Google is embedding inaudible watermarks right into its AI generated music::Audio created using Google DeepMind’s AI Lyria model will be watermarked with SynthID to let people identify its AI-generated origins after the fact.
Yeah, like most people don’t realise but until about 1900 most piano music was played by humans, of course there were no pianists after the invention of the pianola with its perforated rolls of notes and mechanical keys.
It’s sad, drums were things you hit with a stick once but Mr Theramin ensured you never see a drummer anymore, while Mr Moog effectively ended bass and rhythm guitars with the synthesizer…
It’s a shame it would be fun to go see a four piece band performing live but that’s impossible now no one plays instruments anymore.
People are never going to stop learning to play instruments, if anything they’ll get inspired by using AI to make music and it’ll get them interested in learning to play, they’ll then use ai tools to help them learn and when they get to be truly skilled with their instrument they’ll meet up with some awesomely talented friends to form a band which creates painfully boring and indulgent branded rock.
Those are a bit of false equivalencies, because all of them still required human input to work. AI generated music can be entirely automated, just put in a prompt and tell it to generate 10 and it’ll do the rest for you. Set up enough servers and write enough prompts and you can have hundreds of distinct and unique pieces of AI music put online every minute.
Realistically, putting aside sentimental value, there isn’t a single piece of music that humans have made that an AI couldn’t make. But I hope your optimism turns out to be right :/
I sort of think this is looking at it wrong. That’s looking at music more like a product to be consumed, rather than one which is to be engaged with on the basis that it engenders human creativity and meaning. That’s sort of why this whole debate is bad at conception, imo. We shouldn’t be looking at AI as a thing we can use just to discard music from human hands, or art, or whatever, we should be looking at it as a nice tool that can potentially increase creativity by getting rid of the shit I don’t wanna deal with, or making some part of the process easier. This is less applicable to music, because you can literally just burn a CD of riffs, riffs, and more riffs (buckethead?), but for art, what if you don’t wanna do lineart and just wanna do shading? Bad example because you can actually just download lineart online, or just paint normal style, lineless or whatever. But what if you wanna do lineart without shading and making “real” or “whole” art? Bad example actually you can just sketch shit out and then post it, plenty of people do. But you get the point, anyways.
Actually, you don’t get the point because I haven’t made one. The example I always think of is klaus. They used AI, or neural networks, or deep learning or matrix calculation or whatever who cares, to automate the 3 dimensional shading of the 2d art, something that would be pretty hard to do by hand and pretty hard to automate without AI. To do it well, at least. That’s an easy example of a good use. It’s a stylistic choice, it’s very intentional, it distinguishes the work, and it does something you couldn’t otherwise just do, for this production, so it has increased the capacity of the studio. It added something and otherwise didn’t really replace anyone. It enabled the creation of an art that otherwise wouldn’t have been, and it was an intentional choice that didn’t add like bullshit, it allowed them to retain their artistic integrity. You could do this with like any piece of art, so you desired. I think this could probably be the case for music as well, just as T-pain uses autotune (or pitch correction, I forget the difference) to great effect.
I like these examples. Taken to the extreme, I would still consider a piece of ai generated sheet music played by a human musician to be art, but I guess it’s all subjective in the end. For music specifically, I’ve always been more into the emotional side of it, so as long as the artist is feeling then I can appreciate it.
