[ajuc]

That's like saying we've had abakuses since forever therefore these computers will never be revolutionary. Quantitative change by orders of magnitude is qualitative change.

Imagine a world where you ask your smartphone to make you a death metal song about fishing and feminism in Australia and to use Freddy Mercury voice and jazz harmonies and it does that on the fly and generates something objectively good.

Wouldn't that be revolutionary for music? Because it's entirely possible in the next decade. Probable even.

[boffinism]

To be honest, that doesn't sound _that_ revolutionary for music. Because I'm pretty sure if you went digging, you could already find somewhere on Spotify a pretty decent death metal song with a vocalist who sounds like Freddy Mercury and jazz harmonies (I will concede, the specified subject matter is unlikely). Would you go looking for that, though? Probably not, because musical tastes and interests aren't about wanting a very specific set of attributes in a song. It's about tribalism, cults of personality, senses of belonging, nostalgia etc. The world is not short of good music, or variation in styles of good music, and what causes songs to be popular is not the objective quality of the music.

Put it another way. If an AI could generate new Beatles music on the fly, making it sound exactly like the Beatles, with the same creativity of lyrics, tight harmonies, beautiful melodies, would Beatles fans go out in their millions to buy them? No. In the same way that the same dusty demos from the 60s found in an attic somewhere became valuable when it was discovered that they were Beatles demos. The music didn't change, it didn't get better or worse. The personal story attached to them was what mattered.

[ajuc]

My point isn't that any particular generated song will be revolutionary. My point is that you can get any song you can describe. There will be billions of good quality songs made because billions of people will be able to produce a song just by describing it.

I expect new genres to be created almost immediately. And I'm not sure how real musicians can compete with that level of noise out there.

[TeaDrunk]

This only works if the sound and themes desired are vast enough for that. It's fine if a casual listener is a fan of something like anything house, pop, or electro. It's more difficult if your taste level is more obscure- a specific artist's style, or a specific juxtaposition produced from a one-off album. In that case there is quite literally not enough data to train on to produce further.

[p1esk]

Even when there's not enough data to train on, it might still be possible to generate something in a desired rare style - provided this style is a mixture of several more common styles. Modern generative models are pretty good at interpolating.

[dahfizz]

That sounds more like a meme than something which would revolutionize music. It would be a funny gag, but what really determines if its good music or not is... if its good music or not. If my phone idea of "generate a death metal song" is to parrot what every other death metal song sounds like, it will be boring and not enjoyable to listen to.

[FartyMcFarter]

The border between "parroting" and "generating something good" may be very hard to discern at some point.