative parts in software engineering has been taken over by vibe coding and now humans are supposed to do only tedious works, so probably the same thing applies here.

> I want Al to do my laundry

Do you want a washing machine with Alexa built-in? Be careful what you ask for.

(I know what you meant, but the only laundry-related AI you can hope for, is a cloud connected smart speaker telling you it can't wash with unapproved third party detergent pods)

These are actually just the problems easier for researchers to solve, mostly due to a lot of readily available data.

Nothing stops you from doing art and writing, just like nothing is stopping someone today from riding a horse, running a marathon or rowing a boat.

For the last year I have been generating music heavily with Udio. For few years before that I was creating music by hand, trying to get into all aspects of music creation (theory, composition, sound design, mixing, arrangement, etc.) and let me tell you - this last year was the most fun I had with music. Generation isn't just a big button to push to get the output. It's completely separate creative process that opens a plethora of possibilities which you can mix & match with all the other skills you had before.

One other aspect of art generation is that it can complement your other creative process. You may need illustration for a book you're writing, or assets + music for your game. So let the AI help you where you need help and you yourself focus on the things that matter to you the most or where you are having the most fun.

All these art producing AIs are a byproduct of the research progress towards AGI and AI that can do your chores. It is inevitable that somebody has made image or music generating AI in a world where household robots exist. So I don't see any problem with DeepMind trying what they can do with current technology. It's just a reality of the world we have to live with.

AI is going to do jobs like radiologists, so humans can work at McDonald's or be bartenders! I mean, the pouring drinks part of it, the conversational skills of an AI bartender will be superior to those of humans!

We already have machines that do laundry and dishes.

The last 5 years have been a supersized lesson in Moravec’s paradox [1]. More people need to hear about this: the tech world doesn’t have some kind of conspiracy against the creative class, it literally is the lowest hanging fruit as predicted 30 years ago.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

This particular direction is over 180 years old at this point.

"[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine...Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."

Lovelace, Ada; Menabrea, Luigi (1842). "Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq".

> I want Al to do my laundry

Stanisław Lem has told us about the grave dangers of such a development decades ago.

This is a good summary, summary quoted below, full article linked on the page (requires a login - but reading Lem's story itself is better than reading about it anyway):

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/11/30/the-washing-ma...

"Shortly after Ijon Tichy's return from the Eleventh Voyage, newspapers made much of the competition between two washing machine manufacturers. They were producing robot washers of increasing complexity. They came out with sex-pot washers, washers that seduced women, carried on intelligent conversations, etc. A man named Cathodius Mattrass started a religious cult called the cybernophiles, which believed the Creator had intended humans to be a means toward creating electrobrains more perfect than itself. He turned himself into a giant robot and established himself in outer space. A series of court cases ensued. Finally, a special plenary session was held to decide if Mattrass was a planet, a human, a robot, or what, and Tichy was invited to attend. Suddenly, after much argument and deliberation, cries rang out that electronic brains disguised as lawers were present. The Chairman went through the room with a compass and an x-ray machine was brought in. Eventually everyone was kicked outNthey were found to be made of all sorts of thingsNcotton wool, machinery of all kinds. Ijon was the only human, and then he turned the compass on the chairman and found that he, too, was a robot. He kicked out the chairman, paced the empty hall for a while, and then went home."

One problem is, you have to make them into real capable robots, since you want them to pick up what needs washing by themselves. That then leads to feature-creep and ever increasing abilities that have little or nothing to do with washing, and it escalates from there. The story also had gangs of abandoned intelligent washing machines robbing parts from still owned and in use ones, and more.

The story is part of "Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy"

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88321.Memoirs_of_a_Space...

The original Polish book was first published in 1957.

I don't think there would be any art or writing to do if there was absolutely no "laundry and dishes", conflict, either. The Wall-e future seems more consistent with that honestly, but maybe I'm just revealing an ugly part of my own personality

However, Holywood might like the idea of producing an endless stream of content/music/movies/etc. with little human intervention.

> You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-Al is? Wrong direction.

> I want Al to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for Al to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.

This implies a zero-sum where resources put into LLMs are resources taken away from robotics, and having to choose between one or the other.

The reality is that we can have both, and people are working on both. And I'd bet that advancing LLMs will help to advance useful robotics.

So I really dislike that sentiment.

Music is a form of Art, so the quote checks out.

While robots mature, analog arts and one time IRL art events are safe and might be the emphasis.

I'm getting a little tired of hearing this quote at this point.

What about humoring the opposite?

I want AI to automate art so I can spend more time doing dishes and doing laundry. Dishes and laundry are purely analog human experiences. Art, at this point, is essentially digital, and digital is the domain of machines so we can let machines do that now.

Doesn't matter what you want. AI is going to do everything that humans do, and probably better, faster and cheaper.

You are on to the key insight here.. what is emerging is the creative consumer. I.e. I know what I want when I hear it. Or I know what I want when I see it.

This means you can hear something and say.. you know this is nice, but I would like it more if it were different in this way.

With generative tools you can do that. Personally I really like to listen to music, but I generally dislike the lyrics. I want uplifting songs, maybe about what I am doing right now to motivate me. Well with something like Suno.com.. I can just make one. Or I can work with claude or chatgpt to quickly iterate on some lyrics and edit them to create an even higher fidelity song.

The key here is that I can give a rat's ass if anyone in the world likes or cares about my song.. but I can listen to it while I work. It is exactly what I wanted to listen to or close enough.

Art is always some form of human interaction. When we talk about AI music, I think we do not talk about art anymore, so this isn't human interaction as this isn't art too. The creation of the AI itself, could be considered as art, but not the outcome of the AI. We have to be careful in our discussions not to mix the things up. A lot of confusion happens in recent discussion.

The impact of AI on creative fields will be pretty nuanced I feel. I don't think we will end up in a world where everyone is just AI generating the media they want. In some cases we will, for example stuff like lo-fi beats on YouTube are already started to be bulk made by AI because really it's just fancy white noise for people to use to work.

Actual music (like what you find on Spotify) I think won't be impacted very much. People strongly identify with the art they consume, and that identity comes from the people who make the art. Those folks might be using AI under the covers for elements of their creative work, but ultimately what people care about is the humanity behind the art. It's the same with film, and traditional art people hang on their walls. We like the actors, the director, the artist, their taste, and who they are. It's why we have celebrities, because we get invested in the people behind the art.

Video games I think will be interesting... I feel they will be more susceptible to being accepted as AI generated. I don't think people identify with them as strongly.

>The interest in ai music generation is lower than I initially thought. I jumped in but felt the exercise lacked the joy of making music physically or with software like pro tools. With pro tools you control the thousands of knobs which gives you more control. These AI models take away that connection. You can play around with different words to get different results but it's like painting with a shotgun.

You can still pull AI stuff into your music editor and tweak it, although it's harder because it's already mixed. But ironically, this is the exact same problem you have with AI coding to avoid learning how to code - unless you know what you need and how to do it, you're basically relying on AI to one-shot it for you. The nice thing with music and visual art is that it's subjective, so you're the only judge of what's correct. That's why people get super impressed with images in GenAI when it generates 1001 human faces in that setting vaguely resembling what was asked. If you had to generate a very specific thing, it's basically impossible to get it correct.

> No one wants to hear other people's ai songs because they lack meaning and novelty.

Not true. No one wants to pay for other people's ai songs. There are so many AI songs on youtube (mostly lofi or traditional Japanese instrumental) and they cumulatively have quite a lot of view.

The thing is for quite a lot people, music is just something they put in background while doing their office desk jobs. It's just there to make chores a bit more tolerable and nothing more.

Also image generation, particularly with latest GPT, can be finetuned a lot more than music generation which is nowadays limited to "here's something with those lyrics and genre".

> No one wants to hear other people's ai songs because they lack meaning and novelty.

That's not true. I already found a few tracks that I like. It's actually impressive what Udio can produce. Also ElevenLabs demoed their music generator, and their demo tracks were all quite cool.

I do agree with you that fine controls are missing, and also splitting instruments/voices into separate tracks.

> No one wants to hear other people's ai songs because they lack meaning and novelty.

And hear I was thinking that many people listen to songs because they like the sounds of it, but apparently it needs to have "meaning".

People also said similar things in the past (I'm a musician as well: guitar, piano and bass) about Synths and Drum machines (and things like GarageBand which can do backing drums and even basslines semi-automatically now).

Some of those things enabled others to create new types of music or express themselves in different ways.

Good art is not going out of fashion. Tools may change but part of an artists job is to adapt.

For example, when you learn instruments you also train your ear and taste. These are things one cannot take shortcuts in.

I wouldn’t worry about it, but approach new tools (once they actually arrive and are not just advertisements like this one) with curiosity.

> With all these AI-generated music tools, the world is about to be flooded with a ton of low-effort, low-quality music

We've reached that point long before AI entered the scene. All the rest are drops in the ocean of mediocre music.

> I've just recently re-discovered the joy of writing my own songs

Good for you man, how will AI stop you? Are you writing songs for the pleasure of writing songs or for getting validation from other people?

I feel its already hit the tipping point. I used to listen to mixes on youtube liberally, but I've now had to filter all searches to pre-2023 due to the flood of slop that's appeared. I used to finds loads of great up-coming musicians, but the amount of effort required to do so has increased considerably. I am tired of filtering out the slop.

Let me tell you that the world has been flooded with low-effort, low-quality music for decades already. Most of the popular music relying on the same 3 chords, dull lyrics etc. While I'm a fan of music generators like Udio, I'm pretty sure the best music is still going to be created by humans. I also believe that while AI slop is bad, human slop is even worse.

I don't think it's going to drown people out. I think it's going to make recommender systems much less useful, so the people who care will simply return to the older methods of curation, and the people who don't care will get the slop they want.

"Art" is not a career, sorry.

> Why aren't the people who build these tools innovating more?

We’re getting access to generative AI tech and people are looking for innovation in the UI? I mean I get the need for UX but it’s probably coming man, what with MVPs and all

> cathartic when you're sitting at home in the dark because the power company continues to fail

Ironical remark about the power drawn by IA assisted creation left to the reader.

Sounds like a new genre: live music generated on the fly depending on each user’s context.

Just a new possibility!

My theoretical perfect wireless headphone will detect interruptions and play a lofi instrumental version at low volume without skipping a beat and ramp up to original. Bonus points if it can detect my brain straining as an interruption.

Yep not going to bother reading these hype advertisements about things that are not even available. This sucks so much from Google.

don't be so cynical, maybe 10 of us on the waiting list can actually use it before it gets discontinued again

AI slop is cringe. You don't want that kind of optics when marketing your product or company.

No, it won't "get better". AI slop is slop not because of technical limitations.

I remember when they made some generative AI chess demo and when I went to visit it, it said it's not available to users under 18 or outside US. And I had to do a double-take at the idea of chess that is 18+ and georestricted

The world will wait for the Deepseek version.

> That is not a water bottle, it's a domesticated puddle.

Many (most?) people don't care about the artists behind songs (even less so about their culture). They care about the "organised sound" being enjoyable to hear. And to them, AI music is just as valuable as manual music.

Gangam style didn't become popular because people cared about PSY. It didn't become popular because of its thoughtful lyrics and insightful message. It became popular because it sounds good.

The end effect will be the same, I'm afraid: one "AI composer" in a TV studio or a marketing shop will be able to create most of the needed music on demand, removing the need to record and mix new tracks and putting a lot of musicians out of business.

Maybe they're playing the long game and using this to train on musician's input to prepare for the final blow.

> It is great if you want to make a poor imitation of top 40 hits.

generation models in a nutshell

Since we've already evaluated - let's exaggerate - that "most Top 40 songs are slop", maybe lyrics are a big factor in creating identity? I mean, it's true for books, right? I could easily imagine an AI-generated Top 40 song that people would still describe as having a unique identity.

I'm not super into the topic, but let me give you two niche examples that are definitely not Top 40 material, yet are considered to have a strong identity within their communities.

I guess one of the reasons the game Yasuke Simulator has like 10x more sales (don't pin me down on that) on Steam than the actual game Assassin's Creed: Shadows is its very catchy soundtrack, with lyrics that are funny and strongly aligned with the content. [0]

Another example, not focused on lyrics and from a completely different niche genre, is this jazzy death metal song that was particularly well received, not only because of the intentionally hallucinatory video. One could even argue that the hallucination is perceived as a feature, not a bug. So why shouldn't the same be true for audio? [1]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hkh38jhILec

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzXafFUekl0

I actually built a very crude python app that could generate basic melodies with MIDI. It can serve as a fun starting point if you want to remix common songs. But it wasn't a very fun project to set up. It's like this technology is out there but nobody really wants to develop it.

If I had to guess there are already a handful of fake record labels generating at tons of AI slop to just post on Spotify. Even if each song only gets something like two or three views over time they can still generate a modest amount of revenue. Oh wait Spotify has been caught doing that themselves

Some of the artists of the top 40 use some form of auto-tune to generate pleasing music. Can that be considered a slop-y?

Of course there are music models that let you edit and remix music, just add a bit of Audacity:

https://github.com/adefossez/demucs

Yes, why are deep learning models so effective relatively at writing code? It's because programmers have been making their work copyleft for decades, and continue to do so.

Agreed to some extent, but I don't think you'll have too long to wait before that comes to pass. It can't possibly be that hard to build a model that will disassemble a given song into its original tracks, like a Fourier transform that yields drums, strings, keyboards, and vocals rather than sines and cosines. Equally unlikely that such a model will be too large to run locally.

We will get some very cool tools -- and some very cool remixes - when that happens.

Leadership wrote the requirement "launch by X date if you want to get promoted".

Rank and file said "absurd".

Middle management figured out a way to claim success to leadership while keeping rank and file from quitting.