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 artistic viable piece of work using ai.

I'd pay for some app which allows be to dump all my ableton files into, train some transformer on it, just to synthesize new stuff out of my unfinished body of work. It will happen and all lines will get blurred again, as usual.

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 so you didn’t have to learn how to sing on key. There are many innovations in music over time that make it easier and less gatekeepy to make music.

We are just moving from making music as a rote activity similar to code, to making music like a composer in much the way that you can create software without writing code. It’s moving things up a level. It’s how the steady march of innovation happens.

It won’t work to put the genie back in the bottle, now it’s to find what you love about it and makes it worth it for you and to focus on that part. Banning the new types of art is only going to last as long as it takes for people to get over their initial shock of it and for good products to start being produced with it.

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 alright with drawing a line between AI learning and human learning. The law and social conventions are for humans. I want the ability to learn from others and produce original works that show influences. If this right is allowed to all humans, there is a chance one learn from and outperform me. That would suck for me, but I can accept it because it came from a universal human right I also enjoy. But an AI model doesn't have human rights. For models, the law and social conventions should still favor humans. The impact on the creative community and future creative endeavors should be balanced against the people who create and use the models.

I don't know how to do that with LLMs in a way that doesn't prevent the development of these amazing models. Maybe the government should distribute a portion of the revenue generated by the models amongst all citizens, to reflect how each model's value came from the written works of those citizens.

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.

>That would suck for me, but I can accept it because it came from a universal human right I also enjoy.

I don't know about that. America shows us that laws and social conventions are for corporations. Humans are just entities to extract profit from.

But I've seen the discussion here on that's and we're pretty far away from being able to have a good discussion on that. Let along bridging the two topics together.

This is cliche. Most celebrated artists in the electronic music world can play several instruments, if not expertly, than at least with enough familiarity to understand the nuances of musical performance.

Electronic musicians are more akin to composers and probably have more in common with mathematicians and programmers in the way that they practice their craft, whereas musical performers probably have more in common with athletes in the way that they practice their craft.

Same applies to Bandcamp not having any issues with people making music in a DAW

People don't understand that about music either. We may use sequencers and automation, but the work happens in real time, and it is an instrument that we are playing. It's just that we work at a higher level than just playing something on a keyboard.

But if it is possible it's probably going to be a lot more involved than just '"video of cute cartoon cat, Pixar style" into a prompt'.

Though relatively old in the AI world (2023), it's still quite interesting.

In case you can't access the article, the prompt used is:

> 35mm, 1990s action film still, close-up of a bearded man browsing for bottles inside a liquor store. WATCH OUT BEHIND YOU!!! (background action occurs)…a white benz truck crashes through a store window, exploding into the background…broken glass flies everywhere, flaming debris sparkles light the neon night, 90s CGI, gritty realism

Neither of those things are really true, though. They made it possible to make poor music without learning those things, I suppose, but not make good music.

> Banning the new types of art

Nobody is seriously talking about banning AI generated music. What you're seeing is a platform deciding that AI generated music isn't something that platform is into. There are a lot of different platforms out there.

Doesn't seem like a good way to measure a "good song".

I think in this context, the term "intentional music" or "earnest music" applies better. People who just wants "music that sounds good" already has mainstream stuff. Many who want a more niche sound deliberately look to support humans in that endeavor. Not yet another billionaire label who puts out "safe" but "boring" stuff. Except it's worse now.

I would imagine the vast majority of other humans agree with me. I'm not just gonna betray humankind because some 1s and 0s "learned" how to write music. Who cares, it's silicon.

I guess the difference is proprietary code is mostly not used for training. It's going to be trained on code in the public. It's the inverse for music, where it's being trained on commercial work, not work that has been licensed freely.

Yes, when I make music, I am taking inspiration from all of the other artists I've listened to and using that in my music. If someone listens to my music, they are getting some value from my contribution, but also indirectly from the musicians that inspired me.

The difference between that and AI is that I am a human being who deserves to live a life of dignity and artistic expression in a world that supports that while AI-generated music is the product of a mindless automaton that enriches billionaires who are actively building a world that makes it harder to live a life of stability, comfort, and dignity.

These are not the same thing any more than fucking a fleshlight is the same as being in a romantic relationship. The physical act may appear roughly the same, but the human experience, meaning behind it, and societal externalities are certainly not.

If someone trains a machine on my work and it means you can get the benefit of my labor without knowing me, interacting with my work or understanding it, or really any effort beyond some GPUs, that feels bad. And, it's much more of a risk to me, if that means anything.

Agreed. My goal, my moral compass, is to live in a world populated by thriving happy people. I love teaching people new things and am happy to work hard to that end and sacrifice some amount of financial compensation. (For example, both of my books can be read online for free.)

I couldn't possibly care less about some giant matrix of floats sitting in a GPU somewhere getting tuned to better emulate some desired behavior. I simply have no moral imperative to enrich machines or their billionaire owners.

Sure, but so does the homeless guy living on the streets right now because computers and the internet automated his job - and yet here you are using the very tools ("mindless automatons") that put him out of work.

The invention of the shipping container put nearly every stevedore out of a job. But it made it radically cheaper to ship things and that improved the quality of life of nearly everyone on Earth.

I suspect that for most stevedores, it was a job where the wages provided dignity and meaning in their life, but where the work itself wasn't that central to their identity. I hope that most were able to find other work that was equally dignified.

That's certainly less true for musicians, poets, and painters where what they do is central to the value of the work and not just how much they can get paid.

There's no blanket technology-independent answer here. You have to look at a technology and all of its consequences and try to figure out what's worth doing and what isn't.

I think shipping containers are a pretty clear win. I think machine learning for classification is likely a win.

It's not at all clear to me that using generative AI to produce media is a win. I suspect it is a very large loss for society as a whole. Automating bullshit drudgery is fine. Most people don't want to do that shit anyway. But automating away the very acts that people find most profoundly human seems the height of stupidity to me.

Do you really want to live in a world where more people have to be Uber drivers and fewer people get to make art? Do you want to live in that world when it appears that the main people who benefit are already billionaires?

In fact, the theoretical turn in 20th century art was due in part to the invention of the camera. What's the point in continuing down the path of representational art if the camera can recreate a scene with infinitely more realism than the best painter?

Many of the same criticisms that people have of photography as art are being used against AI today, like that it's too easy, that it's soulless, or that the machine is the real artist.

You say that as if it's a given that that's a good thing.

> Many of the same criticisms that people have of photography as art are being used against AI today, like that it's too easy, that it's soulless, or that the machine is the real artist.

I made none of those criticisms.

Plenty of people miss taking care of their horses, but we still drive cars.

The vast majority of humans do not, in fact, think making art is "the most profoundly human" thing. They are about socializing, they care about their family, they want to go on fun vacations and have fun experiences. Most people do not spend their free time painting.

I observed, which is entirely likely to be true, that on average people probably find more personal fulfillment in the work of being an artist than the work of hauling crates off a ship.

Yes, we humans are clever creatures and will extract as much upside and value as we can out of any situation. That does not at all mean that all jobs are thus equivalent in all respects.

> they want to go on fun vacations and have fun experiences.

And how many of those vacations are to places with incredible architecture and rewarding art museums? How many of those fun experiences are music, plays, and movies?

Certainly, family and socializing are important avenues of meaning as well. Those aren't mutually exclusive with wanting to live in a world full of art made by others who care about it.

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).

It's the same with background music when I work. But like as a specific example, that's a specific track I quite listening to, and it's 100% AI generated. Can you really say it doesn't have any character?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJUvNVCqtpI

>> The world is messy, and human music reflects that

Are you familiar with the term "elevator music"? It doesn't need to be messy or have any character to it - it just has to cover the noises of the elevator moving up and down its shaft.

>>d that human-created music seems offensive to you,

I literally never said that, please stop implying so.

Put a different way, if I'm listening to music on random, and Led Zeppelin finishes, do I want there to be a chance of pink noise or elevator music playing after that song? Not really, but if "it's all on Spotify," then it could happen

Not music.

>waves crashing on the beach

Also not music.

>It's the same with background music when I work.

You do you. I like good music when I work, not "background music". The better the music, the more fun it is to work. YMMV.

>But like as a specific example, that's a specific track I quite listening to, and it's 100% AI generated. Can you really say it doesn't have any character?

Maybe it's not only the AI-generated music that is lacking in character.

>Are you familiar with the term "elevator music"? It doesn't need to be messy or have any character to it - it just has to cover the noises of the elevator moving up and down its shaft.

And if it's pretty bad music, then it makes me anticipate getting out of the elevator even more, but most likely I'll be listening to music that I like in my earbuds while I'm in the elevator. And I've been in some fancy elevators with actually nice non-AI generated music.

>>>without anyone trying to impart anything on them.

>> that human-created music seems offensive to you,

>I literally never said that, please stop implying so.

Okay, maybe I read more into it than you were expressing, but it seems like having a human put effort into relating an experience is just too distracting for some people, or something... I took it as "offensive" because you seem to just want a machine to sanitize what someone else wrote and regurgitate it out in a non-distracting way. If that's what you want, nobody here is stopping you from having it, but we can form opinions based on what you write about yourself. You are free to do the same, and yes, I'm sure I can be seen as kind of an asshole sometimes. Maybe I should write a song about it, I'd call it "Ballad of an Internet Asshole", and I'm sure a lot of people would relate to it.

This is already what pop music, EDM and some other genres have been about for decades. Most of it is slop made with overused similar chord progressions and beats. The very fact that we can easily separate music into genres is a proof most of the music we produce nowadays is super generic and follows very basic repetitive patterns.

There is AI slop but there is human slop too and it tends to be very successful.

But the parent poster is, presumably, human! Humans have the right to take inspiration like that from other humans (or machines)! Why do we seem so keen on granting machines the right to take from us? Are we not supposed to be their masters?

The volumes of production are really scales of magnitude of difference between a human producing music, and a computer.

With a script and generator 1 individual could oversaturate the whole marketplace overnight rendering it impossible for other individuals to be found let alone extract any value.

Also, I don't know if you've ever done music production for fun but you don't really just setup only a prompt. It takes a significant amount of time to actually produce something. Time setting up a DAW system and export an empty track, and submitting it. An empty track.

Let alone actually doing all the microoptimizations by ear and trial to produce any catchy tune. Meanwhile a statistical approach doesn't even have to understand what's it's doing, could as well be white noise for all it matters.

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.

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?

It's an old story, but it was a fabricated one.

The only reason this sort of tracks is that a lot of people today don't listen to music, they just put it on as background noise to drown out the silence. It seems to pay off for some producers, but I don't think there's big money there, or a real threat of replacing artists.

By and large, the general public has shown that they notice the vapidness, blandness, and incongruity of GenAI music, and don't much care for it apart from seeing it as an interesting curiosity.

You didn't, and I never claimed that you did - I wrote that I doubt you have. If you had written non-trivial code, or written any music worth listening to, then I doubt you would have the same conclusions.

>A lot of the music people listen to is devoid of the depth, warmth and meaning you mention, even without AI involvement.

I agree, and it will be forgotten, and that's fine. Not every song is a winner. I guarantee that #1 AI generated hit will not be thought about a year after it comes out. Yes we're still listening to hits from the 1960s that real people created because they express human experience that isn't easily fabricated by a machine.

> lukevp 13 hours ago | parent | next [–]

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.

AI-boosting nonsense

>Do you believe that if someone uses a sample, or uses a prebuilt drum loop, that their music automatically is bad?

Generally, yes. I abhor Kanye and his ilk. YMMV.

Normally the copyright is owned by the creator. Algorithms can't own copyrights, so there is no copyright. There is already legal history on this.

For me, one key difference is that I can cite my stylistic influences and things I tried, while (to my knowledge) commercial musical generation models specifically avoid doing that, and most don't provide chord/lead sheets either -- I would find it genuinely sad to talk to a musician about their arrangement/composition choices, only to find they couldn't

So much of music composition is what "feels right" and is instinctual. Artists aren't consciously aware of probably most of their influences. They can cite some of the most obvious ones, but the creative process is melding a thousand different vibes and sounds and sequences you've heard before, internalized, and joined into something new, in a way only your particular brain could.

Let music historians work on trying to cite and trace influences. That's not something artists need to worry about.

Thus already doing much better than the average Suno producer

E: More seriously, this strikes me as a motte-and-bailey where "Artists cannot list every single influence they have or provide an explicit motivation for every single creative choice" is treated the same as "artists cannot list influences or justify creative choices at all"

It's not about putting the genie back in the bottle, it's about helping folks realize that the vague smell of farts in the air IS the genie--and this particular genie only grants costly monkey paw wishes that ultimately do more harm to the world than good.

Is "gatekeepy" how we're referring to skill now? "Man I'd like to make a top-quality cabinet for my kitchen, lame how those skilled carpenters are gatekeeping that shit smh"

This is an argument that the AI should be allowed to benefit, not the person prompting it.

Your instrument is the computer and designing sound. You still have to have talent and musical ear to make this music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH-BNwBV4EI

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 find a way to grease controversy and marketing out of finding cases where they are knocked off, taking it as a compliment, and juicing it for marketing.

But I liked the Picasso quote when I was younger and earlier on in my journey as a musician because it reminded me to be humble and resist the desire to get possessive -- if what I was onto was really my own, people would like it and others could try to knock it off and fail. That is a lesson that has always served me very well.

Why are people mad? Don't they understand that you can't stop progress? Fssss... /s

What do you think about The Prodigy?

What’s being repackaged isn’t a new instrument, it’s other people’s careers. I’m not sure what part of that is supposed to be amusing.

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 whatever) might be extremely annoying to someone because they had to listen to it every day at work.

And what exactly is the meaning of jazz fusion? I really like a good solo, but a lot of people hate it, they need to hear a voice. (though I don't particularly like the signature Suno or Udio solo..)

I found this ai track on Spotify that I unironically enjoyed. I listened to it every day while working on reviving an old passion project, which became its meaning to me. The tune, a long with its album with random disparate suno generations was taken down.

I'm not sure if I have a point here, but something is off with the story thing in art to me from a consumers point of view. Maybe from other artists as consumers point of view?

But my experience as an artist talking to non-artists about art, I don't think the sentiment that art without a struggling artist, purpose, story to tell, human arc, etc, is not real art is a true sentiment. First of all, because it's not true, because people apply their own meaning and form their own unique relationship with an artist. (The saying don't meet your heroes come to mind.)

Note that I'm not talking about AI at all here. I'm 100% for banning purely generated AI on soundcloud, bandcamp, spotify, etc. What I really want is to filter out art created by people who has put profit as first priority and thrown away any shred of artistic integrity.

But this is an impossible feat, because who am I to judge that someone else's favorite artist is devoid of artistic integrity?

yes, listeners project their own memories onto music, no one’s disputing that. but that doesn’t make the creator, context, intent, or labor irrelevant. treating music as interchangeable stimulus is how you end up defending systems that strip human work of attribution, risk, and livelihood while still feeding on the cultural residue artists created in the first place.

While I personally like it when people put their heart and soul into something, even if the result is technically not very great, it's society who is the ultimate judge of whether that creation benefits them or not.

I know that the track I'm currently listening to is superior in every way to some modern pop song. The artists have practiced for decades, they have their own unique style I can recognize in other tracks. But I also know that 99.999% of people don't give a shit and think it's noisy music, and depending on your perspective, they're correct.

>Maybe one day machines will be able to make art in the same way humans do: by going out into the world, having experiences, making mistakes, learning, connecting with others, loving and being loved, or being rejected soundly, and understanding deeply what it means to be a living thing in this universe.

I think this is a good description of the process of how some art is created, but not all? Some art is a pursuit of "what is beautiful" rather than "what it means to be human" ie a sensory experience, some art is accidental, some art just is. For some art knowing the person behind is important, to me; for some not; for some it adds to the experience; for some it removes from it.

I would also highlight some small contradiction:

>I can imagine that this is true for a lot of people. There are certainly folks out there who see music as an interesting sensory stimulus. This song makes you dance, this one makes you cry, this other one makes you feel nostalgic. To these people, the only thing that matters is what the music makes them feel. It's a strange, solipsistic way of engaging with art, but who am I to judge?

>Here's an admittedly extreme example, but it's demonstrative of how I personally relate to music. In the wake of the #MeToo movement (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeToo_movement), some of the musicians I used to love as a teenager were outed as sexual predators. When I found out, I scoured my music library and deleted all their work. The music was still the exact same music I fell in love with all those years ago, but I could no longer listen to it without being reminded of the horrible actions of the musicians. Listening to it was triggering.

That seems to me a case of "the only thing that matters is what the music makes them feel".

As can I, but a gorgeous sunset is not art. It's beauty.

Or Beethoven's 9th. For different reasons...

Whenever I look at popular artists on streaming platforms, I see 'remixes' where people just slowed down the particular original song and added reverb or some other silly effect to it. I don't think AI existing or not will change the behaviour of people trying to make a quick buck. If they aren't using AI, they'll use a different tool as they did before.

You still need to invest significant time and effort to make it work.

As a new artist you have to compete against 60+ years of music history - much of it really good music too.

Kinda, sorta. Good music is reflective of the society and era it was produced in and that matters. I regularly listen to music, from all over the world, that was composed (and some, recorded) 100+ years ago, music that was recorded 50+ years ago, and music that was recorded last month. None of them are a substitute for the other because each has a unique voice expressing things that were unique about the time and place they were made in.

So, in a sense, they aren't in competition with each other. But also, there are only so many hours in a day and there isn't enough time in your life to listen to all the worthy music that humans have made. Hard choices are necessary. In that sense, they are in competition with each other.

Now it’s that the listener has to compete with 60x absolute slop to find something good.

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't correlate to good output. 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.

Any other toolset I can become familiar and better equipped to use. AI-based tools are uniquely unpredictable and so I haven't really found any places beyond base concepting work where I'm comfortable making them a permanent component.

And more generally, to your nod that some day artists will use AI: I mean, it's not impossible. That being said, as an artist, I'm not comfortable chaining my output to anything as liquid and ever-changing and unreliable as anything currently out there. I don't want to put myself in a situation where my ability to create hinges on paying a digital landlord for access to a product that can change at any time. I got out of Adobe for the same reason: I was sick of having my workflows frustrated by arbitrary changes to the tooling I didn't ask for, while actual issues went unsolved for years.

Edit: I would also add the caveat that, the more work the tool does, the less room the artist has to actually be creative. That's my main beef with AI imagery: it literally all looks the same. I can clock AI stuff incredibly well because it has a lot of the same characteristics: things are too shiny is weirdly the biggest giveaway, I'm not sure why AI's think everything is wet at all times, but it's very consistent. It also over-populates scenes; more shit in the frame isn't necessarily a good thing that contributes to a work, and AI has no concept at all of negative space. And if a human artist has no space to be creative in the tool... well they're going to struggle pretty hard to have any kind of recognizable style.

It has full image generation mode, it has an animation mode, it has a live mode where you can draw a blob of images and it will refine it 2-50 steps only in that area.

So you are no longer doing per line stroke and saved brush settings, but you are still painting and composing an image yourself, down to a pixel by pixel rate. It's just that the tool it gives is WAY more compute intensive, the AI is sort of rendering a given part of a drawing as you specify as many times as you need.

How much of that workflow is just prompting a one-shot image, vs photoshopping +++ an image together until it meets your exact specifications?

No, the final image cannot be copyrighted under current US law in 2026, but for use in private settings like tabletop RPGs...my production values have gone way up and I didn't need to get a MFA degree in The old Masters drawing or open a drawing studio to get those images.

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 was a lot of hostility to Photoshop then, and a lot of "That's not really art."

But I found that if I allowed myself to experiment, the output still had a unique personality and flavour which wasn't defined by the tool.

AI is the same.

The requirement for interesting art is producing something that's unique. AI makes that harder, but there's a lot of hand-made art - especially on fan sites like Deviant Art - which has some basic craft skill but scores very low on original imagination, unusual mood, or unique personality.

The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique. AI-made art mechanises the mash-up, but it's still up to the creator to steer the process to somewhere interesting.

Some people are better at that than others, and more willing to dig deep into the medium and not take it at face value.

For me, the artist, sure. I've not yet had a day where Affinity Photo just doesn't have the juice, and I don't see the appeal. Photoshop, for all it's faults, doesn't have bad days.

That's the difference between the artist and the artists' tool. A difference so obvious I feel somewhat condescending pointing it out.

> I spent some of the 90s and 00s making digital art. There was a lot of hostility to Photoshop then, and a lot of "That's not really art." ... But I found that if I allowed myself to experiment, the output still had a unique personality and flavour which wasn't defined by the tool.

"People were wrong about a completely different thing" isn't the slam dunk counterpoint you think it is.

Also as someone else in that space at that time, I genuinely haven't the slightest idea what you mean about photoshop not being real art. I knew (and was an) artists at that time, we used Photoshop (of questionable legality but still) and I never heard this at all.

> The requirement for interesting art is producing something that's unique. AI makes that harder,

Understatement of the year.

> The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique. AI-made art mechanises the mash-up, but it's still up to the creator to steer the process to somewhere interesting.

The difference is the lack of intent. A "person" mashes up what resonates with them (positively or negatively) and from those influences, and from the broader cultures they exist in, creates new and interesting things.

AI is fundamentally different. It is a mash up of an average mean of every influence in the entire world, which is why producing unique things is difficult. You're asking for exceptional things from an average machine (mathematical sense not quality sense.).

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.

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.

This is something people spent a lot of time on, is trained lovingly on only their own stuff, and makes for some great music.

It's "AI" but in an almost unrecognizable way to us now: its not attached to some product, and its not about doing special prompting. It is definitely pop/electronic music, but it follows from a tradition of experimentation between what we can control and what we can't, which is here their bespoke stochastic program.

https://youtu.be/sc9OjL6Mjqo

It is not about how the computer or the model enables us, which is so silly. (As if art is simply about being able to do something or not!) Its about doing something with the pieces you have that only those pieces can do.

And since it's from 2019, it's not quite the same thing. I like it, unlike the current wave of unwanted LLM slop.

It's original. Of course if 1000 people were doing the same with minimal creative effort and passing it off as something else, that would ruin it.

I get Kate Bush and Dead Can Dance vibes, filtered through a mechanical chorus with a bit of glitched breakbeats.

It's empathically not the forgettable, bland averaged pastiches that LLMS emit on lazy command. Even if it's not your favourite, I'm sure that it's something.

1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvNqNgHAEys

2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4sROgbaeOs

What does Bandcamp really mean? Perhaps sampling others voices and music is barred, not these mini-AIs that are everywhere ?

Algorithmic progression generation IS IN USE for years, sorry you didn't mention, or perhaps you don't listen that much to everyday radio. Markov chains, constraint solvers, and rule-based harmony live in many VSTs... the fact there are so many "experimentors" out dare winding knobs to match a pleasurable pattern, does not change the fact they be 100% ignorant about the 'deux ex machina'.

I'm surrounded by producers having absolutely no clue about the vast amount of actual AI and actual probabilistic algorithms that make their "unique" sounds possible. And all of them are 100% ignorant of what AI means when they say it, because they don't mean a specific thing.

How is this not AI? Or one needs an transformer-based model to call it AI? This whole story did not start an year or two ago, you may be late for history class though. The fact there's been this moving marketing concept of what "AI" actually is, does not change the reality of most modern music (including acoustic) at some point of the production process getting artificially enhanced by honestly super-complex systems that are intelligent enough to do what otherwise would take 20x more effort to get right.

Good thing that's not what Bandcamp is doing, then. To spare you a click, here's the exact wording:

"Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp."

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.

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.

Also, there's quite a lot of pushback against AI-generated code, but also because unlike music, normal people have no interest in and aren't aware of the code.

In the first place, I do not regard a copyright notice and license on AI generated code to be valid in my eyes, so on those grounds alone, I cannot use it any more than I could merge a piece of proprietary, leaked source code.

You cannot ignore a credible/plausible claim from a third party.

It's not simply the case that the output has a public-domain-like status.

When it comes to code, I don't think anyone cares how the sausage is made, and only very rarely do people care by whom. The only question is "does it work well?"

Art is totally different. Provenance is much more important - sometimes essential. David is a beautiful work, but you could 3d print or cast a replica of "David". No one would pretend that the copy is the same as the original though - even if they're indistinguishable to the untrained eye - because one was painstakingly hand sculpted and the others were cheaply produced. This sense of provenance is the property that NFTs were (unsuccessfully) trying to capture.

[1] https://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

It's difficult to pin down the line. Ultimately it's up to the individual to define them. "The relationship to art, and this kind of painting, to their work, varied with the person entirely."[1]

[1]: https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/03/31/berkeley-voices-transfo...

No and no.

If you raise and teach a child and they generate a painting, are you the artist?

while programmers have to rush it these days or they lose their jobs. Programmers don't have much of say in their companies.

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 entirely different.

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.

Compare this to music where you are free to choose and listen to whatever you want, or stare at art that moves you. IF you don

At work most people are force to deal with code like SalesForce or MSFT garbage, not the same experience at all.

Why would people care about code coming from an industry that has been bleeding them dry and making their society worse for nearly 20+ years?

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

I think it's also about money. Places code and code samples are stored tend to be large companies that are in tech and on the AI hype wagon. Bandcamp is not one of those places.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Steam-updates-AI-disclosure-fo...

An apt analogy would be like a shared drawing taking merge requests and having to spend 30 minutes looking at every single merge request zoomed in to see if there was a microscopic phallus embedded somewhere.

It is completely fair for an open source project to have their own standards, and you are also free to fork it so you can accept as many AI PRs as you want.

None of these options are available for someone that wants to sell AI generated music. There are really only 2 marketplaces to sell your own music and if both of them banned AI, then you are effectively locked out of the entire market.

I have dozens of little programs and websites that are AI generated and do their job perfectly.

Eventually that'll change, as artists and musicians continue to experiment with AI and come up with novel uses for it, just as digital artists did with tablets and digital painting software, and just as musicians did with keyboards and DAWs.

In terms of how well it works, the quality of AI music is far better than art or code. In art there are noticeble glitches like multiple fingers. For code, it can call non existent functions, not do what it is supposed to do, or have security issues or memory leaks. From what I can tell, there is no such deal breaker for AI music.

More subjective tells: drums are hissy and weak, lyrics are generic or weird like "Went to the grocery store to buy coffee beans for my sadness", weirdly uniform loudness and density from start to finish, drops/climaxes are underwhelming, and (if you've listened to enough of them) a general uncanny feel to them.

I've generated about 70 hours of AI music and have listened to all of the songs at least once, so it's become intuitive for me to pick them out.

Some examples for listening for the hiss filter:

https://suno.com/s/qvUKLxVV6HDifknq (Easiest to hear at 0:00 with the inhale)

https://suno.com/s/QZx1t0aii0HVZYGx (Really strong at 0:09)

Some examples for more hiss and other (subjective) tells like weak drums:

https://suno.com/s/tTYygsVFo88SX6OV

https://suno.com/s/CzFgC6dxSQLWyGSn

I guess what I'm getting at is that, since programmers are typically more inclined than the average person to understand how AI works, programmers are therefore ahead of the curve when it comes to understanding those pitfalls and structuring their workflows to minimize them — to play to the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs. A “fancy” autocomplete v. a “fancy” linter v. something pretending to be a junior programmer are all going to have very different rates of success.

The issue hindering art and music is that most people using generative AI for art and music are doing so analogously to the “something pretending to be a junior programmer” role instead of the “fancy autocomplete” or “fancy linter” roles. That is: they're typically using AI to generate works end-to-end, whereas (non-vibe-coder) programmers are typically using AI in far narrower scopes, with more direct control over the final output. I think the quality of AI-based art and music will improve as more narrowly-scoped AI-driven workflows catch on among actually-skilled artists and musicians — and the result will be works that are very different from existing works, rather than works that only cheaply imitate some statistical average of existing works.

I'm pretty sure the people at Bandcamp agree with you and that's why they mention future "updates to the policy as the rapidly changing generative AI space develops".

And on the surface the drill is better. But this heir is assuming that all diggers do is diplace dirt. Not thinking about where to dig, how to dig safely,, what to dig for, and where brute force is needed vs a subtle touch (because even in 2025, miners keep shovels with them). That's all going out the window for "hey I made a hole, mission accomplished!".

Instead of working with diggers to enhace their mining, they want to pretend they can dig themselves. That's why no one in the creative space is confident in this.

Sure, you just can't upload the resulting track directly on Bandcamp, but you're free to "creatively prompt" on SUNO all you want, they'll even host your "music".

It's also a matter of resources. People uploading gigabites of AI generated slop a day isn't really what Bandcamp is about.

And in the mean time, AI will continue to clutter creative spaces and drown out actual hardworking artists, and people like you will co-opt what it means to be an artist by using tools that were trained on their work without consent.

There may be short term emotional strings to pull. "AI driven!" or "AI free!"

But ultimately, no one will care if it's AI or not if it's good.

Nobody listens to techno - Eminem

AI needs to make music that sells. The same way Scorsese and Brando sell the Godfather. until it can do that literally nobody will care.

https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE

First, art is, I think, one of the most enjoyable activities we have. One evidence is a lot of people forego higher salaries to choose an art job (although being a job carries additional responsibilities and some inconveniences compared to doing it as a hobby). It's a shame to see it diminished, when I believe we should be diverting efforts to automate other stuff.

Second, most AI art I've seen has been quite substandard compared to human art. We still don't know very well what human emotions are, the origin of sentience and qualia, etc.. But I think humans still lead here in having and probably understanding emotions. While for other tasks most implementation detail is irrelevant (e.g. in code, that it works tends to be most important, vs. minute choices in style), in art every detail is particularly relevant. Knowing this, it bothers me usually when I see this art that it doesn't carry the same knowledge of context and nuance a human would have.

Third, There's also the effect of making me question whether each piece of artwork was made by a human or AI, that didn't exist before. It does carry a bit of a magical feeling I think knowing a real person made every piece of artwork prior to 2018 or so (I think algorithmic art[1] is fine in this regard, because it tends to be more clearly algorithmic, and the involvement of the artist in coding is significant), that is now gone or at risk. Even the thought of imagining say their work day or what they had for lunch or talked to coworkers or friends is pleasant to me (at the risk of romanticizing it too much).

I suppose if AI art actually understood human nature, and specially the specific context of each art piece, better than us some of my arguments might be diminished. But the negatives so far seem to outweigh the positives, and I would like to e.g. give preference to content that doesn't use AI art.

(It is, admittedly, also the case that we lost a similar amount of craftsmanship when the industrial revolution happened, and in return we were able to support a larger population, and greater material conditions for most people. Every object now isn't carefully handcrafted. I think it's different because well, now material conditions are relatively abundant, and second there's no such insatiable, significant and irreplaceable demand for art as there were to common industrialized objects (take shoes for example), at least not to the same extent or vital significance. That is, the ability to have a shoe at all far outweighs it being carefully handcrafted, I believe; while experiencing a poorly made AI movie or artwork might be actually worse than none at all (or simply an older human made movie), and it also gets more cumbersome to evaluate for ourselves whether AI was employed or not. Also, while say shoes only last a limited time and need to be constantly produced, good artwork can last indefinitely (using digital storage), and even if you account for cultural change and relevance, can still last a really long time, motivating investing more into it.)

I'm quite sure that if we're still around in 500 or so years, we'll still be enjoying say Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh (probably as a digital reproduction). Current AI art will probably be largely discarded, so seems largely an unwise investment. Actually this kind of applies to code as well. It seems plausible Linux could still be used in 500 years from now (see how we still value finding Unix v4 50 years after), or at least of some interest. Those durable intellectual goods don't seem like wise places to invest anything but the best of us :) (at least in the cases it's not disposable)

The arguments above also don't seem to apply say in concept stages, or say for bland corporate diagrams that will be disposed of in 1 day, and which a huge quantity is needed. I think the main criteria I would evaluate is (1) Was it enjoyable to produce (for the artist(s))?; (2) Will it have a significant (artistic) impact on who is experiencing it?; (3) Will it last a long time?

[1] W.r.t. algorithmic art (and digital in general) (take bytebeat[2] for example), which is a field I really love, I am not any kind of absolutist about it. I know there tends to be extremely more degrees of freedom for human expression in a manual piece than in an algorithmic piece, so I see it more as a complement and not a substitute for more conventional art. I'd never give up ever hearing human musician player music for bytebeat, just bytebeat is a lovely experimental other dimension of expression. Writing a prompt seems a too few degrees of freedom and context, and too much of an uniform context that is less rich than humans can provide.

[2] https://dollchan.net/bytebeat/

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.

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

No, that's the whole problem. The systems are capable of outselling the artist whether or not they're trained on the artist. So you can't prevent it by complaining about the training data.

My bad. As the first part of my comment suggested, what I meant to say here was "imitating instruments and the performers thereof".

> which streaming platforms and record labels then repackage and outsell you with

But that's the thing: it doesn't seem very likely that they'd ever succeed at actually outselling very many actual musicians, for the same reason those cheap keyboards that can play pop songs at the press of a button don't actually replace any actual musicians: not just because the quality sucks compared to even amateur performers, but because even if the quality didn't suck, the end result is about as interesting to the audience as a karaoke backing track or musak playing in an elevator. If anyone can press a button to make some statistical average of popular music, then that's gonna get real boring real quick, while the actual musicians will be making actual, novel music. It's just like what happened to the “vaporwave” and “nightcore” genres: they got flooded with “new songs” that are just slowed down / sped up (respectively) versions of existing songs, and nobody bothered seeking out those songs unless they were really into vaporwave/nightcore for their own sake or they were trying to put together one of the umpteen bajillion “anime girl studying while listening to lo-fi beats” playlists out there.

That is:

> false analogy.

Then here's another “false” analogy for you: just like with synthesizers, just like with vaporwave/nightcore, just like with all sorts of other musical phenomena where all of a sudden people with no skill could very easily and cheaply make musical slop, this new AI-driven wave of slop will, too, consume itself until it's yet another layer of background noise against which the actual musicians distinguish themselves and push the boundaries of music. It's a wildfire burning away yet another underbrush of mediocrity and creative stagnation, and while it's absolutely terrifying and dangerous in the present, it paves the way for a healthier regrowth in the aftermath.

Let me guess: you're an amateur musician. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it makes it much easier to be amused about this topic.

> 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.

What are you talking about? Which "tech kit" got demonized by whom? Of course, there were always controversies around techniques like sampling or whatever, or conservatives in the UK demonizing rave culture, but otherwise, I have no idea what you're referring to.

Always has been :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpUj9zpOiP0

(And honorary mention)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYKAOPj_uts

If so then estimating the marginal likelihood of each one and comparing them seems pretty reasonable?

(I mean in the sense of Jaynes chapter 20.)

For PCA or factor analysis, there's lots of ways but without some way of determining ground truth it's difficult to know if you've done a good job.

(Disclaimer: I wrote it.)

There's also a spec for a Multi Producer Multi Consumer (MPMC) Disrupter.

And here’s one I saw linked on HN recently: https://github.com/0burak/imperial_hft/tree/main/distuptor

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About me: Professional Machine Learning / Quant development background (Python, Torch). Experience with low latency software Engineering in C++. Expertise in time series related engineering topics in both ML and software engineering.