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AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

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Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#421

Post by spopejoy »

CapsAdmin wrote: post #400
rambojohnson wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI takes all of that old school idm and electronic music and repackages it without a human story to tell, ripping off actual musicians in the process. AI didn’t magically ‘make old IDM its own.’ It scraped decades of artists’ work, stripped out the context and intent, and reassembled the surface features. There’s no human arc, no lived constraint, no risk and no culture. What’s being repackaged isn’t a new instrument…

I'm honestly not getting the human story thing when it comes to music and maybe art in general. I mean I get what it means, but I don't think it describes why people enjoy art. To me, it seems more like people place their own meaning in art. A particular song might remind one individual of the good times they had in their teens, while the actual meaning of the song is completely different. Bachs 5th symphony (or what…

Your point echoes the "death of the author" concept in literature, where the work is independent of the creator, full stop. It's a useful concept up to a point, but if you really have no idea what it means to have a deep connection to music that is wrapped up in some idea of the creator as a human being, you should trust others when they say they do and it's important to them. For those of us with that value, AI slop is offensive, and to be clear, it has precedents in history with Muzak, early schlager music etc -- what they all share is a desire to use the power of music for non-artistic ends, which sucks from any number of viewpoints. If music has non-artistic utility, that doesn't justify a concerted effort to take away artist-made music from those who may not be paying attention.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#422

Post by spopejoy »

codexon wrote: post #192
ffsm8 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What??? Every thread on HN that touches on the topic has countless people talking about how LLM generated code is always bad, buggy and people that utilize them are inexperienced juniors that don't understand anything. And they're not completely wrong. If you don't know what you're doing, you'll absolutely create dumster fires instead of software

Sure, I am one of the people who will say that. But where are the people calling for it to be banned? Where are the stores and websites that are banning AI generated software?

Really? You've not seen the numerous open source projects banning AI-generated PRs with extreme prejudice?

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#423

Post by egypturnash »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #203
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Usually this means I have forgotten to eat, or that I need to take a step back and consider whatever I’m doing at a deeper level. Once I recognized that the “keep trying and trying and nothing works” days vanished for good.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#424

Post by egypturnash »

neom wrote: post #167
jplusequalt wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole problem with this is that the people using generative AI tools are trying to co-opt what "art" is. They're barging into creative spaces and demanding that the real artists treat them as equals. I hope you understand that no group of people would treat you kindly for doing that.

Sure except half my classes in art school ended up in debates on what "art" even is/means - some people thought if it involved commerce at all it's not art, some people about the process, some people about the human, some people about the final work itself, is it high or low brow, fine art or emotive? So when you say "co-opt what "art is." - sure, but...not sure. On barging into creative spaces and how that should be…

Most of the artists I know, including me, have kinda given up on DA after its pivot to AI.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#425

Post by spopejoy »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #203
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique

Yeah, no. Competent artists are not generalizable as "unconscious", solely "mashing up" influences or input, or even working with "signifiers": many are exquisitely aware of their sources; many employ diverse and articulated methodologies for creation and elaboration; many enjoy working with the concrete elements of their medium with no concern for signification. Even "technique" does not have a uniform meaning across different fields and modes.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#426

Post by alisonatwork »

vitaflo wrote: post #259
codexon wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting that there's so much pushback against ai generated art and music while there seems to be very little for ai generated code.

Devs are quite used to using others peoples work for free via packages, frameworks and entire operating systems and IDE’s. It’s just part of the culture. Music has its history in IP, royalties, and most things need to be paid for in the creation of music or art itself. It’s going to be much easier for devs to accept AI when remixing code is such a huge part of the culture already. The expectation in the arts is entir…

This doesn't make sense to me. I mean, the term "remix" literally comes from the music scene.

Artists are constantly getting inspiration from one another, referencing one another, performing together or having their works exhibited together...

While there are some big name artists who are famously protective of the concept of IP, those artists have made headlines exactly because when they litigate they seem so unreasonable compared to the bedroom musicians and pub bands and church choirs and school teachers and wedding DJs and millions of other artists and performers whose way of participating in "the culture" is much less tied to ownership.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#427

Post by skramzy »

tensor wrote: post #369
crtasm wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not AI generated at all. Using acoustic models to stem out individual sections from a recording is not creating new material (and I wouldn't even describe that as "AI" despite what I'm sure a lot of the tools offering it want us to believe).

Sorry, that's AI. So is OCR, so is voice recognition, and many other things you probably use and take for granted. I'd suggest you focus on use cases not trying to redefine definitions for an entire area of science and technology based on your own preferences. Saying "I'm against fully AI generated music" is at least precise, and doesn't throw out detecting cancer along with the AI bandwagon term.

> Sorry, that's AI. So is OCR, so is voice recognition, and many other things you probably use and take for granted

Have you heard of machine learning?

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#428

Post by [deleted] »

egypturnash wrote: post #424
neom wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure except half my classes in art school ended up in debates on what "art" even is/means - some people thought if it involved commerce at all it's not art, some people about the process, some people about the human, some people about the final work itself, is it high or low brow, fine art or emotive? So when you say "co-opt what "art is." - sure, but...not sure. On barging into creative spaces and how that should be…

Most of the artists I know, including me, have kinda given up on DA after its pivot to AI.

[deleted]

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#429

Post by rambojohnson »

astrange wrote: post #317
rambojohnson wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> generative AI catch on not by just imitating other instruments, but generative AI didn’t catch on by "imitating instruments." It caught on by imitating artists, which streaming platforms and record labels then repackage and outsell you with. false analogy.

This argument won't get you anywhere because "imitating artists" and "outselling artists" aren't actually the same thing. i.e. complaining about training on copyrighted material and getting it banned is not sufficient to prevent creating a model that can create music that outsells you. Because training isn't about copying the training material, it's just a way to find the Platonic latent space of music, and you can g…

you're dodging the point by retreating into silly abstractions. I’m talking about cultural and economic displacement of artists, not a pedantic debate about latent spaces. "Training isn’t copying" is the cynical AI shill statement that doesn’t address the fact that systems trained on artists are then packaged and monetized to outsell them. why is this part so complicated for you? or are you just being obnoxious...

dropping wiki links and math jargon avoids the ethical / market reality here.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#430

Post by leptons »

lukevp wrote: post #225
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.

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…

>We are just moving from making music as a rote activity similar to code

From this statement, I doubt you've written any music worth listening to, or any code that's not trivial.

Don't confuse music with muzak. What you get from an "AI" is muzak. It will never, ever have the same depth, warmth, or meaning as a human translating human emotions and experience into music and lyrics.

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