Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 751 posts

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#201

Post by yellowapple »

BrokrnAlgorithm wrote: post #79

I'm a musician, but am also pretty amused by this anti ai wave. There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own. Even if its just creative prompting, or perhaps custom trained models, someday someone will come along and make a genuine ar…

Along the same lines, the anti-AI attitude among musicians today reminds me quite a bit of the anti-synthesizer attitude of the 60's and 70's, down to the same exact talking points: fears of “real” musicians being replaced by nerds pushing buttons on machines that can imitate those musicians.

I think the fears were understandable then, and are understandable now. I also think that, just as the fears around synthesizers didn't come to fruition, neither will the fears around AI come to fruition. Synthesizers didn't, and generative AI won't, replace musicians; rather, musicians did and will add these new technologies into their toolsets and use them to push music beyond what was previously understood to be possible. Synthesizers didn't catch on by just imitating other instruments, but by being understood and exploited as instruments in their own right; so will generative AI catch on not by just imitating other instruments, but by being understood and exploited as an instrument in its own right.

The core problem right now is that AI (even beyond just music) ain't being marketed as a means of augmenting one's creativity and skills, but as a means of replacing them. That'll always be misguided, both in the practical sense of producing worse outputs and in the philosophical sense of atrophying that same creativity and skills. AI doesn't have to produce slop, but it will inevitably produce slop when it's packaged and sold and marketed in a way that actively encourages slop — much like taking one of those cheap electric keyboards with built-in beats and songs and advertising it as able to replace a whole band. Yeah, it's cool that keyboards can play songs on their own and AI can generate songs on their own, but that output will always be subpar compared to what someone with even the slightest bit of creativity and skill can pull out of those exact same tools.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#202

Post by jatora »

hooverd wrote: post #168
jatora wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and that is why policies like this will turn platforms into dinosaurs. no need to care. large behemoths always thrash a lot as they die. as do the people who see this as a positive thing. ai music will be the future and create curated music for every user, specific to their tastes at that moment, for pennies. suno already matches 99% of music in quality and creativity. the last 1% and beyond will come soon enough.

having a shared reality is good actually

Sorry I dont understand what you're referring to, can you elaborate?

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#203

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #103
BrokrnAlgorithm wrote: post #79

I'm a musician, but am also pretty amused by this anti ai wave. There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own. Even if its just creative prompting, or perhaps custom trained models, someday someone will come along and make a genuine ar…

The main differentiator I've noticed is: how much work is the tool doing, and how much work is the artist doing? And that's not to say that strictly more effort on the part of the artist is a good thing, it just has to be a notable amount to, IMHO, be an interesting thing. This is the primary failure of all of the AI creative tooling, not even necessarily that it does too much, but that the effort of the artist doesn…

> Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful.

That's normal for any kind of creative work. Some days it just happens quickly, other days you keep trying and trying and nothing works.

I spent some of the 90s and 00s making digital art. There was a lot of hostility to Photoshop then, and a lot of "That's not really art."

But I found that if I allowed myself to experiment, the output still had a unique personality and flavour which wasn't defined by the tool.

AI is the same.

The requirement for interesting art is producing something that's unique. AI makes that harder, but there's a lot of hand-made art - especially on fan sites like Deviant Art - which has some basic craft skill but scores very low on original imagination, unusual mood, or unique personality.

The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique. AI-made art mechanises the mash-up, but it's still up to the creator to steer the process to somewhere interesting.

Some people are better at that than others, and more willing to dig deep into the medium and not take it at face value.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#204

Post by neom »

jatora wrote: post #194
squidsoup wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Creativity, fundamentally, is overlapping memories of what you have seen already. Literally no different than any diffusion or transformer model. Every individual has a unique experience, and assimilates different things from their experiences depending on their personal tastes and culture. That is profoundly different from a model which assimilates the output of hundreds of thousands of individuals. A model has no…

Do you really think a human creating something isn't the output of assimilating the outputs of countless humans that came before them? Your argument implies creativity is confined to humans or brains. So no creativity existed before that? Weird. Lucky for us that evolution spawned creativity then! If you could answer that question then that should help me understand, since you say it is trivial to verifiably prove my…

The dean of the art school I went to regularly used to say "The most creative people simply to the best job of hiding the source of their creativity". - in fact he invoked it once directly to me when I protested about how one of my peers went about their final assignment, and again when the whole program revolted over a submission that won honors. I learned a lot about art in that art program, but mostly I learned art wasn't that I thought it was. :)

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#205

Post by jesterswilde »

anthonypasq wrote: post #120
drittich wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a musician and I don't think it's that amusing. IMO this isn't an "AI can't be art" discussion. It's about the fact that AI can be used to extract value from other artists' work without consent, and then out-compete them on volume by flooding the marketplace.

[flagged]

Curation is a real concern. 'Flooding the market' is bad for everyone, being seen is difficult as is. It's even harder in a slopstorm.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#206

Post by fzeroracer »

I feel like the thing like you can easily divide things along the lines of 'art' vs 'consumption'.

A lot of people including myself enjoy music because it's so intimately human, the flaws and all. It's someone putting a bit of themselves into every piece they create, and people look for things that resonate with them.

AI music however is purely about consumption. It's not something made to be remembered or cherished. And the more you integrate it into your music, the less and less of yourself you put into it and the less reason for anyone to bother. I could just ask whatever AI to generate generic rock music inspired by the beatles and remove you from the equation entirely and have the same experience. Everything gets amalgamated into the exact same thing with all of the imperfections sheared away.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#207

Post by pousada »

alfalfasprout wrote: post #138
anthonypasq wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Yet your argument is deeply flawed too. Flooding the market with slop makes it much more difficult to discover genuine, quality, art from smaller creators. ad hominem has no place on HN.

The market was already flooded 20 years ago.

Your biggest competition as musician is not AI or any new music it’s the music released in the last 50 years.

I predict that slop won’t significantly change the game - which was already rigged against new (and good) artists when I was a little baby

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#208

Post by troupo »

mcpar-land wrote: post #185
anthonypasq wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Spotify has a history of intentionally boosting internally produced, royalty-free and/or AI music over actual artists. https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...

That article is bandied around, and no one either reads or understands what's written there. Neither do article authors BTW.

1. Spotify doesn't have "internally produced music"

2. There are companies that provide white-label ambient/white noise/similar music.

3. Spotify may have preferential licensing deals with some of them (as any company would seek preferential contract terms)

4. Some of that music is generated (AI or otherwise)

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#209

Post by pousada »

nartho wrote: post #144
BrokrnAlgorithm wrote: post #79

I'm a musician, but am also pretty amused by this anti ai wave. There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own. Even if its just creative prompting, or perhaps custom trained models, someday someone will come along and make a genuine ar…

The issue is not so much an artist that will use it as a tool, even though there is much to say about it, it's the hundred of thousands of people with no interest in music whatsoever, that will flood the platforms in order to make a quick buck.

People who won’t invest anything and just want to make a quick buck won’t be successful with AI generated content/music.

You still need to invest significant time and effort to make it work.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#210

Post by bombdailer »

hmokiguess wrote: post #163
bombdailer wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A stonemason who creates pieces by hand gathers more respect than one who delegates their craft to a cnc machine. No person who respects their craft will use tools that devalue their relation to their craft. Only those who seek to maximize personal gain of wealth would use such tools. Such a person, who sees merit only in the ends produced, rather than in the means themselves, does not participate in the shared histo…

I confess I am torn by your comment. I myself wouldn't choose AI for guitar, given that's where I have perfected my craft, and I am able to relate to what you said. However, not as an artist, but as a listener, I have no trouble with a guitar composition made by a machine. John Dewey's famous book talks about shifting the focus from the maker to the experience and that the value of something is not about the artist's…

The making of art is a personal experience, and the beholding of art is another type of personal experience. If we suggest that the two can be separated such that we can behold art without knowledge of the production of it, well I would consider that wrong. There is a reason each piece in a museum is given a plaque telling its medium and brief background. This is because the meaning of a piece is derived from its context and cannot be separated from it without making art an arbitrary sensory stimuli.

The issue with the reduction of art to experience is that it ignore that our knowledge shapes our experience, and so the more we know about an artist and their process, the more different our experience of their art will be.

If one sees the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, they might not think much of it if all they know is that it's very popular. Another who knows why the Mona Lisa is particularly popular, because of its historic theft, has a different experience of it. And the person who knows of Da Vinci's life, who has read his journals, knows of his elaborate painting process and sophisticated details and meaning supplied in his paintings, why that person derives much more joy out of the work than one who merely sees it as a visual appearance producing merely a arbitrary liking/disliking.

Perhaps you might enjoy an AI composed track, but would you not enjoy it more if instead that track were human produced, particularly if you held more knowledge of the people making it?

As for meaning living in the reader, that cannot be true, for a person can find meaning in tea leaves or moving clouds. True meaning, as intentional, is not derived, but supplied, and it is the goal of every reader to behold the authors vision. That one fashions a different interpretation for themselves over the authors intentions is of necessity, for no two minds will see alike, but to look only for the reflection of oneself in art and not look beyond, why that is the death of art, for art is the revelation of the soul.

Post reply on HN