The moment quality in art becomes commodified, what is popular will select on something other than quality. Look what happened to visual art in the earliest 20th century. Any art academy graduate could give you a beautiful painting, but nobody remembers any artists from the 20th century who simply made "beautiful paintings"
You're right that pure formal perfection is not the only component in art; art has to mean something.
But quality has always been a very important aspect of popularity in art as well as in music (see: Renaissance sculptors & painters, Baroque and Classical composers, etc.)
Great art is when a unique, profound emotion or insight is expressed with great execution.
AI helps with the last part; real artists should still provide the emotional seed.
But effort itself is also a quality. The fact that a human took out a substantial fraction of their time on planet earth to create something is already a sign that at least one individual cared about the work: the creator. If art is like vomit then that initial round of validation is absent.
I don't think I agree with that. "A for effort"? Who cares if someone spent time on something, if the result isn't good? They wasted their time, which is their problem; but they shouldn't waste mine as well to compensate for that.
There are even artists who don't actually make anything: they formulate an idea and then commission craftsmen to produce what they imagined. While the resulting oeuvre involves some degree of effort by someone, that someone isn't the artist themselves; this is quite similar to AI.
Now, there's something to be said for scarcity. If producing something becomes so easy that anyone can output anything, then sure it may become a problem.
Yet the history of the arts is in many ways a history of explosion, and the number of things produced did not kill art. Often, it invented new art forms.
Baudelaire had this to say about photography in 1865:
> As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. (…) it is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy, and that the confusion of their several functions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled. Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place. If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.
I think he was dead wrong.
Photography may have influenced painting and force it into non-figurative territories (or it may have gone there by itself), but 1/ painting in general, even figurative painting, survived, 2/ photography became a new art form, and 3/ if abundance of photography did in fact, eventually, devalue the work of professional photographers, it didn't block the existence of great photographic art.
Not an 'A for effort' but 'effort for initial validation'. It shouldn't lead to automatic approval but zero effort is less of a signal than some effort and probably a weaker signal than 'a lot of effort' assuming the basic skills are present.
Photography is interesting because it has very subtle parallels with for instance painting. One of the more interesting ones to me is that it ranges the gamut from 'technical documentation' through 'personal memento' all the way up to very high end art. The big thing missing in photography is spirituality, which arguably was the driver (and often the patron in a financial sense) of lots of great art in paint.
A videogame AI[1] (the AI itself; we're not talking about its developers here) in a FPS being invincible with omniscience and perfect accuracy, at most makes me think "nice".
But a flawed meaty human with enough skill to be the best human at that same game, makes me think "wtf is this witchcraft", with full respect and acknowledgment, and I'll have way more interest in them than in the perfect omniscient flawless AI.
[1]: Yes, I know here "AI" is not used in the same sense as in the article. The point still stands.
I as an artist can come up with an idea want to archive and then use AI tools to reach it or an artist is completely cut out of the loop.
I don't believe that the later can be called an art or even a creation. It is just a patterned noise and more of it is produced the more noisy our environment becomes.
One of my very favorite pieces of visual art is just some text painted on a canvas taken from a review of some of the artist's other work. It probably took her maybe ten minutes to put together.
You have to care to put in effort, but effort isn't the core of art.
So what if humans make a lot of not especially interesting art. More art is good! You can choose what you connect with.
Now you need to define what a unique, profound emotion is.
And you need to define great execution.
And you need to explain why intentionally having poor execution couldn't express a unique, profound emotion. On Radiohead's biggest hit Creep "That's the sound of Jonny trying to fuck the song up. He really didn't like it the first time we played it, so he tried spoiling it. And it made the song."
At the end of the day it's always going to seem all subjective and a matter of opinion. Because it's too hard to pinpoint the objective part of what we are doing when we decide what's great and what's garbage. If there even is an objective part.
> But quality has always been a very important aspect
But what is quality? I used to think it was just degree of goodness, then I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and now I have no idea what it is (or what it isn’t).
It doesn't have to be something that you can objectively measure to exist and people to be able to recognize it (even if not perfectly) - which is the whole point of Z.A.M.M. by the way.
Can you give an example of a unique insight or emotion? A lot of the classic books I read, the greatest films of all time, and the most celebrated visual artists are unique mostly in style or execution, but all express the same basic universal human truths.
His projection is valid because it's not a qualitative problem, it's a quantitative one.
Music may already have been turned into a commodity selected by traits other than quality, but tools like this bring the effect up to a whole new level, a whole new order of magnitude.
Every tool that makes it easier to create art is good in my book. In years past you had to actually have the instruments and had to know how to work them. Now you can much easier learn to use simpler tools to get even better results, which just increases the amount of people that can actually realize their creativity.
But part of the whole point of listening to music is enjoying the expression of the people playing the instrument. Music is much more than just the final output of a machine, it's an expression of the soul. You may be able to create music more easily with this tool, but I guarantee it will be soulless, just like Google.
The results certainly will not be better. They will be a hideous amalgam from a computer. Just listen to real music created by real people (preferably live) and you will know how hideous these results really are.
Everything, even EFFICIENCY, has its limits to how much we should have.
The same arguments were made to dismiss rock music when compared to classical music. And a world without the Velvet Underground would be more soulless to me.
I've heard soulless music performed by highly trained musicians playing on great instruments. And soulful music played on crappy instruments by untrained musicians. On average, the great music comes from the more trained musicians on the better tools.
AI is just another tool. The vast majority of music is terrible. It will continue to be terrible. And a few geniuses will use AI the way Hendrix used the electric guitar. I'm excited to hear what that will sound like.
> The same arguments were made to dismiss rock music when compared to classical music
Just because people were wrong in the past doesn’t mean they are wrong now.
> AI is just another tool
Not all tools are the same. A tool that changes how sound is amplified (like an electric guitar) is vastly different than a tool that can theoretically replace the human in the loop entirely.
Someone playing a piano and someone playing an electric piano are much, much closer to each other than someone pressing the start button on a player piano is to either of them.
That same argument has been wrong over and over again. So there's no reason to believe it's now suddenly a good argument unless given solid evidence.
Distortion was just another tool, and first rejected as highly undesirable. It's literally "just" putting an electric guitar through a tube amp and turning up the knob. And it revolutionized music. It sounds amazing in the right hands.
The more important point that I already made is the not all musicians are the same. Give a piano or a player piano to the vast majority of musicians and the output will be common and familiar. Give either to a musical genius like Hendrix and they'll manage to get something beautiful and new out of it. I'm looking forward to what the handful of geniuses out there will get out of AI. It's going to be fun.
The sheer amount of pop music and its pop-ularity contradicts you a bit here. Because one can play live AI generated music just as well, hop around on the beat and prompt the viewers to put their hands in the air - a live performance is (arguably much) more than the music. But I may be wrong, maybe the pop assembly line is not the sign of commoditization I seem to see, and won't gain that much from AI support.
You are right. The pop assembly line is EXACTLY what you describe. However, that does not mean we should create new technology to make that assembly line even MORE efficient! Instead, we should work on changing and dismantling society so that it is LESS efficient.
Hm. It was before the 20th century maybe. People knew of artists by name, not by their social life and sex tapes. The pop culture paraphilia is a very recent thing.
You're claiming that gossip and hero worship and celebrity didn't exist before the 20th century which is a wild claim that you'd need to back up with evidence. Humans haven't changed that much over the centuries.
Like most things I read outside programming on this board, it is people talking out their ass about things they don't know much about but they think they do because they are well paid to write javascript.
I would argue spotify is more consequential than a new tool generate music then. Spotify et al commodify the access to very obscure and niche music so people are now much more able to access or express themselves with whatever they want.
Maybe punk music was partly a consequence of mass media pop and rock music for these reasons too.
