[injuly]

I like how the comments in Devin's HN thread were all bleak and full of doom.

But now that it's a different industry AI is eating up, we're congratuling the team and sharing generated songs.

This looks like a fun tool, but when the smaller artists in Udio's training set recorded their albums, they didn't price in a capitalist company using their work to put them out of business.

[piltdownman]

A few major points here:

1. The market for this and the market for the output of actual Artists are mutually exclusive (see the 'sound-alike' industry for stock music).

2. Most artists don't own their mechanical reproduction rights, their publishers and/or copyright trolls do.

3. Existing 'likeness laws' going back as far as Bette Midler v Ford offer protection/relief for more egregious violations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Overall, I see this as a legacy problem, with new developments in AI acting as a positive catalyst to drive robust and clarified legislation around music royalties and copyright - badly needed since the quagmire the Robin Thicke 'Blurred Lines' judgement caused.

“At the core of music is math, and every mathematical combination has already occurred in some way, shape, or form. It’s the performance of that math that changes depending on the singer or the song style...Saying something is derivative is a pretty hard argument for copyright owners to make because we all borrow ideas from things that we’ve heard before. AI just does it at a way faster speed.”

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23836337/music-generative...

[injuly]

Interesting points. This isn't just about music, though. Udio can do standup skits too, and elevenlabs can already replace NPC dialogue voice actors in games and audiobook narrators. Smaller music producers who make intros for big youtubers, or sound designers who make tunes like notification sounds and SFX for video game screens are going to have their lives severely impacted by AI audio generators.

[piltdownman]

Broadly we're in agreement - I just see the examples you use as raising the bar of production values of the low-end commercial use-cases, rather than subjugating the industry outright.

Take for example the Wordpress Blog 'Review Site' ecosystem. The ubiquity of low-quality and keyword/SEO optimised Wordpress based review blogs for e.g. Dropshipped Mattresses didn't destroy the blogging industry - in fact it was the exact time sites dedicated to long-form content started emerging like Medium.

More pertinently, you cite the example of the intro 'stings' for youtubers - these were once strictly the purview of SFX Houses, but innovations like Adobe After Effects and Final Cut Pro's cost and licensing models democratised the industry to the extent where we now expect broadcast-TV quality fades and transitions in basic family home videos. This didn't negatively impact the high-end of the market so much as lower the barriers for entry for the indies in a way not seen since the advent of Super-8, and later Digital, Video Recording.

Simply put, if there's low-hanging fruit to automate in the nuts and bolts of media production, history tells us it will eventually be automated to the strength rather than the detriment of the industry. From Da Vinci to Warhol, from Picasso to Hirst, there has always been a cross-pollination between industry and art. More to the point, there has always been subsequent re-evaluation of what constitutes Art following these techno-cultural upheavals. We saw it in the 1980s with particular relevance when Art was enhanced, not degraded, by the opportunities afforded by the audio and video sampling revolution of the time.

The postmodernist approaches to music that emerged as a result of sampling were, at the time, decried as the end of both musicianship and creativity by many critics and authorities. 40 years on, Academics have re-evaluated and rightly see it simply as the natural and due evolution of Western Musicology from the Musique Concrète of the 1940s.

Where AI differs from the historical examples to date is in its ability to represent concept and context, to effect subtext and nuance - ersatz or otherwise - in its output. To me this poses the real question that must be answered; namely 'How differently will this artistic paradigm shift impact us compared to every other one to date? Does the ability to render a visual concept in a distinct mode via articulation rather than ability detract from Art as a whole, or will it afford us greater opportunity in expanding the sphere of Art itself and remove any need to leverage artistic talent in the pursuit of gross commerce?'