This, along with the AI slop and agentic nonsense gutting real work, is exactly why I pivoted my career. The industry feels like it's being driven by chest-thumping, siege-heiling authoritarian inbreds at the top, propped up by tepid company-man shills who clap along and call it innovation while the place rots from the inside. my feed on LinkedIn gives me hives. I've since cancelled my account as well. good riddance. tech is dead and I hope the public doesn't have to yet again bailout some late-stage capitalist bullshit when yet another bubble bursts. /rant
AI takes all of that old school idm and electronic music and repackages it without a human story to tell, ripping off actual musicians in the process. AI didn’t magically ‘make old IDM its own.’ It scraped decades of artists’ work, stripped out the context and intent, and reassembled the surface features. There’s no human arc, no lived constraint, no risk and no culture.
What’s being repackaged isn’t a new instrument, it’s other people’s careers. I’m not sure what part of that is supposed to be amusing.
I'm honestly not getting the human story thing when it comes to music and maybe art in general. I mean I get what it means, but I don't think it describes why people enjoy art.
To me, it seems more like people place their own meaning in art. A particular song might remind one individual of the good times they had in their teens, while the actual meaning of the song is completely different.
Bachs 5th symphony (or whatever) might be extremely annoying to someone because they had to listen to it every day at work.
And what exactly is the meaning of jazz fusion? I really like a good solo, but a lot of people hate it, they need to hear a voice. (though I don't particularly like the signature Suno or Udio solo..)
I found this ai track on Spotify that I unironically enjoyed. I listened to it every day while working on reviving an old passion project, which became its meaning to me. The tune, a long with its album with random disparate suno generations was taken down.
I'm not sure if I have a point here, but something is off with the story thing in art to me from a consumers point of view. Maybe from other artists as consumers point of view?
Your point echoes the "death of the author" concept in literature, where the work is independent of the creator, full stop. It's a useful concept up to a point, but if you really have no idea what it means to have a deep connection to music that is wrapped up in some idea of the creator as a human being, you should trust others when they say they do and it's important to them. For those of us with that value, AI slop is offensive, and to be clear, it has precedents in history with Muzak, early schlager music etc -- what they all share is a desire to use the power of music for non-artistic ends, which sucks from any number of viewpoints. If music has non-artistic utility, that doesn't justify a concerted effort to take away artist-made music from those who may not be paying attention.
I appreciate the honesty. I'm not saying people don't have this relationship with art, I think everyone can have some degrees of it, including me.
But my experience as an artist talking to non-artists about art, I don't think the sentiment that art without a struggling artist, purpose, story to tell, human arc, etc, is not real art is a true sentiment. First of all, because it's not true, because people apply their own meaning and form their own unique relationship with an artist. (The saying don't meet your heroes come to mind.)
Note that I'm not talking about AI at all here. I'm 100% for banning purely generated AI on soundcloud, bandcamp, spotify, etc. What I really want is to filter out art created by people who has put profit as first priority and thrown away any shred of artistic integrity.
But this is an impossible feat, because who am I to judge that someone else's favorite artist is devoid of artistic integrity?
except that what you’re describing is the CONSUMER SIDE of meaning, not the SOURCE of it.
yes, listeners project their own memories onto music, no one’s disputing that. but that doesn’t make the creator, context, intent, or labor irrelevant. treating music as interchangeable stimulus is how you end up defending systems that strip human work of attribution, risk, and livelihood while still feeding on the cultural residue artists created in the first place.
I think maybe we're talking past each other then. I'm saying I don't agree with the argument that music necessarily needs to have a story to be widely consumed in a positive way.
While I personally like it when people put their heart and soul into something, even if the result is technically not very great, it's society who is the ultimate judge of whether that creation benefits them or not.
I know that the track I'm currently listening to is superior in every way to some modern pop song. The artists have practiced for decades, they have their own unique style I can recognize in other tracks. But I also know that 99.999% of people don't give a shit and think it's noisy music, and depending on your perspective, they're correct.
> I think maybe we're talking past each other then. I'm saying I don't agree with the argument that music necessarily needs to have a story to be widely consumed in a positive way.
I can imagine that this is true for a lot of people. There are certainly folks out there who see music as an interesting sensory stimulus. This song makes you dance, this one makes you cry, this other one makes you feel nostalgic. To these people, the only thing that matters is what the music makes them feel. It's a strange, solipsistic way of engaging with art, but who am I to judge?
I personally don't connect to music—or any other art—that way. The process that goes into making a piece of music is as important to me as the music itself. The people who make that music are even more important. I don't believe in separating art from the artist. In fact, I find the whole idea of separating art and artist to be fundamentally rotten.
Here's an admittedly extreme example, but it's demonstrative of how I personally relate to music. In the wake of the #MeToo movement (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeToo_movement), some of the musicians I used to love as a teenager were outed as sexual predators. When I found out, I scoured my music library and deleted all their work. The music was still the exact same music I fell in love with all those years ago, but I could no longer listen to it without being reminded of the horrible actions of the musicians. Listening to it was triggering.
And so to me, music is not just a series of sounds that make me feel good. There are humans behind those sounds, and I care deeply about those humans. They don't need to be perfect—everyone fucks up from time to time—but they need to demonstrate some level of human decency. And they certainly can't be machines, because machines aren't people.
I love machines. I've spent my life building them, programming them, and caring for them. But machines aren't people, and therefore I don't care about the art they make. Maybe one day machines will be able to make art in the same way humans do: by going out into the world, having experiences, making mistakes, learning, connecting with others, loving and being loved, or being rejected soundly, and understanding deeply what it means to be a living thing in this universe. A generative AI model doesn't do that (yet!) and so I'm utterly uninterested in whatever a generative AI model has to say about anything.
I don't think appreciating art separated from the author is solipsistic, in fact I'd argue the opposite. Needing a human presence to engage with art is very human-centric. Or maybe that's due to your definition of art? I can be stunned by how beautiful a sunset is, the same way that I am by a painting, even if no human had a hand in that sunset. I can appreciate the cleverness of a gull stealing some bread from a duck the same way I can appreciate the cleverness of a specific music being used at a specific point in a movie. I can shiver at the brutality of humanity watching Night and Fog, just like I can shiver at the brutality of a praying mantis, eating alive a roach.
>Maybe one day machines will be able to make art in the same way humans do: by going out into the world, having experiences, making mistakes, learning, connecting with others, loving and being loved, or being rejected soundly, and understanding deeply what it means to be a living thing in this universe.
I think this is a good description of the process of how some art is created, but not all? Some art is a pursuit of "what is beautiful" rather than "what it means to be human" ie a sensory experience, some art is accidental, some art just is. For some art knowing the person behind is important, to me; for some not; for some it adds to the experience; for some it removes from it.
I would also highlight some small contradiction:
>I can imagine that this is true for a lot of people. There are certainly folks out there who see music as an interesting sensory stimulus. This song makes you dance, this one makes you cry, this other one makes you feel nostalgic. To these people, the only thing that matters is what the music makes them feel. It's a strange, solipsistic way of engaging with art, but who am I to judge?
>Here's an admittedly extreme example, but it's demonstrative of how I personally relate to music. In the wake of the #MeToo movement (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeToo_movement), some of the musicians I used to love as a teenager were outed as sexual predators. When I found out, I scoured my music library and deleted all their work. The music was still the exact same music I fell in love with all those years ago, but I could no longer listen to it without being reminded of the horrible actions of the musicians. Listening to it was triggering.
That seems to me a case of "the only thing that matters is what the music makes them feel".
If the definition of art is that a human must be involved, then fine. AI generated music is not art. But it is everything art is minus the human component? ie, it can be beautiful, ugly, etc, just like how a sunset can be beautiful and a rotting corpse can be ugly.
> generative AI catch on not by just imitating other instruments,
but generative AI didn’t catch on by "imitating instruments." It caught on by imitating artists, which streaming platforms and record labels then repackage and outsell you with. false analogy.
This argument won't get you anywhere because "imitating artists" and "outselling artists" aren't actually the same thing.
i.e. complaining about training on copyrighted material and getting it banned is not sufficient to prevent creating a model that can create music that outsells you. Because training isn't about copying the training material, it's just a way to find the Platonic latent space of music, and you can get there other ways.
you're dodging the point by retreating into silly abstractions. I’m talking about cultural and economic displacement of artists, not a pedantic debate about latent spaces. "Training isn’t copying" is the cynical AI shill statement that doesn’t address the fact that systems trained on artists are then packaged and monetized to outsell them. why is this part so complicated for you? or are you just being obnoxious...
dropping wiki links and math jargon avoids the ethical / market reality here.
> "Training isn’t copying" is the cynical AI shill statement that doesn’t address the fact that systems trained on artists are then packaged and monetized to outsell them.
No, that's the whole problem. The systems are capable of outselling the artist whether or not they're trained on the artist. So you can't prevent it by complaining about the training data.
> but generative AI didn’t catch on by "imitating instruments."
My bad. As the first part of my comment suggested, what I meant to say here was "imitating instruments and the performers thereof".
> which streaming platforms and record labels then repackage and outsell you with
But that's the thing: it doesn't seem very likely that they'd ever succeed at actually outselling very many actual musicians, for the same reason those cheap keyboards that can play pop songs at the press of a button don't actually replace any actual musicians: not just because the quality sucks compared to even amateur performers, but because even if the quality didn't suck, the end result is about as interesting to the audience as a karaoke backing track or musak playing in an elevator. If anyone can press a button to make some statistical average of popular music, then that's gonna get real boring real quick, while the actual musicians will be making actual, novel music. It's just like what happened to the “vaporwave” and “nightcore” genres: they got flooded with “new songs” that are just slowed down / sped up (respectively) versions of existing songs, and nobody bothered seeking out those songs unless they were really into vaporwave/nightcore for their own sake or they were trying to put together one of the umpteen bajillion “anime girl studying while listening to lo-fi beats” playlists out there.
That is:
> false analogy.
Then here's another “false” analogy for you: just like with synthesizers, just like with vaporwave/nightcore, just like with all sorts of other musical phenomena where all of a sudden people with no skill could very easily and cheaply make musical slop, this new AI-driven wave of slop will, too, consume itself until it's yet another layer of background noise against which the actual musicians distinguish themselves and push the boundaries of music. It's a wildfire burning away yet another underbrush of mediocrity and creative stagnation, and while it's absolutely terrifying and dangerous in the present, it paves the way for a healthier regrowth in the aftermath.
Bit rot isn’t some mystical decay, it’s dependency drift: APIs change, platforms evolve, security assumptions expire, build chains break. Software survives because people continuously adapt it to a moving substrate.
Reducing churn is good. Pretending maintenance disappears is fantasy. Software doesn’t decay in isolation, it decays relative to everything it depends on. And it sounds like you don’t know anything about Newtonian dynamics either.
you’re treating narrative completeness as a prerequisite for legitimacy. that makes any systemic issue unfalsifiable unless someone can account for every market, municipality, and incentive simultaneously.
this is an impossible burden of proof. requiring a perfectly schematic, end-to-end causal story before acknowledging harm is a convenient way to dismiss any structural concern.
pointing out that housing markets are complex doesn’t invalidate localized, repeatable effects or concentrated power. that just raises the bar of explanation until lived outcomes are dismissed as “just-so stories”, which matches the tone of your condescension.
If narrative coherence is your expectation the only satisfactory resolution is not dig into and normalize the contractual minutiae of the legacy finance system but flush the finance industry and the politically coddled mess it created.
There is no narrative coherence to be found demanding the living honor social debts, contracts of history; yes children believe these successes you never witnessed happened! That surely cannot be used for ill gains.
This smells more like self selection bias. You have been successful and thus prefer care be taken tidying up systemic issues created by our ledger.
Am a Thomas Jefferson fan when it comes to generational churn; the only constant political rule should be to rewrite things every couple decades or the living end up ruled by fiat decree of the dead.
im not even disagreeing with you, but i hate that hn seems to have this penchant to point out that unreasonable assertions may still be true despite being ludicrous. can facts emerge from a hypocrite? yes of course, but prices are not affected by buying and holding a tiny supply, so given that reasonable axiom, it is reasonable to demand more comprehensive evidence.
> but i hate that hn seems to have this penchant to point out that unreasonable assertions may still be true despite being ludicrous
Topics like this are hard on HN because a lot of commenters hold a deep, passionate hatred of something: Wall Street, Big Tech, OSes they don't use, even the concept of private automobile ownership. Once they descend upon a thread they're not interested in facts, they just want to tell stories that support their villain narratives. When it starts to get illogical they don't want to back down because doing so feels like an attack on their deep-seated beliefs.
There are some completely illogical economic theories being pushed all through this comment section. It's kind of fascinating to see how bad some of them are. Someone tried to argue with me that cars could be produced for a couple thousand dollars if not for all the regulatory overhead we impose on them in the US. It's almost hard to fathom how someone could believe that without stopping for a moment to wonder why no other country is building these $2000 full featured automobiles without these supposed regulations that increase the price by an order of magnitude.
The tata nano is an example of a low-featured car that sold in India for the equivalent of $2500 in 2008 dollars. You can make a car for pretty cheap if you strip down a lot of the hardware. I think one of the reasons new cars are designed/priced the way they are in the US is that the more frugal buyers always end up buying a used car anyway, so the manufacturers don't target the low end of the market.
I don’t think it’s an unreasonable assertion in the first place. Just because they are holding a small portion of all houses doesn’t meant they can’t have a huge effect. The primary reason being that the portion of houses on sale is small as well. Another reason being they are huge institutions with tons of money, and thus can hold houses longer, buy houses are higher prices, influence related markets, etc.
> Just because they are holding a small portion of all houses doesn’t meant they can’t have a huge effect.
There's no reason to believe that someone owning a tiny portion of the houses is setting the market price.
> they are huge institutions with tons of money, and thus can hold houses longer, buy houses are higher prices, influence related markets, etc.
No huge institution is willing to lose enormous sums of money waiting for vacant overpriced houses to sell.
I've lived in many houses. One was in a development, and I wanted to sell it. There were several houses in it that were vacant and for sale with no offers in the previous year. I sold mine in 3 weeks. It was simple - I priced it properly, and I didn't have to pay another year of taxes, insurance, repairs, maintenance, and worry, only to have to lower the price anyway to get rid of it. A couple of the other homeowners were angry with me about that, but that was their problem.
There is reason to believe that someone owning a tiny portion of the houses is setting the market price because that tiny portion is a significant portion of the houses on sale.
Before we even reach the question of how true that is, there isn't evidence that any firm holds a significant portion of the "houses on sale". A starting point here would be the fact that corporate investors buy houses and hold on to them, and thus definitionally don't hold any of the house on sale, but whatever, either way, just flesh the story out instead of handwaving it.
if we start with reasonable but definitely vague numbers that suggest 2M houses are for sale and institutional investors own 500k of the total stock, it suggests this is NOT true; it's unlikely they own all their houses in the same geo market and they're all for sale at the same time. This doesn't mesh with a business strategy (diversification) or the typical model (they rent houses; they don't flip them).
Doesn’t rent have a constant influence on house prices? Along with the data science based rent prices they demand, that implies a constant upward influence on rent and consequently house prices.
Also these institutions would be buying houses in high demand areas.
> It was simple - I priced it properly, and I didn't have to pay another year of taxes, insurance, repairs, maintenance, and worry, only to have to lower the price anyway to get rid of it. A couple of the other homeowners were angry with me about that, but that was their problem.
I think you just explained partly the reason behind why a small number of owners can drive the prices up. But these are usually private owners. Whenever I see bank sales, they're more like flash sale and done.
Those who can afford to sit on the property trying to obtain a higher price will do it. Other owners will look at that and try to keep the price high with the illusory hope that they can also make that much money. Individual owners can suffer from FOMO and are influenced by success stories, so ask a high price hoping to capture as much of the value as possible.
I saw it in action when I bought my house. The seller saw his neighbor selling the house a year earlier for [princely sum] so he jumped to put his house on the market for [princely sum +20%]. The whole neighborhood was following the same playbook, looking at who sold and raising the bar. After a year with that house on the market I became interested and in a 6 month process I ended up buying the house for [princely sum -20%].
None of the neighbors know how much he got, only know how much he asked. A similar house 50m away is still up for sale for even higher price than than the listed price for mine. They can afford to sit on it for a while because the extra money they hope for covers the taxes and upkeep tenfold or more.
"None of the neighbors know how much he got, only know how much he asked. A similar house 50m away is still up for sale for even higher price than than the listed price for mine. They can afford to sit on it for a while because the extra money they hope for covers the taxes and upkeep tenfold or more."
At least where I live, real estate sales are public and you can easily find the sale price at the county assessor's website.
You're either generalizing or just making a mistake stating so definitively that sitting on an asset means being stupid with investments. You know your house and situation but that's far from representative. Sitting on it might turn out to be the stupidest or the smartest decision you can make. If you take the hard stance that it can only mean one thing, you're just being stupid with investments in all the "other" cases.
I am surrounded by people who sat on houses for a decade only to triple their money after inflation adjustment when they sold. We're talking 7 figure profits. Trying to sound smarter than everyone else sometimes backfires.
this is not true, this is the basis for housing speculation. Holding vacant overpriced houses until they sell. Its not a loss until you close the sale.
this doesn't make any sense; you're tying up significant resources and losing out an the alternatives. Nobody evaluates investment returns in isolation.
the numbers I have seen suggest that institutional investors own about 500k of the ~100M residential properties in the US. Small investors probably own about 15M in total. Roughly 2M units are for sale, so even if every single institution-owned unit was for sale they wouldn't be able to exert much influence. The fact that this is a big, complex and widely distributed market IS the reason they can't distort it like they do with specific industries in a given geography.
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