[wootland]

> I loathe the vision of a future where anyone can ask a neural network to create music just by describing what they, the user, want to hear, without them necessarily having any musical chops at all

As a musician I have to say I don't care at all. In fact it seems very, very cool that people without the massive amount of time and money privilege required to learn music theory and practice well enough to make an enjoyable song, can unleash their creative ideas and hear something they find interesting. It's akin to listener empowerment, and I'm all for it.

[EGreg]

When millions of digital compositions a second can be created by swarms of AI, all digital human endeavor will be drowned out. The market cares not anymore that you can knit a sweater.

What this means is everything you offer as a musician will be as irrelevant as renaissance music and classical music is today for the vast majority of people.

[earthnail]

Same was said about microphones and amplifiers, the drum machine, sampling...

Music just adapts. New methods, new sounds, new genres. And it won't get easier to create music, it will just get easier to create certain parts of it (anyone can play strings now with an orchestral sampler; that was unthinkable 50y ago). It will still be brutally hard to stand out from the crowd.

[EGreg]

Nonsense. Those things didn’t churn out new finished compositions. At best, they added a track using a few parameters.

This is entirely different. Your comment can easily have been generated by an LLM. Operating at scale, human comments and articles would literally become 0.00001% of all comments and articles, and on average probably would be lower quality anyway, in both breadth of “knowledge” and lack of civility. Once people come to overwhelmingly prefer digital content, all those charming platitudes about how human ingenuity / whatever can never be replaced, will melt away. “The crowd” will be 99.9999% automated processes.

Do you want a human to make your fries and smile a fake smile as they give them to you?

Do you want a human to operate your elevators? Produce your clothes and shoes by hand? You are spoiled by the thread count and consistency of machines there. Why not in digital content?

[wootland]

I've never made music as relevant as renaissance or classical music, but that's not my goal. I play for my own enjoyment, turns out some people also like watching me play which is pretty cool.

I think it's easy as an artist to put our own social position ahead of the actual goal: listeners should be able to enjoy music that evokes feeling/joy/relaxation/excitement. Whether that's 300 year old classical, a garage band or AI generated pop doesn't really matter. Lots of people had the same complaints about 3 chord DIY punk. Gatekeeping the creation of art seems elitist and anti-listener/viewer/reader...

[EGreg]

People enjoy watching you play because robots can’t do it better yet.

Do people enjoy watching you give directions?

No one is gatekeeping it. Just saying your activity is only appreciated by people because an affordable robot can’t do it better yet.

[wootland]

I don't need people to enjoy watching me play. I'd still play even if it was just for myself.

That said, I imagine IRL people will always enjoy a demonstration of skill. That's a bit orthogonal to just enjoying the music on its own though since it includes an element of performance. If robot bands could put on super entertaining live shows and produce amazing (better than human) music, I'd be first in line to listen.