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AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

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Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#511

I'm a musician, but am also pretty amused by this anti ai wave. There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own. Even if its just creative prompting, or perhaps custom trained models, someday someone will come along and make a genuine ar…

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.

“great artists steal”?

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#512

I'm a musician, but am also pretty amused by this anti ai wave. There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own. Even if its just creative prompting, or perhaps custom trained models, someday someone will come along and make a genuine ar…

I don’t think this is an AI issue, but the amount of effort, the thought process and the story telling about the track they made.

Before generative AI, there were already a swarm of people who aimed at maximising the number of track they made within a short time, with abusing marketing. It is not wrong that they can pump up 100 tracks in a year, with a template and a specialised workflow and correct marketing techniques but… what is the story to these music? For many tracks, I only heard the story of:

> I am the most productive person and I can make most of the money because of that.

Quantity wise, for sure, they wins, but quality wise, I failed to imagine a more complex story than things above although they are good to hype the dance floor or a concert. These days, I mostly listen to music I have bought, or made by specific music communities because of their story behind their track despite not as perfect.

Same reasons why don’t I watch many movies since Ironman 3, most of the blockbusters follow the same winning formula rather than trying something new and in depth or unexpected, CGI and product placements all over the place instead of a good story.

AI just emphasised this problem even more since commercial “art” has been testing majorities’ newest lows.

There are differences between using a tool to create art or use it to spam.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I certainly would. I might even start hating the song, if that discovery left me feeling tricked.

That is such a bizarre opinion to have. Do you not enjoy art because it gives you joy?

It's not that simple.

I used to enjoy Lostprophets before the news about the singer SAing children came out. You cannot disconnect your relationship with the artist from the art.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#514
post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. At that point you’re watching a video game that plays itself or a rather involved screensaver.

AI music is the same. There is no surprise. No human element. No interest. No intention.

But the qusstion never got answered. If you liked a song that you later realized was generated would it ruin the song?

If a robot ai basketball team was authentic enough to have hoodwinked me into thinking it was a real entertaining team then it has become a different question than whether or not I would knowingly participate as a spectator in an AI basketball league.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#515
post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is such a bizarre opinion to have. Do you not enjoy art because it gives you joy?

Art is interesting because it’s fundamentally human and challenges you. Slop is incapable of doing that.

So in the future when we need an expert to discern the real art that's fundamentally human you'll be available, right?

The concept that there is some hidden quality to human made art strikes me as the same line of thinking that lead people to try to measure the weight of the soul.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But what gives me joy with art is that it's a communication from one person to another Maybe if a person generated 50,000 songs, not even listening to them, you could have a point. Although, even in that case, regardless of the lack of an "artist's intention," there is the interpretation of what people will take from that thing. And that interpretation is often different from what the author originally had in mind.…

It needs to be more than that, I want to hear musicianship that has been honed and crafted. The struggle to find their sound. I'm fine with even an amateur musician learning their way around an instrument and being able to put something together that they tracked and mixed. If a prompt returned the most perfect song, I would still not care to listen as that to me has completely divorced any human element that I would…

Fine, but you've now established this loop where one must find and analyze the human struggle in the music before qualifying an opinion, how does this jibe with deciding whether or not a tune playing in the grocery store has a catchy beat?

Do you run and grab your phone to id the artist before you decide to tap your foot?

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#517

I'm a musician, but am also pretty amused by this anti ai wave. There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own. Even if its just creative prompting, or perhaps custom trained models, someday someone will come along and make a genuine ar…

> Even if its just creative prompting, or perhaps custom trained models, someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai.

We've now had this technology for 2 years. Show me one, just ONE track that is purely(!) made by AI you find honestly exciting. Not "commercially successful", mind you, something you, a musician, personally think is actually great. You are referencing Aphex Twin there, and I'm old enough to remember when I first heard "Digeridoo", so, you know, something where you just go "Wow, that's a banger". If you're DJing: something you would actually put on in a club and the crowd would go wild.

Let's cut the crap: there is none. All GenAI is good for is generating stupid memes, shitposting, ads, and generic background music. There is ZERO creative value in purely generative AI. Yes, there are tools leveraging AI models which can help musicians create tracks - entirely different thing. This is also not what Bandcamp is banning here. Most people will freely admit that AI tooling can be used creatively, like what De Staat did with the "Running backwards into the future" music video - that's all fine, really nobody is disputing that fact, although that "look" is now well established and people are mostly bored and annoyed by it, but that's just how it goes.

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all about the DAC, no? Yes, it is (unless the CD player is so bad that it can't do adequate error correction). What I do is rip the CD to my music server, which is where I listen to the music from. Then the quality of the CD player isn't important, as long as it works correctly.

it's surprising difficult to rip from audio CDs in a error free manner most tools do it badly and just accept what the drive gives them in default mode, often with glitches

This page has drive accuracy test results and recommendations:

https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#519
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…

>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.

Where did I claim in my post to have written music worth listening to or nontrivial code? Seems like you’re just insulting me in particular instead of providing a counter-argument.

There have already been AI-created #1 hits.

Sure, there’s music that has all of the attributes you lay out as “requisite” for “good” music, but this is classic moving of the goalposts. It’s how people always justify that AI is not here yet, because there’s this facet of it that’s not human enough.

A lot of the music people listen to is devoid of the depth, warmth and meaning you mention, even without AI involvement. It’s written and produced by tens or hundreds of people and there’s no single visionary behind it. It’s a product.

Similarly, there can be AI assisted music that has just as much depth, warmth and meaning as a human, BECAUSE a human is involved in the decision-making of that music.

Do you believe that if someone uses a sample, or uses a prebuilt drum loop, that their music automatically is bad? What level of assistance is acceptable? Where do you draw the line?

Re: AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's surprising difficult to rip from audio CDs in a error free manner most tools do it badly and just accept what the drive gives them in default mode, often with glitches

Just use a tool that supports the AccurateRip database or similar, and check your checksums, right? Like, ripping seems easy to me, you rip with something that supports a checksum database, and if it comes out with a correct checksum then it's right.

If you don't have a good drive and a clean disc you may get skipping/jitter and thus possibly never get a AR or CueTools DB match. (CTDB has parity records that can be used to repair some small errors.) This is the point of the elaborate re-read stuff Exact Audio Copy or cdparanoia does. Though even with a good drive you ought to be using a tool that checks for C2 errors, and that won't necessarily catch everything; error correction and detection is always probabilistic.

Also not everything is in AR/CTDB. Maybe 3% of the 1000+ CDs I've ripped had no records yet, though I do tend towards the obscure. I rip these again with EAC, which is set up to automatically do CTDB submission. (Usually I'm using the redumper tool which has some specialized features.)

Without external verification it's best to dump it twice and ensure they're bit equal, preferably with a different drive to minimize error correlation.

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