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AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

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Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#331

Post by BurningFrog »

frakt0x90 wrote: post #30
neom wrote: post #5

I've been having fun making stuff in Suno, I'm not a musician but I've always enjoyed "producing tracks" using Abelton and find the Suno + Abelton combo to be real magic on the weekends. I think some of the stuff I made isn't too bad and I'd love feedback on it. For a few weeks I went back and forth about uploading them to my soundcloud and resolve with this: I wouldn't have insisted we only allowed art made with MS…

Whenever I see defences of AI "art" people very often reduce the arguments to these analogies of using tools, but it's ineffective. Whether you use MS Paint, Photoshop, pencil, watercolor etc. That all requires skill, practice, and is this great intersection of intent and ability. It's authentic . Generating media with AI requires no skill, no intent, and very minimal labor. It is an approximation of the words you ty…

A: This post is part of an eternal debate about art: Do we appreciate the finished work, or the artist? This post is firmly in the latter camp. There are also solid arguments for the other extreme.

B: Having spent some time trying to make songs with Suno, I can assure you it takes more skills than I have...

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#332

Post by Agres »

owenversteeg wrote: post #218
frakt0x90 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I see defences of AI "art" people very often reduce the arguments to these analogies of using tools, but it's ineffective. Whether you use MS Paint, Photoshop, pencil, watercolor etc. That all requires skill, practice, and is this great intersection of intent and ability. It's authentic . Generating media with AI requires no skill, no intent, and very minimal labor. It is an approximation of the words you ty…

Well said. The credit is with the model; you commissioned it but did not create it. With AI art... there is no passion, there is no pain, there is no emotion, there is no sex, there is no feeling, there is no reason. When Blaze Foley sang If I Could Only Fly or Nina Simone sang Stars or Bardot sang Je t'aime or Morricone wrote Se telefonando or Vermeer painted Zicht op Delft or Orozco painted his Epic of American Civ…

Your comment made me read "The Swimmer" for the first time. Thanks.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#333

Post by nluken »

eterm wrote: post #169
WD-42 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did just realize after posting maybe touting how affordable CDs have become is maybe not the best idea.

I can't remember the artist but there's a fun song about how they used to pick up second hand LPs really cheap and then they got popular and too expensive, then discovered second hand CDs are really cheap now. Frank turner-ish vibes but I don't think it was actually him. It's completely un-googlable though, and even the LLMs aren't much help on this one.

Oh! I know this one! You're thinking of Jeffrey Lewis & The Voltage's LPs from 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3urXygZXb74'

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#334

Post by default-kramer »

Gigachad wrote: post #236
pousada wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are though by sheer volume. Finding anything half good will be a needle in a planet sized haystack of slop.

You're right, but for EDM this was pretty much already the case. The scene survives in large part thanks to DJs who wade through countless mediocre tracks looking for the few hidden gems to deploy at the right moment. I think AI means that DJs will become much more important in all genres.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#335

Post by gambiting »

nobody_r_knows wrote: post #283
butlike wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs. Not necessarily apples-to-apples here. Full songs generated from AI prompts don't crash like a computer program would. You could simply upload the garbage to Spotify and reap the rewards until it got removed (if it even does).

Some of the worst (best?) AI "artists" on Spotify have millions of views. It's tragic what it says about us. That most of us not only can't tell, but actually prefer this kind of uni-tone, blase, on-the-nose, emotionally manipulative crap.

There's music and there's music. When I want to listen to Music then I pick an artist and album manually. But 99% of the time, I just need something to play in the background when I'm working or cooking or cleaning - then it just has to sound pleasant, the value of that for me is exactly zero. Some of the best mixes I find for that are ai generated because they have a uniform pleasant sound for a long time, without anyone trying to impart anything on them.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#336

Post by undeveloper »

yowlingcat wrote: post #228
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.

Wasn't it Picasso that said "good artist borrow, great artists steal?" I've never heard an artist confident in their own ability complain about this because they're not threatened by other competent human artists knocking them off never mind an AI that's even worse at it. AI not going to out-compete anyone on volume by flooding the marketplace because switching costs are effectively zero. Clever artists can probably…

> then out-compete them on volume by flooding the marketplace

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#337

Post by meindnoch »

newman8r wrote: post #50

If I have an exact idea of what I want something to sound like, and I'm able to use an automated system to create that, is that creative expression? Obviously AI isn't entirely capable of that, but eventually with BCI devices it might be. I've spent many hours learning to play guitar and ukulele but I'm really not very good, and probably never will be - but I can hear the music in my head I want to create. I'm not in…

>I've spent many hours learning to play guitar and ukulele but I'm really not very good, and probably never will be - but I can hear the music in my head I want to create. I'm not interested in monetary gain at all, just being able to hear it for real and maybe share it with some people.

Luckily there are hundreds of MIDI editor DAWs available. Open the piano roll, and write down the music note by note. Surely, it's not that hard if you can hear it in your head.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#338

Post by lotsofpulp »

rdiddly wrote: post #243
soulofmischief wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let people enjoy what they like. It makes it easier to just sit back and enjoy what you like.

That's fine until, for example and by analogy, you go to the store to buy beer, and you don't particularly care for IPA, but IPAs have crowded out half the beers that used to be there including the one you used to sit back and enjoy.

That is still fine. There should be no expectation that what you want will always be available in the market.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#339

Post by alexjplant »

miki123211 wrote: post #310
alexjplant wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bandcamp continues to be the best place to organically discover new artists. If I'm ever bored I go to their front page and browse by genre. It feels like the digital version of Sam Goody or whichever 90s record store had the headphone kiosks where you could listen to songs before buying the record. Spotify, on the other hand, induced a level of visceral disgust I'd never felt before when I stumbled across an AI-gene…

This is not Spotify, it's Spotify fraudsters. It's like being mad at your bank that somebody stole your credit card on the subway and made purchases with it.

Spotify failed and continues to fail to verify the provenance of the music on their platform. They also routinely allow bedroom EDM and trap producers to associate their releases with older artists just because they have the same name. If they have hundreds of millions of dollars to sign podcasters to exclusive deals then they certainly have the resources to respond to these egregious cases of misclassification. Unfortunately their report submission system will only allow this class of problem if you can verify that you're the copyright holder. This therefore means (unless I'm missing something) that it's easier to submit fraudulent music than it is to take it down.

Do not shift blame here. Spotify is actively complicit in this. Hell, they could sic a few crafty data scientists on this and build an ML model to weed these bad tracks out. It'd be great PR for them ("we're saving artists from stolen revenue and preserving the sanctity of their work") and would be a novel contribution to the field of fraud prevention. The problem is that they're not incentivized to do so.

And, by the way, card transaction fees exist to cover the exact case you're talking about. Card companies make you whole in the case of fraud.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#340

Post by tensor »

vharuck wrote: post #304
lukevp wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do? AI music is the same as AI code. It’s derived from real code, but it’s not just regurgitated wholesale. You still as a person with taste have to guide it and provide inputs. Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument. Auto tune made it…

>And you create music without ever having heard music before? Or are you also extracting other artist’s work and using it as inspiration for what you do? Personally, I don't buy this "AI models are learning just like we do." It's an appeal to ignorance. Just because we don't fully understand how a human brain learns, one can't claim it's the same as a statistical model of ordered tokens. But even if it were true, I'm…

> If this right is allowed to all humans, there is a chance one learn from and outperform me. That would suck for me,

This is a rather sad take. If someone learned from my art or music and did something new and more popular, I would be happy! I had influence, I mattered. That new more popular work takes nothing away from my previous work. In fact, when I do science I'm doing it explicitly for this reason, to build on.

For me, creating music is not about "being the best" or "making more money than some other artist." It's about telling the stories I want to tell. An AI would not tell my stories, ever. It might produce things that somewhat similar, but it won't tell a human story, just a shallow imitation.

On the flip side, AI can be immensely useful. For example, stemming means that DJs or visualizer applications can do more with music. Perhaps AI can be used to create interesting new effects, or interesting new instruments or sounds. It can give ideas and help with inspiration.

I honestly have a hard time seeing AI actually driving musicians out of business because it can't tell a story. And it can't do that because it hasn't lived a life. Yes, I can see it producing low quality ad-jingles or low quality filler tracks like you see in spotify, so some people will be impacted. But we're long past time for some form of universal basic income to deal with this. It's not just artists that need a basic income at this point.

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