381–390 of 405 posts
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I’d say the quality is the most important metric. I (and I think most poeple?) object to slop because it is objectively bad, not because it was generated. And popularity is unrelated to quality.
This is a contradiction. If most people objected to bad music, that would make popularity directly related to quality.
With the majority of popular music decided by a handful of people in LA, Nashville, or New York, let me ask one question: is this actually a bad thing? Hear me out. Most of what's on the radio could have been made by AI already and no one would've noticed the difference. To be clear, I'm not talking about legitimate artists doing something original or authentic. I'm talking about the execs who find performers to sing…
That's what's happening though. Someone is writing a prompt, generating some slop and then directing bots to collect money that will never make it to real artists.
If they were getting too small of a slice before, now it's even smaller.
> But at that point, if the music really is that good, does it matter?
We're very far from "that point". The point we're at right now, which we need to tackle is the one in which we're drowning in slop.
I'm not personally against using AI tools to write code or help someone generate music, but right now it just impedes, devalues and deplatforms the real stuff to make money from a system that hasn't caught up.
I'm trying to learn music production with a DAW, sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting my time. Part of my reason for trying this was reading how creative endeavors can be therapeutic (I'm dealing with burnout/depression/cptsd). I'm at the stage where sometimes I make something that sounds good (to me) but I know it requires work (in the "not fun" sense) to finish it and even then, it will likely never be appreciated by…
> I'm trying to learn music production with a DAW, sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting my time. Part of my reason for trying this was reading how creative endeavors can be therapeutic (I'm dealing with burnout/depression/cptsd). If you enjoy the process and its outcomes, then it's not a waste of time. If you are forcing yourself to do it or have another motivation for it that is not rooted in genuine interest, then yes…
These days YouTube has so much AI generated music, very hard to differentiate from originals. For examples look at these YT channels uploading AI generated music: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6Xw8Jrwf009nHTV165UuQw https://www.youtube.com/@ForeverDisco80s/videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQn7ZUixKXg&list=RDMQn7ZUixK... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUph_6i5Pr0&list=RDWUph_6i5P... so on..I think uncountab…
If you heard these on the radio while working at a grocery store in 1983 you'd be begging your local music store to sell them to you.
To me this AI-generated "slop" is much more enjoyable than human-generated slop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPAg7ODubB4
Where "slop" = "what can I put out that I don't love but that people will click on?"
Not sure what algorithm Deezer is using, but Benn Jordan is a fairly tech savvy musician who talks about ways to id AI generated music by looking for compression artifacts used by the training data. https://youtu.be/QVXfcIb3OKo?si=74EdIey6RIhuwdzg
it will still miss the ai authoring the music, and a human performing it
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Because some crafts are more sacred than others. Making a painting is more sacred than smearing my shit in the Barns and Nobel bathroom stall, although arguably less fun. Who decides that? We do, collectively. Why do we have that power? Because we define art. Why do only humans have this power? Because art is an innately human thing, so we get to decide.
I find one of the most unsettling things about 2025-2026 is how little people seem to agree with this point you're making. It's like this hyper-reductive thinking where it's all just "if the the outcome is the same, so what!?" has just metastasized and everyone is false-equivalence-ing their way into hell It makes me want to scream. like, beauty is not arbitrary, not everything can be homogenized into content paté, t…
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If you didn’t sink a career’s worth of time doing creative work professionally, then that’s a nice relationship to have with creative output. For a lot of people, AI has been one gut-punch after another with someone selling cheap knockoffs of your work in the same marketplace using your munged up work taken without credit, compensation, or permission. Mortgages not paid, cancer not treated, birthday presents not purc…
I don't think highly of AI made stuff uploaded without clear labelling as such. But it's almost certainly not AI's fault if your mortgage is not paid, your cancer not treated or you can't pay birthday presents for your kids. Music was already extremely "cheap", and success has very little with how much or little work you put into it (extremely unlikely either way). Let's fund art, but this business model you want to…
B) There’s a universe of creative workers AI fucked over that have nothing to do with retail music sales. Concept artists, stock photographers, session musicians, copywriters, video game foley artists, etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc. Those were all reliable career paths until very recently. Disney chopped their concept art team to replace them with models Disney trained on their work… probably posturing to look pro-AI enough after their pathetic sora debacle. As an aside, they can go fuck themselves.
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The reality is, essentially nobody makes money by creating music. Taylor Swift, you might say, is a billionaire. Is it from selling music? Nope, it's from selling tickets to her shows. People want to see her perform live. A Taylor Swift impersonator would make no money singing the same songs. A cover band wouldn't do any better. It's the same with authoring books. Almost nobody makes any significant money off of them…
> Taylor Swift, you might say, is a billionaire. Is it from selling music? Nope, it's from selling tickets to her shows. People want to see her perform live. People want to see her performing...her music. She would not make nearly as much money by going up on stage and sitting quietly for a few hours. It's also worth nothing that she literally re-recorded several of her albums due to someone else getting the rights t…
There have been many stories on HN over the years on rock bands making a pittance from record sales and having to tour to make any decent money.
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Yeah. People act like it's a sin to want some notice or respect when you've worked and achieved something, like you should be some zen-like creature that is purely intrinsically motivated. It is not wrong to want some notice or respect from your peers once in a while.
I'd like to clarify my comment 4 levels up. Of course it's not a sin to want some notice and respect from people. It's a totally understood and natural, human thing. By proposing to part with those expectations, I don't mean getting rid of human nature in a transhumanist way. I'm just trying to warn people who are in the very beginning of their creative ways. There are so many ways to descend into misery and depressi…
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I'd like to clarify my comment 4 levels up. Of course it's not a sin to want some notice and respect from people. It's a totally understood and natural, human thing. By proposing to part with those expectations, I don't mean getting rid of human nature in a transhumanist way. I'm just trying to warn people who are in the very beginning of their creative ways. There are so many ways to descend into misery and depressi…
Thanks for writing this. For the record, I wasn't responding to your original comment, which I agreed with. And I agree with and empathize with what you're saying here too - it sounds like you've had an interesting relationship with creating and have a lot of perspective on it, good and bad. Although if you were advocating to get rid of human nature in a transhumanist way, I would understand that to some extent - it'…