Let’s look at the input required for each, in the context of computer-aided music production.
‘Generated’ music: typing a prompt and pressing the RETURN key (time required: ~10 seconds)
‘Made’ music: thinking about melody, harmony and rhythm and writing down or programming in each from scratch. Choosing sounds and MIDI instruments. Experimenting with different effects, tweaking every parameter precisely and playing around (using your ears for feedback) until you find something you like. Finally, mixing the tracks together so the whole thing sounds cohesive. (time required: ~1 hour, min.)
To me, it seems hard to confuse the two processes.
You may very well argue that the ‘AI’ is doing something analogous to human music production (well… architecturally it isn’t, but you could at least argue it’s equivalent in some sense), but arguing that the human who typed the prompt ‘wrote the song’ seems to be… to put it lightly, rather overstating it.
You don't have much control over what is being generated. And if you did want to have fine control then what would be the difference compared to just dicking around on a synthesizer?
A lot of the enjoyment of music comes from connecting emotionally with the artist. The artist had something to say based on their experience of life and adversity. You relate maybe because you've been there too. After all, you and the artist are both just human at the end of the day.
This is why for instance I have a hard time believing in AI girlfriends or AI therapists. It's not that I don't think that an AI could learn to be empathetic and say the right things at the right time, it's that I think there is something about you the human knowing it is an AI speaking that would make you not be able to connect. It's the knowledge that they haven't had any life experiences like you. They haven't had adversity or struggle.
> You don't have much control over what is being generated
I don't understand this nitpick at all. What part of "make" implies fine-grained control over the output? Parents didn't have much control over what's generated when a child is, but by any reasonable definition of the word "make", the baby that comes out is "made" by the mother and (to a lesser extent) the father!
> A lot of the enjoyment of music comes from connecting emotionally with the artist. The artist had something to say based on their experience of life and adversity. You relate maybe because you've been there too.
I think you might be assuming that your experience generalizes a lot more than it does. I've been a musician for decades, and I'm constantly listening to music, and I don't need to know who did what to be able to enjoy a song. To be clear, there's nothing _wrong_ with that being part of your enjoyment, but there's nothing wrong with just liking to hear sounds that sound "good" without caring about where they came from.
I am definitely generalizing. It does seem to be a common sentiment expressed when this gets brought up though. Whether it's just an instance of me clinging on to anything to distinguish from AI or if it's a legitimate problem remains to be seen I guess.
And there definitely are songs I feel I just enjoy in their own right.
As for 'make' I guess that just comes down to semantics.
How do you reconcile the fact that music from people who have done pretty despicable things can still be widely popular? You can certainly argue that enough people are willing to look past someone being a murderer or child abuser or something because they still can find some sort of human connection with the artist, but given how uncommon that sort of sentiment is in basically every other part of life, it seems far more likely that people just don't really think about it an artist at all when they listen to their music if the artist is someone they wouldn't want to connect with.
I don't think his personality was really that much of an outlier when his music first became popular, so I'd argue that empirically the answer is yes. From looking at Wikipedia, his first album was released in 2004 and charted at number 2, with his first single hitting 15 on the charts and his follow-up being number 1. I don't think you can argue that he was famous enough for anyone to be listening to the music because they knew who he was rather than because of the music itself.
Nobody needs to know who the artist ahead of time is to connect to what they say (instrumentally or vocally). The art does the talking.
I largely agree that if you don't know anything about music but generate some stuff with a very-high-level AI tool then you are unlikely to produce anything that resonates with people for any significant amount of time.
If you do know something about music (say, producer- or other-tastemaker level) and you replace the artists with an AI tool - you could have much better luck - but I'm curious there how much longetivity you get. Could you create the next star or the next trend or will the tools not have the ability to "break the mold" in ways that really connect to audiences and new generations without being used by newcomers themselves?
> I largely agree that if you don't know anything about music but generate some stuff with a very-high-level AI tool then you are unlikely to produce anything that resonates with people for any significant amount of time.
I feel like you're not really making a strong assertion here because of how subjective "resonates with people for any significant amount of time" is. Instead, I'd propose something akin to the Turing test; instead of conversing with someone and trying to determine if they're a computer or a human, the participant would listen to to a piece of music and try to guess whether it was made "traditionally" or by someone who used an AI tool and had no experience making music in any other fashion. I think we're not far from the point where it would be possible to generate instrumental music with AI that would be indistinguishable from a control set of human-created music (either instrumental or with the vocal track removed from the mix) with a certain level of complexity (let's say songs without changes in tempo, time signature, or key, which would give us at absolute minimum a few thousand popular mainstream songs over the past half century, and potentially a lot more). How long do you think it will take for this to be possible (if ever)? If you don't think it will ever be possible, why not? And if you do think it will be possible, isn't this sufficient evidence that there isn't any inherent need for a "human" element in music?
It’s not about that. It’s more if ye uses ai to make music it’s still ye making the music.
Ye is actually an endorsement of this because he’s absolutely a creative director more than a skill based musician. His best works are from leading others to greatness and building situations for that rather than skill in strumming a guitar or whatever
> A lot of the enjoyment of music comes from connecting emotionally with the artist. The artist had something to say based on their experience of life and adversity. You relate maybe because you've been there too. After all, you and the artist are both just human at the end of the day.
Absolutely not the case for me. The artist is just a name and I often don't know what the song is called. I have zero interest in the "meaning". It's all about the melody/harmonics, beat and production value for me.
Melody, beat, and production techniques are all ways to express meaning. Do you feel anything when listening to favorite music? Odds are that feeling, or something like it, are intentionally conveyed, even in instrumentals.
Check out aiva.ai if you want more control over what’s being generated.
Regarding the connection with an artist - I think it’s overrated. I don’t really care about Lady Gaga life experience to enjoy her songs. I have no idea who created half of the songs on my Spotify playlist. Artists create brief virtual life experiences through their songs. Songs I like usually remind me about something I have experienced or would like to experience.
I agree about music. When it comes to girlfriends and therapists when the medium is text the connection could be faked with a large corpus and RLHF. Keep in mind that some people already have inflatable girlfriends. It aint pretty but may serve some purpose for disfunctional people. I’d get more worried if it becomes a bigger thing.
When it comes to chat therapy, it could be an interesting mode of self discovery. My only worry is if the goal is to attempt to replace therapists altogether.
Don't you think simply knowing it was an AI would mean you can't take it seriously? Or do you think this is just a cultural thing that will fade away in coming years.
Oh I hate those pseudo-smart replies like this. You clearly know when it's generating and the distinction between creating and making (composing) music. It's generating when you prompt the ai to do all the work for you. As simple as this, you don't touch the actual producing part yourself. If you commission a song to a producer to make for your game, you don't make the music. The producer makes it
Because humans aren't actually doing the generating either, the answer gets clearer when the question is something like, "are you making music, or telling something to make you music?"
Replicators are a good analogy. Ordering a meal from a replicator doesn't make you a cook any more than giving Midjourney an order makes you an artist.
If the number of different knobs is is sufficient to make it impossible that any one person could try all the combinations, manipulating the knobs could be an art. You could imagine eg cooking using that method.
And when we look at great songwriters, do we need to know their educational background and what music they’ve listened to in order to determine how much of their work is created out of thin air versus arrived at by reasoning over theory and inspiration from other work?
You can hear some of the AI-generated songs here:
https://app.suno.ai/