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 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.
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 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.
The problem with that approach is when what people like impacts other people negatively. If your habits don’t make things worse for others, have at it!
This is actually the definition of competition. You are just being drowned by AI music so no one can discover your music. Steam had the same issue years ago with asset flips drowning out the discoverability of actual titles and they implemented many curating tools to help resolve the issue. Acting like AI music isn't having a similar effort on genuine musicians is just playing dumb.
as a musician, the internet has made it that there already is a shit ton of competition. AI will make it worse sure, but it was already a 'problem' and never going to be solved.
The thing is, you aren't entitled to distribution.
Most musicians who make it these days work really hard at doing live shows, or growing a following on tiktok.
once they have an audience - who cares about competition?
The hardest pill to swallow as a musician is that despite everyone who ever listened to you telling you you're great, despite being in a band and playing shows, despite maybe even selling some merch...if you are not in the top 1%, you probably will never even get chance to play a show that might put you on someone meaningful's radar.
All of the "discoverability" algorithms are specifically and fundamentally about sifting through the millions to find the few that are preferred. That is their many-billion-dollar industry purpose. Spotify does a fantastic job with this, for me.
> will often just opt for whatever is popular.
Are you suggesting that people consume media they don't like? I'm not familiar with anyone that does this. I personally skip if I don't like a song even a little.
Yet your argument is deeply flawed too. Flooding the market with slop makes it much more difficult to discover genuine, quality, art from smaller creators.
The issue is not so much an artist that will use it as a tool, even though there is much to say about it, it's the hundred of thousands of people with no interest in music whatsoever, that will flood the platforms in order to make a quick buck.
> demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own
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".
Along the same lines, the anti-AI attitude among musicians today reminds me quite a bit of the anti-synthesizer attitude of the 60's and 70's, down to the same exact talking points: fears of “real” musicians being replaced by nerds pushing buttons on machines that can imitate those musicians.
I think the fears were understandable then, and are understandable now. I also think that, just as the fears around synthesizers didn't come to fruition, neither will the fears around AI come to fruition. Synthesizers didn't, and generative AI won't, replace musicians; rather, musicians did and will add these new technologies into their toolsets and use them to push music beyond what was previously understood to be possible. Synthesizers didn't catch on by just imitating other instruments, but by being understood and exploited as instruments in their own right; so will generative AI catch on not by just imitating other instruments, but by being understood and exploited as an instrument in its own right.
The core problem right now is that AI (even beyond just music) ain't being marketed as a means of augmenting one's creativity and skills, but as a means of replacing them. That'll always be misguided, both in the practical sense of producing worse outputs and in the philosophical sense of atrophying that same creativity and skills. AI doesn't have to produce slop, but it will inevitably produce slop when it's packaged and sold and marketed in a way that actively encourages slop — much like taking one of those cheap electric keyboards with built-in beats and songs and advertising it as able to replace a whole band. Yeah, it's cool that keyboards can play songs on their own and AI can generate songs on their own, but that output will always be subpar compared to what someone with even the slightest bit of creativity and skill can pull out of those exact same tools.
Most code people interact with are creations shat out by soulless corporations, why would they care? Being honest here, the vast majority of people have their code experience dictated by less than a handful of companies; at their jobs they are told to use these tools or get file for welfare. The animosity has been baked into the industry for quite a while, it's only very very recently that the masses have been able to interact with open source code and even that is getting torn down by big tech.
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?
I think a key factor there is that programmers (in the actual sense, rather than so-called “vibe coders”) are more likely on average than (current) artists and musicians to have intimate knowledge of how AI works and what AI can and can't do well — and consequently, the quality of their output is high enough that it's harder to notice the use of AI.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai
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.
> you sound like someone from the 1800's shouting about how photography should be banned and not allowed to crowd out hard working painters.
I'm saying that you shouldn't call photographs paintings because they aren't paintings. I don't particularly care if people make AI "music" or "art" and I don't particularly care if they consume it (people have been consuming awful media for the entire history of humanity, they aren't going to stop because I say so), but if you give me a ham sandwich and call it a hamburger I am going to be annoyed and tell you that it isn't a hamburger and to stop calling it that because you're misleading people who actually appreciate hamburgers.
AI "art" isn't art. I don't care whether you like it. It's like fractals or rock formations or birdsong - it may be aesthetically appealing to some people, but that isn't the definition of art.
Similarly, people keep posting articles to HN that get upvoted which are substantially AI edited. They're never labeled as such, and it's unpleasant to find myself reading unlabeled ChatGPTese again. There's a Show HN up now that has an entirely generated readme, which is just... fine, I guess. I just don't want to engage with it.
I would say trying to dictate what is and isn't art really goes against the spirit of art in general. plenty of art exists to push boundaries including what can be considered art.
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'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.
> 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 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.
> 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.
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.).
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.
The various lo-fi channels are also likely carrying heavily AI-generated music and it's actually kind of fine. The 'pieces' seem like undifferentiated background music of a certain mood, which is often what I'm looking for while I'm doing something else.
Previously, search was such a big problem. For instance, I'm not big on hip-hop and so on but I like songs like Worst Comes To Worst by Dilated Peoples. I've searched in all sorts of ways for other songs like that and come up with a handful of examples. Likewise, I want the vibe of Thick As A Brick by Jethro Tull during various parts. It's hard to find this kind of stuff.
But Suno.ai can generate that boom-bap vibe pretty easily and it's not the kind of thing where I'm going to put the same song on all the time like I do with the Dilated Peoples one, but it's good enough to listen to while I'm working.
Funny to see this right now. Spotify's promotion of AI music bothered me so much that it has actually pushed me to Bandcamp and the practice of buying music again. It's really fun to build a collection knowing you're supporting the artists, download FLAC files, organize your little "collection" page ... Feels like a renaissance in my relationship with music, the most fun I've had since what.cd. Anyway, love this stance they're taking.
Same for me! Switched to Bandcamp + Navidrome and have decided that one of my goals for the year is to find at least 2 albums per month I want to buy.
I will shamelessly promote the bandcampsync [1] CLI tool for automating downloads of your bandcamp library and bandcamp-sync-flask [2] wrapper that I built so I could invoke it from the web on my phone after I buy an album.
I’ve been doing the same over the last few months.
The best part for me is going to record stores again. CDs are SO cheap now, especially used ones. I’ll usually pick a few out of the dollar bin just based on vibes and the cover and rip them when I get home. I’ve found some cool stuff. It’s like a treasure hunt.
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.
Aren't CD players just reading digits? I'm not anywhere close to a hifi expert but it must be all about the DAC, no? Or do you mean the ones with a built-in DAC?
I've been reading about Spotify pushing generated music but haven't seen that myself so I'm interested to know in what context it happens. Is it certain music styles? Spotify's own playlists? That smart shuffle feature?
I listen mostly in the old school way, full albums of my favourite artists, so I suppose it would be quite unexpected to stumble into AI music this way.
I believe if you go down the rabbit hole of "mood playlists" and spotify created playlists, then you'll get a lot of tracks that they don't need to pay royalties for and that could probably include AI generated music.
If you are explictitly looking for music by specific artists, then you get their music obviously.
> then you'll get a lot of tracks that they don't need to pay royalties for
I love this conspiracy theory. Which track doesn't Spotify pay royalties for? Considering that it licenses 100% of its music from external distributors.
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-generated album supposedly made by an artist I enjoy. In this case it was somebody that had been dead for 15 years - they were hijacking her Spotify page to promote it as a new release. I'm not an AI reactionary but I found this absolutely fucking gross. Having AI-generated music for four-hour YouTube videos of anime girls sitting in apartments on a rainy day is fine. Desecrating the body of work of a departed musician is decidedly not.
Is it easy to get in as a former what cd power user rank? I found my old rippy stickers from what.cd and missed that community so much. Ptp is great and alive though.
A few months ago I spoke with the frontman of a local Boston band from the 1980s, who recently re-released a single with the help of AI. The source material was a compact cassette tape from a demo, found in a drawer. He used AI to isolate what would've been individual tracks from the recording, then cleaned them up individually, without AI's help.
Does that constitute "wholly or in substantial part"? Would the track have existed were it not for having that easy route into re-mastering?
I understand what Bandcamp's trying to do here, and I generally am in support of removing what we'd recognize as "fully AI-generated music", but there are legitimate creative uses of AI that might come to wholly or substantially encompass the output. It's difficult to draw any lines line on a creative work, by just by nature of the work being creative.
(For those interested - check out O Positive's "With You" on the WERS Live at 75 album!)
If the Beatles can use AI to restore a poorly recorded cassette tape of John Lennon playing the piano and singing at his dinner table, I think it's alright if other bands do it, too.
I think it makes some sense to allow leeway for intelligent "signal processing" using AI (separating out individual tracks, clean-up, etc) vs generating new content with AI.
Similarly, say, for video editors, using AI to more intelligently rotoscope (especially with alpha blending in the presence of motion blur - practically impossible to do it manually), would be a great use of AI, removing the non-creative tedium of the process.
It's not clear where the line is though. I was quite impressed with Corridor Crew's (albeit NVidia+Puget-sponsored) video [1] where they photographed dolls, motion-captured human actors moving like the dolls, and transferred the skeletal animation and facial expressions to those dolls using GenAI. Some of it required nontrivial transformative code to accommodate a skeleton to a toy's body type. There's a massive amount of tedium being removed from the creative process by GenAI without sacrificing the core human creative contribution. This feels like it should be allowed -- I think we should attempt to draw clearer lines where there are clearly efficiency gains to be had to have less "creative" uses be more socially acceptable.
It may be a tedious job to spend days rotoscoping but I personally know people who get paid to do that, and as soon as AI can do it, they will have to go find other work (which they already do, on the side, because the writing is on the wall, but there's a ton of people worldwide who do this kind of work, and that's not the only process being delegated to AI).
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).
I think any line is necessarily going to be arbitrary, a blanket ban on any ML model being used in production would be plainly impossible -- using Ozone's EQ assistant or having a Markov chain generate your chord progressions could also count towards "in substantial part", but are equally hard to object to.
But we also live with arbitrary lines elsewhere, as with spam filters? People generally don't want ads for free Viagra, and spam filters remain the default without making "no marketing emails" a hard rule.
The problem isn't that music Transformers can't be used artfully [1] but that they allow a kind of spam which distribution services aren't really equipped to handle. In 2009, nobody would have stopped you from producing albums en masse with the generative tech of the day, Microsoft's Songsmith [2], but you would have had a hard time selling them - but hands-off distribution services like DistroKid and improved models makes music spam much more viable now than it was previously.
The question doesn't feel legit to me though. The OP somehow found the one justifiable example among a sea of AI slop.
Justifiable because there were some filters. That may not even have been "AI". They may have been some deterministic algorithms that the software maker has to label "AI" because they otherwise think it won't sell...
I've done audio engineering as a hobby. Even a decade ago, verbiage like "ai noise reduction" was very common. Of course that was RNNs, not transformers. But I think they have a valid point. I googled and found this 2017 post about iZotope integrating machine learning: https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/what-the-machine-learning-i...
I don't know. I think there's a tendency to look at things as pure or impure, as all black or all white. If it was touched by AI, it's AI. If not, it's pure.
I'm not familiar with the music business, but I'm a Sunday photographer. There's an initiative to label pictures that had "generative ai" applied. I'm not a professional, so I don't really have a horse in this race. I also enjoy the creations of some dude I follow on Instagram which are clearly labelled as produced by AI.
But in between, the situation isn't as clear cut. As photographers, we used to do "spot removal", with pretty big "spots" for ages [0]. You just had to manually select the "offending" "spot", try to source some other part which looked close enough. Now you can use "object removal" which does a great job with things like grass and whatnot but is "generative ai". These are labelled AI, and they are.
I can understand someone arguing that what required a lot of skill is now more accessible. And I guess that's true? But that just sounds elitist.
So what's the issue with "AI"? Do you enjoy the result? Great! Do you hate it? Move to the next one. Does that particular "artist" produce only thins you hate? Skip them!
--
[0] my point is about "artistic" pictures, not photojournalism or similar where "what was" is of utmost importance. Note that even in those cases, selective cropping only requires your feet and nobody would label as "edited". But I specifically don't want to open that can of worms.
The example you present seems fairly straightforward to my intuition, but I think your point is fair.
A harder set of hypotheticals might arise if music production goes the direction that software engineering is heading: “agentic work”, whereby a person is very much involved in the creation of a work, but more by directing an AI agent than by orchestrating a set of non-AI tools.
Ya, "AI" is too broad a term. This was already possible without "AI" as we know it today, but of course it was still the same idea back then. I get what you're saying, though: would he have bothered if he'd have to have found the right filters/plugins on his own? idunno.
That's not "generating" the music with AI - that's isolating the tracks of existing music. Probably not generative AI at all, and depending on who you ask, not even AI.
This is why it is to these generative AI companies' benefit that 'AI' becomes a catchall term for everything, from what enemies are programmed to do in video games to a spambot that creates and uploads slop facebook videos on the hour.
thats sounds more like unsupervised learning via one of the bread and butter clustering algorithms. I guess that is technically AI but its a far cry from the transformers tech thats actually got everyone's underwear in knots.
> It's difficult to draw any lines line on a creative work, by just by nature of the work being creative.
If you want to be some neutral universal third party sure. If you're OK with taking a position, the arbitrariness actually makes it much easier. You just draw the line you want.
Creativity demands limitation, and those limitations don't have to be justified.
Where does it stop. My dad is a decent guitarist but a poor singer (sadly, I'm even worse). He has written some songs, his own words, some guitar licks or chords as input material and AI turning it into a surprisingly believable finished piece. To me it's basically AI slop but he's putting in a modest amount of effort for the output.
I had this opinion for a long time, but only recently was I personally affected, but that made me even more convinced.
I was listening to my new releases playlist on Apple Music and listened to a track that sounded nice, but also a little generic. I don’t know exactly what prompted me to check, but it had all the signs of something fishy going on like generic cover image, the artist page showed a crazy output of singles last year (all the same generic images), unspecific metadata and - to my surprise - I found other Reddit posts about this artist being AI.
Now, a lot of music is generic and goes through so many hands you can hardly call it a personal piece of art. But even then, there’s always some kind of connection.
I guess that’s why I felt betrayed.
I thought AI generated art was wrong before, but I didn’t expect to feel this mix of anger and disappointment.
For me, music (like all fine art) is about human connection. It's the artist telling me something human and personal. It's not entirely about the aesthetics of the music. The provenance of the art is very important. If I feel that connection with a song and it turns out that the song wasn't made by a person (it hasn't happened yet as far as I know), I have been deceived and would be furious.
A song made by a person using AI as tool (rather than to generate the music) is different. What matters is that the song is actually an expression of humanity, not the tools used to make it.
However, the presence of AI-generated music means that I am not really willing to buy music anymore unless its either a few years old or I'm buying it at the merch table the artist has at a live performance.
They literally thought it was odd and generic, checked, and found it was AI and got pissed off. How is that "emotional cope"? They correctly guessed something was weird about it based on how it sounded!
I'm not ideologically opposed to making music with AI, but the dream would be new songs which which showcase the new sounds and musical forms that AI enables, like Believe for autotune, or Rumble for electric guitar, or Autobahn for synths.
I want a friend to message me like "Hey, there's some interesting stuff happening in the AI music scene, check out these tracks".
But everything I've seen is pastiche, either novelty songs (hit song as different genre, or famous monologue from popular movie as pop song) or generic background music meant for algorithmic streaming playlists.
I mean, even if it's just a pastiche machine, I do believe that people could use it to make new and interesting music, just like they did with sampling.
But yeah, music is so accessible and there is so much new music all the time that if all, or most, of what AI is being used for is to make even more of the same stuff we're already awash in then banning it is necessary curation.
Most human derived goods markets need to filter low effort attempts at monetization in general. I'm tired of going to Renn. Faire / Farmer Markets / Artist Alley Markets only to find they've started letting in "Joe Blow with a poorly configured 3d printer #35." These places have become infested with people selling the exact same piles of thingverse trash in a rainbow of colors.
It sucks that a lot of these types of markets are suffering from low numbers of shoppers. They open themselves up to these plastic peddlers in desperation only to drive away customers even more.
After 3D-print slop infested craft fairs, and fake AI-slop products infested Etsy, it's got me to wondering: is this just an evolution in an existing scummy business model?
Consider how easy it would have been, any time in the last decade, to get a booth at any "local hand-made goods craft fair", selling "hand-made" copper jewelry... that you happened to buy in bulk lots off Alibaba. The jewelry was "hand-made"... kind of... by someone else, making far too little money, in sweatshop conditions, following techniques and using machines that enable them to produce hundreds at once, with no QC whatsoever.
Nobody would ever guess you hadn't made the stuff yourself. They would read the lack of QC as evidence for your claim that "each piece is distinct and made to match my artistic vision in the moment." You'd put one or two of each type of piece out on the table at a time, as if those are all you have; yet as soon as one sells, you'd pull another out from the box of hundreds.
I can't say for sure that this ever happens, but judging by the number of people willing to be scummy in the more modern ways... it certainly feels like it could. Honestly makes me hesitant to buy anything from a craft fair. Which is a shame.
With regard to Etsy, hand-made crafts don't scale so a VC-backed startup around them was never going to be able to resist this. Only hope would be a highly moderated and curated Craigslist-style website that was happy to pay the bills, pay some salaries and keep the lights on while maintaining integrity.
Craft fairs, though, no excuse or reason. There should not be profit maximizing at local craft fairs. They're a bellwether for the degradation of culture.
At first I was just curious, and unimpressed with the horridly bland shite coming out of these AI music generators. But then I made a prompt that sparked some kind of magic, so now I want to finish off that track just to see if I can end up with something that I consider good.
I don't hold it much hope for this track because everything else I've heard on suno and udio are rubbish, but the 1 minute preview I have is enticing me to spend 8 bucks just so I can experiment a bit more.
I feel somewhat conflicted by my fascination because I have a great love for music and I wholeheartedly support efforts to restrict AI music crap.
But as the tools mature, the creative possibilities to make new sounds with finer control and granularity will make the process more ... creative - with greater human input.
I'm sure we'll end up with new styles and maybe even new genres that originate from prompts, and hits too. Is this a good thing to look forward to? I can see my future listening habits become strictly human only, but dang, the start of my new track sounds so dope!
I applaud Bandcamp's stance here and I will always look for ways to meaningfully support real musicians.
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 interested in monetary gain at all, just being able to hear it for real and maybe share it with some people.
AI is not the only way to make synthetic music. If you have an exact idea, you can use virtual instrument plugins for software like Ableton Live to produce music.
It sounds to me like you just need to try creating electronic music, not using generative AI. If you really have an exact idea of what the music should sound like, you should be able to realize your vision this way, and you can use realistic instrument samples if you want. It may not sound the way a person would have played it, since you can't fully replace a human performer, but it can still sound really good, and there's a huge body of video game music from the last 30 years or so to vouch for that.
I’m a founder of one of these AI music companies and that noise you’re describing (it differs between co’s for us it’s loud vocals, for Suno it’s vocal aliasing/sandiness and mushy instrumentals, etc) is exactly why I think these songs should not be going on Spotify/etc.
We’ll have this (and the corny lyrics issue) mostly fixed in a month or so, then it mostly becomes a recommendations problem. For example, TikTok is filled with slop, but it’s not a problem - their algorithm helps the most creative/engaging stuff rise to the top. If Spotify is giving you Suno slop in your discover weekly (or really crappy 100% organic free range AI-free slop) blame Spotify, not the AI or the creators. There are really high effort and original creations that involve AI that deserve to be heard, though.
I suggest going back and listening to some of the first experimental electronic music. The tools have improved a lot since then and people have used them to do really cool things, even spawning countless genres.
Thankfully, most of it doesn't reach your Spotify feed. I think most of it is garbage, but I'd fight for the right of people to continue posting it. All things algorithmic have this exploration/exploitation, diversity/fidelity tradeoff and Spotify has theirs tuned very heavily toward exploitation/fidelity. I think there is a cool opportunity for someone to put the tradeoff dial into users hands.
I think the real distinction is whether the output came from the artist's human intention, or whether someone just said "let's just see what happens!"... it's sort of impossible to reach inside the artist's brain to find out where that line is. I suppose the only test is to start with that same intention multiple times and see how widely the output varies.
Wasn't your intention whatever you typed in? That doesn't make you an artist and I don't want to hear the music AI made that you happened to type some words to and hit enter.
Not really. If I plug up and frob-a-knob (real or emulated) eurorack at random to just see what happens, the resulting hour long noise will be described as experimental, boring, profound, piece of trash etc. (e.g. check reviews on Beaubourg by Vangelis) It is not going to be put on the same spot as AI slop.
While intent of course is important, the quantity and manner of taking others' work and calling it my own, I thing, plays even bigger role. If I go "hey check out this Bohemian Rhapsody song I just created using Google Search", I do not think much regard will be given to my intent.
Not a musician (dabble with the guitar from time to time but I do absolutely love music) and don’t make music but one of my best friends growing up has been playing instruments forever. He writes songs and song lyrics. He has started a YouTube channel and shares some of the music he makes, and it sounds really great. I am amazed sometimes how great. But he puts in lots of effort to craft these songs and lyrics. They are not “one-shot” prompts.
If we look at this through the lens of making software with ai, which also allows for creativity, blanket bans may keep lots of quality stuff from being made.
How will the tracks be distinguished? Any ai and you’re out?
This is just a fad. The platforms will soon learn that the vocal minority is not necessarily their best customer. And then they'll slowly / quietly revert their bans or stop enforcing them.
If people listen to music, they like the music, and it can come from wherever. Gatekeeping never works.
They can get their "AI" music in many other places, there's no reason for Bandcamp specifically to provide it.
As of yet Bandcamp hasn't tried to become an 'everything is here' kind of distributor, but rather more tailored to small, niche, quality &c. artists, and not consumers. Kind of the opposite to Spotify.
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 paint on deviantART, we didn't even enforce quality (tho we highlighted) - we enforced the type of kindness that leads to learning and growth. I hope we can have places for professionals and places for people to display and play with creativity and art irrespective of the tooling. :)
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 typed in and reduces you to a commissioner. You created nothing. You commissioned a work from a machine and are claiming creative authorship.
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 Civilization or Maugham wrote Of Human Bondage or Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or Cheever wrote The Swimmer there was a magnificent concentration of real feeling and a real reason that each of these things were made.
Could you imagine someone prompting a model, receiving the result, and then writing, as Cheever did about The Swimmer:
>It was a terribly difficult story to write. I couldn't ever show my hand. Night was falling, the year was dying. It wasn't a question of technical problems, but one of imponderables. When he finds it dark and cold, it has to have happened. And by God, it did happen. I felt dark and cold for some time after I finished that story.
Sure, but you also just disregarded a whole swath of people who use the tools/abstractions as a component of the composition of a final work. If I download a free vector of a premade sun to put into my final multimodal image, how is that any less authentic to me and my work? You feel like I cheated? Not how you would do it? This reminds me of when the film industry moved to digital and the pro associations said for contest submissions, first no digital at all, then it was ok for you to use digital post production but not a digital camera.
You're barking up the wrong tree. You're trying to tell artists about "skill", when they've spent lots of time (potentially thousands of hours!) getting good at their craft.
Your snobbery will be short-lived as tools eclipse our "art", and creativity is revealed as nothing inherently unique to humans.
Creativity, fundamentally, is overlapping memories of what you have seen already. Literally no different than any diffusion or transformer model.
You painting a piece of art or composing a song was really the functional output of billions of cells coordinating in unison, 100% subconsciously, and the thoughts that arose out of your subconscious were entirely (or mostly, to avoid free will debate) out of your control. Your output was the product of billions of years of stellar and biological evolution on top of millennia of human history and influence. You created nothing.
Soon you will have to grapple with the reality of what really drives your enjoyment of media, and part of that will be realizing that the human-ness never mattered at all.
Is beautiful nature scenery not beautiful because it wasnt hand-crafted painstakingly by a creative human? Of course it is. There is no intuition for the vast swaths of time it took to form, that is a modern human conceptualization that came long after we already found nature to be beautiful.
We have a biological pattern recognition tuned for beauty regardless of its origin. And there is nothing inherently unbeautiful about elegant software that can produce beautiful "art". Nor is there any justifiable, defensible, or intellectually honest way to argue that the human/effort element in art matters in any way besides perhaps portraying and conveying social status.
> Creativity, fundamentally, is overlapping memories of what you have seen already. Literally no different than any diffusion or transformer model.
Every individual has a unique experience, and assimilates different things from their experiences depending on their personal tastes and culture. That is profoundly different from a model which assimilates the output of hundreds of thousands of individuals. A model has no creative, or artistic voice. Your argument is anti-humanistic, nihilistic nonsense, and also trivially verifiably wrong given no model today has produced music or art of any value.
Do you really think a human creating something isn't the output of assimilating the outputs of countless humans that came before them?
Your argument implies creativity is confined to humans or brains. So no creativity existed before that? Weird. Lucky for us that evolution spawned creativity then!
If you could answer that question then that should help me understand, since you say it is trivial to verifiably prove my position wrong
The dean of the art school I went to regularly used to say "The most creative people simply to the best job of hiding the source of their creativity". - in fact he invoked it once directly to me when I protested about how one of my peers went about their final assignment, and again when the whole program revolted over a submission that won honors. I learned a lot about art in that art program, but mostly I learned art wasn't that I thought it was. :)
I am a musician, in the “accomplished amateur” category. For me, music is a never-ending journey of learning and skill-building, and I’ve come to appreciate that journey as much or more than the destination (= recording or live performance). If you gave me a one-click button to improve my skills, I’m not sure I would click it— I’d rather get there myself.
I’d encourage you to dig deeper into why and how the music that is being created by those tools works.
"If you gave me a one-click button to improve my skills, I’m not sure I would click it— I’d rather get there myself." - Me too! :) I use suno to gen vocals, I use my regular teenage engineering workflow + Abelton to mix and master, I'm WAY better in Abelton than I was even 6 months ago - people have always been able to download photoshop actions and filters etc, as you said, it's more about the creative journey.
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 viewed, I suspect you and I would find we feel the same. I was personally involved in building and shaping deviantart and how we tackled these ideas, so what you see there today is influenced by my(and scott, eric angelo etc) thinking on this matter.
Exactly! :) When I was going through my back and forth on if I should upload it to soundcloud I thought a few times "I should just build SlopART" - if I had more time I probably would, because it's a place I wouldn't mind hanging out. :)
Typed a prompt and hit generate. No response after waiting some time. I scrolled down to existing sample music to get a sense of what it creates and hit play. Not one of the play buttons worked. Ok load up Chrome instead of Firefox, maybe they did some Chrome specific thing? Nope site's still broken and none of the samples under "Suno AI Music Gallery" actually work. There's a javascript error "invalid client" on clicking it. I'm not logged in i guess?
It did work on mobile but that seems like it presents a completely different site.
I think the URL should be suno.com, the link you posted is a different thing? Suno.com is the one I've used, I generally use it for DND type campaigns when I need custom music for scenes or background noises. It does pretty good sound effects and spoken word so sometimes I use it for that as well.
Mostly using it to gen vocals, sometimes stems, sometimes gen samples, then as you'd expect -> wav out -> lay it up in Abelton, add in my teenage engineering stuff - filters -> mix and master -> out
https://soundcloud.com/john/eager - I put over 16 hours into this track, I'm sure someone who knows about music can point to loads of errors in it, I'm sure it's sloppy in parts, but I put real effort into it and I'm proud of that effort.
Can’t imagine this policy lasts more than a year or two given the rate that AI tools for music are improving. Once the tech can reliably create high quality dry stems of instruments, backing tracks etc. and automate professional-sounding production work (which most musicians do not currently have access to) everyone is going to be using it even if they won’t admit it publicly.
For an example of an AI generated song that's gone viral in the last few days, getting millions of views on Spotify / Youtube, see this post from earlier today:
"Tell HN: Viral Hit Made by AI, 10M listens on Spotify last few days" [1]
It will be interesting to see how/where the line is drawn on "in substantial part", considering that Logic Pro lets you click a button and adjust some sliders to add an (awful, imo) drum/instrument played by AI to your track.
But that's absolutely not generative AI (which bandcamp explicitly stated the policy is for) and it's not even classifiable as traditional AI. The session tracks are just some base patterns selected by sliders attached to options adjust stuff like "play these notes in an inverted chord".
This is IMHO an impossible line to draw. If an established artist uses a GenAI music tool it would be accepted. If somebody unpublished does the same it wouldn’t. Assuming they can even tell the difference, which they can’t.
This seems like a good decision, although, is there a good way to tell if music is AI-generated? I assume that some of the music that's showing up in my Spotify feed is AI-generated but I've never noticed.
So there's really accurate ways to detect "pure AI".
The AI music detectors out there are mainly looking out for production things:
-a flatness to the EQ spectrum that you wouldn't get out a properly mixed and produced piece of audio
-no good stem separation, so no per-source eq (relates to above point)
-change BPM mid-song
-unnatural warbles at the end of every phrase
-vocals will have these weird croaky voice cracks, or sound scratchier and raspier
There definitely are tell-tale signs of "pure AI" in audio, but it becomes a lot more nuanced when any sort of secondary mixing/mastering/compression happens (which is the case 90% is the time in the real world- anything on YouTube/Spotify get's compressed).
At least for the current AI music generators, it's pretty easy to tell by ear that it's AI generated. Everything is just a little off, especially the higher frequencies. Vocals often sound indistinct, like an unholy amalgamation of thousands of people are singing instead of a single person.
I think it would be very difficult for most people to tell that songs are generated by Suno 5. There are some interesting anomalies I can see in the spectrum and mid/side channels, like Suno music often has very little information in the side channel (what happens when you subtract the left and right channels from each other). You also commonly see the eq curve of the rhythm section shift over time throughout the song - like drums will sound normal at the beginning but end up sounding kind of under water by the end, but they are quickly improving these things. But to the layperson, many of these things are completely invisible. The most obvious tell, IMO, is the cadence of the lyrics.
Does this apply to all genres or just highly produced popular music? I would not be surprised if I failed to detect an AI song as background in a television commercial, but it is difficult to imagine that anyone could fail to pick out an AI impersonation were you to slip one in to a record like 'João Voz e Violão.'
> I assume that some of the music that's showing up in my Spotify feed is AI-generated but I've never noticed.
A lot of it is now, and it's frustrating to me. The worst part is that I'm not actually anti-AI-music. There's one or two "groups" ("producers"?) I've found where it's clearly AI but they've put a lot of work into making something worth listening to, but Spotify seems to have a "this sucker will listen to the cheap stuff" flag and now I'm drowning in tracks from people who paid for Suno and think that's enough.
I'm not sure about the flag :D but I've had pretty good results with always making sure to flag every artist in AI suggestions with "don't play". You have to visit the artist profile pages to do it though, so it remains a cat and mouse game, but I think that as long as they don't prevent it by force, doing this tends to improve the AI suggestions (of non-AI music).
Similar to YouTube slop.
If that would stop working, I'd cancel Spotify again.
Speaking of YouTube slop, I think Spotify has had its own system of preferring cheap muzak from labels they support since before GenAI music even took off, I think. Example label: Firefly entertainment (IIRC)
Currently it sounds like it's been through an allpass/comb filter. Complex parts, while spectrally there, do not make much sense as a real sound. Probably audio analog of the "finger salad" of early image models. I do not count of being able to tell one from another in a few months.
It sounds like a moral stance on its face, but honestly they probably wouldn't care if someone posted a reasonable amount of AI-generated music that was high quality enough to gain a following of listeners.
This is likely a stance to prevent an individual from producing thousands of AI generated tracks and attempting to flood the zone for anyone browsing and searching.
There's a lot of music on Spotify for example that tries to latch on to current trends in an attempt to get pulled into search results and recommendations.
One day soon many musicians will be using AI assistance, and many won't tell you for fear of judgment.
It's like that with code and art.
Purely AI anything is garbage. But AI tools in the hands of people who know what they're doing are just faster scaffolding and better plywood to build with. The framing is still mostly human expert.
The same argument applies to AI generated or assisted music. Anyone can write a prompt and get a song. It takes judgement and taste to pick a good song and choose to publish it.
"New technologies have the tendency to replace skills with judgement – it's not what you can do that counts, but what you choose to do, and this invites everyone to start crossing boundaries." - Brian Eno
I feel like the thing like you can easily divide things along the lines of 'art' vs 'consumption'.
A lot of people including myself enjoy music because it's so intimately human, the flaws and all. It's someone putting a bit of themselves into every piece they create, and people look for things that resonate with them.
AI music however is purely about consumption. It's not something made to be remembered or cherished. And the more you integrate it into your music, the less and less of yourself you put into it and the less reason for anyone to bother. I could just ask whatever AI to generate generic rock music inspired by the beatles and remove you from the equation entirely and have the same experience. Everything gets amalgamated into the exact same thing with all of the imperfections sheared away.
I am not against AI art but this would better to be contained in specific platforms, you could browse Suno for AI music and Bandcamp for human music.
You would'nt display some generative art piece next to a Rembrandt. Also, Bandcamp could enshittified by a flood of AI music and change the fees or terms, so please no.
How would they know? A lot of the new stuff is pretty indistinguishable from regular music with the AI adding imperfections like a recorded album would have.
Ok maybe you have the opinion that it's all crap right now. That's fine. But pretend it gets good. Pretend that instead of bothering with bands at some point in the future you just generate music to your tastes on the fly all the time.
Where does that leave Bandcamp? Do they market themselves as "fresh organic music" and live in that niche? What good does all the rights music companies own do if music generates on the fly?
I suspect a huge amount of lobbying incoming asap to stop this. Perhaps a law against AI generated music that's not owned by the RIAA? You might not like AI generated music but you should be very very cautious of those fighting it.
> Pretend that instead of bothering with bands at some point in the future you just generate music to your tastes on the fly all the time.
As someone who enjoys live music, I would still need a live band to play this on-the-fly generated music. I guess then you'll trot out AI holograms! but that sounds still as unappealing as your base case.
We now sort of accepted the idea of “vibe coding”, and, even shared appreciation from people who are using it to resuscitate side projects and things they wanted to do but required a lot of work. (Heck, even Linus Torvalds is doing it).
Is “Vibe Music / Art” any different? For example, I am not a drummer, say I use Suno to program some drums for me so I can record my guitar on top, and finally release that track I’ve been procrastinating.
I think the analogy here holds. Not all vibe coding is good, and not all vibe art is bad.
The difference is that code is functional, and the product is the output of the code, not the code itself, whereas music is the thing in itself. I'm not inherently anti ai-creations, but the bar is higher for style in aesthetic domains than functional ones, so AI art/writing/music/etc needs to be heavily filtered/massaged/etc. Plenty of writers/artists/musicians are using AI like an idea generator/scaffold then recreating/enhancing the outputs and going under the radar, it's just the low effort people that everyone sees.
The use of the AI drums would pollute your original guitar work with sounds that, interpreted as music, are necessarily derivative and unsentimental. I agree that the technological aspect is a red herring, but art and coding are dissimilar in their aims.
Sure, the analogy applies. Vibe music, vibe art, and vibe coding, for the original specific use of "vibe" meaning "take whatever the computer spits out and don't try to understand it or make it human-serviceable at all", are all low-effort, and they don't belong alongside the corresponding human work without a clear warning label.
(I also think that "AI-assisted" work should have a clear warning label, but I don't automatically equate "AI-assisted" with full "primarily AI-written".)
What do you mean by warning? Transparency I get it, what made you pick the word warning specifically? I wouldn’t mind disclosing that my drums were AI generated for example, but what would a “warning” text be?
In the labeling sense, it's a warning label, in that it serves to tell people who may wish to avoid something that it is present in the product, much like warnings saying "may contain tree nuts" on products that are potentially cross-contaminated. (As compared to a label that people are likely to seek out, like "100% juice", which is regulated differently to prevent people from using it when it doesn't apply.)
In the computing sense, it's a warning, in that it doesn't stop you from ignoring it if you want to, but some people may wish to `-Werror` / `-D warnings`.
That was precisely what I meant with the use of "sort of". Sorry it wasn't clear to you, I did not mean to take words from those that disagree and I do understand that!
If it solves a problem, good for you but I don't think people should put their vibe coded projects online. They don't have any value.
There are delusional people who create vibe coded pull requests to open source projects and they believe they are actually contributing value. No they only create work for the maintainers that have to review the subpar code.
As for your use case, are there really no royalty free drum beats that you could use? Not to mention you could probably learn to create your own beats in Ableton in one weekend. You are cheating yourself.
Personally, I feel like tech companies have already taken over so much of our lives and culture that I don't want them to take more. Corporations have weaseled their way into almost every facet of our lives at this point. Letting them take over human expression and become a substitute for human creativity just feels beyond the pale at this point. When do people say enough is enough?
A stonemason who creates pieces by hand gathers more respect than one who delegates their craft to a cnc machine. No person who respects their craft will use tools that devalue their relation to their craft. Only those who seek to maximize personal gain of wealth would use such tools. Such a person, who sees merit only in the ends produced, rather than in the means themselves, does not participate in the shared history of their craft, in artistry, or in their own personal development.
For a real musician, AI is already too much. For there to be meaning and soul in their music, is must be derived from the intersection of their skills and imagination, whereby the unconscious can make itself manifest in the utilization of ones virtues. Delegating this process to a black box deprives the art of its unique individual perspective that can only arise out of the finitude of human experience and learning. For though the black box may have superficial knowledge of generalizations of many such perspectives, it smooths out all paths into bland sameness. Thus no real artist of merit has any use for AI, for it is always of a lower degree than the more powerful tool that is their mind.
I confess I am torn by your comment. I myself wouldn't choose AI for guitar, given that's where I have perfected my craft, and I am able to relate to what you said. However, not as an artist, but as a listener, I have no trouble with a guitar composition made by a machine.
John Dewey's famous book talks about shifting the focus from the maker to the experience and that the value of something is not about the artist's inner struggle but about the work's capacity to generate lasting experiences. This also ties well into Roland Barthes' essay about reading and how language is a living thing. He puts forward the notion that meaning lives in the reader, not in the writer. Audiences is what turns it into an experience.
Again, this isn't to devalue the effort or that the inner struggle isn't commendable, this is to say that artistic value can exist beyond that.
The making of art is a personal experience, and the beholding of art is another type of personal experience. If we suggest that the two can be separated such that we can behold art without knowledge of the production of it, well I would consider that wrong. There is a reason each piece in a museum is given a plaque telling its medium and brief background. This is because the meaning of a piece is derived from its context and cannot be separated from it without making art an arbitrary sensory stimuli.
The issue with the reduction of art to experience is that it ignore that our knowledge shapes our experience, and so the more we know about an artist and their process, the more different our experience of their art will be.
If one sees the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, they might not think much of it if all they know is that it's very popular. Another who knows why the Mona Lisa is particularly popular, because of its historic theft, has a different experience of it. And the person who knows of Da Vinci's life, who has read his journals, knows of his elaborate painting process and sophisticated details and meaning supplied in his paintings, why that person derives much more joy out of the work than one who merely sees it as a visual appearance producing merely a arbitrary liking/disliking.
Perhaps you might enjoy an AI composed track, but would you not enjoy it more if instead that track were human produced, particularly if you held more knowledge of the people making it?
As for meaning living in the reader, that cannot be true, for a person can find meaning in tea leaves or moving clouds. True meaning, as intentional, is not derived, but supplied, and it is the goal of every reader to behold the authors vision. That one fashions a different interpretation for themselves over the authors intentions is of necessity, for no two minds will see alike, but to look only for the reflection of oneself in art and not look beyond, why that is the death of art, for art is the revelation of the soul.
I would have no problem with that. I wouldn't maybe call the AI an artist though, it wouldn't have sentient knowledge to be an artist. It would be art made by a machine. In fact, we have several of those examples already, and there's lots there are really fun and appreciated out there. This new one just happens to be quite more complex and eerie to digest at first.
> Our guidelines for generative AI in music and audio are as follows:
> Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp.
> Any use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles is strictly prohibited in accordance with our existing policies prohibiting impersonation and intellectual property infringement.
Which is balanced. It means that you can still use Illugen to generate a drum sample for instance, but you can't just generate a whole track on SUNO and just upload it on Bandcamp.
I've encountered a few artists who partially used AI in their music making process and the results have been incredible, I would hate to see them banned when grouped with people making completely AI-generated slop... Perhaps a middle ground could be reached? Allow AI generated audio as long as it undergoes significant processing by humans, for example.
Irrelevant platform says irrelevant thing. Also let people like or dislike things. Maybe we could pick if we want AI content or not. (it’s a no from me personally ) but I feel like the ban hammer is the tool of petty tyrants and lacks creativity and nuance
They handle a lot of sales [1], I do not think they can be called irrelevant under any reasonable definition of the word:
> In the past year alone, [customers] spent $208 million on 14.6 million digital albums, 11.2 million tracks, 1.55 million vinyl records, 800,000 CDs, 250,000 cassettes, and 50,000 t-shirts.
and that is why policies like this will turn platforms into dinosaurs. no need to care. large behemoths always thrash a lot as they die. as do the people who see this as a positive thing.
ai music will be the future and create curated music for every user, specific to their tastes at that moment, for pennies.
suno already matches 99% of music in quality and creativity. the last 1% and beyond will come soon enough.
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.
this is incoherent. Publishing a bunch of stuff no one wants is not competition. You're just mad that people actually like AI music.
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
1. Spotify doesn't have "internally produced music"
2. There are companies that provide white-label ambient/white noise/similar music.
3. Spotify may have preferential licensing deals with some of them (as any company would seek preferential contract terms)
4. Some of that music is generated (AI or otherwise)
Yes, I am! I'm also mad that people like shitty over-produced pop, though (including me sometimes), so what can you do. Life is shit.
The thing is, you aren't entitled to distribution.
Most musicians who make it these days work really hard at doing live shows, or growing a following on tiktok.
once they have an audience - who cares about competition?
> will often just opt for whatever is popular.
Are you suggesting that people consume media they don't like? I'm not familiar with anyone that does this. I personally skip if I don't like a song even a little.
It sounds like music, because it was generated by a model that was trained on actual music.
It is music that has been chewed up and regurgitated. It provides no benefit to the actual artists whose music fed that model.
ad hominem has no place on HN.
Your biggest competition as musician is not AI or any new music it’s the music released in the last 50 years.
I predict that slop won’t significantly change the game - which was already rigged against new (and good) artists when I was a little baby
You still need to invest significant time and effort to make it work.
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".
I think the fears were understandable then, and are understandable now. I also think that, just as the fears around synthesizers didn't come to fruition, neither will the fears around AI come to fruition. Synthesizers didn't, and generative AI won't, replace musicians; rather, musicians did and will add these new technologies into their toolsets and use them to push music beyond what was previously understood to be possible. Synthesizers didn't catch on by just imitating other instruments, but by being understood and exploited as instruments in their own right; so will generative AI catch on not by just imitating other instruments, but by being understood and exploited as an instrument in its own right.
The core problem right now is that AI (even beyond just music) ain't being marketed as a means of augmenting one's creativity and skills, but as a means of replacing them. That'll always be misguided, both in the practical sense of producing worse outputs and in the philosophical sense of atrophying that same creativity and skills. AI doesn't have to produce slop, but it will inevitably produce slop when it's packaged and sold and marketed in a way that actively encourages slop — much like taking one of those cheap electric keyboards with built-in beats and songs and advertising it as able to replace a whole band. Yeah, it's cool that keyboards can play songs on their own and AI can generate songs on their own, but that output will always be subpar compared to what someone with even the slightest bit of creativity and skill can pull out of those exact same tools.
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?
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.
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 have dozens of little programs and websites that are AI generated and do their job perfectly.
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 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.
Nothing can compete with AI slop when the ratio is 100000:1 AI slop vs real music.
Look at Google search results... they're not all AI slop yet, but they're 100000:1 content mills vs useful results.
I'm saying that you shouldn't call photographs paintings because they aren't paintings. I don't particularly care if people make AI "music" or "art" and I don't particularly care if they consume it (people have been consuming awful media for the entire history of humanity, they aren't going to stop because I say so), but if you give me a ham sandwich and call it a hamburger I am going to be annoyed and tell you that it isn't a hamburger and to stop calling it that because you're misleading people who actually appreciate hamburgers.
AI "art" isn't art. I don't care whether you like it. It's like fractals or rock formations or birdsong - it may be aesthetically appealing to some people, but that isn't the definition of art.
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.
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.).
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.
Previously, search was such a big problem. For instance, I'm not big on hip-hop and so on but I like songs like Worst Comes To Worst by Dilated Peoples. I've searched in all sorts of ways for other songs like that and come up with a handful of examples. Likewise, I want the vibe of Thick As A Brick by Jethro Tull during various parts. It's hard to find this kind of stuff.
But Suno.ai can generate that boom-bap vibe pretty easily and it's not the kind of thing where I'm going to put the same song on all the time like I do with the Dilated Peoples one, but it's good enough to listen to while I'm working.
I will shamelessly promote the bandcampsync [1] CLI tool for automating downloads of your bandcamp library and bandcamp-sync-flask [2] wrapper that I built so I could invoke it from the web on my phone after I buy an album.
[1] https://github.com/meeb/bandcampsync
[2] https://github.com/subdavis/bandcamp-sync-flask
The best part for me is going to record stores again. CDs are SO cheap now, especially used ones. I’ll usually pick a few out of the dollar bin just based on vibes and the cover and rip them when I get home. I’ve found some cool stuff. It’s like a treasure hunt.
Don’t miss Spotify one bit.
Also the price of decent (Sony hifi grade, not ES) CD players used is great too.
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.
I listen mostly in the old school way, full albums of my favourite artists, so I suppose it would be quite unexpected to stumble into AI music this way.
If you are explictitly looking for music by specific artists, then you get their music obviously.
I love this conspiracy theory. Which track doesn't Spotify pay royalties for? Considering that it licenses 100% of its music from external distributors.
Spotify, on the other hand, induced a level of visceral disgust I'd never felt before when I stumbled across an AI-generated album supposedly made by an artist I enjoy. In this case it was somebody that had been dead for 15 years - they were hijacking her Spotify page to promote it as a new release. I'm not an AI reactionary but I found this absolutely fucking gross. Having AI-generated music for four-hour YouTube videos of anime girls sitting in apartments on a rainy day is fine. Desecrating the body of work of a departed musician is decidedly not.
Does that constitute "wholly or in substantial part"? Would the track have existed were it not for having that easy route into re-mastering?
I understand what Bandcamp's trying to do here, and I generally am in support of removing what we'd recognize as "fully AI-generated music", but there are legitimate creative uses of AI that might come to wholly or substantially encompass the output. It's difficult to draw any lines line on a creative work, by just by nature of the work being creative.
(For those interested - check out O Positive's "With You" on the WERS Live at 75 album!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_and_Then_(Beatles_song)
Similarly, say, for video editors, using AI to more intelligently rotoscope (especially with alpha blending in the presence of motion blur - practically impossible to do it manually), would be a great use of AI, removing the non-creative tedium of the process.
It's not clear where the line is though. I was quite impressed with Corridor Crew's (albeit NVidia+Puget-sponsored) video [1] where they photographed dolls, motion-captured human actors moving like the dolls, and transferred the skeletal animation and facial expressions to those dolls using GenAI. Some of it required nontrivial transformative code to accommodate a skeleton to a toy's body type. There's a massive amount of tedium being removed from the creative process by GenAI without sacrificing the core human creative contribution. This feels like it should be allowed -- I think we should attempt to draw clearer lines where there are clearly efficiency gains to be had to have less "creative" uses be more socially acceptable.
[1]: https://youtu.be/DSRrSO7QhXY
But we also live with arbitrary lines elsewhere, as with spam filters? People generally don't want ads for free Viagra, and spam filters remain the default without making "no marketing emails" a hard rule.
The problem isn't that music Transformers can't be used artfully [1] but that they allow a kind of spam which distribution services aren't really equipped to handle. In 2009, nobody would have stopped you from producing albums en masse with the generative tech of the day, Microsoft's Songsmith [2], but you would have had a hard time selling them - but hands-off distribution services like DistroKid and improved models makes music spam much more viable now than it was previously.
[1] I personally find neural synthesis models like RAVE autoencoders nifty: https://youtu.be/HC0L5ZH21kw
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research_Songsmith as ...demoed? in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg0l7f25bhU
Justifiable because there were some filters. That may not even have been "AI". They may have been some deterministic algorithms that the software maker has to label "AI" because they otherwise think it won't sell...
I'm not familiar with the music business, but I'm a Sunday photographer. There's an initiative to label pictures that had "generative ai" applied. I'm not a professional, so I don't really have a horse in this race. I also enjoy the creations of some dude I follow on Instagram which are clearly labelled as produced by AI.
But in between, the situation isn't as clear cut. As photographers, we used to do "spot removal", with pretty big "spots" for ages [0]. You just had to manually select the "offending" "spot", try to source some other part which looked close enough. Now you can use "object removal" which does a great job with things like grass and whatnot but is "generative ai". These are labelled AI, and they are.
I can understand someone arguing that what required a lot of skill is now more accessible. And I guess that's true? But that just sounds elitist.
So what's the issue with "AI"? Do you enjoy the result? Great! Do you hate it? Move to the next one. Does that particular "artist" produce only thins you hate? Skip them!
--
[0] my point is about "artistic" pictures, not photojournalism or similar where "what was" is of utmost importance. Note that even in those cases, selective cropping only requires your feet and nobody would label as "edited". But I specifically don't want to open that can of worms.
Was this demo his, or someone else’s IP? If he is cleaning up or modifying his own property, not a lot of people have a problem with that.
If it is someone else’s work, then modifying with AI doesn’t change that.
I think they just don’t want AI generated works that only mash up the work of other artists, which is the default of AI generated stuff.
A harder set of hypotheticals might arise if music production goes the direction that software engineering is heading: “agentic work”, whereby a person is very much involved in the creation of a work, but more by directing an AI agent than by orchestrating a set of non-AI tools.
This is why it is to these generative AI companies' benefit that 'AI' becomes a catchall term for everything, from what enemies are programmed to do in video games to a spambot that creates and uploads slop facebook videos on the hour.
If you want to be some neutral universal third party sure. If you're OK with taking a position, the arbitrariness actually makes it much easier. You just draw the line you want.
Creativity demands limitation, and those limitations don't have to be justified.
I had this opinion for a long time, but only recently was I personally affected, but that made me even more convinced.
I was listening to my new releases playlist on Apple Music and listened to a track that sounded nice, but also a little generic. I don’t know exactly what prompted me to check, but it had all the signs of something fishy going on like generic cover image, the artist page showed a crazy output of singles last year (all the same generic images), unspecific metadata and - to my surprise - I found other Reddit posts about this artist being AI.
Now, a lot of music is generic and goes through so many hands you can hardly call it a personal piece of art. But even then, there’s always some kind of connection.
I guess that’s why I felt betrayed.
I thought AI generated art was wrong before, but I didn’t expect to feel this mix of anger and disappointment.
For me, music (like all fine art) is about human connection. It's the artist telling me something human and personal. It's not entirely about the aesthetics of the music. The provenance of the art is very important. If I feel that connection with a song and it turns out that the song wasn't made by a person (it hasn't happened yet as far as I know), I have been deceived and would be furious.
A song made by a person using AI as tool (rather than to generate the music) is different. What matters is that the song is actually an expression of humanity, not the tools used to make it.
However, the presence of AI-generated music means that I am not really willing to buy music anymore unless its either a few years old or I'm buying it at the merch table the artist has at a live performance.
I want a friend to message me like "Hey, there's some interesting stuff happening in the AI music scene, check out these tracks".
But everything I've seen is pastiche, either novelty songs (hit song as different genre, or famous monologue from popular movie as pop song) or generic background music meant for algorithmic streaming playlists.
Has it done this? Or does it just make things that sound like what it's trained on?
I mean, even if it's just a pastiche machine, I do believe that people could use it to make new and interesting music, just like they did with sampling.
But yeah, music is so accessible and there is so much new music all the time that if all, or most, of what AI is being used for is to make even more of the same stuff we're already awash in then banning it is necessary curation.
It sucks that a lot of these types of markets are suffering from low numbers of shoppers. They open themselves up to these plastic peddlers in desperation only to drive away customers even more.
Consider how easy it would have been, any time in the last decade, to get a booth at any "local hand-made goods craft fair", selling "hand-made" copper jewelry... that you happened to buy in bulk lots off Alibaba. The jewelry was "hand-made"... kind of... by someone else, making far too little money, in sweatshop conditions, following techniques and using machines that enable them to produce hundreds at once, with no QC whatsoever.
Nobody would ever guess you hadn't made the stuff yourself. They would read the lack of QC as evidence for your claim that "each piece is distinct and made to match my artistic vision in the moment." You'd put one or two of each type of piece out on the table at a time, as if those are all you have; yet as soon as one sells, you'd pull another out from the box of hundreds.
I can't say for sure that this ever happens, but judging by the number of people willing to be scummy in the more modern ways... it certainly feels like it could. Honestly makes me hesitant to buy anything from a craft fair. Which is a shame.
Craft fairs, though, no excuse or reason. There should not be profit maximizing at local craft fairs. They're a bellwether for the degradation of culture.
E.g. how is this worse and needs to be removed: https://youtu.be/L3Uyfnp-jag?si=SL4Jc4qeEXVgUpeC but crap that top pop artists vomit out into the world doesn't
> Boom we did: https://hangout.fm/
clicks link, scrolls down one screen
> Let’s get something started! Create your own hangout or craft a new song
> Big purple "(sparkles) Generate music" button
I don't hold it much hope for this track because everything else I've heard on suno and udio are rubbish, but the 1 minute preview I have is enticing me to spend 8 bucks just so I can experiment a bit more.
I feel somewhat conflicted by my fascination because I have a great love for music and I wholeheartedly support efforts to restrict AI music crap.
But as the tools mature, the creative possibilities to make new sounds with finer control and granularity will make the process more ... creative - with greater human input.
I'm sure we'll end up with new styles and maybe even new genres that originate from prompts, and hits too. Is this a good thing to look forward to? I can see my future listening habits become strictly human only, but dang, the start of my new track sounds so dope!
I applaud Bandcamp's stance here and I will always look for ways to meaningfully support real musicians.
https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/
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.
Your ability to make and share music as you like hasn't been abridged. Bandcamp has chosen not to be a part of it if it's AI-mediated.
It sounds like bandcamp is not the right place for what you want to do. There's plenty of ways to do what you're looking for though!
I have to imagine* that we will figure out what that difference is, but it will be difficult and costly.
* I have to imagine that or else I will lose all hope in the future.
https://caniphish.com/blog/how-to-spot-ai-audio
https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/help-information/site-modera...
even coded detectors exist https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checker?id=09f25ee7913a415...
We’ll have this (and the corny lyrics issue) mostly fixed in a month or so, then it mostly becomes a recommendations problem. For example, TikTok is filled with slop, but it’s not a problem - their algorithm helps the most creative/engaging stuff rise to the top. If Spotify is giving you Suno slop in your discover weekly (or really crappy 100% organic free range AI-free slop) blame Spotify, not the AI or the creators. There are really high effort and original creations that involve AI that deserve to be heard, though.
I suggest going back and listening to some of the first experimental electronic music. The tools have improved a lot since then and people have used them to do really cool things, even spawning countless genres.
Thankfully, most of it doesn't reach your Spotify feed. I think most of it is garbage, but I'd fight for the right of people to continue posting it. All things algorithmic have this exploration/exploitation, diversity/fidelity tradeoff and Spotify has theirs tuned very heavily toward exploitation/fidelity. I think there is a cool opportunity for someone to put the tradeoff dial into users hands.
Speak for yourself.
That's why I choose to make the distinction by just not caring about any kind of music that uses any kind of AI.
While intent of course is important, the quantity and manner of taking others' work and calling it my own, I thing, plays even bigger role. If I go "hey check out this Bohemian Rhapsody song I just created using Google Search", I do not think much regard will be given to my intent.
If we look at this through the lens of making software with ai, which also allows for creativity, blanket bans may keep lots of quality stuff from being made.
How will the tracks be distinguished? Any ai and you’re out?
If people listen to music, they like the music, and it can come from wherever. Gatekeeping never works.
As of yet Bandcamp hasn't tried to become an 'everything is here' kind of distributor, but rather more tailored to small, niche, quality &c. artists, and not consumers. Kind of the opposite to Spotify.
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 Civilization or Maugham wrote Of Human Bondage or Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead or Cheever wrote The Swimmer there was a magnificent concentration of real feeling and a real reason that each of these things were made.
Could you imagine someone prompting a model, receiving the result, and then writing, as Cheever did about The Swimmer:
>It was a terribly difficult story to write. I couldn't ever show my hand. Night was falling, the year was dying. It wasn't a question of technical problems, but one of imponderables. When he finds it dark and cold, it has to have happened. And by God, it did happen. I felt dark and cold for some time after I finished that story.
Those people don’t tend to have a good understanding of what most humans like and why they like stuff like music.
Creativity, fundamentally, is overlapping memories of what you have seen already. Literally no different than any diffusion or transformer model.
You painting a piece of art or composing a song was really the functional output of billions of cells coordinating in unison, 100% subconsciously, and the thoughts that arose out of your subconscious were entirely (or mostly, to avoid free will debate) out of your control. Your output was the product of billions of years of stellar and biological evolution on top of millennia of human history and influence. You created nothing.
Soon you will have to grapple with the reality of what really drives your enjoyment of media, and part of that will be realizing that the human-ness never mattered at all.
Is beautiful nature scenery not beautiful because it wasnt hand-crafted painstakingly by a creative human? Of course it is. There is no intuition for the vast swaths of time it took to form, that is a modern human conceptualization that came long after we already found nature to be beautiful.
We have a biological pattern recognition tuned for beauty regardless of its origin. And there is nothing inherently unbeautiful about elegant software that can produce beautiful "art". Nor is there any justifiable, defensible, or intellectually honest way to argue that the human/effort element in art matters in any way besides perhaps portraying and conveying social status.
Every individual has a unique experience, and assimilates different things from their experiences depending on their personal tastes and culture. That is profoundly different from a model which assimilates the output of hundreds of thousands of individuals. A model has no creative, or artistic voice. Your argument is anti-humanistic, nihilistic nonsense, and also trivially verifiably wrong given no model today has produced music or art of any value.
Your argument implies creativity is confined to humans or brains. So no creativity existed before that? Weird. Lucky for us that evolution spawned creativity then!
If you could answer that question then that should help me understand, since you say it is trivial to verifiably prove my position wrong
I’d encourage you to dig deeper into why and how the music that is being created by those tools works.
And I would much prefer to hear your music over machine-generated music even if the generated music is technically better performed.
On barging into creative spaces and how that should be viewed, I suspect you and I would find we feel the same. I was personally involved in building and shaping deviantart and how we tackled these ideas, so what you see there today is influenced by my(and scott, eric angelo etc) thinking on this matter.
Typed a prompt and hit generate. No response after waiting some time. I scrolled down to existing sample music to get a sense of what it creates and hit play. Not one of the play buttons worked. Ok load up Chrome instead of Firefox, maybe they did some Chrome specific thing? Nope site's still broken and none of the samples under "Suno AI Music Gallery" actually work. There's a javascript error "invalid client" on clicking it. I'm not logged in i guess?
It did work on mobile but that seems like it presents a completely different site.
https://soundcloud.com/john/eager - I put over 16 hours into this track, I'm sure someone who knows about music can point to loads of errors in it, I'm sure it's sloppy in parts, but I put real effort into it and I'm proud of that effort.
"Tell HN: Viral Hit Made by AI, 10M listens on Spotify last few days" [1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46600681
-a flatness to the EQ spectrum that you wouldn't get out a properly mixed and produced piece of audio
-no good stem separation, so no per-source eq (relates to above point)
-change BPM mid-song
-unnatural warbles at the end of every phrase
-vocals will have these weird croaky voice cracks, or sound scratchier and raspier
There definitely are tell-tale signs of "pure AI" in audio, but it becomes a lot more nuanced when any sort of secondary mixing/mastering/compression happens (which is the case 90% is the time in the real world- anything on YouTube/Spotify get's compressed).
A lot of it is now, and it's frustrating to me. The worst part is that I'm not actually anti-AI-music. There's one or two "groups" ("producers"?) I've found where it's clearly AI but they've put a lot of work into making something worth listening to, but Spotify seems to have a "this sucker will listen to the cheap stuff" flag and now I'm drowning in tracks from people who paid for Suno and think that's enough.
Similar to YouTube slop.
If that would stop working, I'd cancel Spotify again.
Speaking of YouTube slop, I think Spotify has had its own system of preferring cheap muzak from labels they support since before GenAI music even took off, I think. Example label: Firefly entertainment (IIRC)
This is likely a stance to prevent an individual from producing thousands of AI generated tracks and attempting to flood the zone for anyone browsing and searching.
There's a lot of music on Spotify for example that tries to latch on to current trends in an attempt to get pulled into search results and recommendations.
It's like that with code and art.
Purely AI anything is garbage. But AI tools in the hands of people who know what they're doing are just faster scaffolding and better plywood to build with. The framing is still mostly human expert.
Word on the street here in Nashville is that it's already the case. The songs getting published aren't AI-made, but there's AI assistance.
This seems to fly over the heads of many. art is about taste.
A lot of people including myself enjoy music because it's so intimately human, the flaws and all. It's someone putting a bit of themselves into every piece they create, and people look for things that resonate with them.
AI music however is purely about consumption. It's not something made to be remembered or cherished. And the more you integrate it into your music, the less and less of yourself you put into it and the less reason for anyone to bother. I could just ask whatever AI to generate generic rock music inspired by the beatles and remove you from the equation entirely and have the same experience. Everything gets amalgamated into the exact same thing with all of the imperfections sheared away.
Ok maybe you have the opinion that it's all crap right now. That's fine. But pretend it gets good. Pretend that instead of bothering with bands at some point in the future you just generate music to your tastes on the fly all the time.
Where does that leave Bandcamp? Do they market themselves as "fresh organic music" and live in that niche? What good does all the rights music companies own do if music generates on the fly?
I suspect a huge amount of lobbying incoming asap to stop this. Perhaps a law against AI generated music that's not owned by the RIAA? You might not like AI generated music but you should be very very cautious of those fighting it.
As someone who enjoys live music, I would still need a live band to play this on-the-fly generated music. I guess then you'll trot out AI holograms! but that sounds still as unappealing as your base case.
We now sort of accepted the idea of “vibe coding”, and, even shared appreciation from people who are using it to resuscitate side projects and things they wanted to do but required a lot of work. (Heck, even Linus Torvalds is doing it).
Is “Vibe Music / Art” any different? For example, I am not a drummer, say I use Suno to program some drums for me so I can record my guitar on top, and finally release that track I’ve been procrastinating.
I think the analogy here holds. Not all vibe coding is good, and not all vibe art is bad.
(I also think that "AI-assisted" work should have a clear warning label, but I don't automatically equate "AI-assisted" with full "primarily AI-written".)
In the labeling sense, it's a warning label, in that it serves to tell people who may wish to avoid something that it is present in the product, much like warnings saying "may contain tree nuts" on products that are potentially cross-contaminated. (As compared to a label that people are likely to seek out, like "100% juice", which is regulated differently to prevent people from using it when it doesn't apply.)
In the computing sense, it's a warning, in that it doesn't stop you from ignoring it if you want to, but some people may wish to `-Werror` / `-D warnings`.
speak for yourself please, not all of us have
If it solves a problem, good for you but I don't think people should put their vibe coded projects online. They don't have any value.
There are delusional people who create vibe coded pull requests to open source projects and they believe they are actually contributing value. No they only create work for the maintainers that have to review the subpar code.
As for your use case, are there really no royalty free drum beats that you could use? Not to mention you could probably learn to create your own beats in Ableton in one weekend. You are cheating yourself.
I've been attacked for saying I don't hate it, and I witness this everywhere.
It's a tool. Artists and professionals can use tools. They're professionals and know how much is too much.
For a real musician, AI is already too much. For there to be meaning and soul in their music, is must be derived from the intersection of their skills and imagination, whereby the unconscious can make itself manifest in the utilization of ones virtues. Delegating this process to a black box deprives the art of its unique individual perspective that can only arise out of the finitude of human experience and learning. For though the black box may have superficial knowledge of generalizations of many such perspectives, it smooths out all paths into bland sameness. Thus no real artist of merit has any use for AI, for it is always of a lower degree than the more powerful tool that is their mind.
John Dewey's famous book talks about shifting the focus from the maker to the experience and that the value of something is not about the artist's inner struggle but about the work's capacity to generate lasting experiences. This also ties well into Roland Barthes' essay about reading and how language is a living thing. He puts forward the notion that meaning lives in the reader, not in the writer. Audiences is what turns it into an experience.
Again, this isn't to devalue the effort or that the inner struggle isn't commendable, this is to say that artistic value can exist beyond that.
The issue with the reduction of art to experience is that it ignore that our knowledge shapes our experience, and so the more we know about an artist and their process, the more different our experience of their art will be.
If one sees the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, they might not think much of it if all they know is that it's very popular. Another who knows why the Mona Lisa is particularly popular, because of its historic theft, has a different experience of it. And the person who knows of Da Vinci's life, who has read his journals, knows of his elaborate painting process and sophisticated details and meaning supplied in his paintings, why that person derives much more joy out of the work than one who merely sees it as a visual appearance producing merely a arbitrary liking/disliking.
Perhaps you might enjoy an AI composed track, but would you not enjoy it more if instead that track were human produced, particularly if you held more knowledge of the people making it?
As for meaning living in the reader, that cannot be true, for a person can find meaning in tea leaves or moving clouds. True meaning, as intentional, is not derived, but supplied, and it is the goal of every reader to behold the authors vision. That one fashions a different interpretation for themselves over the authors intentions is of necessity, for no two minds will see alike, but to look only for the reflection of oneself in art and not look beyond, why that is the death of art, for art is the revelation of the soul.
People seem to have an irrational fear of being entertained by AI, equating that to admitting that it is a higher form of intelligence than their own.
> Our guidelines for generative AI in music and audio are as follows:
> Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp.
> Any use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles is strictly prohibited in accordance with our existing policies prohibiting impersonation and intellectual property infringement.
Which is balanced. It means that you can still use Illugen to generate a drum sample for instance, but you can't just generate a whole track on SUNO and just upload it on Bandcamp.
I think you need hard rules to make it not completely subjective.
> In the past year alone, [customers] spent $208 million on 14.6 million digital albums, 11.2 million tracks, 1.55 million vinyl records, 800,000 CDs, 250,000 cassettes, and 50,000 t-shirts.
[1] https://bandcamp.com/about
ai music will be the future and create curated music for every user, specific to their tastes at that moment, for pennies.
suno already matches 99% of music in quality and creativity. the last 1% and beyond will come soon enough.