Around this time, two years ago, I was learning how to prompt in OpenAI’s Playground using GPT-3. Amazingly, I could produce an output that could synthesize the plots from three films and I thought that was impressive. That was in 2022 when generative AI was limited to large language models. Now, anyone can prompt a music generator to produce a song that sounds like the real thing. While this technology may seem like a fun novelty, it raises profound questions about the future of human creativity, artistry, and our very relationship with music itself.
Consumer AI apps have a really high turnover Generative AI is demonstrating. For every Stability or Midjourney, a Leonardo or Ideogram magically shows up to do what they can do more or less for cheaper or better. Hard to take AI tools or app seriously in such an environment of music chairs tbh.
As impressive as Suno or Udio might be, I think for ChatGPT or Sora, it's only an invitation for more apps like them to come and go.
Respectfully, you may be making a common mistake, assuming that AI threatens or ends human creativity.
First, no AI can prevent me from playing acoustic guitar, or learning how to play piano. The threat is not to human creativity or to the enjoyment of traditional art forms. The threat is to the music business. And like in any business, the most efficient means of pleasing the customer usually wins. It's the human customer who makes the decision, not AI.
Second, it's entirely possible to be creative with AI, just as it is with any other tool. There's nothing about being creative with a violin that is automatically superior to being creative with some other tool, such as AI. Should you think using AI is a push button easy unworthy creative challenge, try writing a novel with AI, illustrating it with AI images, and then make a video of the story with AI characters talking with AI voices on top of an AI soundtrack. Should you attempt something like that, you will soon discover that there are a million different ways you can go about it, each of which is an open door to creativity.
Finally, there's this. Whether we like it or not, AI is coming. Farms were automated, factories were automated, and now it's the turn of the white collar world. AI is like the weather, we're free to complain about it, but doing so accomplishes exactly nothing.
I actually agree that AI is a mistake for humanity at this time. But so what? AI is going to happen anyway, nobody can stop it. So the only rational option is to try to learn how to adapt to the new environment unfolding before us.
“The great question that hovers over this issue, one that we have dealt with mainly by indifference, is the question of what people are for. Is their greatest dignity in unemployment? Is the obsolescence of human beings now our social goal?” Wendell Berry, writing in 1985 about mechanisation, automation and compurisation (in agriculture and industry).
So much to chew on here, as usual. I think you zero in on the ultimate crux of this technology, which is it's a challenge to figuring out what we value, and it's possible that some of us will not like those answers, or that only certain groups will have the privilege of doing work that reflects their values.
Those songs, like the recently released Suno videos are simultaneously amazing and also soulless and shitty. Of course, there's lots of popular songs that are soulless and shitty, so it's not like soulless and shitty are barriers to market success.
As with AI writing we've also been prepped for accepting soulless and shitty by the steady templatization of music, both in terms of production (using ProTools, which tunes every voice and keeps tempo rock steady), and form (there's hardly any bridges in popular music today). Maybe we've been conditioned to accept something that is just not good and we've lost touch with what's meaningful.
There's something very satisfying about learning an instrument in terms of advancing one's individual mastery and appreciating that progress, but it's possible none of that will "matter" in the broad scheme of producing music for public consumption.
Consumer AI apps have a really high turnover Generative AI is demonstrating. For every Stability or Midjourney, a Leonardo or Ideogram magically shows up to do what they can do more or less for cheaper or better. Hard to take AI tools or app seriously in such an environment of music chairs tbh.
As impressive as Suno or Udio might be, I think for ChatGPT or Sora, it's only an invitation for more apps like them to come and go.
Respectfully, you may be making a common mistake, assuming that AI threatens or ends human creativity.
First, no AI can prevent me from playing acoustic guitar, or learning how to play piano. The threat is not to human creativity or to the enjoyment of traditional art forms. The threat is to the music business. And like in any business, the most efficient means of pleasing the customer usually wins. It's the human customer who makes the decision, not AI.
Second, it's entirely possible to be creative with AI, just as it is with any other tool. There's nothing about being creative with a violin that is automatically superior to being creative with some other tool, such as AI. Should you think using AI is a push button easy unworthy creative challenge, try writing a novel with AI, illustrating it with AI images, and then make a video of the story with AI characters talking with AI voices on top of an AI soundtrack. Should you attempt something like that, you will soon discover that there are a million different ways you can go about it, each of which is an open door to creativity.
Finally, there's this. Whether we like it or not, AI is coming. Farms were automated, factories were automated, and now it's the turn of the white collar world. AI is like the weather, we're free to complain about it, but doing so accomplishes exactly nothing.
I actually agree that AI is a mistake for humanity at this time. But so what? AI is going to happen anyway, nobody can stop it. So the only rational option is to try to learn how to adapt to the new environment unfolding before us.
“The great question that hovers over this issue, one that we have dealt with mainly by indifference, is the question of what people are for. Is their greatest dignity in unemployment? Is the obsolescence of human beings now our social goal?” Wendell Berry, writing in 1985 about mechanisation, automation and compurisation (in agriculture and industry).
So much to chew on here, as usual. I think you zero in on the ultimate crux of this technology, which is it's a challenge to figuring out what we value, and it's possible that some of us will not like those answers, or that only certain groups will have the privilege of doing work that reflects their values.
Those songs, like the recently released Suno videos are simultaneously amazing and also soulless and shitty. Of course, there's lots of popular songs that are soulless and shitty, so it's not like soulless and shitty are barriers to market success.
As with AI writing we've also been prepped for accepting soulless and shitty by the steady templatization of music, both in terms of production (using ProTools, which tunes every voice and keeps tempo rock steady), and form (there's hardly any bridges in popular music today). Maybe we've been conditioned to accept something that is just not good and we've lost touch with what's meaningful.
There's something very satisfying about learning an instrument in terms of advancing one's individual mastery and appreciating that progress, but it's possible none of that will "matter" in the broad scheme of producing music for public consumption.
Seems like this is all true for writing as well.