[simmonmt]

If you consider say elevator music - music that's just there to fill space, rather than to be listened too - then I don't think there's that much difference between using AI to produce it and using AI to produce clip art or boilerplate code.

[marcus_holmes]

Music as wallpaper vs music as artistic paintings.

We are fine with mass-producing wallpaper with machines. People buy this every day, no problem.

We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art".

Both hang on the wall as decoration. Essentially the same purpose. But we have very different feelings about them and hold them to very different standards.

Music is the same. We have muzak - background music that isn't supposed to be listened to, it's just wallpaper. I don't think many people object to this being machine-made in bulk. And then we have music that is art and is supposed to be listened to explicitly. We hold this to a higher standard and expect it to be the product of human creative urges.

[TiredOfLife]

> We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art".

China is full of factories where exactly this is being done and people are fine with this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15742507

[Nasrudith]

It depends entirely upon who the "we" is in question. There has long been an aristocratic tantrum against affordable decoration in the art and architecture world, dating back to men's formal wear going mostly monochromatic as soon as colors became widely affordable instead of reserved for the gentry. There were similar ones against ornamentation with Brutalism (mixed with dadaist 'the world doesn't deserve art!' post WWI despair memes).

The cynical would dismiss the whole distinction between mass produced and unique art as arbitrary. Or worse, just as a racket to create artificial scarcity, a social kabuki show to create the pretension of high culture, or for the purpose of some sort of criminal scheme like money laundering.

[aethertron]

Seems a bit silly, though. More economical to paint (or draw, or cut-and-paste, or whatever) one original, scan it, then print many copies.

[joshoink]

Even furniture music is art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furniture_music

[yellowapple]

> We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art".

Sure “we” are; we just call them “prints” or “posters” instead of ”paintings”.

[TOMDM]

I have the sudden urge to frame some wallpaper.

[gizajob]

Relevant Basquiat quote:

“Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.”

[Ferret7446]

> We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art".

Uhh... Cheap, basically AI generated art for home decor definitely exists.

> And then we have music that is art and is supposed to be listened to explicitly

Just like how most people are not sommeliers, most people just listen to pop music "slop"

[chromacity]

Well, code and visual art is more differentiated, so the thing you need probably doesn't exist and it would take effort & money to procure it. Not always, but often enough to make rational people default to AI.

With music... if there's a style you like, no matter how eclectic, there are probably thousands matching human-recorded tracks you can listen to today.

[yellowapple]

Finding those thousands of matching human-recorded tracks and curating them into playlists seems like a benign use of music-aware ML models.