I'm sure this reads as very cynical, but a lot of the replies here seem to be written by people who do not like music, or don't place much value in it.
A ton of these comments are cynical or defeatist. It’s like they think that music is already a dying art and this is the final nail in the coffin.
There’s tons of amazing, wonderful music being made all the time, to a degree that is staggeringly incomprehensible, and nothing about AI generated music is going to stop people from making beautiful art “by hand”
100%! I think a lot of people love to say "Music's not what it used to be."; while they do have a point, in that music does tend to rely more on computation than instruments, it's not like the usage of instruments is a dying art. Some artists just choose to provide a different experience; if people like it, they buy it, and that's the form of quality control we've always had for music (I'm not saying it's perfect, of course.)
You made me think of some of my favorite lines from LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge”:
> I hear you're buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real. You want to make a Yaz record.
> I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables.
> I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.
I think you're correct. I also think that they're envisioning this tool's potential in terms of the kind of derivative, trite rubbish that makes up 95% of what is played on pop radio stations nowadays.
I don't doubt that's achievable. What I do very much doubt is that software will ever capable of auto-generating something with the beauty, passion and originality of a Beethoven symphony, as performed by the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of von Karajan. I don't believe that an algorithm will ever be able to compose and render a new song in the style of Nick Drake, that has even 1% of his soulfulness.
Machines can be programmed to imitate patterns of musical notes, or even the timbre of a voice. That's nothing. Lived experience and human emotion are prerequisites for the creation of great art.
I love music and listen to it all the time, but frankly I do not care much about the artists, in the same way that I don’t care much about the person making my coffee or my house. Obviously I don’t wish harm on anyone out of pure malice, but if a robot could make better coffee or build a better (to my tastes) house I wouldn’t stay stuck in the past out of some sense of romanticism.
Why is this unfortunate? I have visual art on my walls that is mostly just for the background. This doesn't destroy the experience of going to a museum or a local art fair and experiencing visual art. Not everybody has to engage with everything in the way that you do.
Yep and this is a key and major point driving the whole AI craze. The hyper capitalist consumer society in which all sense of value has been strictly translated to "what's the immediate output" is prerequisite to the love of these tools. If all you care about is the destination, not the journey, if you are nothing but a consumer, generative AI is fantastic. Infinite monkeys are just as good as Shakespeare if they can produce the output of Shakespeare. What this perspective misses is that, at least historically, the things we value as human beings are actually not just outputs but something much richer and deeper than that. The crazed embrace of AI is just a marked shift toward an even deeper philosophical bankruptcy and pure focus on materialism.
