That is theoretically how one would think it would play out but that’s not what happens in reality. Instead it becomes like blog spam where it becomes impossible to actually find what you’re looking for because you’re wading through so much crap you don’t want.

Also, a lot of us value the fact that music is made by a person. Digital tools have been around for a long time and people have bickered about that, but ultimately they still require a person with some knowledge to sit down and actually produce the music, to do the thing. Writing prompts until you get something interesting can be fine, but what people are doing is carpet bombing us with whatever nonsense comes out because they have a financial incentive to do so.

I have plenty of experiments back when I did more digital music where I would mess with frequency modulators and such until I just found something interesting. I don’t see the harm in activities like that. But that’s not really what’s happening here. It’s deliberately lazy, corner cutting work to spam music platforms for profit. Yes there is a gray area between these two scenarios but that gray area isn’t the problem.

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tombert 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Honestly I think the thing that most humans appreciate is effort. Using AI tools is not inherently "bad", but these very-literally mass produced AI songs are almost by definition low-effort and as a result pretty bland and unlikeable.

Digital music has always been fine to me, as long as the song being produced feels like it took a human some amount of effort.

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Forgeties79 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is a much more concise and effective way of communicating my thoughts ha

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gedy 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah I agree with that nuance, as I personally enjoy making AI covers of songs I like in genres that I can't produce myself (old vintage blues covers of 80s new wave songs if you must know). It's a fair amount of work prompting and curating (and editing in some cases). I think they are cool and have shared a few, but they do tend to get lumped in with "ai slop" and some people take offense.

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tombert 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think a lot of people make an assumption that problems like this are fixed-sized; that by making getting a song easier, that that's the end of the the line.

In my mind the better mindset is to think that the problems are not fixed size, and instead these tools can allow for bigger and cooler projects, and/or projects that wouldn't be possible (or at least would be infeasible) without some kind of technological assistance.

AI tools can be used to create slop that is either "bad" or extremely bland at an effectively-infinite speed. It could also be used to make some really cool and interesting stuff if a person is really willing to spend time and effort to make it cool. Usually this requires more than just "prompting" though.

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Forgeties79 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The difference between this and what we are seeing in this article is you aren't sitting down, grinding out dozens/hundreds of these, then spamming them with little to no regard for anyone else for profit. You do it at small scale, for yourself/friends, and clearly care about the results. You are trying to make something intentionally.

	▲	gedy 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, exactly a good way to put it.

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mvdtnz 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You are describing AI slop.

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gedy 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Not in my book, I know a lot of low/no effort attempts to spam "content creation" channels, no curation, etc that I'd call slop before this. I'm trying to use AI to generate something that did not/would not exist otherwise. It's admittedly probably better because it's using human-written lyrics for the covers (and memories?), but to be honest, 80s new wave lyrics can be pretty hokey. "Any AI = slop" is probably more a belief system than an objective measure.

	▲	tombert 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think what you're doing, or at least what you described, is inherently slop. If you're actively putting in effort to make something you think is cool and to make something you're actively proud of (or at least something that you genuinely want people to enjoy), I don't think that's "slop", or at least I don't think it's bad. It's certainly different than those low-effort channels that mass upload hundreds of videos a day because they're able to automate the entire video-making process; those are completely soulless, again almost by definition. Those exist to just try and effectively skim revenue from adsense (or subscriber revenue in the case of Deezer), and making something that people will actually "enjoy" isn't the purpose. Of course, this isn't a new problem; I remember a few years ago (before generative AI became viable for this stuff), there were "tutorials" on the best way to upload hours and hours of noise or silent music to Spotify to extract revenue, and of course let's not forget the infamous "Elsagate" stuff that plagued YouTube. AI has maybe accelerated the problem but it certainly wasn't the first thing to create "slop". I'm hardly the first person to make this point, but AI is a tool. Tools can be good or bad; if AI is a tool that you can use to actively help you be more creative then I don't think that's bad. If you're just generating something to pad a resume or extract ad revenue, that's slop.