[lukan]

The purpose of music is (usually) to touch people emotionally. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how it was made. There is no cheating when there is feeling.

Generic AI music so far does not touch me. I might tolerate it in the background, but I know there is great music being made with the help of AI. (Which is different from letting the AI do it all)

An aimbot in competive playing is indeed cheating and sucks the fun out for others. But if you have fun with single player aimbots, why not. (I know some games integrated autoaim and they can still be fun)

[kmike84]

I'm not sure I want AI to touch me emotionally.

It feels insincere and manipulative, especially when I don't know upfront if the content (music, video, text) is from another human being or from AI.

AI will become good enough to write songs better than humans; it's a matter of time. But it feels like someone tries to hack my mind, exploit my human instincts, it doesn't feel like genuine art the way it was for the whole human history - people expressing themselves, creating and sharing something beautiful with each other.

The end result is an automated personalized "enjoy" button, and this is sad.

[bccdee]

> AI will become good enough to write songs better than humans; it's a matter of time.

I'm unconvinced. The process of songwriting is so dependent on being able to listen to what you've made and decide whether you enjoy it or not. We can train a model to imitate popular music, but we can't train a model to enjoy music, because we can't quantify enjoyment and turn it into a data set. You can train an LLM on soup recipes, but you can't train one to taste the soup and tell you whether it's good or not.

That's part of what offends me so much about the notion of AI-assisted "creativity." Creating music should be a way of engaging more deeply with music, but you've discovered a way to pay even less attention to music than before. None of the details in an AI-generated song really matter; they were chosen arbitrarily, because they seemed normal. Indeed, they are so normal that your ear will slide right off of them.

You can't fix a soup that someone else prepared—not as an amateur. You don't know what went into it, so you can't pick out the individual flavours and decide whether they're right or not. They were never "right" for you, because you didn't pick them. It's like ordering a Big Mac, taking it apart, and trying to workshop it into Duck à l'Orange. All you get is a Big Mac with some orange slices on it. Maybe you like Big Macs; maybe you're happy. It's a pretty poor substitute for creativity, though.

[anal_reactor]

> But it feels like someone tries to hack my mind, exploit my human instincts, it doesn't feel like genuine art the way it was for the whole human history - people expressing themselves, creating and sharing something beautiful with each other.

There's a thin line between art and business - quite often the goal isn't to have you feel something, it's to sell you product that you pay for, and if by the way you feel something, that's cool.

[matthewkayin]

People care about authenticity, though. There are people who get bothered by things like fake DJs, ghostwritten songs, lip synced live performances, and manufactured artists (such as many kpop groups).

And as for single-player aimbots, I agree that it doesn't do anyone any harm, but what's the point? It's like running the course of a marathon on a segway. If you're just doing it by yourself, then I suppose it doesn't hurt anyone, but you can't really say that you ran a marathon, can you?

[lukan]

"but what's the point? "

The point of playing video games?

Having fun. You don't achieve anything for real anyway, unless you are playing professional e-sports. And some games can still be fun, with aimbot. There is more to games than precision mouse work. I remember a arcade space shooter, where flying the aircraft was speedy action with dogfights, and you had only to do rough aiming, the rest did the "targeting computer". But I also have seen FPS shooters with that option and people enjoying the action and boom boom boom feeling powerful.

"There are people who get bothered by things like .. lip synced live performances, and manufactured artists"

And that would actually be me as well. But I try to keep an open mind even with the shallowest mainstream popsongs. Not liking it because of the source, but to see if I feel the music. Usually I turn it off a very quickly though, but I still don't talk down to my niece for example who likes it.

[gassi]

"The purpose of games is (usually) to win. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how you won. There is no cheating when there is winning."

[ToucanLoucan]

> The purpose of music is (usually) to touch people emotionally. If it works, it works. Doesn't matter how it was made.

The touching you emotionally part is due to the quality of the underlying creative work. I'm sure the GP's wife was touched- they put in the work to make something- but the fact is that work they did was enabled by the theft-at-scale of work others have done.

You can square this with your own ethics however you like but there's simply no getting away from the fact that all of this, the text, the music, the video, all of it only exists because of theft of creative work on an industrial scale. These models did not come from the ether- they are weighted mathematical averages based on ingesting shit tons of existing creative work, made by people, the vast majority of which was ingested against those creatives' explicit wishes.

Unfortunately most people don't give a shit where things come from as long as they get whatever they want in the end, which is why our economy is almost exclusively run by sociopaths.

[lukan]

"You can square this with your own ethics however you like but there's simply no getting away from the fact that all of this, the text, the music, the video, all of it only exists because of theft of creative work on an industrial scale"

I know enough of music creation to know, all music we enjoy is created by "theft". Meaning taking a riff from here, a melody from there. And tweaking it. AI just automated it. Not sure, it sucks with the whole buisness modell around it. That only some profit and not the truly creative composers. But that .. is hardly a new thing. There are many, many awesome musicians out there. Always have been. But only some become "superstars". Where a whole industry pushes them so they stay on top no matter what. That's not fair, but AI did not change this.

[ToucanLoucan]

This argument always hinges on pretending that "humans being influenced by other humans" is the same thing as "a model ingesting millions of works without permission," and it just isn’t. Not even remotely.

Human influence is selective. It’s contextual, filtered through taste, memory, culture, and intent. A metal songwriter doesn't subconsciously absorb the entire global corpus of music; they draw from the artists who shaped them, or deliberately subvert something specific. That’s literally the creative process: choosing what to reference, twist, or subvert, reject, counter.

A model doesn't do that. It doesn't choose influences, it doesn’t have tastes, and it doesn't have intent. It just digests everything it's fed into a massive statistical set of averaged patterns that it has found, and then regurgitates them on command so as to "minimize error." Calling that the same thing as human inspiration is like saying a wood chipper is just an automated sculptor because both involve wood going in and differently shaped wood coming out.

The music industry fucks musicians raw, to be sure, but this is not guaranteeing anything for musicians in the slightest, quite the opposite: it just makes it so users of the models can also fuck musicians. How is that good at all? The exploitation of artists at scale being the status quo is not a reason to excuse even more exploitation, that's certifiably insane.

[lukan]

"A metal songwriter doesn't subconsciously absorb the entire global corpus of music; they draw from the artists who shaped them"

They also draw from the people around them. The music they hear when they are in public spaces. Etc.

Out of curiosity, have you ever done composing?

Anyway, one can create very shallow songs by hand. One can also give empty vague prompts.

Or one can make a complex music arrangement, manual editing of tracks, have some AI generated mixed in, very detailed prompts etc. If that ain't creative to you, that is your opinion. I think different.

[veunes]

If it were just an average, we'd only get gray sludge. Models learn the manifold distribution - they don't just mix existing works; they discover the hidden rules by which those works were created. This is reverse-engineering of human culture, and that's exactly why control over the latent space is so critical - otherwise, we surrender culture to an algorithm that has "learned the rules" but has no concept of meaning

[echelon]

AI music models are a tool. They're only as good as the person doing the steering and curation.

I am a filmmaker. I have made photons-on-glass films for decades.

I have always wanted to make big-budget sci-fi and fantasy films, as have my friends and colleges who went to film school. The barrier to entry is almost impossible to climb. Most of my friends wound up in IATSE or doing commercial work, but never had the chance to follow through on their passion projects.

Ten thousand kids go to film school every year. Very few of them will wind up being able to make what they dream to create. It's a fucking tragedy that all of this ambition withers on the vine.

Getting a large film budget requires connections. You see a lot of nepotism. Sometimes a director who was in the right place at the right time with the right ideas will make it, but that's such a survivor's bias problem. There are orders of magnitude more people that didn't make it. Talented people full of dreams. And that's a tragedy - imagine how many Martin Scorseses, Hayao Miyazakis, Yorgos Lanthimoses, Denis Villeneuves, and Chloe Zhaos we're losing.

AI is the first tool that will level the playing field for truly driven individuals. I mean this with my full heart - this is a great tool for creative and driven people. It's the arrival of the printing press for us.

But the news of this gift has been twisted and soured by the media and by popular influencers who push only a fear agenda.

By trying to make AI films, I have been doxed, sent death threats, insulted, called thousands of names. Every day! People pour out hatred, racist comments, sexist comments - they literally want me (all of us) to DIE because they've been taught to hate this.

I can't even begin to tell you how exhausting this is. Instead, let me focus on the good.

Here's a list of (what I think) are really good AI films. Each of them takes 10+ hours of work:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4 - Made by a film school grad as a demo of real filmmaking combined with AI VFX.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAQWRBCt_5E - Created by a Hollywood TV writer for an FX show you've probably seen. Not the best animation or voicing, but you can see how it gives a writer more than just a blank page to convey their thoughts.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWZYP5jn5w4 - Music video. Slightly MAGA-coded, but made by a Hollywood VFX person.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U - Made by a film school grad as a Robot Chicken homage. If you're going to tell them "don't use AI", then are you going to get them a job at Disney? Also, all the pieces are hand-rotoscoped, the mouth animations are hand-animated, and every voice is from a hired (and paid) voice actor.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4NFXGMuwpY - Made by a film school grad as a Robot Chicken homage. See previous comment.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_KXYpaTe_8 - Another slightly MAGA-coded music video. Made by the same Hollywood VFX person.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hlx5Rslrzk - Amazing Spider-Man vs. Carnage anime created with ComfyUI and other models.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqoCWdOwr2U - Christmas Grinch anime. It's really funny if you like Jojo and get the references.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKYeDIiqiHs - Totally 100% cursed. Made by a teenager following the comic book's plot. Instead of this teenager spending 100 hours on Fortnite, they made this.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps5Dhc3Lh8U - A Pixar-like short film

These tools do not remove the need for editing, compositing, rotoscoping. You still have to understand film language, character arcs, story, pacing. The human ingredients still have to be there.

By using these models and tools, directors and editors can finally pursue projects that would require many people and potentially very large budgets. Like the Red vs. Blue creators sitting down and making machinima, they can create vivid sci-fi worlds or whatever genre or mood they want to evoke.

AI is a tool. In the hands of an artist, you can make art with AI.

Yes, people are using AI to make slop. Cameras also make slop - selfies, food pics. Your own camera roll is full of garbage.

People are posting slop AI because it's novel. If we'd gone from "no cameras at all" to "smartphones" overnight, you would see so much smartphone camera slop it would be unbearable. We, as a society, had time to develop filters and curation around cameras. That'll eventually happen for AI too.

Cameras can make incredible art in the hands of an artist. They can also make a lot of shit. But we don't demonize the cameras. Soon, our feelings towards AI will become equivalent.

But right now, it's extremely painful to be a creative person using AI.

I -

ABSOLUTELY HATE

ABSOLUTELY DETEST

   THE "ALL AI IS BAD" MEME

IT IS MIMETIC VITRIOL

People have let this stupid meme boil over to the point of sending death threats and doxxing creators. And that is beyond unacceptable.

We need to stop adopting angry slogans of hate and start thinking on a case by case basis with nuance.

This entire conversation needs way more humanity and humility.

And we need to accept that there are good things being created with AI too.

[alwa]

I agree with you on pretty much all that you’ve said here. Thank you especially for the recommended viewing!

I wonder what happens, though, as the economics shift? It’ll be great, creatively speaking, for people who have a project inside them itching to get out into the world. Those were always the people who made the most interesting art anyway.

But viewership economics aren’t expanding in the same way. Same number of viewers, less patience for feature-length work, less willingness to pay.

If the status quo only generated enough money for an already-small universe of Hollywood professionals to feed their families through their creative work, what happens when even that withers?

Film school, it seems to me, is partly about the access to equipment and talent, but mostly about the time and community expectation to dedicate every waking hour to your creative project.

Art and commerce have always been awkward bedmates, but it makes me a little sad that the price for anyone being able to create is that ~none of them will be able to make money from their creative labor.

[echelon]

Hollywood budgets aren't growing, but they're not shrinking either.

Most recent cost cutting has been Hollywood offshoring IATSE jobs to Europe and Asia. 80% of Atlanta's once burgeoning film production has moved away. We have tremendous, multi-billion dollar studio facilities here too.

I do expect AI to eventually be used for saving on VFX costs, pre-production, and even B roll, but I don't think it'll replace principal photography right away. It might be used in more animation projects.

I don't think those budgets will disappear. Rather, I think they will be spent on other projects to increase the slate of offerings.

Meanwhile, completely orthogonal to all of this, the creator economy has been growing tremendously year over year. We have lots of independent creators that are now household names and brands.

Some indie YouTubers that have grown big include:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zach_Hadel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivienne_Medrano

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Haver

All of them were offered network deals.

I suspect we'll see a rise of indie filmmakers and that the field will begin to look more like writing, indie music, or indie games. Anyone can bring their talent and not much capital and make interesting and compelling work.

The problem, as always, will be discovery. A lot of good work will still go unseen. But this is better than the work not being practical or possible.

As long as people capture minds and attention, there will be incredible value in creating and captivating. Artists will get paid. It's just a matter of artists breaking through and finding an audience.

[NateEag]

As a longtime musician, I fervently believe in doing the best you can with the tools you have.

As a programmer with a philosophical bent, I have thought a lot about the implications and ethics of toolmaking.

I concluded long before genAI was available that it is absolutely possible to build tools that dehumanize the users and damage the world around them.

It seems to me that LLMs do that to an unprecedented degree.

Is it possible to use them to help you make worthwhile, human-focused output?

Sure, I'd accept that's possible.

Are the tools inherently inclined in the opposite direction?

It sure looks that way to me.

Should every tool be embraced and accepted?

I don't think so. In the limit, I'm relieved governments keep a monopoly on nuclear weapons.

The people saying "All AI is bad" may not be nuanced or careful in what they say, but in my experience, they've understood rightly that you can't get any of genAI's upsides without the overwhelming flood of horrific downsides, and they think that's a very bad tradeoff.

I agree with them.

[echelon]

The Corridor Crew [1] are luminaries in our field, and they are incredibly bullish on this tech.

They've made dozens of essays and done tons of experiments showing that they think AI is going to be great for our field:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSRrSO7QhXY (scrub through the timelines to the end of these videos to see)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq5JaG53dho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUFlOynaUyk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVT3WUa-48Y

Listen to them.

Our entire industry pays attention to them, and they're right!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corridor_Digital

[CyberDildonics]

The Corridor Crew [1] are luminaries in our field, and they are incredibly bullish on this tech.

They are literally "react" youtubers who have never worked a single day as professional vfx artists.

This is like saying Jake Paul is the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

[standardly]

I created a jazz fusion supergroup in Suno capable of impossibly tight jamming. I believe the synth player has 8 arms. I'm not even selling it as an output of my own creativity - even though I partially feel like it was - but rather, it was just fun to make! I had a ton of fun with it, even downloaded stems and mixed a lot in a DAW. I still LOL at how fresh some of it is. Suno rocks. Top 40 is garbage anyways, and the best music out right now are live bands, imo, so I don't feel that I'm encroaching on anyone else's artistic opportunity (hopefully) by doing these Suno projects.

That said, I haven't shown it to anyone... I'm not trying to make anyone mad. But what's the point of working on any music, AI or not, if nobody wants to hear it? This was a bit of a depressing realization for someone who was always fearful of letting anyone listen to my own actual music. It doesn't matter how much I piloted the prompt, or mixed down the stems, and how good the final result is, because at the end of the day, its just AI... I really don't know how to feel about the whole thing - there are legitimate arguments against AI for creative use, it's hard to not feel like a hypocrite or something for even using it..