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by kavalg 1236 days ago
Google's MusicLM sounds plausible, but quite dull and even sometimes irritating to my musician's ear.
1 comments

As another musician, I'll point out that there was a point when the only thing AI could produce visually was a lot of dog faces.
My day job is in ML, but I also enjoy music making as a hobby (on a very amateur level - mostly making 4-bar loops on a handheld tracker or knob twiddling on 90s synths I couldn't afford as a kid). I see an interesting mix of curiosity, hostility and head-in-the-sand attitudes from the musician communities. Though the "head-in-the-sand" component will almost certainly start becoming less prevalent with this and other models that are sure to come out in short order.

I'm pretty sure soon enough we'll start seeing the same kind of dynamics that have played out for the arts community in music, not that the dust has settled there yet. I hope there isn't much negative financial impact on people's livelihoods, but maybe some will be unavoidable. And of course, AI is also coming for programmer's jobs, which will hit even closer to home. The next decade will be "interesting", so to speak.

I also think that it's still very new, and we have not yet discovered the creative limitations of the tech.

I personally expect that it will turn out that there is zero creativity inherent to the tech, and that it will become apparent after a while that without constant new training input from real brains, the output will not creatively evolve, and therefore become boring to many and end up relegated to elevators, hold music, etc, while people rebel and quite possibly have another folk music explosion. Banjos refuse to die, and that will remain true.

I might be wrong, but that's how I'd bet my twenty bucks.

I am not arguing that it won't be successful, just that I don't like it at its current stage of progress. Actually most of the music that people hear our days is nothing special either (either quite dumb or just a rinse-repeat of some older successful musical forms).