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.
I just wanted to say, thanks for saying this. I actually have been writing music and using Distrokid to publish to the normal streaming services (Spotify/Apple Music) and your comment actually pushed me to sign up for and put music on Bandcamp.
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.
You stream the music you own, it uses the subsonic protocol/API, and so is compatible with countless clients, letting your enjoy your lossless music on fancy hardware at home or cached on your mobile device when on the go.
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.
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?
Yes, it is (unless the CD player is so bad that it can't do adequate error correction). What I do is rip the CD to my music server, which is where I listen to the music from. Then the quality of the CD player isn't important, as long as it works correctly.
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.
The people who really want to stop paying for streaming are going to turn to piracy, don't worry. Physical media will still be accessible for people who are willing to pay with space instead of money.
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.
There are artists that Spotify has different deals with. Spotify promotes their music in their playlists, but the artists get a much smaller cut of the profits in exchange. Win-win for everybody.
This only happens in genres where most listeners don't care about the artists they're listening to, think "chillout", "focus" or "easy listening." That kind of music is a commodity, Taylor Swift (or Metallica or Mozzart or whatever) is not. This has been proven.
My hypothesis is that those genres would otherwise lose Spotify the most money, as people often play that kind of music and never turn it off. Because Spotify pays per listen, the user who attentively listens to their favorite artist a few times a week is much better for them than somebody who has "chillout" playing on their echo 24/7.
> The program, according to Pelly’s reporting in Harper’s Magazine, is designed to embed low-cost, royalty-free tracks into Spotify’s most popular mood- and activity-based playlists. Produced by a network of “ghost artists” operating under pseudonyms, the tracks are commissioned with the intent to reduce the company’s royalty payouts to artists, per Pelly.
I'm not saying they are doing it now, but what's stopping them from generating their own tracks? What's to stop them from creating some bullshit company to generate AI slop and then licensing music from themselves at fractions of what they'd pay a real artist just to keep up the illusion so that real artists don't leave their platform?
If a corporation can do something that will make them more money than they'd make not doing it you should expect them to do the profitable thing. Corporations don't care about ethics or even the law. Maximizing shareholder value is their purpose. They exist only to take from the many and give to the few. It's not a conspiracy theory to assume that they'll be doing exactly what they are designed to do.
Yet another person who plays the bogeyman card of "conspiracy theory" when what is described is garden variety corruption, only takes a trivial amount of secret coordination in a group smaller than your average terrorist cell, and could probably even be defended as legal with a small legal team (Spotify probably has a big one).
There are a billion ways you could cash in on this. A dead easy one is "music written for hire by a company you own".
Even if Spotify is not doing the slightest thing like this, suggesting that they might is not a conspiracy theory. Quit trying to tar every proposed view of the world you disagree with with that label. You're just making it easier for the actual grand conspiracy theorists.
It's not really a conspiracy theory. YouTube users can use royalty-free music, it stands to reason Spotify would have the same (potentially internally) to decrease costs.
"Why pay royalties if it's just going to be BGM for a massage parlor?" could be their reasoning.
After an album ends Spotify keeps playing some related music. It's expected to include some tracks that are new to you. Then suddenly you notice "artists" you've never heard of with empty descriptions and "albums" from 2025 only.
This. Lazy/mindless consumption without any discernment has been leading to various rabbit holes for quite a while. Ever saw youtube content which algorithm brings toddlers to if left alone with a device?
I switched to Bandcamp a while back because I was sick of Spotify playing the same 100 songs forever. It feels like they have about 2 songs for every artist that they will actually play in any generated playlist.
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.
Spotify failed and continues to fail to verify the provenance of the music on their platform. If they have hundreds of millions of dollars to sign podcasters to exclusive deals then they certainly have the resources to build a Report feature and staff people to respond to it. Unfortunately their report submission system will only allow this class of problem if you can verify that you're the copyright holder. This therefore means (unless I'm missing something) that it's easier to submit fraudulent music than it is to take it down. Do not shift blame here. Spotify is actively complicit in this.
And, by the way, card transaction fees exist to cover the exact case you're talking about. Card companies make you whole in the case of fraud.
>It's like being mad at your bank that somebody stole your credit card on the subway and made purchases with it, and then your bank is like "oh, sorry man, we can't do anything about that, guess they have your card forever now"
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.
Of course I do. But what gives me joy with art is that it's a communication from one person to another. It's not about pretty sounds (or pictures, or whatever the medium is). If that communication isn't there, then the art has no real value to me regardless of how pretty it is.
If I think I'm talking with a person and it turns out that I'm talking with a machine, I've been duped and will likely be angry about it.
Another way to think about it is that when it comes to art, "the ends justify the means" doesn't really work because the whole point is more the means than the ends.
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.
> Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument.
This is cliche. Most celebrated artists in the electronic music world can play several instruments, if not expertly, than at least with enough familiarity to understand the nuances of musical performance.
Electronic musicians are more akin to composers and probably have more in common with mathematicians and programmers in the way that they practice their craft, whereas musical performers probably have more in common with athletes in the way that they practice their craft.
Electronic music is also very closely related to computer animation. Animated film technology is much more advanced, but a lot of techniques are similar.
You also need to understand how instruments make sound at an engineering level if you want to make timbre-perfect synthesizers which sound like said instrument, for instance
>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?
Personally, I don't buy this "AI models are learning just like we do." It's an appeal to ignorance. Just because we don't fully understand how a human brain learns, one can't claim it's the same as a statistical model of ordered tokens.
But even if it were true, I'm alright with drawing a line between AI learning and human learning. The law and social conventions are for humans. I want the ability to learn from others and produce original works that show influences. If this right is allowed to all humans, there is a chance one learn from and outperform me. That would suck for me, but I can accept it because it came from a universal human right I also enjoy. But an AI model doesn't have human rights. For models, the law and social conventions should still favor humans. The impact on the creative community and future creative endeavors should be balanced against the people who create and use the models.
I don't know how to do that with LLMs in a way that doesn't prevent the development of these amazing models. Maybe the government should distribute a portion of the revenue generated by the models amongst all citizens, to reflect how each model's value came from the written works of those citizens.
> If this right is allowed to all humans, there is a chance one learn from and outperform me. That would suck for me,
This is a rather sad take. If someone learned from my art or music and did something new and more popular, I would be happy! I had influence, I mattered. That new more popular work takes nothing away from my previous work. In fact, when I do science I'm doing it explicitly for this reason, to build on.
For me, creating music is not about "being the best" or "making more money than some other artist." It's about telling the stories I want to tell. An AI would not tell my stories, ever. It might produce things that somewhat similar, but it won't tell a human story, just a shallow imitation.
On the flip side, AI can be immensely useful. For example, stemming means that DJs or visualizer applications can do more with music. Perhaps AI can be used to create interesting new effects, or interesting new instruments or sounds. It can give ideas and help with inspiration.
I honestly have a hard time seeing AI actually driving musicians out of business because it can't tell a story. And it can't do that because it hasn't lived a life. Yes, I can see it producing low quality ad-jingles or low quality filler tracks like you see in spotify, so some people will be impacted. But we're long past time for some form of universal basic income to deal with this. It's not just artists that need a basic income at this point.
> 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.
Neither of those things are really true, though. They made it possible to make poor music without learning those things, I suppose, but not make good music.
> Banning the new types of art
Nobody is seriously talking about banning AI generated music. What you're seeing is a platform deciding that AI generated music isn't something that platform is into. There are a lot of different platforms out there.
> 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.
I guess the difference is proprietary code is mostly not used for training. It's going to be trained on code in the public. It's the inverse for music, where it's being trained on commercial work, not work that has been licensed freely.
> 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.
Not necessarily apples-to-apples here. Full songs generated from AI prompts don't crash like a computer program would. You could simply upload the garbage to Spotify and reap the rewards until it got removed (if it even does).
Some of the worst (best?) AI "artists" on Spotify have millions of views. It's tragic what it says about us. That most of us not only can't tell, but actually prefer this kind of uni-tone, blase, on-the-nose, emotionally manipulative crap.
There's music and there's music. When I want to listen to Music then I pick an artist and album manually. But 99% of the time, I just need something to play in the background when I'm working or cooking or cleaning - then it just has to sound pleasant, the value of that for me is exactly zero. Some of the best mixes I find for that are ai generated because they have a uniform pleasant sound for a long time, without anyone trying to impart anything on them.
> 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?
For me, one key difference is that I can cite my stylistic influences and things I tried, while (to my knowledge) commercial musical generation models specifically avoid doing that, and most don't provide chord/lead sheets either -- I would find it genuinely sad to talk to a musician about their arrangement/composition choices, only to find they couldn't
> I would find it genuinely sad to talk to a musician about their arrangement/composition choices, only to find they couldn't
So much of music composition is what "feels right" and is instinctual. Artists aren't consciously aware of probably most of their influences. They can cite some of the most obvious ones, but the creative process is melding a thousand different vibes and sounds and sequences you've heard before, internalized, and joined into something new, in a way only your particular brain could.
Let music historians work on trying to cite and trace influences. That's not something artists need to worry about.
> 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?
But the parent poster is, presumably, human! Humans have the right to take inspiration like that from other humans (or machines)! Why do we seem so keen on granting machines the right to take from us? Are we not supposed to be their masters?
> 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.
I didn't even think about the analogy to sampling (and the prior controversy) but that is an even better analogy. Ultimately, the different between what's creative re-use and what's a ripoff is a matter of how skillfully it's done and there's a lot of controversy in the middle!
That's fine until, for example and by analogy, you go to the store to buy beer, and you don't particularly care for IPA, but IPAs have crowded out half the beers that used to be there including the one you used to sit back and enjoy.
How does the analogy work with music though? Are you saying that because there is now over-produced pop there is now less rock, jazz or whatever you prefer? If so, is that actually true and verifiable by numbers?
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.
I hear you and feel you on this being a hard (hardest) pill to swallow, and I think I have a helpful phrase. It helped me quite a bit so I hope it helps you:
'For the love of the game.'
When you don't make any money and no one comes to your shows; when the booking emails go unanswered and the likes on soundcloud remain <10, just remember why you picked up the instrument in the first place. For the love of the game.
> The thing is, you aren't entitled to distribution.
That applies to people spamming AI slop too.
People are right to complain about spammers.
Platforms are right to try to stop spam, even though everyone knows that spam is a problem that is never going be solved.
> Most musicians who make it these days work really hard at doing live shows, or growing a following on tiktok.
Live shows, by their nature, have almost zero reach. A performance for 40 people takes place once in a single location at a specific time and then it's over. You're either there when it happens or you missed it. A song on youtube or bandcamp can be heard by millions quickly over a few weeks or gradually over years. Social media was a massive boon for musicians.
Sadly, it will get substantially harder to grow a following on tiktok or any other social media platform if those platforms are flooded with AI generated garbage. Real artists will be harder to find. Anyone doing anything new will be drowned out by AI regurgitating everything old. When creative people can't succeed, the creativity they'd inspire in others is lost and everything stagnates.
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.
You're not wrong, but the need to please the user is still paramount, otherwise they'll just do something else. This is why TikTok is eating everyone's lunch.
I don't agree with this to answer the question you original I do think users are consuming things they don't actually enjoy. The goal isn't to please the user, the goal is to not bore the user. If you talk to people I'm sure you'll find a lot of the music they listened isn't "enjoyed" so much as it is inoffensive background noise.
I see this a lot, actually. People put things on in the background, for instance, and don't really care if they like it or not (as long as they don't hate it). They just want noise. Or people just scrolling through their feeds without genuinely liking much in them.
In the old days, this was also how the majority of television was watched. People watched TV out of habit, and frequently watched things they didn't like because choices were limited and often there was nothing they actually like on. Thus all the complaints in the day about how "there's nothing on TV".
People are willing to sacrifice quite a lot of real enjoyment for convenience.
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.
Wasn't it Picasso that said "good artist borrow, great artists steal?"
I've never heard an artist confident in their own ability complain about this because they're not threatened by other competent human artists knocking them off never mind an AI that's even worse at it.
AI not going to out-compete anyone on volume by flooding the marketplace because switching costs are effectively zero. Clever artists can probably find a way to grease controversy and marketing out of finding cases where they are knocked off, taking it as a compliment, and juicing it for marketing.
But I liked the Picasso quote when I was younger and earlier on in my journey as a musician because it reminded me to be humble and resist the desire to get possessive -- if what I was onto was really my own, people would like it and others could try to knock it off and fail. That is a lesson that has always served me very well.
I'm starting to think more and more in my older age that being 'great' isn't a good thing. I might actually prefer being good. We'll see how that thought plays out though; give me a couple more years
AI takes all of that old school idm and electronic music and repackages it without a human story to tell, ripping off actual musicians in the process. AI didn’t magically ‘make old IDM its own.’ It scraped decades of artists’ work, stripped out the context and intent, and reassembled the surface features. There’s no human arc, no lived constraint, no risk and no culture.
What’s being repackaged isn’t a new instrument, it’s other people’s careers. I’m not sure what part of that is supposed to be amusing.
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.
Musicians who are being threatened by AI impersonating them, flooding the market with music like theirs, and otherwise actually harmed by this would disagree with you. Benn Jordan speaks at length about it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVXfcIb3OKo
You're right, but for EDM this was pretty much already the case. The scene survives in large part thanks to DJs who wade through countless mediocre tracks looking for the few hidden gems to deploy at the right moment. I think AI means that DJs will become much more important in all genres.
> As a new artist you have to compete against 60+ years of music history
Kinda, sorta. Good music is reflective of the society and era it was produced in and that matters. I regularly listen to music, from all over the world, that was composed (and some, recorded) 100+ years ago, music that was recorded 50+ years ago, and music that was recorded last month. None of them are a substitute for the other because each has a unique voice expressing things that were unique about the time and place they were made in.
So, in a sense, they aren't in competition with each other. But also, there are only so many hours in a day and there isn't enough time in your life to listen to all the worthy music that humans have made. Hard choices are necessary. In that sense, they are in competition with each other.
How many engineers are using ai-generated software libraries at this point? This could be all over github, but the software mostly sucks (because the AI doesn’t do architecture and real engineering, that has to be input into it right now). Increasing the volume of production doesn’t necessarily lead to the abandonment of the “good stuff”. You still have to compose the music and write the lyrics, the AI is not sophisticated enough to competently do that right now
> 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".
This is not a super well thought out position, but I've been leaning towards really disliking AI art in general (without having an opinion on any strong policy action yet).
First, art is, I think, one of the most enjoyable activities we have. One evidence is a lot of people forego higher salaries to choose an art job (although being a job carries additional responsibilities and some inconveniences compared to doing it as a hobby). It's a shame to see it diminished, when I believe we should be diverting efforts to automate other stuff.
Second, most AI art I've seen has been quite substandard compared to human art. We still don't know very well what human emotions are, the origin of sentience and qualia, etc.. But I think humans still lead here in having and probably understanding emotions. While for other tasks most implementation detail is irrelevant (e.g. in code, that it works tends to be most important, vs. minute choices in style), in art every detail is particularly relevant. Knowing this, it bothers me usually when I see this art that it doesn't carry the same knowledge of context and nuance a human would have.
Third, There's also the effect of making me question whether each piece of artwork was made by a human or AI, that didn't exist before. It does carry a bit of a magical feeling I think knowing a real person made every piece of artwork prior to 2018 or so (I think algorithmic art[1] is fine in this regard, because it tends to be more clearly algorithmic, and the involvement of the artist in coding is significant), that is now gone or at risk. Even the thought of imagining say their work day or what they had for lunch or talked to coworkers or friends is pleasant to me (at the risk of romanticizing it too much).
I suppose if AI art actually understood human nature, and specially the specific context of each art piece, better than us some of my arguments might be diminished. But the negatives so far seem to outweigh the positives, and I would like to e.g. give preference to content that doesn't use AI art.
(It is, admittedly, also the case that we lost a similar amount of craftsmanship when the industrial revolution happened, and in return we were able to support a larger population, and greater material conditions for most people. Every object now isn't carefully handcrafted. I think it's different because well, now material conditions are relatively abundant, and second there's no such insatiable, significant and irreplaceable demand for art as there were to common industrialized objects (take shoes for example), at least not to the same extent or vital significance. That is, the ability to have a shoe at all far outweighs it being carefully handcrafted, I believe; while experiencing a poorly made AI movie or artwork might be actually worse than none at all (or simply an older human made movie), and it also gets more cumbersome to evaluate for ourselves whether AI was employed or not. Also, while say shoes only last a limited time and need to be constantly produced, good artwork can last indefinitely (using digital storage), and even if you account for cultural change and relevance, can still last a really long time, motivating investing more into it.)
I'm quite sure that if we're still around in 500 or so years, we'll still be enjoying say Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh (probably as a digital reproduction). Current AI art will probably be largely discarded, so seems largely an unwise investment. Actually this kind of applies to code as well. It seems plausible Linux could still be used in 500 years from now (see how we still value finding Unix v4 50 years after), or at least of some interest. Those durable intellectual goods don't seem like wise places to invest anything but the best of us :) (at in the cases it's not disposable)
The arguments above also don't seem to apply say in concept stages, or say for bland corporate diagrams that will be disposed of in 1 day, and which a huge quantity is needed. I think the main criteria I would evaluate is (1) Was it enjoyable to produce (for the artist(s))?; (2) Will it have a significant (artistic) impact on who is experiencing it?; (3) Will it last a long time?
[1] W.r.t. algorithmic art (and digital in general) (take bytebeat[2] for example), which is a field I really love, I am not any kind of absolutist about it. I know there tends to be extremely more degrees of freedom for human expression in an art piece than in an algorithmic piece, so I see it more as a complement and not a substitute for more conventional art. I'd never give up ever hearing human musician player music for bytebeat, just bytebeat is a lovely experimental other dimension of expression. Writing a prompt seems a too few degrees of freedom and context, and too much of an uniform context that is less rich than humans can provide.
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.
> generative AI catch on not by just imitating other instruments,
but generative AI didn’t catch on by "imitating instruments." It caught on by imitating artists, which streaming platforms and record labels then repackage and outsell you with. false analogy.
This argument won't get you anywhere because "imitating artists" and "outselling artists" aren't actually the same thing.
i.e. complaining about training on copyrighted material and getting it banned is not sufficient to prevent creating a model that can create music that outsells you. Because training isn't about copying the training material, it's just a way to find the Platonic latent space of music, and you can get there other ways.
Perhaps that's because there's an enormous difference between fine art and computer programs.
Also, there's quite a lot of pushback against AI-generated code, but also because unlike music, normal people have no interest in and aren't aware of the code.
I won't merge anything AI generated in any of my FOSS projects, unless I'm successfully deceived.
In the first place, I do not regard a copyright notice and license on AI generated code to be valid in my eyes, so on those grounds alone, I cannot use it any more than I could merge a piece of proprietary, leaked source code.
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?
Devs are quite used to using others peoples work for free via packages, frameworks and entire operating systems and IDE’s. It’s just part of the culture.
Music has its history in IP, royalties, and most things need to be paid for in the creation of music or art itself.
It’s going to be much easier for devs to accept AI when remixing code is such a huge part of the culture already. The expectation in the arts is entirely different.
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.
AI music from suno sounds indistinguishable to non-ai generated music to me.
In terms of how well it works, the quality of AI music is far better than art or code. In art there are noticeble glitches like multiple fingers. For code, it can call non existent functions, not do what it is supposed to do, or have security issues or memory leaks. From what I can tell, there is no such deal breaker for AI music.
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?
I feel like part of the difference is how art vs code is viewed. You could make the argument code is art, though most don't have that stance. Visual art and music tend to be made by a few people, there is ego involved, you care who the artist is. Code tends to be made by shops and consumers don't know who the coders are. Programmers are already faceless.
I think it's also about money. Places code and code samples are stored tend to be large companies that are in tech and on the AI hype wagon. Bandcamp is not one of those places.
There's one popular platform that requires disclosing whether and how AI was used (Steam), and if you search anything about it, all you can find is like a sea of articles opposing it.
Music is art, code is engineering. "Hackers and painters"[1] was always wishful fluff, unfortunately.
When it comes to code, I don't think anyone cares how the sausage is made, and only very rarely do people care by whom. The only question is "does it work well?"
Art is totally different. Provenance is much more important - sometimes essential. David is a beautiful work, but you could 3d print or cast a replica of "David". No one would pretend that the copy is the same as the original though - even if they're indistinguishable to the untrained eye - because one was painstakingly hand sculpted and the others were cheaply produced. This sense of provenance is the property that NFTs were (unsuccessfully) trying to capture.
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.
There is an AI plugin for krita that lets you define regions, selection bounds, sub-prompts, control nodes, and lots more control over a given image generation model than standard Automattic or comfyUI workflows...down to 'put an arm wearing armor here' for example in my RPG NPC token writing.
It has full image generation mode, it has an animation mode, it has a live mode where you can draw a blob of images and it will refine it 2-50 steps only in that area.
So you are no longer doing per line stroke and saved brush settings, but you are still painting and composing an image yourself, down to a pixel by pixel rate. It's just that the tool it gives is WAY more compute intensive, the AI is sort of rendering a given part of a drawing as you specify as many times as you need.
How much of that workflow is just prompting a one-shot image, vs photoshopping +++ an image together until it meets your exact specifications?
No, the final image cannot be copyrighted under current US law in 2026, but for use in private settings like tabletop RPGs...my production values have gone way up and I didn't need to get a MFA degree in The old Masters drawing or open a drawing studio to get those images.
> 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.).
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.
People don't listen to music because it sounds good, most music sounds downright awful, they listen to it for the human stories and connection. 99% of the music I listen
Nobody listens to techno - Eminem
AI needs to make music that sells. The same way Scorsese and Brando sell the Godfather. until it can do that literally nobody will care.
>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.
> I'm a musician, but am also pretty amused by this anti ai wave.
Let me guess: you're an amateur musician. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it makes it much easier to be amused about this topic.
> There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own.
What are you talking about? Which "tech kit" got demonized by whom? Of course, there were always controversies around techniques like sampling or whatever, or conservatives in the UK demonizing rave culture, but otherwise, I have no idea what you're referring to.
There was no "demonization" about these things even remotely comparable to what we are witnessing now w.r.t. AI generated music (and I'm old enough to remember most of these things). Of course there was intense dislike from certain groups representing the "old-school" around new styles of music and new techniques. However, at the same time, you also had the "new-wave" which loved it and made it successful. For instance, a ton of people hated Disco music, at the same time, you had a ton of people who genuinely loved it. Same with practically any kind of electronic music. This simply does not exist with GenAI music. People listen to GenAI music because they either don't care, or don't know, not because they genuinely prefer it. There's absolutely nothing new about GenAI music that would make it exciting.
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.
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!)
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).
We've been using software to fix grammar for a long time, and AI does it also. The question is valid: if I get an LLM to fix a few grammar errors in my own writing, am I ripping anyone off? We can't just dismiss the question just because grammar fixing is something we did without machine-learning AI trained on vast numbers of other people's texts.
The output does depend on training works, even if you are just fixing grammar errors. But the document is obviously a derivative of your own writing and almost nothing else. A grammatic concept learned from vast numbers of worsk is probably not a copyright infringment.
Similarly, a part extraction concept learned from training sets such as pairs of mixed and unmixed music, and then applied to someone's own music to do accurate part extraction, does not seem like an infringing use. All features of the result are identifiable as coming from the original mixed audio; you cannot identify infringing passages in it added by the AI --- and if such a thing happened, it would be an unwanted artifact leading us to re-do the part extraction in some other way to avoid it.
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.
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).
One is trained with a set of pairs which match words with images. Vast numbers of images tagged with words.
The other is trained on a set of photographs of exactly the same scene from the same vantage point, but one in daylight and the other at night. Suppose all these images are copyrighted and used without permissions.
With the one AI, we can do word-to-image to generate an image. Clearly, that is a derived work of the training set of images; it's just interpolating among them based on the word assocations.
With the other AI, we can take a photograph which we took ourselves in daylight, and generate a night version of the same one. This is not clearly infringing on the training set, even though that output depends on it. We used the set without permission to have the machine extract and learn the concept of diurnal vs. nocturnal appearance of scenes, based on which it is kind of "reimagining" our daytime image as a night time one.
The question of whether AI is stealing material depends exactly on what the training pathway is; what it is that it is learning from the data. Is it learning to just crib, and interpolate, or to glean some general concept that is not protected by copyright: like separating mixed audio into tracks, changing day to night, or whatever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 it's either a few years old or I'm buying it at the merch table the artist has at a live performance.
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'm a moderately frequent user of Suno and have encountered some unusual AI-generated effects that I've not come across before in more traditionally synthesized music.
One is when it attempts to generate vocals without a lyrics prompt. It's gibberish but just on the edge of comprehensibility. Sometimes it'll be entirely spoken word with no accompaniment. Very uncanny.
Another is transitioning between vocals and instrument in the same melody line. Like a humanesque voice holding a steady note at the end of a verse which seamlessly transitions into a saxophone sound and proceeds into a solo. Or vice versa, an instrumental morphing into a voice.
Finally is when the generation goes wrong and it starts spitting out absolute nonsensical sounds with no rhythm or melody, in a uniquely fragmented way I can't really describe. It feels like seeing the musical matrix, the inner thoughts of the AI.
Now I've written all that out and had a think about it, I'm tempted to sample these oddities and try to make something more structured out of them.
What I'm hoping for is a (good) musician to take a small music model, train it on a selection of their influences and existing music and then add on a prompt tracklist. Something like a NN album that the fan can add their own prompts and get new music in the style the artist meant for that album.
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.
I don't know if this really counts as art but there are existing AI music that are at least though provoking funny like https://kommandointernet.bandcamp.com/
It is German but there is really funny remixes combining Mallorca Party music (a German music genre of its own) with anti fascist themes. They manage to make fun of both without being IMHO totally alienating both subcultures, which could count as art. IMHO such things would not really be possible without AI. Would be really disappointed if this disappeared from BC.
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.
This is dumb. The solution for all music platforms should be to add a label for AI-generated tracks or artists so users clearly can disambiguate. It's frivolous to prevent someone from enjoying a piece of art whether AI or human. Furthermore, the line is blurred between what constitutes human vs AI development of music. Most producers today use pre-packaged samples, sequencers, and tracks to generate derivatives. Sure, they might manually have to mess around with Ableton to do so, but the line is already blurred.
I worry that as technologists we are over indexing on accusing things of being AI. I worry about policies like this where they will remove suspected AI content without investigation.
Case in point, the other day I made a comment on reddit. I spent about 10 minutes writing it. I used proper grammar, bullet points, clean formatting, and em dashes, as I've been doing for many years.
I immediately got downvoted and sent multiple PMs about "not posting AI slop".
I didn't use AI at all to write that comment. It just looked like AI because it was well formed and researched. So am I supposed to add errors just to make it look "human"? But also, how do I even prove I wrote it without AI?
I've been micro-sampling AI "covers" or "re-imaginations in a new genre" of certain pieces of music.
For making house/4x4 type music, it's actually pretty fun. Once you chop something and repitch it enough, no algorithm can pick up on what song it is you are sampling if the AI track is way off from the original piece.
No way would I actually try to monetize it, though.
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.
>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.
Luckily there are hundreds of MIDI editor DAWs available. Open the piano roll, and write down the music note by note. Surely, it's not that hard if you can hear it in your head.
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.
That's how I feel about it too. I play piano well enough to get my ideas out and have used synthesizers and digital audio workstation software for years. I can sit down and carefully craft the music I have in my mind if I want to. Though I don't often have the time or the mental space to do so.
Or, I can make a barebones recording of musical ideas - of melodies, harmonies and the overall song structure - then upload it to Suno and inspire its robotic session musicians to play it in the style I ask. Quicker to make, faster to iterate upon, and can even be used as the basis for resynthesizing the track using more traditional methods.
Half-finished tracks, ideas that were only in my mind or existed only as badly recorded piano-bashed drafts, now (almost) fully fleshed out. It's immensely satisfying, and has made me even more creative as I use this tool to understand and explore musical styles I'm less familiar with.
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.
> 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?
i say this without malice (more as an encouragement to you to do whatever you like): nobody cares about your individual consumption choices. if you want to consume content from a machine that produces the thing you want to consume, that in and of itself has no impact on anyone but you. but you might be missing out on good music (either by someone else, or by your own hand) and ultimately, i wonder if you will value the end product of a musical vending machine.
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.
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.
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.
How would this be a vocal minority on a website like Bandcamp, whose whole mission statement is to let people support their favorite artists directly?
I'm sure there genuinely are lots of people out there who would enjoy AI-generated music, but I very much doubt there's a huge crowd of them on Bandcamp, if for no reason other than ideological.
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.
A: This post is part of an eternal debate about art: Do we appreciate the finished work, or the artist? This post is firmly in the latter camp. There are also solid arguments for the other extreme.
B: Having spent some time trying to make songs with Suno, I can assure you it takes more skills than I have...
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 saying, 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.
---
To me, the reason for art is feeling, and the problem is that most things don't really provide feeling - if they do, it is a cheap and one-dimensional feeling. Almost all art and music and literature (and food, wine, architecture, poetry, photography, theatre, dance) that people consume today is _good enough_. It is correct, it satisfies. You listen to some hours of good-enough music on Spotify and the music is all correct and you come across "Chill77"'s AI-generated Papaoutai cover and you think that it is good. After all, it seems to have fooled a number of genuine Stromae fans. But the real function of art is not to satisfy. It is to reduce you to tears or silence or lust or anger or some beautiful cocktail of feeling. Of course, in the right context, with enough supporting factors, anything can produce emotion, but the best art needs little or nothing to make you feel. Bad art and good art are all around us, but the great is rare. That rarity is why people enjoy AI art: they forget the last time they felt, the AI is good, and that is enough.
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.
I'm a professional artist. I don't use AI as it's just not there yet.
But I don't consider using AI all that different to using a camera. A photographer still has plenty of work to do with composition and framing, the lighting, the subject mater, even timing. I still consider a photographer an artist.
I think an AI artist will have a lot to consider as well. To distinguish themselves from other AI artists.
Update: When I say the AI tools are not there yet, its precisely because I can't seem to get the AI to take feedback or instructions. I can't adjust the lighting to create the mood I want, I can't tweak the framing.
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.
Why would quality matter, You make a image from Google AI and its instantly marked as Synth ID. It can be easily detected and thrown out if you want to keep the site AI free.
We would need AI free places now that AI is so easy and cheap to produce.
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.'
It really depends on the style, yes. You could probably slip one into any modern pop/dance/club/EDM album and no one would know as long as the vocals sounds like the performer. For styles which are very unique with that sort of imperfect human touch that makes music so enjoyable, it would likely be obvious, at least at the moment.
> 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
A little shocked. The biggest issue with music streaming right now is, imo, discovery. Algorithmic discovery is cute, but there’s a perverse incentive for companies who provide discovery services (ie Spotify) to funnel users to artists that cost less (ie AI generated in-house).
There’s also the fact that flooding the market with AI music slop _also_ makes discovery even harder.
Tried-and-true methods for discovery over the past decades are network effects (artists featuring and collaborating), and niche label A&R. However, Spotify has no interest, or incentive, to allow users to explore these avenues for discovery.
So, kudos to Bandcamp. But with better discovery this wouldn’t be necessary.
Finally, anecdotally, as someone in the top percentile of listeners for several niche genres on Spotify, I’ve yet to hear AI generated music that isn’t crap. Whenever it gets recommended to me by Spotify I reach for my phone, see that I don’t recognize the artist, and then see that they’re self-published on Spotify with a few hundred listeners. I guess if you don’t have any taste you might not notice, but it’s painfully obvious for anyone who is familiar enough to recognize themes, callbacks, and instrumentation within a genre.
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.
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 think we need to start distinguishing between art-music and utilitarian-music.
Art-music is made by humans as a way of expressing yourself and making human connections.
Utilitarian-music can be made by humans or machines and is there to serve a purpose. Background music for the elevator or while you’re on hold. An ambient soundscape that you play in an airport terminal. It’s not meant to move people, it’s just there to fill silence.
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.
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!
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`.
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.
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. 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.
We don't have to agree, but the biggest problem I find with this take you're now bringing is that it leads to an infinite regress, you can forever expand your knowledge about the origin of something. Then, not to mention, that often we construct from evidence which is already an interpretation with data loss.
The Mona Lisa example actually supports both our positions in my opinion: someone can have a profound experience of it knowing nothing of Leonardo, while someone else has a different profound experience knowing his biography. Neither experience is 'false', they're just different modes of engagement with the same work. Personally, I have even experienced the inverse throughout my life.
Growing up not speaking English, and being flooded with American culture through radio, I was deeply moved by lots and lots of music made by foreigners that sounded like absolute gibberish to me. Later in life, after learning about the meaning of certain songs, I, unfortunately, lost some of my appreciation for it. Some may call that alienation, but to me it was a form of naivety of a child that enjoyed just sound in its pure form without it being tainted by any derived or supplied meaning from its creator that was attached to it through accompanied lyrics.
But then do we not agree, for if your experience of the music has changed upon learning the meaning of the songs, then it was true knowledge of the meaning of the piece which in the end determined your appreciation for it. And that our experience is not a fixed thing at one moment in time, but can re-occur and is in flux and subject to change in its quality based on knowledge gained. So from this you cannot return to the naivety of a child unless you reject from your mind the notion that knowledge determines quality and that the meaning supplied from its makers influences our experience of it.
Who is more correct, the child or the adult? If you suggest the child, then what do you say to the adult who objects on the grounds of the meaning of the sounds uttered? The adult would say that though the sounds are pleasant to the ear, they are not good to the mind. Thus, rather than affirming the child's vision, they would reject the pleasant sounds with poor meaning in favor of higher quality ones which are as equal in their harmonic value as with the greater quality in their meaning.
As for the infinite regress, that only proves the value of knowledge all the greater, for if we can expand our knowledge on the origins of something continually, so too can our appreciate of the thing grow in proportion. This only leads to a richer and deeper appreciation for life. In this way I can reread or rewatch a show in time and see more and know more than in my first experience, and so grows my appreciation for the details that I missed the first time. And this may only occur if the subject at hand is of good quality in the first place, for else when we descend further into the details and meaning we would be dissapointed at its lack. But that which is rich in meaning lacks none and may reveal itself new with every experience. This is why knowledge of the good is required, and why AI and lackluster artists may only produce pleasant sounds.
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.
Good decision. Bandcamp makes money from people who consciously avoided the streaming shitfest in favor of directly supporting the artists. Hardly surprising that their have a strong aversion to AI slop.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
AI-generated music is novel, but like images and videos, I think of it almost exclusively as a novelty. I haven't heard any AI-generated music that I like in a real way. Just stuff that sounds like something I like.
The real value AI has for music is discovery. I've been using Gemini and ChatGPT to build playlists based on music I already like, and discovering lots of fun new tracks. I can be really specific about what kind of music I like and don't like. I can show it a playlist I already made, and ask it to make one like it, but with completely different artists. It's insanely useful!
But these kinds of tools would just expand how many different artists Spotify has to pay from my streaming, and that doesn't do the same thing as shoving cheap mass-produced slop down our throats, so it isn't surprising what they offer us.
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.
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.
I just wanted to say, thanks for saying this. I actually have been writing music and using Distrokid to publish to the normal streaming services (Spotify/Apple Music) and your comment actually pushed me to sign up for and put music on Bandcamp.
In case you'd like to take a look, shameless self promotion: https://aaronholbrook.bandcamp.com/music
I have to go through my back catalog, and add all my music, but I appreciate your perspective and for wanting to support artists!
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.
[1] https://github.com/meeb/bandcampsync
[2] https://github.com/subdavis/bandcamp-sync-flask
What's the navidrome pitch?
You stream the music you own, it uses the subsonic protocol/API, and so is compatible with countless clients, letting your enjoy your lossless music on fancy hardware at home or cached on your mobile device when on the go.
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.
Don’t miss Spotify one bit.
Yes. But shhhhh about cds, don’t want people to realise…
Also the price of decent (Sony hifi grade, not ES) CD players used is great too.
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?
> all about the DAC, no?
Yes, it is (unless the CD player is so bad that it can't do adequate error correction). What I do is rip the CD to my music server, which is where I listen to the music from. Then the quality of the CD player isn't important, as long as it works correctly.
I did just realize after posting maybe touting how affordable CDs have become is maybe not the best idea.
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.
Oh! I know this one! You're thinking of Jeffrey Lewis & The Voltage's LPs from 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3urXygZXb74'
The people who really want to stop paying for streaming are going to turn to piracy, don't worry. Physical media will still be accessible for people who are willing to pay with space instead of money.
:'D
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.
There are artists that Spotify has different deals with. Spotify promotes their music in their playlists, but the artists get a much smaller cut of the profits in exchange. Win-win for everybody.
This only happens in genres where most listeners don't care about the artists they're listening to, think "chillout", "focus" or "easy listening." That kind of music is a commodity, Taylor Swift (or Metallica or Mozzart or whatever) is not. This has been proven.
My hypothesis is that those genres would otherwise lose Spotify the most money, as people often play that kind of music and never turn it off. Because Spotify pays per listen, the user who attentively listens to their favorite artist a few times a week is much better for them than somebody who has "chillout" playing on their echo 24/7.
> There are artists that Spotify has different deals with.
Spotify doesn't have deals with artists because Spotify doesn't have direct contract with artists. Only with distributors.
> My hypothesis is that those genres would otherwise lose Spotify the most money,
How would they "lose Spotify money", and how is this different from top artists on Spotify?
Spotify hires musicians to churn out content that fits certain criteria. see https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
Spotify doesn't hire any artists because if it did, major labels would immediately pull their contracts.
No one actually understands what's written in this article, including the authors themselves.
Also note how you didn't provide a single track that Spotify allegedly pays no royalties for.
> The program, according to Pelly’s reporting in Harper’s Magazine, is designed to embed low-cost, royalty-free tracks into Spotify’s most popular mood- and activity-based playlists. Produced by a network of “ghost artists” operating under pseudonyms, the tracks are commissioned with the intent to reduce the company’s royalty payouts to artists, per Pelly.
https://edm.com/news/spotify-using-ghost-artists-minimize-ro...
Internally, they refer to it as “perfect fit content” (pfc).
It used to just be stuff like white noise and rain sounds, but it has expanded to essentially be a modern Muzak replacement.
For situations when people don really want “music” and just need “contextually appropriate aesthetically pleasing sound”
That makes all the sense in the world to me. I'd call that an entirely legitimate use for AI generated music.
I'm not saying they are doing it now, but what's stopping them from generating their own tracks? What's to stop them from creating some bullshit company to generate AI slop and then licensing music from themselves at fractions of what they'd pay a real artist just to keep up the illusion so that real artists don't leave their platform?
If a corporation can do something that will make them more money than they'd make not doing it you should expect them to do the profitable thing. Corporations don't care about ethics or even the law. Maximizing shareholder value is their purpose. They exist only to take from the many and give to the few. It's not a conspiracy theory to assume that they'll be doing exactly what they are designed to do.
Yet another person who plays the bogeyman card of "conspiracy theory" when what is described is garden variety corruption, only takes a trivial amount of secret coordination in a group smaller than your average terrorist cell, and could probably even be defended as legal with a small legal team (Spotify probably has a big one).
There are a billion ways you could cash in on this. A dead easy one is "music written for hire by a company you own".
Even if Spotify is not doing the slightest thing like this, suggesting that they might is not a conspiracy theory. Quit trying to tar every proposed view of the world you disagree with with that label. You're just making it easier for the actual grand conspiracy theorists.
It's not really a conspiracy theory. YouTube users can use royalty-free music, it stands to reason Spotify would have the same (potentially internally) to decrease costs.
"Why pay royalties if it's just going to be BGM for a massage parlor?" could be their reasoning.
After an album ends Spotify keeps playing some related music. It's expected to include some tracks that are new to you. Then suddenly you notice "artists" you've never heard of with empty descriptions and "albums" from 2025 only.
This. Lazy/mindless consumption without any discernment has been leading to various rabbit holes for quite a while. Ever saw youtube content which algorithm brings toddlers to if left alone with a device?
Autopilot in, autopilot out.
But still fuck this AI slop.
I switched to Bandcamp a while back because I was sick of Spotify playing the same 100 songs forever. It feels like they have about 2 songs for every artist that they will actually play in any generated playlist.
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.
This is not Spotify, it's Spotify fraudsters.
It's like being mad at your bank that somebody stole your credit card on the subway and made purchases with it.
Spotify failed and continues to fail to verify the provenance of the music on their platform. If they have hundreds of millions of dollars to sign podcasters to exclusive deals then they certainly have the resources to build a Report feature and staff people to respond to it. Unfortunately their report submission system will only allow this class of problem if you can verify that you're the copyright holder. This therefore means (unless I'm missing something) that it's easier to submit fraudulent music than it is to take it down. Do not shift blame here. Spotify is actively complicit in this.
And, by the way, card transaction fees exist to cover the exact case you're talking about. Card companies make you whole in the case of fraud.
>It's like being mad at your bank that somebody stole your credit card on the subway and made purchases with it, and then your bank is like "oh, sorry man, we can't do anything about that, guess they have your card forever now"
FTFY.
I miss what.cd, bandcamp almost a replacement
There's is a quite solid alternative to what.cd: https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html
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.
There's also Orpheus.network which is fantastic, gazelle based as well.
Same. I buy music from Bandcamp and Qobuz. I don't stream it though instead opting to sync my massive music collection through Syncthing
Absolutely! Bandcamp has really been phenomenal these past few years for me as well
If you came across a song and fell in love with it, only to find out later that it was generated by ai, would you stop loving the song?
Yes, I certainly would. I might even start hating the song, if that discovery left me feeling tricked.
That is such a bizarre opinion to have. Do you not enjoy art because it gives you joy?
Of course I do. But what gives me joy with art is that it's a communication from one person to another. It's not about pretty sounds (or pictures, or whatever the medium is). If that communication isn't there, then the art has no real value to me regardless of how pretty it is.
If I think I'm talking with a person and it turns out that I'm talking with a machine, I've been duped and will likely be angry about it.
Another way to think about it is that when it comes to art, "the ends justify the means" doesn't really work because the whole point is more the means than the ends.
Absolutely not. Reggae Wars is proof of this.
Now that's a sales pitch! You have my interest.
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.
> Electronic music made it so you didn’t have to learn to play an instrument.
This is cliche. Most celebrated artists in the electronic music world can play several instruments, if not expertly, than at least with enough familiarity to understand the nuances of musical performance.
Electronic musicians are more akin to composers and probably have more in common with mathematicians and programmers in the way that they practice their craft, whereas musical performers probably have more in common with athletes in the way that they practice their craft.
Electronic music is also very closely related to computer animation. Animated film technology is much more advanced, but a lot of techniques are similar.
You also need to understand how instruments make sound at an engineering level if you want to make timbre-perfect synthesizers which sound like said instrument, for instance
>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?
Personally, I don't buy this "AI models are learning just like we do." It's an appeal to ignorance. Just because we don't fully understand how a human brain learns, one can't claim it's the same as a statistical model of ordered tokens.
But even if it were true, I'm alright with drawing a line between AI learning and human learning. The law and social conventions are for humans. I want the ability to learn from others and produce original works that show influences. If this right is allowed to all humans, there is a chance one learn from and outperform me. That would suck for me, but I can accept it because it came from a universal human right I also enjoy. But an AI model doesn't have human rights. For models, the law and social conventions should still favor humans. The impact on the creative community and future creative endeavors should be balanced against the people who create and use the models.
I don't know how to do that with LLMs in a way that doesn't prevent the development of these amazing models. Maybe the government should distribute a portion of the revenue generated by the models amongst all citizens, to reflect how each model's value came from the written works of those citizens.
> If this right is allowed to all humans, there is a chance one learn from and outperform me. That would suck for me,
This is a rather sad take. If someone learned from my art or music and did something new and more popular, I would be happy! I had influence, I mattered. That new more popular work takes nothing away from my previous work. In fact, when I do science I'm doing it explicitly for this reason, to build on.
For me, creating music is not about "being the best" or "making more money than some other artist." It's about telling the stories I want to tell. An AI would not tell my stories, ever. It might produce things that somewhat similar, but it won't tell a human story, just a shallow imitation.
On the flip side, AI can be immensely useful. For example, stemming means that DJs or visualizer applications can do more with music. Perhaps AI can be used to create interesting new effects, or interesting new instruments or sounds. It can give ideas and help with inspiration.
I honestly have a hard time seeing AI actually driving musicians out of business because it can't tell a story. And it can't do that because it hasn't lived a life. Yes, I can see it producing low quality ad-jingles or low quality filler tracks like you see in spotify, so some people will be impacted. But we're long past time for some form of universal basic income to deal with this. It's not just artists that need a basic income at this point.
>The law and social conventions are for humans.
I don't know about that. America shows us that laws and social conventions are for corporations. Humans are just entities to extract profit from.
> 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.
Neither of those things are really true, though. They made it possible to make poor music without learning those things, I suppose, but not make good music.
> Banning the new types of art
Nobody is seriously talking about banning AI generated music. What you're seeing is a platform deciding that AI generated music isn't something that platform is into. There are a lot of different platforms out there.
> 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.
I guess the difference is proprietary code is mostly not used for training. It's going to be trained on code in the public. It's the inverse for music, where it's being trained on commercial work, not work that has been licensed freely.
> 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.
Not necessarily apples-to-apples here. Full songs generated from AI prompts don't crash like a computer program would. You could simply upload the garbage to Spotify and reap the rewards until it got removed (if it even does).
Some of the worst (best?) AI "artists" on Spotify have millions of views. It's tragic what it says about us. That most of us not only can't tell, but actually prefer this kind of uni-tone, blase, on-the-nose, emotionally manipulative crap.
There's music and there's music. When I want to listen to Music then I pick an artist and album manually. But 99% of the time, I just need something to play in the background when I'm working or cooking or cleaning - then it just has to sound pleasant, the value of that for me is exactly zero. Some of the best mixes I find for that are ai generated because they have a uniform pleasant sound for a long time, without anyone trying to impart anything on them.
> 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?
For me, one key difference is that I can cite my stylistic influences and things I tried, while (to my knowledge) commercial musical generation models specifically avoid doing that, and most don't provide chord/lead sheets either -- I would find it genuinely sad to talk to a musician about their arrangement/composition choices, only to find they couldn't
> I would find it genuinely sad to talk to a musician about their arrangement/composition choices, only to find they couldn't
So much of music composition is what "feels right" and is instinctual. Artists aren't consciously aware of probably most of their influences. They can cite some of the most obvious ones, but the creative process is melding a thousand different vibes and sounds and sequences you've heard before, internalized, and joined into something new, in a way only your particular brain could.
Let music historians work on trying to cite and trace influences. That's not something artists need to worry about.
> They can cite some of the most obvious ones
Thus already doing much better than the average Suno producer
I am 100% sure you can't cite all of them
> 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?
But the parent poster is, presumably, human! Humans have the right to take inspiration like that from other humans (or machines)! Why do we seem so keen on granting machines the right to take from us? Are we not supposed to be their masters?
Couldn't you just as well say it's a human taking inspiration from other humans through a machine?
> 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.
What do you think about The Prodigy?
I didn't even think about the analogy to sampling (and the prior controversy) but that is an even better analogy. Ultimately, the different between what's creative re-use and what's a ripoff is a matter of how skillfully it's done and there's a lot of controversy in the middle!
>then out-compete them on volume by flooding the marketplace.
this is incoherent. Publishing a bunch of stuff no one wants is not competition. You're just mad that people actually like AI music.
Spotify has a history of intentionally boosting internally produced, royalty-free and/or AI music over actual artists.
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
That article is bandied around, and no one either reads or understands what's written there. Neither do article authors BTW.
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)
Preferential contracts to AI-gen music makers is equivalent to "internally produced music" in my mind, even though they're not technically equivalent.
`==` vs. `===` essentially
> You're just mad that people actually like AI music.
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.
Let people enjoy what they like. It makes it easier to just sit back and enjoy what you like.
That's fine until, for example and by analogy, you go to the store to buy beer, and you don't particularly care for IPA, but IPAs have crowded out half the beers that used to be there including the one you used to sit back and enjoy.
How does the analogy work with music though? Are you saying that because there is now over-produced pop there is now less rock, jazz or whatever you prefer? If so, is that actually true and verifiable by numbers?
That is still fine. There should be no expectation that what you want will always be available in the market.
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!
The problem is economies of scale. Surely me enjoying heroin on my open-air back porch wouldn't be a bother to others, right?
Curation is a real concern. 'Flooding the market' is bad for everyone, being seen is difficult as is. It's even harder in a slopstorm.
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.
I hear you and feel you on this being a hard (hardest) pill to swallow, and I think I have a helpful phrase. It helped me quite a bit so I hope it helps you:
'For the love of the game.'
When you don't make any money and no one comes to your shows; when the booking emails go unanswered and the likes on soundcloud remain <10, just remember why you picked up the instrument in the first place. For the love of the game.
> The thing is, you aren't entitled to distribution.
That applies to people spamming AI slop too. People are right to complain about spammers. Platforms are right to try to stop spam, even though everyone knows that spam is a problem that is never going be solved.
> Most musicians who make it these days work really hard at doing live shows, or growing a following on tiktok.
Live shows, by their nature, have almost zero reach. A performance for 40 people takes place once in a single location at a specific time and then it's over. You're either there when it happens or you missed it. A song on youtube or bandcamp can be heard by millions quickly over a few weeks or gradually over years. Social media was a massive boon for musicians.
Sadly, it will get substantially harder to grow a following on tiktok or any other social media platform if those platforms are flooded with AI generated garbage. Real artists will be harder to find. Anyone doing anything new will be drowned out by AI regurgitating everything old. When creative people can't succeed, the creativity they'd inspire in others is lost and everything stagnates.
What you call slop others may enjoy. Calling stuff AI slop doesn't mean it isn't someone's art.
I feel that human artists as a class are more entitled to distribution than generated slop.
And decisions like Bandcamp's above reflects essentially the same view.
if no one wants the slop, then its not competition. the problem is that people do actually want the slop and artists are mad about it.
That's not how discoverability works. If it becomes too much of a chore to sort through the swamp people will often just opt for whatever is popular.
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.
> All of the "discoverability" algorithms are specifically and fundamentally about sifting through the millions to find the few that are preferred.
They are fundamentally about finding the content that will generate the most revenue. That changes the dynamics quite a bit.
You're not wrong, but the need to please the user is still paramount, otherwise they'll just do something else. This is why TikTok is eating everyone's lunch.
I don't agree with this to answer the question you original I do think users are consuming things they don't actually enjoy. The goal isn't to please the user, the goal is to not bore the user. If you talk to people I'm sure you'll find a lot of the music they listened isn't "enjoyed" so much as it is inoffensive background noise.
> I'm not familiar with anyone that does this.
I see this a lot, actually. People put things on in the background, for instance, and don't really care if they like it or not (as long as they don't hate it). They just want noise. Or people just scrolling through their feeds without genuinely liking much in them.
In the old days, this was also how the majority of television was watched. People watched TV out of habit, and frequently watched things they didn't like because choices were limited and often there was nothing they actually like on. Thus all the complaints in the day about how "there's nothing on TV".
People are willing to sacrifice quite a lot of real enjoyment for convenience.
Many people don't care because it sounds like music.
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.
should artists pay royalties in perpetuity to their teachers and musical inspirations?
I have not met a single person offline who wants more AI music
AI music gets millions of listens, idk what to tell you dawg.
but people do want it. people who listen to top 40 want slop. most people want slop
At least top 40 has a room of engineers and at least they're getting some compensation. Yes, I understand splits are a bloodbath.
A sufficient proportion of junk can cause a market to fail, taking down "legitimate" or "quality" purveyors.
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.
ad hominem has no place on HN.
The market was already flooded 20 years ago.
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
Wasn't it Picasso that said "good artist borrow, great artists steal?"
I've never heard an artist confident in their own ability complain about this because they're not threatened by other competent human artists knocking them off never mind an AI that's even worse at it.
AI not going to out-compete anyone on volume by flooding the marketplace because switching costs are effectively zero. Clever artists can probably find a way to grease controversy and marketing out of finding cases where they are knocked off, taking it as a compliment, and juicing it for marketing.
But I liked the Picasso quote when I was younger and earlier on in my journey as a musician because it reminded me to be humble and resist the desire to get possessive -- if what I was onto was really my own, people would like it and others could try to knock it off and fail. That is a lesson that has always served me very well.
> then out-compete them on volume by flooding the marketplace
[delayed]
I'm starting to think more and more in my older age that being 'great' isn't a good thing. I might actually prefer being good. We'll see how that thought plays out though; give me a couple more years
AI takes all of that old school idm and electronic music and repackages it without a human story to tell, ripping off actual musicians in the process. AI didn’t magically ‘make old IDM its own.’ It scraped decades of artists’ work, stripped out the context and intent, and reassembled the surface features. There’s no human arc, no lived constraint, no risk and no culture.
What’s being repackaged isn’t a new instrument, it’s other people’s careers. I’m not sure what part of that is supposed to be amusing.
I know a few EDM producers and the culture seems to consist of doing the most drugs of anyone you've ever met. Which is quite risky, true.
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.
People who won’t invest anything and just want to make a quick buck won’t be successful with AI generated content/music.
You still need to invest significant time and effort to make it work.
Musicians who are being threatened by AI impersonating them, flooding the market with music like theirs, and otherwise actually harmed by this would disagree with you. Benn Jordan speaks at length about it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVXfcIb3OKo
They will be successful in drowning out the artists. Not individually so, but collectively.
They are though by sheer volume. Finding anything half good will be a needle in a planet sized haystack of slop.
You're right, but for EDM this was pretty much already the case. The scene survives in large part thanks to DJs who wade through countless mediocre tracks looking for the few hidden gems to deploy at the right moment. I think AI means that DJs will become much more important in all genres.
This has already been the case way before AI was a thing.
As a new artist you have to compete against 60+ years of music history - much of it really good music too.
> As a new artist you have to compete against 60+ years of music history
Kinda, sorta. Good music is reflective of the society and era it was produced in and that matters. I regularly listen to music, from all over the world, that was composed (and some, recorded) 100+ years ago, music that was recorded 50+ years ago, and music that was recorded last month. None of them are a substitute for the other because each has a unique voice expressing things that were unique about the time and place they were made in.
So, in a sense, they aren't in competition with each other. But also, there are only so many hours in a day and there isn't enough time in your life to listen to all the worthy music that humans have made. Hard choices are necessary. In that sense, they are in competition with each other.
As a listener this is a good thing. Too much good music.
Now it’s that the listener has to compete with 60x absolute slop to find something good.
How many engineers are using ai-generated software libraries at this point? This could be all over github, but the software mostly sucks (because the AI doesn’t do architecture and real engineering, that has to be input into it right now). Increasing the volume of production doesn’t necessarily lead to the abandonment of the “good stuff”. You still have to compose the music and write the lyrics, the AI is not sophisticated enough to competently do that right now
> 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".
This is not a super well thought out position, but I've been leaning towards really disliking AI art in general (without having an opinion on any strong policy action yet).
First, art is, I think, one of the most enjoyable activities we have. One evidence is a lot of people forego higher salaries to choose an art job (although being a job carries additional responsibilities and some inconveniences compared to doing it as a hobby). It's a shame to see it diminished, when I believe we should be diverting efforts to automate other stuff.
Second, most AI art I've seen has been quite substandard compared to human art. We still don't know very well what human emotions are, the origin of sentience and qualia, etc.. But I think humans still lead here in having and probably understanding emotions. While for other tasks most implementation detail is irrelevant (e.g. in code, that it works tends to be most important, vs. minute choices in style), in art every detail is particularly relevant. Knowing this, it bothers me usually when I see this art that it doesn't carry the same knowledge of context and nuance a human would have.
Third, There's also the effect of making me question whether each piece of artwork was made by a human or AI, that didn't exist before. It does carry a bit of a magical feeling I think knowing a real person made every piece of artwork prior to 2018 or so (I think algorithmic art[1] is fine in this regard, because it tends to be more clearly algorithmic, and the involvement of the artist in coding is significant), that is now gone or at risk. Even the thought of imagining say their work day or what they had for lunch or talked to coworkers or friends is pleasant to me (at the risk of romanticizing it too much).
I suppose if AI art actually understood human nature, and specially the specific context of each art piece, better than us some of my arguments might be diminished. But the negatives so far seem to outweigh the positives, and I would like to e.g. give preference to content that doesn't use AI art.
(It is, admittedly, also the case that we lost a similar amount of craftsmanship when the industrial revolution happened, and in return we were able to support a larger population, and greater material conditions for most people. Every object now isn't carefully handcrafted. I think it's different because well, now material conditions are relatively abundant, and second there's no such insatiable, significant and irreplaceable demand for art as there were to common industrialized objects (take shoes for example), at least not to the same extent or vital significance. That is, the ability to have a shoe at all far outweighs it being carefully handcrafted, I believe; while experiencing a poorly made AI movie or artwork might be actually worse than none at all (or simply an older human made movie), and it also gets more cumbersome to evaluate for ourselves whether AI was employed or not. Also, while say shoes only last a limited time and need to be constantly produced, good artwork can last indefinitely (using digital storage), and even if you account for cultural change and relevance, can still last a really long time, motivating investing more into it.)
I'm quite sure that if we're still around in 500 or so years, we'll still be enjoying say Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh (probably as a digital reproduction). Current AI art will probably be largely discarded, so seems largely an unwise investment. Actually this kind of applies to code as well. It seems plausible Linux could still be used in 500 years from now (see how we still value finding Unix v4 50 years after), or at least of some interest. Those durable intellectual goods don't seem like wise places to invest anything but the best of us :) (at in the cases it's not disposable)
The arguments above also don't seem to apply say in concept stages, or say for bland corporate diagrams that will be disposed of in 1 day, and which a huge quantity is needed. I think the main criteria I would evaluate is (1) Was it enjoyable to produce (for the artist(s))?; (2) Will it have a significant (artistic) impact on who is experiencing it?; (3) Will it last a long time?
[1] W.r.t. algorithmic art (and digital in general) (take bytebeat[2] for example), which is a field I really love, I am not any kind of absolutist about it. I know there tends to be extremely more degrees of freedom for human expression in an art piece than in an algorithmic piece, so I see it more as a complement and not a substitute for more conventional art. I'd never give up ever hearing human musician player music for bytebeat, just bytebeat is a lovely experimental other dimension of expression. Writing a prompt seems a too few degrees of freedom and context, and too much of an uniform context that is less rich than humans can provide.
[2] https://dollchan.net/bytebeat/
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.
> generative AI catch on not by just imitating other instruments,
but generative AI didn’t catch on by "imitating instruments." It caught on by imitating artists, which streaming platforms and record labels then repackage and outsell you with. false analogy.
This argument won't get you anywhere because "imitating artists" and "outselling artists" aren't actually the same thing.
i.e. complaining about training on copyrighted material and getting it banned is not sufficient to prevent creating a model that can create music that outsells you. Because training isn't about copying the training material, it's just a way to find the Platonic latent space of music, and you can get there other ways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
https://phillipi.github.io/prh/
There are plenty of places to publish AI generated music. Why should a platform allow music it's users clearly don't want.
I find it interesting that there's so much pushback against ai generated art and music while there seems to be very little for ai generated code.
Companies sell products built on code, not the code itself. Code is a means to an end.
Musicians and artists are under pressure to make money, but they cant rush it
while programmers have to rush it these days or they lose their jobs. Programmers don't have much of say in their companies.
Perhaps that's because there's an enormous difference between fine art and computer programs.
Also, there's quite a lot of pushback against AI-generated code, but also because unlike music, normal people have no interest in and aren't aware of the code.
I won't merge anything AI generated in any of my FOSS projects, unless I'm successfully deceived.
In the first place, I do not regard a copyright notice and license on AI generated code to be valid in my eyes, so on those grounds alone, I cannot use it any more than I could merge a piece of proprietary, leaked source code.
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?
Devs are quite used to using others peoples work for free via packages, frameworks and entire operating systems and IDE’s. It’s just part of the culture.
Music has its history in IP, royalties, and most things need to be paid for in the creation of music or art itself.
It’s going to be much easier for devs to accept AI when remixing code is such a huge part of the culture already. The expectation in the arts is entirely different.
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.
AI music from suno sounds indistinguishable to non-ai generated music to me.
In terms of how well it works, the quality of AI music is far better than art or code. In art there are noticeble glitches like multiple fingers. For code, it can call non existent functions, not do what it is supposed to do, or have security issues or memory leaks. From what I can tell, there is no such deal breaker for AI music.
What???
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?
I feel like part of the difference is how art vs code is viewed. You could make the argument code is art, though most don't have that stance. Visual art and music tend to be made by a few people, there is ego involved, you care who the artist is. Code tends to be made by shops and consumers don't know who the coders are. Programmers are already faceless.
I think it's also about money. Places code and code samples are stored tend to be large companies that are in tech and on the AI hype wagon. Bandcamp is not one of those places.
There's one popular platform that requires disclosing whether and how AI was used (Steam), and if you search anything about it, all you can find is like a sea of articles opposing it.
Yes and it was probably only done because of people complaining about AI art, not AI code.
Positing that AI generated code is always bad and buggy is delusional.
I have dozens of little programs and websites that are AI generated and do their job perfectly.
Music is art, code is engineering. "Hackers and painters"[1] was always wishful fluff, unfortunately.
When it comes to code, I don't think anyone cares how the sausage is made, and only very rarely do people care by whom. The only question is "does it work well?"
Art is totally different. Provenance is much more important - sometimes essential. David is a beautiful work, but you could 3d print or cast a replica of "David". No one would pretend that the copy is the same as the original though - even if they're indistinguishable to the untrained eye - because one was painstakingly hand sculpted and the others were cheaply produced. This sense of provenance is the property that NFTs were (unsuccessfully) trying to capture.
[1] https://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
The pushback is motivated by the interests of the petty-bourgeois class, and those are a larger proportion of the former.
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.
There is an AI plugin for krita that lets you define regions, selection bounds, sub-prompts, control nodes, and lots more control over a given image generation model than standard Automattic or comfyUI workflows...down to 'put an arm wearing armor here' for example in my RPG NPC token writing.
It has full image generation mode, it has an animation mode, it has a live mode where you can draw a blob of images and it will refine it 2-50 steps only in that area.
So you are no longer doing per line stroke and saved brush settings, but you are still painting and composing an image yourself, down to a pixel by pixel rate. It's just that the tool it gives is WAY more compute intensive, the AI is sort of rendering a given part of a drawing as you specify as many times as you need.
How much of that workflow is just prompting a one-shot image, vs photoshopping +++ an image together until it meets your exact specifications?
No, the final image cannot be copyrighted under current US law in 2026, but for use in private settings like tabletop RPGs...my production values have gone way up and I didn't need to get a MFA degree in The old Masters drawing or open a drawing studio to get those images.
> 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.).
Cf. Holly Herndon's album Proto.
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.
People don't listen to music because it sounds good, most music sounds downright awful, they listen to it for the human stories and connection. 99% of the music I listen
Nobody listens to techno - Eminem
AI needs to make music that sells. The same way Scorsese and Brando sell the Godfather. until it can do that literally nobody will care.
>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.
> I'm a musician, but am also pretty amused by this anti ai wave.
Let me guess: you're an amateur musician. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it makes it much easier to be amused about this topic.
> There was recently a post referencing aphex twin and old school idm and electronic music stuff and i can't help bein reminded how every new tech kit got always demonized until some group of artists came along and made it there own.
What are you talking about? Which "tech kit" got demonized by whom? Of course, there were always controversies around techniques like sampling or whatever, or conservatives in the UK demonizing rave culture, but otherwise, I have no idea what you're referring to.
He's talking about the demonization of synthesizers, sampling, and digital audio workstations when each were respectively released.
There was no "demonization" about these things even remotely comparable to what we are witnessing now w.r.t. AI generated music (and I'm old enough to remember most of these things). Of course there was intense dislike from certain groups representing the "old-school" around new styles of music and new techniques. However, at the same time, you also had the "new-wave" which loved it and made it successful. For instance, a ton of people hated Disco music, at the same time, you had a ton of people who genuinely loved it. Same with practically any kind of electronic music. This simply does not exist with GenAI music. People listen to GenAI music because they either don't care, or don't know, not because they genuinely prefer it. There's absolutely nothing new about GenAI music that would make it exciting.
> its just creative prompting,
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.
Good news! It just degrades the quality of service. Now its hard to separate AI music in Spotify.
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!)
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).
That feels legit to me. We have been using software to isolate individual instruments from a recording for a while.
We've been using software to fix grammar for a long time, and AI does it also. The question is valid: if I get an LLM to fix a few grammar errors in my own writing, am I ripping anyone off? We can't just dismiss the question just because grammar fixing is something we did without machine-learning AI trained on vast numbers of other people's texts.
The output does depend on training works, even if you are just fixing grammar errors. But the document is obviously a derivative of your own writing and almost nothing else. A grammatic concept learned from vast numbers of worsk is probably not a copyright infringment.
Similarly, a part extraction concept learned from training sets such as pairs of mixed and unmixed music, and then applied to someone's own music to do accurate part extraction, does not seem like an infringing use. All features of the result are identifiable as coming from the original mixed audio; you cannot identify infringing passages in it added by the AI --- and if such a thing happened, it would be an unwanted artifact leading us to re-do the part extraction in some other way to avoid it.
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.
Seems to me like he just wanted to advertise that song.
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.
[1]: https://youtu.be/DSRrSO7QhXY
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).
Suppose we have two image-oriented AI's.
One is trained with a set of pairs which match words with images. Vast numbers of images tagged with words.
The other is trained on a set of photographs of exactly the same scene from the same vantage point, but one in daylight and the other at night. Suppose all these images are copyrighted and used without permissions.
With the one AI, we can do word-to-image to generate an image. Clearly, that is a derived work of the training set of images; it's just interpolating among them based on the word assocations.
With the other AI, we can take a photograph which we took ourselves in daylight, and generate a night version of the same one. This is not clearly infringing on the training set, even though that output depends on it. We used the set without permission to have the machine extract and learn the concept of diurnal vs. nocturnal appearance of scenes, based on which it is kind of "reimagining" our daytime image as a night time one.
The question of whether AI is stealing material depends exactly on what the training pathway is; what it is that it is learning from the data. Is it learning to just crib, and interpolate, or to glean some general concept that is not protected by copyright: like separating mixed audio into tracks, changing day to night, or whatever.
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.
[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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_and_Then_(Beatles_song)
>The source material was a compact cassette tape from a demo, found in a drawer.
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.
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.
AI unmixing or denoising is not really generating music AI.
This is very similar to, "am I ripping people off if I just get the LLM AI to make a few grammar fixes in my own writing?"
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.
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.
> 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.
You don't make it clear whether the music on that tape was "generated" "by AI", only that it was post-processed in such a way.
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.
Completely understandable.
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.
Yeah, I agree.
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 it's either a few years old or I'm buying it at the merch table the artist has at a live performance.
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'm a moderately frequent user of Suno and have encountered some unusual AI-generated effects that I've not come across before in more traditionally synthesized music.
One is when it attempts to generate vocals without a lyrics prompt. It's gibberish but just on the edge of comprehensibility. Sometimes it'll be entirely spoken word with no accompaniment. Very uncanny.
Another is transitioning between vocals and instrument in the same melody line. Like a humanesque voice holding a steady note at the end of a verse which seamlessly transitions into a saxophone sound and proceeds into a solo. Or vice versa, an instrumental morphing into a voice.
Finally is when the generation goes wrong and it starts spitting out absolute nonsensical sounds with no rhythm or melody, in a uniquely fragmented way I can't really describe. It feels like seeing the musical matrix, the inner thoughts of the AI.
Now I've written all that out and had a think about it, I'm tempted to sample these oddities and try to make something more structured out of them.
What I'm hoping for is a (good) musician to take a small music model, train it on a selection of their influences and existing music and then add on a prompt tracklist. Something like a NN album that the fan can add their own prompts and get new music in the style the artist meant for that album.
> new sounds and musical forms
Has it done this? Or does it just make things that sound like what it's trained on?
That's why it's the dream.
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.
I don't know if this really counts as art but there are existing AI music that are at least though provoking funny like https://kommandointernet.bandcamp.com/
It is German but there is really funny remixes combining Mallorca Party music (a German music genre of its own) with anti fascist themes. They manage to make fun of both without being IMHO totally alienating both subcultures, which could count as art. IMHO such things would not really be possible without AI. Would be really disappointed if this disappeared from BC.
Every major platform needs to also do this. They've all become overrun with literal trash.
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.
No one in these threads ever discusses how you would identify and remove AI-generated music.
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
> but crap that top pop artists vomit out into the world doesn't
It should!
I wonder why the head honchos of the music industry haven’t come together and put together an alternative to Spotify’s increasingly AI-slop platform
Boom we did: https://hangout.fm/
> an alternative to Spotify’s increasingly AI-slop platform
> 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
can't see Microslop GitHub banning AI slop
This is dumb. The solution for all music platforms should be to add a label for AI-generated tracks or artists so users clearly can disambiguate. It's frivolous to prevent someone from enjoying a piece of art whether AI or human. Furthermore, the line is blurred between what constitutes human vs AI development of music. Most producers today use pre-packaged samples, sequencers, and tracks to generate derivatives. Sure, they might manually have to mess around with Ableton to do so, but the line is already blurred.
Reddit link is an official announcement, and it's also on their blog
https://blog.bandcamp.com/2026/01/13/keeping-bandcamp-human/
I worry that as technologists we are over indexing on accusing things of being AI. I worry about policies like this where they will remove suspected AI content without investigation.
Case in point, the other day I made a comment on reddit. I spent about 10 minutes writing it. I used proper grammar, bullet points, clean formatting, and em dashes, as I've been doing for many years.
I immediately got downvoted and sent multiple PMs about "not posting AI slop".
I didn't use AI at all to write that comment. It just looked like AI because it was well formed and researched. So am I supposed to add errors just to make it look "human"? But also, how do I even prove I wrote it without AI?
I'm not entirely sure how to solve this problem.
I've been micro-sampling AI "covers" or "re-imaginations in a new genre" of certain pieces of music.
For making house/4x4 type music, it's actually pretty fun. Once you chop something and repitch it enough, no algorithm can pick up on what song it is you are sampling if the AI track is way off from the original piece.
No way would I actually try to monetize it, though.
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.
>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.
Luckily there are hundreds of MIDI editor DAWs available. Open the piano roll, and write down the music note by note. Surely, it's not that hard if you can hear it in your head.
> [...]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.
> We want musicians to keep making music, and for fans to have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans.
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!
Agreed, I'm just pondering the general attitude around the space rather than bandcamp itself
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.
That's how I feel about it too. I play piano well enough to get my ideas out and have used synthesizers and digital audio workstation software for years. I can sit down and carefully craft the music I have in my mind if I want to. Though I don't often have the time or the mental space to do so.
Or, I can make a barebones recording of musical ideas - of melodies, harmonies and the overall song structure - then upload it to Suno and inspire its robotic session musicians to play it in the style I ask. Quicker to make, faster to iterate upon, and can even be used as the basis for resynthesizing the track using more traditional methods.
Half-finished tracks, ideas that were only in my mind or existed only as badly recorded piano-bashed drafts, now (almost) fully fleshed out. It's immensely satisfying, and has made me even more creative as I use this tool to understand and explore musical styles I'm less familiar with.
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.
People have been doing this for decades already, FL studio, Abelton, etc. Not sure what AI has to do with it.
I feel like there's a difference between AI used as a tool and AI used to make slop. Also, most AI music has weird noise in it that drives me insane.
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.
Fear not- there is research in this area~
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...
If a detector can exist, it can be used adversarially without a human in the loop to defeat itself.
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.
I'll blame Spotify, and your company.
See here for a truly random sample of human music: https://0xbeef.co.uk/random/soundcloud
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.
> 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?
i say this without malice (more as an encouragement to you to do whatever you like): nobody cares about your individual consumption choices. if you want to consume content from a machine that produces the thing you want to consume, that in and of itself has no impact on anyone but you. but you might be missing out on good music (either by someone else, or by your own hand) and ultimately, i wonder if you will value the end product of a musical vending machine.
I feel like I appreciate good music and I've been into the underground DnB scene in LA for a while.
> nobody cares about your individual consumption choices
Not sure if I agree though - mentioning that I use gen AI for any use case can cause some very hostile reactions.
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.
Sucks to be you, the rest of us will be here enjoying great music.
>the rest of us will be here enjoying great music
Speak for yourself.
We have different definitions for great.
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.
I understand those distinctions, and I can definitely see people caring about that, although how you would tell seems impossible.
That's why I choose to make the distinction by just not caring about any kind of music that uses any kind of AI.
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.
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.
How would this be a vocal minority on a website like Bandcamp, whose whole mission statement is to let people support their favorite artists directly?
I'm sure there genuinely are lots of people out there who would enjoy AI-generated music, but I very much doubt there's a huge crowd of them on Bandcamp, if for no reason other than ideological.
Bandcamp literally is the vocal minority of music listeners.
why do you think a majority of bandcamp users want AI music?
These are my thoughts exactly. If people enjoy the music, they will listen to it. If they don't, they wont.
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.
A: This post is part of an eternal debate about art: Do we appreciate the finished work, or the artist? This post is firmly in the latter camp. There are also solid arguments for the other extreme.
B: Having spent some time trying to make songs with Suno, I can assure you it takes more skills than I have...
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 saying, 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.
---
To me, the reason for art is feeling, and the problem is that most things don't really provide feeling - if they do, it is a cheap and one-dimensional feeling. Almost all art and music and literature (and food, wine, architecture, poetry, photography, theatre, dance) that people consume today is _good enough_. It is correct, it satisfies. You listen to some hours of good-enough music on Spotify and the music is all correct and you come across "Chill77"'s AI-generated Papaoutai cover and you think that it is good. After all, it seems to have fooled a number of genuine Stromae fans. But the real function of art is not to satisfy. It is to reduce you to tears or silence or lust or anger or some beautiful cocktail of feeling. Of course, in the right context, with enough supporting factors, anything can produce emotion, but the best art needs little or nothing to make you feel. Bad art and good art are all around us, but the great is rare. That rarity is why people enjoy AI art: they forget the last time they felt, the AI is good, and that is enough.
Your comment made me read "The Swimmer" for the first time. Thanks.
You are correct. I wouldn’t waste your time arguing with people who don’t get it.
Those people don’t tend to have a good understanding of what most humans like and why they like stuff like music.
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.
We humans use machines to make art. Robots may use a machine but that imagio deo component is missing.
I'm a professional artist. I don't use AI as it's just not there yet.
But I don't consider using AI all that different to using a camera. A photographer still has plenty of work to do with composition and framing, the lighting, the subject mater, even timing. I still consider a photographer an artist.
I think an AI artist will have a lot to consider as well. To distinguish themselves from other AI artists.
Update: When I say the AI tools are not there yet, its precisely because I can't seem to get the AI to take feedback or instructions. I can't adjust the lighting to create the mood I want, I can't tweak the framing.
You are assuming a very specific form of generation. There are plenty of levels in between. Simply saying "AI" isn't sufficient to make an argument.
If it were so easy to create good AI music, I'd be able to do it all myself instead of following so many artists. But it takes a lot of skill.
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.
And I would much prefer to hear your music over machine-generated music even if the generated music is technically better performed.
"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.
That’s what the sites that generate the music are for. Bandcamp is for musicians.
The community of AI "musicians" should absolutely have a place to share their "music". Just identify it as such so everyone else can avoid it. :)
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. :)
An aside but https://sunoai-music.com/ seems incredibly broken on my desktop.
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.
That worked. Thanks i just googled suno ai music to check it out and got the seemingly spammy link.
That's not the real Suno site.
What workflow are you using with Ableton/Suno?
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.
Why would quality matter, You make a image from Google AI and its instantly marked as Synth ID. It can be easily detected and thrown out if you want to keep the site AI free.
We would need AI free places now that AI is so easy and cheap to produce.
Just a couple more months and a couple more trillion dollars to Altman!
Some people are cursed with being able to recognize reuse or samey backing tracks...
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]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46600681
This is quite sad, in that the fact that it's AI generated is hidden in the disclaimer and nearly all of the comments think it's a real human.
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.
They sent AI generated music away to Bannedcamp.
Man, I friggin' love Bandcamp. I hope Apple Music follows suit. (I don't expect Spotify to.)
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.'
It really depends on the style, yes. You could probably slip one into any modern pop/dance/club/EDM album and no one would know as long as the vocals sounds like the performer. For styles which are very unique with that sort of imperfect human touch that makes music so enjoyable, it would likely be obvious, at least at the moment.
> 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)
It's getting very hard. At this point, lyrics are the biggest giveaway. AI generated lyrics are always awful and the delivery feels very stilted.
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.
AI seems to struggle to produce counterpoint, especially in vocals.
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.
> One day soon many musicians will be using AI assistance, and many won't tell you for fear of judgment.
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.
Auto tune uses a form of "AI", and has been used by most pop singers for a decade.
Auto tune is not what makes a song a hit. What make a song a hit is the fact that the person who injected the use of auto tune has taste.
This seems to fly over the heads of many. art is about taste.
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
/find in page “discovery”, 0 results
A little shocked. The biggest issue with music streaming right now is, imo, discovery. Algorithmic discovery is cute, but there’s a perverse incentive for companies who provide discovery services (ie Spotify) to funnel users to artists that cost less (ie AI generated in-house).
There’s also the fact that flooding the market with AI music slop _also_ makes discovery even harder.
Tried-and-true methods for discovery over the past decades are network effects (artists featuring and collaborating), and niche label A&R. However, Spotify has no interest, or incentive, to allow users to explore these avenues for discovery.
So, kudos to Bandcamp. But with better discovery this wouldn’t be necessary.
Finally, anecdotally, as someone in the top percentile of listeners for several niche genres on Spotify, I’ve yet to hear AI generated music that isn’t crap. Whenever it gets recommended to me by Spotify I reach for my phone, see that I don’t recognize the artist, and then see that they’re self-published on Spotify with a few hundred listeners. I guess if you don’t have any taste you might not notice, but it’s painfully obvious for anyone who is familiar enough to recognize themes, callbacks, and instrumentation within a genre.
I support this.
However, what if I use AI to generate a simple sine wave. Then I map it to a keyboard and play it with different notes.
Who's going to define what's ok.
Well... they'll have to clean their content because unfortunately there is already lots of AI generated music at Bandcamp
Bandcamp is my main source of music online, and this makes me love it even more.
I suspect it's honestly a huge threat.
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.
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 think we need to start distinguishing between art-music and utilitarian-music.
Art-music is made by humans as a way of expressing yourself and making human connections.
Utilitarian-music can be made by humans or machines and is there to serve a purpose. Background music for the elevator or while you’re on hold. An ambient soundscape that you play in an airport terminal. It’s not meant to move people, it’s just there to fill silence.
We already have a term for this: muzak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzak
I have a maybe unpopular opinion to share.
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.
> We now sort of accepted the idea of “vibe coding”
speak for yourself please, not all of us have
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!
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?
I mean it in several senses.
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`.
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.
There is no shared appreciation for vibe coding.
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. When do people say enough is enough?
No, but some people really hate it for some reason.
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.
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.
We don't have to agree, but the biggest problem I find with this take you're now bringing is that it leads to an infinite regress, you can forever expand your knowledge about the origin of something. Then, not to mention, that often we construct from evidence which is already an interpretation with data loss.
The Mona Lisa example actually supports both our positions in my opinion: someone can have a profound experience of it knowing nothing of Leonardo, while someone else has a different profound experience knowing his biography. Neither experience is 'false', they're just different modes of engagement with the same work. Personally, I have even experienced the inverse throughout my life.
Growing up not speaking English, and being flooded with American culture through radio, I was deeply moved by lots and lots of music made by foreigners that sounded like absolute gibberish to me. Later in life, after learning about the meaning of certain songs, I, unfortunately, lost some of my appreciation for it. Some may call that alienation, but to me it was a form of naivety of a child that enjoyed just sound in its pure form without it being tainted by any derived or supplied meaning from its creator that was attached to it through accompanied lyrics.
But then do we not agree, for if your experience of the music has changed upon learning the meaning of the songs, then it was true knowledge of the meaning of the piece which in the end determined your appreciation for it. And that our experience is not a fixed thing at one moment in time, but can re-occur and is in flux and subject to change in its quality based on knowledge gained. So from this you cannot return to the naivety of a child unless you reject from your mind the notion that knowledge determines quality and that the meaning supplied from its makers influences our experience of it.
Who is more correct, the child or the adult? If you suggest the child, then what do you say to the adult who objects on the grounds of the meaning of the sounds uttered? The adult would say that though the sounds are pleasant to the ear, they are not good to the mind. Thus, rather than affirming the child's vision, they would reject the pleasant sounds with poor meaning in favor of higher quality ones which are as equal in their harmonic value as with the greater quality in their meaning.
As for the infinite regress, that only proves the value of knowledge all the greater, for if we can expand our knowledge on the origins of something continually, so too can our appreciate of the thing grow in proportion. This only leads to a richer and deeper appreciation for life. In this way I can reread or rewatch a show in time and see more and know more than in my first experience, and so grows my appreciation for the details that I missed the first time. And this may only occur if the subject at hand is of good quality in the first place, for else when we descend further into the details and meaning we would be dissapointed at its lack. But that which is rich in meaning lacks none and may reveal itself new with every experience. This is why knowledge of the good is required, and why AI and lackluster artists may only produce pleasant sounds.
Would you have a problem if AI was no longer a tool but the artist itself (i.e. no human intervention)?
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.
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.
Good decision. Bandcamp makes money from people who consciously avoided the streaming shitfest in favor of directly supporting the artists. Hardly surprising that their have a strong aversion to AI slop.
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.
Hell yes, I love this and bandcamp so much more for this stance!
So many creator platforms are becoming slop factories.
I am on the opposite side. For the last few months I don't listen to music unless it's AI generate. I can feel the difference.
Do you feel the veins transforming into wires?
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.
They are free to use AI and they are free to post their music on other sides that allow AI.
I think you need hard rules to make it not completely subjective.
From the original post:
Sounds completely subjective if you ask me.Nah
Good. Although It's gonna be tough to enforce.
> 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.
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.
[1] https://bandcamp.com/about
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.
wohooo!
AI-generated music is novel, but like images and videos, I think of it almost exclusively as a novelty. I haven't heard any AI-generated music that I like in a real way. Just stuff that sounds like something I like.
The real value AI has for music is discovery. I've been using Gemini and ChatGPT to build playlists based on music I already like, and discovering lots of fun new tracks. I can be really specific about what kind of music I like and don't like. I can show it a playlist I already made, and ask it to make one like it, but with completely different artists. It's insanely useful!
But these kinds of tools would just expand how many different artists Spotify has to pay from my streaming, and that doesn't do the same thing as shoving cheap mass-produced slop down our throats, so it isn't surprising what they offer us.
We banned AI slop in 2022, and whilst it has been challenging, I believe that only allowing authentic human-created content is the future.
That's pretty racist. It's rejected on account of its origin. And it is given no chance to succeed by merit.
I think you may be operating under an extremely unusual definition of "racism."
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.
having a shared reality is good actually
Sorry I dont understand what you're referring to, can you elaborate?