| ▲ | concats 4 days ago |
| Trying to look at the bigger picture for a moment. A lot of the philosophical debate about art I see here, and elsewhere on social media, is often very shallow and can be reduced to: Does one believe that the value of the art-piece (be is music, paintings, film, or whatever) is created in the mind of the artist, or is it created in the mind of the consumer? If you believe only in the former, AI art is an oxymoron and pointless. If you believe only the later, you're likely to rejoice at all the explosion of new content and culture we can expect in the coming years. As far as I can tell though, most regular people think that the truth is somewhere in between these two extremes, where both both the creator and the consumer's thoughts are important in unison. That culture is about where the two meet each other, and help each other grow. But most of the arguments I've seen online seem to ignore or miss this dichotomy of views entirely, which unfortunately reduces the quality of the debate considerably. |
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| ▲ | XenophileJKO 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | concats 4 days ago | parent [-] | | My theory is that as the quality of these generative tools increase, we'll see the public opinion of them slowly shift. Regardless of philosophy (although discussing it is always fun), it just seems inevitable since there are so many more consumers than producers. And as you say, consumers are the ones that will primarily benefit from this new technology. As a consumer we care primarily (some could argue solely) about our own emotional reaction to the music —or more generally put, art-piece. In practical terms I also believe that this will give rise to a lot of new consumer behavior, and, as you so aptly puts it "creative consumers" will become normal. The ability to on-demand create more content to fill out some very narrow niche is a great example ("Today I want 24 hours of non stop Mongolian throat singing neo-industrial Christmas music"). Or maybe to create covers of songs in the voices of your favorite long dead artist. Anything from minor tweak of existing works ("I wish this love song was dedicated specifically to ME", to completely new works (Just look at how much the parody-music genre has grown since Suno and the like first appeared). The possibilities are near endless. | | |
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| ▲ | awongh 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| In the age of the social feed things are currently tipped more towards the selector/curator/consumer, where before, when all you could do was listen to songs on the radio, it wasn't really possible to participate. But culture will always be fundamentally about 1:many - we have to collectively agree on liking something- algo-based feeds are making the number of people that agree smaller and more siloed, but the dynamic is still the same. In that sense I don't think truly 100% algorithmically created and promoted content could ever truly become cultural- at the very least humans will always ascribe some meaning or motive to it, e.g., when instagram launched AI generated accounts some people pointed their finger at Mark Zuckerberg, tracing something back to a human they could ultimately hold responsible. |
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| ▲ | concats 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I agree, the story behind the work is part of how we humans view a creation and cannot be dismissed. I think we're a long way away from 100% algorithmically created content. This far all I've seen is content that is created based on human inputs and ideas. I'm not aware of the Instagram incident you mentioned, but it too seems like the brain child of a human if I'm not mistaken. There have been trending AI generated videos floating around lately for example. Which I found surprising at first. But they still had a human script writer (prompt writer?), director and a human editor. Someone who had a vision of what they wanted to create and share. My prediction is that this human-directed tool-like usage will be the standard for a long time, so I'm not particularly worried about humans getting removed from the process. | | |
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| ▲ | Aldipower 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | concats 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Personally I don't like to gatekeep art. For example: If someone walks out into the wilderness and encounters a particularly fascinating rock formation or plant, something that was created completely by accident and without a artist or designer, but they find that the sight instills in them strong emotions or deeper thought, I believe they should be allowed to call that art. Maybe this is just petty linguistics and semantics though, in which case we're drifting away from the topic at hand, and I'm sorry. | | |
| ▲ | Aldipower 4 days ago | parent [-] | | If someone walks out into the wilderness there's nobody to disallow anyone to call something art anyway. It's a free person. Hope you turned off networking then. :-)
But as a society we committed on specific words to have a specific meaning and the process of _creating_ art clearly involves humans as creators. |
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| ▲ | awongh 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The thing is that in this century the creative interaction seems to be moving up the value chain- it wasn't long ago that people would say that being a DJ wasn't creative. Simply selecting songs wasn't creative. Now lots of people consider DJs to be creative artists that are communicating something with their human will of selecting and mixing tracks. Unless the whole thing moves to a random AI generated slop stream app, whoever turns the knobs of the AI that creates the music will become the new "artist". Right now it doesn't seem like the AI creator "does" anything, but maybe future people will think that. | | |
| ▲ | Aldipower 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Agreed. This is a fair take. But I am still very skeptical. :-) When being a DJ you are still in the center of the attention of your audience as a human. "What's laid next on the turn table?" And also very important, the DJ is putting music from real humans onto the turn table. So if you go down the ladder, you still consume art from humans. With AI music this is only the case for a very small extend, the training set, and no-one recognizes the real contributors to the training set. | |
| ▲ | concats 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Great take. A mixtape can be greater than the sum of its parts! I believe that a lot of the judgement is also connected to the quality of the works. "Slop", while doubtlessly accurate for today, may be a rather weird description in a couple of year if the rate of progress continues to accelerate like it has. Although I've already heard people starting to refer to DeviantArt and the like as full of "human slop" so perhaps this is just modern language that's evolving and completely unrelated to AI. |
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