[patmcc]

>>>The fact an AI can express itself through music is sure as hell not gonna stop me from also expressing myself.

I think this is the key; if you're making music for your own reasons, no AI (or Mozart) would stop you. But if you're trying to make money at it, or desperately want listeners, you may eventually be on the "losing" side.

[bobthepanda]

Would it? Popular music sees major paradigm shifts every few years, and AIs only really generate things based on observation of existing patterns, at least as far as I can tell.

As far as recent examples go, Lady Gaga and Lorde were major breaks from what was prevalent at the time they started releasing music, and then spawned artists trying to emulate them.

[sl1ck731]

A pattern implies that it can "infer" something in the future.

If we oversimplify and compile a list of traits about "the world" as it was in the past that allowed a new genre or artist to flourish, AI could predict that in the future. It isn't like the paradigm shifts just happen in a vacuum.

Granted there are probably millions of little things that lead to this, stuff like the shared experiences of an entire generation coming of age, political climate, trends in other industries, etc. Not that I believe it will ever happen to an accurate enough degree, but theoretically I don't see why it could not be possible to approximate given time and resources.

[filoleg]

A lot of those things are completely random and non-predictable, to be honest, no one can predict which paradigm will win and take over for the next decade. Especially since when a game-changing paradigm comes, it is usually not received well universally at all, until the moment it takes over the public conscious completely, and then the switch is flipped.

If you feed an AI a bunch of modern car designs and ask it to design a new car, it will design you something like a modern ford or honda/toyota, but it will never design something like a Cybertruck. Which I believe will be the next paradigm shift in the design of trucks (that has been super stale and stagnant for at least the past 20 years), but this is yet to be seen.

For an example with music that has already happened and became apparent - Kanye West's "808s and Heartbreak" album from late 00's. On release, it had very polarizing reviews, most of which were skewing towards "really weak and weird". Fast forward 10 years, most of hip-hop and pop music is directly influenced by that album, most of top 50 albums use similar patterns and methods used in that album, and critics have made a complete 180. So now 808s is hailed as one of the biggest (if not the biggest) paradigm changes and influences in music of the past decade as a whole, as well as the best album by Kanye, despite at the time being called the worst. Imo an AI trained on music of 00's that came before 808s would have never been able to come up with something like that, but it totally could've come up with another top 100 song using existing paradigms.

[sl1ck731]

It doesn't have to be like Kanye's album at that point in time to be a paradigm shift, though. If 1 artist didn't get big or some genre blow up then it would have just been filled by an infinite amount of others that we never heard. Even considering a single artist hitting it big there are how many that are never heard of? An AI could produce an equal number of artists and only has to win once every month/year/etc. I think this is similar to the million monkeys at a typewriter thing.

[patmcc]

It's hard to say - maybe for a sufficiently advanced AI, Lorde's style would be an obvious extrapolation from the popular music of the time. Certainly we're not there yet, and it's an open question if we ever will be - but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if one day AIs can make better music/poetry than the best humans, by any metric we care to use.

[neohaven]

I'm always going to enjoy a person coming and showing a bit of themselves through their music.

That's not something we can really lose without losing something that connects us. People want a story. That has sold since the beginning of time, and it will keep selling. People will keep being moved to music, giving money to the artists that inspire them, and that requires connection. Maybe an AI/human team would make some really incredible stuff, and I'd be willing to pay for it if it makes me feel something. I think the human touch of "selection" will never truly leave, even if only in the listener's mind...