[cowboylowrez]

I think many folks making the "music technology" argument tend to blur things so that human composition is reduced to "just another dial, just another new tech aid for music", "get off my lawn" etc. But its interesting to note that generative AI is unique in that it needs massive amounts of music that has already been produced to train on. Its a very unique development with some interesting questions once you sharpen the picture a bit.

[bambinella]

Let's not forget that extraordinary musical talent tends to be the result of MASSIVE exposure to music as a toddler. It isn't entirely a question of DNA or effort. They start by emulating what they hear, over time they might evolve their own style, or they may not. In other words, you are less likely to become an extraordinary musical talent if you weren't saturated with music before you started going to school. Nobody finds it problematic when a musical star is performing way beyond their age, even though he/she essentially is engaging in deliberate mimicry to a much larger extent than an AI usually would be.

Are you saying that it is wrong for a machine to learn? Even if it was, it is the massive amount it is based on that makes it less problematic, as that makes room for building abstracted knowledge.

[cowboylowrez]

I like to think of mozart and the amount of music he listened to and was influenced by and compare it to what (I imagine) is used by these machines. Heck, you don't even instruct the machines on scales, rhythms or other sorts of fundamental musical aspects, you just tell the machines to make noise that sounds like what they've hoovered up. I'm still convinced that AI music proponents want to blur and obscure the differences between human composers and machine "composers" but I personally think the differences are pretty interesting and worthy of consideration.

[bambinella]

My best tracks are extended in 10-20 second sections. And I carefully choose the prompt and what to keep and where to continue (crop), sometimes just a few seconds. So you can compose with these models, basically, you have to if you want to get something that isn't bland.

So overall, yes, anyone can, with some luck create a "radio friendly" track with music AI, but not everyone can create good art with it. You still need to understand music, and the more you know about genres and composers and how they fit together the more power you have to create musically interesting patterns.

Keep in mind that Sunauto has 3400 generic tags + an undisclosed amount of artist names. You need to understand what makes it possible to combine different Artists/Musicians and what could lead to something interesting.

So musical knowledge is still needed.

[cowboylowrez]

I am certain that AI music can produce something, but that training data needs to be figured out.

[frankhorrigan]

This is a baseless argument. A human being and a machine are fundamentally different. A human being synthesizes things from the world and it becomes a part of them. The art they produce is filtered through their unique brain and life experience and natural talents. All a machine does is spit out recycled versions of things that actual human beings have done.