AI-generated sad girl with piano performs the text of the MIT License

Personal opinion, but I think you're calling it wrong. Also personal opinion, I absolutely hate the idea of it happening, buuut...

I think it's a bit like everyone who said "black cabs in London have nothing to fear; X years of 'The Knowledge' will always be better than a guy with an App in an old Prius..." Except it was all wrong. Black cabs are probably still superior, but the bulk of people (and especially new customers) are all using Uber, because it's easier and they just don't care.

It sucks that production factory, literally built to make money, AI created junk music will be a thing, but it most likely will. Someone will exploit that they can make a ton of cash with low risk and budget. They'll have the connections to, despite initial (somewhat) faux outrage from the public/press, get radio play/playlisted online ("probably even 'ironic' addition from the hipster music crowd"). The song will be an earworm, and aside from the musicians that hear all the flaws, the passive every day mom and pop listeners will get the hook stuck in their head and it'll just be another great tune like any other.

I don't think we'll replace 'celebrity', I think that'll still happen, and I think maybe greater appreciation will happen to 'real musicians' (with a face!). But 'everyday' disposable pop (like all those one hit wonder tunes that are still played in nightclubs, pubs, throwback radio, wedding discos) - that's going to be disrupted massively.

I don't know much music theory but the chord progression in the first 4 bars it seems to deliberately miss the final chord, which leaves us without resolution. The next chord sounds like a change but we don't know what the root it is going to (so any chord would make sense, may it be a minor 6th or 3rd). Then there's this pedal note that is through the whole tune. It can be a tonic or a 7th so very ambiguous.

It reminds me of some musicians that try to comp songs that they don't know (neither the theme melody or chords). Play this way they can easily add one or two notes from the keyboard to a big 7 major/minor/dominant chord and seem to follow the song's chord progression, while the singer will add colour and melody. The audience's brain will fill the gap by themselves.

> Other than The White Stripes, what popular bands have had clearly unskilled drummers?

I want to joke and say Lars from Metallica but I'd be lying. He was a decent drummer in the first couple albums.

> These songs don't have any hooks. Melodies don't get repeated. They all just meander along.

I've been playing around with it for a few days now. While I agree that it seems impossible to create songs with a more "sophisticated structure" (for lack of a better word off the top of my head), you still can get better results by fine-tuning, as is always the case.

If you just request "rock music" or "jazz", you get very dull, generic variants of the requested style. But on a second thought, isn't that exactly what should happen? You throw all the rock music on this planet in a blender, turn it on, and what you get is the most average rock music there is.

If you spend some time spicing up your prompt with flowery language or just a bunch of adjectives, you can get a sound that seems less bland. When you supply lyrics, using square brackets to denote verses, chorus and bridges can also result in a somewhat more structured song, but I found that the AI is pretty lackluster in that regard and you often need several attempts until it follows these inline orders.

So yes, in its current form it has mostly a novelty factor, this is Stable Diffusion for music, but I can easily see this being useful for a small indie gamedev who needs some BGM, or an alternative to the YouTube music library. Instrumental sounds fine, it's mostly vocals that have this clear digital distortion if you pay attention. It's surprisingly good, but still bad.

I did consider mentioning Gorillaz, but they are voiced by actual people, whereas Miku is software synthesis. The suggestion was that "the cause of a person singing is their mental states", but there is no person singing here and therefore no mental states in the singer - it's just Vocaloid.

Meanwhile, "To what extent can a piece of art be a thing that is of interest in itself, divorced from its creator, context, or any representation of anything in particular?" is absolutely a valid area for people to explore and one that artists are exploring all the time. There is now one more tool to play with in the toolbox.

I heard the exact same objections to the modtracker scene three decades ago - "it's just computer generated slop, I'm not interested unless it's a real person performing on real instruments". I maintain that not only was it a perfectly valid mode of expression then, but tools like Ableton grew in part from those experiences and are an integral part of much - most? - music now.