It's not AI, mate. Check out the video below, it unpacks a lot. Leaving aside the easy retort that the death of music is just like your opinion man, I must say in my case, these so-called AI singing technologies (such a silly marketing concept) like Synth V and Replay are helping me deliver very innovative music, way less 'pasteurized' than any live folk or pop/rock music you could catch on a local pub.

 

Last edited: Dec 1, 2024

My career began playing in cover bands in the late 70's. I then made synth pop in the 80's recording to 24 track tape. I wrote songs through my publisher for other artists. I then ran my own studio and became an engineer and producer. I made techno in the 90's. By 2000 I collaborated with an overseas Grammy winning Rock And Roll hall of famer and got onto the Billboard charts thanks to advances in sending large music files. In the last decade I have done film scores. I've seen just about everything in the music biz and I can tell you that AI is an exciting development that I would never have predicted. If you have no music in you to begin with it won't help you, but like mastering an instrument, if you are clever and work with it, the doors it opens breath fresh life into what is at the moment, a pretty static music scene. As it has been for a long while.

 

lol.. is not having a horse and buggy a bad thing??

 

Which reminds me:

 

Two things will happen over time.
1. AI vocals will get better.
2. Our brains will get more used to AI vocals, possibly to the extent that we'll start preferring them over real vocals.

And if you doubt point 2, we're currently raising a generation of kids who think autotuned vocals and live performances to backing tracks are the norm. Some live singers seem to have more than half their vocals on the backing track too.

 

'Real' vocals in popland are sounding less and less real with the use of autotune, pitch correction and other probable techniques we aren't aware of. It all sounds sterile to me, such singers may as well be synth patches.

 

I'm strongly opinionated that using AI can do nothing but dumb down human artistry/creativity as well as so many aspects of other endeavors that we use our minds to make things with, repair and those happy mistakes which lead us on tangents of self discovery in pursuit of self expression, our individual paths of how we view ourselves in empowerment and worth. If we depend on AI for those things all that goes down the drain. Prompting AI software create a fantasy dreamscape image in my opinion isn't at all creative because the last link in the chain isn't the promtor if your hand had not touched the medium. As an example, someone commissions an artist to paint his beloved dog. He tells the artist that he wishes the dog to be in the center of other dogs who are on their backs in subservience to his beloved toy poodle, under a full moon with Saturn and it's rings visible and be on his favorite mountain in The Catskills of NY. Can the promtor now claim artistic ownership of that work? I dare say no. The same would work with music, pottery or any other artistic or crafty medium.

 

I get where you are coming from, but prompting is still an art form in itself. Of course, you are not a master "artist" but getting from A - Z is not as easy as just typing in "dog to be in the center of other dogs who are on their backs in subservience to his beloved toy poodle, under a full moon with Saturn and it's rings visible and be on his favorite mountain in The Catskills of NY". It will take many iterations to actually get there, with inpainting, and likely photoshop or similar.

 

Exactly. One must have an absolute stance on this based on what the technology will* become and not where it currently is. You could say "oh AI is better at humans for some things currently so I am ok with it" when at some point not too far in the distant future, it will be "better" than humans at all* things. Therefore, you must unfortunately be against it in totality and not just in certain aspects of it for convenience.

Let's be honest here and call a spade a spade, in recent times, we have almost completely discouraged one of the most important aspects of humanity which is the true dedication to craft (all crafts/endeavors in general). Many fail to realize the craft and the utter dedication to it IS* the point and that the point is not necessarily just the outcome. It's the everlasting human surrendering to the craft. It's bitter, difficult, may seem redundant, etc. etc., but that is one of, if not the most beauitiful aspects of humanity. Many today would forego that entire process just for the new and shiny, and most importantly, convenient/easy.

I understand how new tech/tools come to be and how much use they are to human endeavors. However, what many miss about the AI conversation is that, while at this current moment in time (and even that is arguably so) it may be just a "tool", what will inevitably come to be is the farthest thing from just a tool. This isn't like the internet or the computer or the telephone or even electricity. For the 1st time in history, the newest shiny tech will eventually evolve into something that completely removes the human element entirely.

We must view it from what it will become and for that, you cannot say it is just another "tool". The implications are completely reality warping.

The train has already left the station which ultimately makes me pessimistic about the future entirely but I think we still must understand what we are dealing with here and how if you have any respect for the integrity of the human spirit, you must view it in general from this lens.

The ironic part of it is, for the most part, pertaining to just the audio/art side of it specifically, it almost seems like its being driven mainly by people not* doing this for a living, but I could be wrong.

 

I really don't believe prompting artificial intelligence is an art. Telling something or someone what to do is not an art form. AI is not the brush, the guitar pick, the bow, the throwing wheel or the hammer and chisel. Anybody with a hint of imagination could spit out something that is what could be considered "interesting" to look at or listen to. A car driving without a human behind the wheel but the passenger instructing it to "hit the coolest bars in this city, but look through his collected works and decide in what order Shakespeare might do it" isn't art...it's travel itinerary.

 

Sure, and in general i agree with you. But playing devils advocate, the prompter is still important. You can give the same request to four different people, and you will get four different results. Knowing how to prompt, what combinations of words to use, and most importantly, how to piece it all together is still an art form.

Lets take sampling for example, or even using stem packs from splice and the like. You could give a 4 track 8 bar loop stem pack to a brand new producer and ask them to make you a pop song using them. No other rules, you can chop, mix, add instrumentation, record vocals, whatever. You just need to deliver a traditional pop song. The new producer will give you a demo at best, maybe they will take out the drums in a section, or add a reverb and record a poorly produced vocal. Give the same instructions and assets to a pro level producer, and they will add instrumentation, layer the loops, arrange, automate, use the right effects, and record and produce an exceptional vocal, giving you a full, well done pop song.

The same thing can apply to using AI, both in music and in art / image creation. Novice producer will prompt using suno " funky pop song, silly lyrics", and thats it. Song done, sounds like every other funky pop song silly lyrics. Pro level prompter / producer will prompt suno multiple times, grabbing the pieces they need to add together into a final composition. Using more detailed prompts, adding instrumentation, customizing the lyrics and melody, combining the outputs into a masterpiece.

 

If one thinks that AI is their medium of expression they've got it backwards. Every prompt is digested and amassed to make you irrelevant in the future.

 

Everything is allowed. Everything that is possible will be done. You either live with it, or you live with it. What do you want to do to stop or change it?
Five years ago, it was basically unthinkable that you can just talk to a computer and the computer will answer your questions. Today it is reality with every recent phone. The AI will even look for answers online to answer questions. The speed of the progress is crazy.
Wait for five more years, and you will not be able to tell if you are talking to a computer or if you are talking to a real human. In the same way, you will have computer generated voices for music, too, that will not be distinguishable from expert human performances. If not in 5 years, it might take 10. Even if it would take 20, which it most probably will not, it will happen rather sooner than later.
So is it a problem? Will music die? Surely not. I believe it will be a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. There will be more bad music, but there will be people that will use it to create great music as well.

We will have AI Teachers that will be able to teach us how to do stuff. They will be able to explain things to you. You will be able to learn at your own pace, and the AI will help you grow. I am sure that it will be able to teach kids/adults to become great musicians, or whatever they want to become. I am sure a lot of things will change, but everything can be used for “good or evil”.
As it always was, and always will be.

 

I don't like the perspective of machine-made art dominating either, but don't you think that visualizing, audiating and telling people what to do is precisely what many talented and successful producers have always done? I dare say that most of the times, it's the concept of the playing and recording that matters most. So many talented jazz pianists have tried, but only the ones who had a novel concept of style survived, while the copycats and 'neutral' ones have mostly vanished. One could argue that strumming a guitar or banging a drum set is mechanical, but having the idea of strumming in this and not that way, or of phasing the hats and crashes in the record, isn't. More radically, one could say that writing a song about getting dumped is so trivial it's almost mechanical, but not so much about giving the idea of writing it as a punk-folk TV advertisement. Weather Report, Queen, Marvin Gaye or Aphex Twin aren't highly regarded because of their agility and dexterity in each part of their crafts, but because their concept was different, in the sense that nothing quite like that had ever been heard before. In the end, it's the idea that matters most. Sadly, that's the part that has been lacking in the mainstream music industry for quite a while now, and it seems to me that the drive for innovating and being different has been suppressed by security and perhaps just sterile imagination, really. If bold men prompt this scenario apart, that'll be a big fuck you to the 'men in charge' of the music industry over the last decades.

 

Imagine thinking any record you’ve ever heard was real. That ship sailed long before you ever think you thought you were there at all. It wasn’t and you weren’t. As if!

 

This is completely delusional. A person who knows absolutely nothing about music can type "energetic rock song" into Suno or Udio and they will get a decent tune. Not to mention the algorithm will only keep getting better. It's beyond primitive to use.

I respect your experience but this notion that it's just like all the previous developments in music is very naive in my opinion. Sometimes, technology really DOES replace us.

If I may speak from my own experience:

-Before I started playing guitar, I thought anyone could do that because you just hit the strings or something. I was wrong, been learning for the past 7 years.

-Before I started producing electronic music, I thought anyone could do that, you just press some buttons on a computer. I was wrong even more than last time.

-Before I tried AI, I thought anyone could do that, you just type a prompt into a website. I was right. There's literally nothing more to it. You type a prompt, maybe try a few different variations and you have a song. And I've seen people who never touched music before learn how to use it just as fast.

Just my experience...

 

My comment that if you don't have music in you it won't help you, I was saying that it won't make you a musician. You won't know how to write a song. You won't know scales or rhythm or the art of composing meaningful lyrics. You can't reverse engineer an AI song and become a songwriter.

 

Why does it matter if the result is a decent song anyways?

Now here's the question we can ponder. If you're "making art and expressing yourself", then obviously nothing can replace you. Nothing can replace anything since well, you're doing it for yourself. It's your thing, who cares how you do it. Throw shit against the wall, record it and call it music.

But if we're talking about the music industry, which I assume we were, then it really doesn't matter how it's made. If you are considered a songwriter or a musician doesn't matter. Doesn't matter how it was made or by whom. Only the end result matters.

So yes, you are right that it won't make you a musician. But it will absolutely replace musicians.

 

Imagine you are in an alternate-reality year of 1985. How hard would it be to prompt this record, which came out the following year? My guess is, it would be nearly impossible, because the A.I. would have no source to draw from and because prompting such a new thing would be absurdly hard. I agree with you, A.I. will replace derivative music, and honestly I couldn't care less. I know A.I. can make innovative music, but in a very different way people would. Lastly, with prompting, you always have to settle for less than what you imagine, because it will never get it right to the dot.

 

This idea has been in circulation since they tried to ban the mellotron. Then they said the same thing about samplers. And musicians are still around. Always will be. I don't describe myself as a musician so it doesn't bother me in the slightest but I know a lot of extremely talented musicians and I'm sure it doesn't bother them in the slightest either. Nobody is being replaced nor are they under threat. As soon as you hear a report that an artist has quit their craft because of AI let us know immediately.