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AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart

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Re: AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart

#281

Post by Nasrudith »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #166
marcus_holmes wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Music as wallpaper vs music as artistic paintings. We are fine with mass-producing wallpaper with machines. People buy this every day, no problem. We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art". Both hang on the wall as decoration. Essentially the same purpose. But we have very different feelings about them and hold them to very different standards. Music is the same. We have muzak - background m…

> We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art". China is full of factories where exactly this is being done and people are fine with this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15742507

It depends entirely upon who the "we" is in question. There has long been an aristocratic tantrum against affordable decoration in the art and architecture world, dating back to men's formal wear going mostly monochromatic as soon as colors became widely affordable instead of reserved for the gentry. There were similar ones against ornamentation with Brutalism (mixed with dadaist 'the world doesn't deserve art!' post WWI despair memes).

The cynical would dismiss the whole distinction between mass produced and unique art as arbitrary. Or worse, just as a racket to create artificial scarcity, a social kabuki show to create the pretension of high culture, or for the purpose of some sort of criminal scheme like money laundering.

Re: AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart

#282

Post by SergeAx »

I just listened to the top 3 songs of this project out of curiosity, and it feels like the same song. Same rhythmic pattern, same harmonies, same instruments.

However, I also listened to several other artists on the chart[1]. They all, bar a couple, are so low effort that they may also be generated by neural networks, FWIW.

[1]: https://itopchart.com/us/en/top-songs/

Re: AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart

#283

Post by topherhunt »

yoz-y wrote: post #243

Auto play has been a way for me to find new music. I stopped using it because now every listen is accompanied by a a nagging feeling that the song that is playing might be AI generated. Now I just go and look for new albums from bands I know I like. I wish there was a pre-2023 filter for the algorithmic feed.

I'm sorry but this attitude baffles me, and I think it's the sort of thing that will sound so silly in 20 years that we'll have collectively memory-holed it. If you're turned off from listening to Spotify recoms becausue they _might_ be AI and you _might_ not know, what does that say to you about the disconnect between your aesthetic judgment and your values?

If you're listening to Spotify autoplays and a shitty song comes up, skip it. If AI slop is flooding Spotify with shitty songs, they'll naturally fail algorithmically (assuming we trust Spotify to actually be honest about its algos, which I'll admit we shouldn't https://substack.com/@tedgioia/note/c-236242253)

If you're listening to Spotify autoplays and a catchy impressive song comes up, what you do is you _listen to it_ and you _fucking enjoy it_. This knee-jerk disgust reaction of "ugh I worry that it's AI" has no place in your heart in that moment. You're just sitting listening to your plastic-and-rare-earth earbuds reproduce digitized waveforms and paying attention to what the music evokes in you. It seems ridiculous to me that we get distracted by questions about "but what if this music isn't made by a human". Insofar as you're a music-enjoyer, listening to music, the only question should be _is it good_. It shouldn't matter if it was created by duck or slug.

The _economic fairness_ aspect is another matter and I don't have as strong opinions there. I think we should ideally incentivize people who use AI in generating their music to disclose their usage, though I have no idea if it's possible to do so, so that consumers who care about only supporting human artists with their listenship-stats can filter to that group. And certainly anyone who closely imitates _a specific artist_, crossing the line from "inspired by" and "shamelessly ripping off", should be severely disincentivized from doing so, whether they used AI or not.

Re: AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart

#284

Post by BoxOfRain »

maplethorpe wrote: post #255
chromacity wrote: post #115

I find the production and consumption of AI music to be uniquely... anti-human. You can make utilitarian arguments for most other uses of AI. For example, the code you're generating didn't exist before, and it would take serious time or money to write it. So, I get it, the economic argument is compelling enough. But music? There's basically an inexhaustible supply of human-created tracks that can be accessed for next…

Having AI create music frees us up to do other things with our time.

This sounds a tad misanthropic, if I had the choice to opt out of working full time making music is one of the primary things I'd spend my time doing. I like software but at the end of the day to me it's the most creative job I can do while still putting bread on my table reliably.

The reasons I don't do music full time are purely economic ones, far from wanting to 'free up' my time to do other things with AI music I'd rather have more of my time occupied by working on music. I want AI to automate the things I don't want to do, I want it to automate the mindless drudgery that is required to exist in a society. Automating art so that I have more time to work is a philistine position in my view, and one which reveals a somewhat dystopian vision of humanity's relationship with both art and work.

Re: AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart

#285

Post by Gigachad »

ssl-3 wrote: post #246
Gigachad wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of them read like twitter bots with generic “wow beautiful ” Wherever there is profit to be made on the internet, you have massive amounts of weird abuse and botting to game the system. Maybe not even literal bots, but paying a sweatshop in India to leave thousands of generic comments to boost your rankings on the algorithm.

People were responding with period-correct, insipid “wow beautiful ” replies for decades before we had bots to do it. It was noise when it was only people; it's still just noise when it also includes bots.

What makes it noise is less the actual comment itself. If I showed someone a piece of art in person and they said this to me, it would be a genuine response. What makes this particular instance noise is it reeks of mass automated messaging with no thought behind it. These comments are generic because they aren't people commenting on the thing they saw, they are just templates being spammed out on mass so they make them generic to fit any context.

Re: AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart

#286

Post by aaronharnly »

topherhunt wrote: post #283
yoz-y wrote: post #243

Auto play has been a way for me to find new music. I stopped using it because now every listen is accompanied by a a nagging feeling that the song that is playing might be AI generated. Now I just go and look for new albums from bands I know I like. I wish there was a pre-2023 filter for the algorithmic feed.

I'm sorry but this attitude baffles me, and I think it's the sort of thing that will sound so silly in 20 years that we'll have collectively memory-holed it. If you're turned off from listening to Spotify recoms becausue they _might_ be AI and you _might_ not know, what does that say to you about the disconnect between your aesthetic judgment and your values? If you're listening to Spotify autoplays and a shitty song…

Some of us want to support actual human musicians?

Re: AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart

#287

Post by tetris11 »

topherhunt wrote: post #283
yoz-y wrote: post #243

Auto play has been a way for me to find new music. I stopped using it because now every listen is accompanied by a a nagging feeling that the song that is playing might be AI generated. Now I just go and look for new albums from bands I know I like. I wish there was a pre-2023 filter for the algorithmic feed.

I'm sorry but this attitude baffles me, and I think it's the sort of thing that will sound so silly in 20 years that we'll have collectively memory-holed it. If you're turned off from listening to Spotify recoms becausue they _might_ be AI and you _might_ not know, what does that say to you about the disconnect between your aesthetic judgment and your values? If you're listening to Spotify autoplays and a shitty song…

Initially bad songs made with real thought often mature into favourites as you learn what the artist was going for.

If you skip every song because you don't immediately like it, then you never learn to refine you palette.

There is then indeed a real fear when a song comes up catered to you, that says nothing about the artist, but was generated to keep you listening. You're getting pidgeonholed.

Re: AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart

#288

Post by krige »

jatora wrote: post #222
krige wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To many, the relationship between what was written in the sheet and how it was played by a live performer, day I say virtuoso, is the imporant thing. The human component is the important component. This is entirely separate from pop, which is the junk food of music - cheap, filling, bad for your health.

I would argue that the human element in music is not an important contributor towards the enjoyment of music for exactly 100% of people. Humans just biologically enjoy rhythmic sounds. We don't care who makes it, we don't care how it is performed live. Those things are just hijacking emotional memory in heightened moments, but that is completely separate from the general natural enjoyment of music. AI music simply dr…

I would counter-argue that you're accusing the other party of exactly the shallow thinking you're guilty of - even worse, you cannot concieve of a thing, so you confidently state thing does not exist and the other party is at best a liar. One only has to have a cursory knowledge of performances on, say, pianos, to know that who and how plays an established piece was always a big deal.

Re: AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart

#289

Post by ssl-3 »

mrob wrote: post #277
ssl-3 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not great in that way. The mastering -- if there is any -- is definitely kind of shit. But that's a relatively easy thing for a human with the right combination of toolchain, ears, and experience to fix. It tends to be a slow process that takes a good bit of time, but lots of actual-mixdowns start off way worse than this before they get polished up by a skilled mastering engineer. (Maybe in a year or three we'll…

Audio mastering is already automated to the level of a mediocre human: https://github.com/sergree/matchering (I haven't actually tried this, I just watched the linked Benn Jordan video.) IMO, the ideal would be for all music to be supplied unmastered so the listener's playback software can apply this process to their own taste. Mastering is necessary for listening with garbage playback equipment (e.g. phone speakers)…

> Mastering is necessary for listening with garbage playback equipment (e.g. phone speakers) or noisy listening environments (e.g. cars, parties), but it makes things sound worse in good conditions.

Eh? I listened to it on quite good nearfield gear, in a decent room, and the AI track linked above still sounds like it needs a good bit of help from a responsible adult to bring it up on this rig. :)

Good mastering helps everywhere -- on all systems. For instance: The sound of Steely Dan is pretty good on playback with about anything, I think, and that sound took a ton of work.

And while classical music is not my first preference, I do love me a good Telarc recording. I strongly suspect that the signal path that they use isn't necessarily quite as pure as they insist that it is. Everything is a tone control, including a microphone -- and money is money. They're not going to reschedule an orchestra to fix an untoward blip at 3KHz. They'll just fix it in post (hopefully, as minimally as possible) and send it.

But otherwise, I agree. The mastering process can be automated. Ultimately, it will be. And for sure, it will also be a customizable user preference.

Some of that work has already been in the bag for decades. Ford, for instance, has been using DSPs in their factory car audio systems to shape sounds in unconventional ways for over 30 years. This gives them a lot of knobs to turn, and to fix into constraints, to help shape a listener's chosen music to sound as good as it can on less-than-ideal built-down-to-price on-road audio systems.

Or at least: It sounds as good it can to a consensus of engineers, or of a focus group.

But the knobs exist. And they don't have to be fixed or constrained: They can (and will) be automatically twisted to suit a listener's preferences.

I'll try to make time to check out your link in a day or two.

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