[topherhunt]

I'm sorry but this attitude baffles me, and I think it's the sort of thing that will sound so silly in 20 years that we'll have collectively memory-holed it. If you're turned off from listening to Spotify recoms becausue they _might_ be AI and you _might_ not know, what does that say to you about the disconnect between your aesthetic judgment and your values?

If you're listening to Spotify autoplays and a shitty song comes up, skip it. If AI slop is flooding Spotify with shitty songs, they'll naturally fail algorithmically (assuming we trust Spotify to actually be honest about its algos, which I'll admit we shouldn't https://substack.com/@tedgioia/note/c-236242253)

If you're listening to Spotify autoplays and a catchy impressive song comes up, what you do is you _listen to it_ and you _fucking enjoy it_. This knee-jerk disgust reaction of "ugh I worry that it's AI" has no place in your heart in that moment. You're just sitting listening to your plastic-and-rare-earth earbuds reproduce digitized waveforms and paying attention to what the music evokes in you. It seems ridiculous to me that we get distracted by questions about "but what if this music isn't made by a human". Insofar as you're a music-enjoyer, listening to music, the only question should be _is it good_. It shouldn't matter if it was created by duck or slug.

The _economic fairness_ aspect is another matter and I don't have as strong opinions there. I think we should ideally incentivize people who use AI in generating their music to disclose their usage, though I have no idea if it's possible to do so, so that consumers who care about only supporting human artists with their listenship-stats can filter to that group. And certainly anyone who closely imitates _a specific artist_, crossing the line from "inspired by" and "shamelessly ripping off", should be severely disincentivized from doing so, whether they used AI or not.

[pjc50]

To a vegetarian: "just think about how it tastes, don't worry if there's meat in it!"

Really this stuff is accelerating a conflict between two philosophies of life:

- one where neural network A (electric) produces a set of stimuli for neural network B (meat), which in turn causes the meat to press buttons to maximize the stimuli received;

- one where humans seek meaning in the world and connection with other humans.

Now, the second is losing, and has been since the decline in philosophical dualism across the 20th century; but it can still express the concepts of "important" and "meaningful", which have no place in the first worldview at all.

> The _economic fairness_ aspect is another matter

More plainly, as soon as I read the headline about one AI occupying 11 top slots I thought it was obviously being gamed by listen-botting. I don't really know how a system where machines "listen" to other machines in order to extract a small revenue from defrauded advertisers is sustainable, but there it is.

[Ajedi32]

This feels like a false dichotomy to me. You can find meaning and connect with other humans over AI music no differently than you can over music written by a celebrity. (And vice-versa, you can listen to music written by a human and just enjoy it for the sound without finding any particular sense of meaning or connection.)

[digital-cygnet]

Different people have very different relationships to art (in this case, music). For me, the aspects of communication and empathy are key: I think of a song as a message from a particular person at a particular time trying to get across a particular feeling, message, etc.

There is nothing wrong with your approach to music appreciation (removing the author entirely and appreciating it as an isolated work), but it's worth recognizing that a lot of people have different values from you here and their preferred mode of music appreciation is equally valid.

[Rebuff5007]

I see your point, and think its valid, but here is a counter:

Content is graded on both instant appeal (e.g. rotten tomatoes "popcornmeter") and artistic appeal (e.g. rotten tomatoes "tomatometer").

I firmly believe that AI generated content cannot have any artistic appeal, because I believe art is fundamentally an invocation of human expression. This might be fine in some contexts, but in general I'd prefer consuming content from groups that I trust to strike a good balance between these types of appeal (e.g. A24 movies).

[latexr]

> Content is graded on both instant appeal (e.g. rotten tomatoes "popcornmeter") and artistic appeal (e.g. rotten tomatoes "tomatometer").

I understand the distinction, but I don’t find the examples compelling. The difference between the popcorn and tomato meters, as I understand it, is just the source. The latter are critics’ opinions while the former are “regular people” opinions. Professional critics may have some concern for the artistic value of a movie, but their job is to help you decide “should you spend your time with this” and the entertainment value is a primary consideration. Furthermore, a critic can have early access and needs to write their review fast. An audience member, who has no such obligation, can let it ruminate and have their opinions evolve. In that sense, a critic’s opinion may be more influenced by initial appeal.

[dabbledash]

If you value art as communication with another human soul, then it matters whether a human was involved.

"Who cares if that 'I love you' voicemail is really from your mother. As long as it sounds like your mother, it should give you the same warm feeling."

[pjc50]

"Mother.com: we can provide you with that warm feeling of your mother's voice, even if she's been dead for years. YC 2027"

[aaronharnly]

Some of us want to support actual human musicians?

[fennecbutt]

Well supporting small artists instead of huge celebrities worth almost a billion dollars or more is a start (not for you, for everyone).

[jeltz]

The one you replied to may do so. I certainly listen more to smallish artists than I listen to big.

[dwedge]

Man this is my current bug bear. Last year I wanted to go offline for all my music. So many of these sites selling mp3s complain about how Spotify pays a fraction of a cent per stream and I should buy music, and I agree.

But then they sell the mp3 albums at $15, more than the physical version ever was. Come on, there has to be a middle ground. At $5 each I'll buy 20, at $15 maybe 1

[bondarchuk]

You can listen to AI-generated music all you want, why does it bother you so that others won't?

[moron4hire]

Because they need Technojesus to come save them from never having learned to invert a binary tree, so any anti-AI sentiment is a threat to that.

[JoeDaDude]

This "human connection" is over rated IMHO. We tend to create an image of what a human musician is like and we forget that they are, well, human. Too often human musicians have disappointed fans because of their lifestyle (the expression sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll exists for a reason) or because some do not agree with the social and political causes the musicians support. Occasionally, fans follow an artist for their commitment to their art later to discover they sell out in some way, like their style changes to achieve greater mass appeal, or the sell their work to become a jingle for sugar pops or similar. I think it is best to appreciate their creation and admit the person creating it may not be someone to place undue adulation on. To quote a film, I think it is best to "separate the art from the artist".

[cheq]

when you think there's an AI behind what you are enjoying, it destroys every sense of purpose, and the only goal is clicks and time listened (not trasncendence, recognition, share of emotions or histories), so the "enjoyer" becomes more like a user or consumer than an human enjoying art

[xerxes249]

The problem is that it is making Spotify money if they substitute real artists by generated music that they produced themselves. They will have to pay a smaller share of their money to actual artists.

[yoz-y]

Among other already stated reasons I take listening to human made music as an investment. If everything is AI the originality will disappear because the already struggling artists will be pushed out even more. Even if they move elsewhere then the platform I currently use, and am comfortable with, will become useless to me.

I can’t enjoy listening to music I know was made by AI. If you can, power to you.

[tetris11]

Initially bad songs made with real thought often mature into favourites as you learn what the artist was going for.

If you skip every song because you don't immediately like it, then you never learn to refine you palette.

There is then indeed a real fear when a song comes up catered to you, that says nothing about the artist, but was generated to keep you listening. You're getting pidgeonholed.

[jhrmnn]

Interesting. The debate about whether the artist matters in perceiving a piece of art is very old. You don’t seem to consider the possibility that the artist’s intent matters when listening to music. For me it absolutely does. As the AI has no intent (agency), the AI music is void of any value to me.

[kingkongjaffa]

> Insofar as you're a music-enjoyer, listening to music, the only question should be _is it good_. It shouldn't matter if it was created by duck or slug.

What an awful take. Music is inherently a human act, there's been lots written about this, but the point, and especially for music with lyrics is story telling, emotion, connection, empathy. Things a duck or slug or large language model have not business mimicking.

[cornholio]

Well, let's make a revoltingly fun analogy: say a hamburger restaurant opened in your city, that openly admits it puts (ethically acquired) human meat in some of its products. You don't have to worry about the legality of the venture, it's all 100% compliant with the original persons donating their bodies to feed the world. Now, the hamburgers are extraordinarily good tasting, some say the best in town. The price is also good - they have a great hook up for the main ingredient, after all.

By the same logic, would you say that people refusing to eat there have "a disconnect between their culinary tastes and their values?" Or, if people have a visceral reaction to some other fast food joints surreptitiously introducing the same magic ingredient in their diet, would you also tell them to _just eat it_ and _fucking enjoy it_?

The source matters, both for meat and art. It's part of the product itself, you cannot disentangle the taste and sound of the performance from the way it was produced. AI art trying to pass as human art is simply a form fraud, and some people will always reject it, while others are of course free to embrace it and enjoy it.

[sneak]

> By the same logic, would you say that people refusing to eat there have "a disconnect between their culinary tastes and their values?"

Yes, obviously. It’s almost a perfect demonstration of that.

[pjc50]

> You don't have to worry about the legality of the venture, it's all 100% compliant with the original persons donating their bodies to feed the world. Now, the hamburgers are extraordinary good tasting, some say the best in town. The price is also good - they have a great hook up for the main ingredient, after all.

Halfway through this paragraph I started hearing it in the Trump cadence.

> The source matters, both for meat and art.

Yes, exactly. This is why people care about things like DOC, fair trade certifications, UFLPA clothing, cruelty-free cosmetics, and so on.

To deepen the analogy slightly: is the AI "ethically acquired"? Do the people collating the training data have consent for every piece of music they trained it on?

[moron4hire]

We know for a fact they don't. We know because they told us they didn't.

[williamdclt]

While I think it's an opinion that's somewhat valid and I wouldn't really blame anyone for consuming art this way, it's definitely missing a lot of what art can be about.

A piece of art is not a self-contained thing, the end result isn't where all (or even most) of the interest resides. The intent of the artist, the point they're making, the history that led to it, the references it makes and why, the choices and decisions taken in making it... that's all inherent part of the art and a huge part of why people might enjoy a piece of art or not.

For example, if I listen to some progressive rock, I might enjoy it for how a fellow human managed to identify and break some rules of traditional songwriting, for their expertise in musical theory, for the references they chose to make to other bands/songs/genres... If I learn it's AI-generated, the song itself hasn't changed but there's no point in it anymore, my enjoyment was directly coming from the fact that it was made by a human: if it's a machine I'll just shrug and say "yeah sure everyone knows machines can do that". Entire genres like punk or grunge make zero sense if not human-made.

For a more extreme example: a piece of contemporary art often has very little point in itself. The art is in the artist's process (their point of view, intent, history, etc), not the piece. If a piece is AI-generated, there's literally zero interest in it (except maybe as commentary on AI itself, fine).

> what you do is you _listen to it_ and you _fucking enjoy it_. This knee-jerk disgust reaction of "ugh I worry that it's AI" has no place in your heart in that moment

I suggest being a lot more humble about your understanding of art and other people's relationship to it

[lsaferite]

Just one comment

> a piece of contemporary art often has very little point in itself. The art is in the artist's process (their point of view, intent, history, etc), not the piece.

I personally find no enjoyment in art where I have to have context for it to be "interesting". Either it is or it isn't interesting on it's own merits. I find all art the same though. If it isn't interesting on it's own, then it's not interesting on the whole (for me).

[aucisson_masque]

>If AI slop is flooding Spotify with shitty songs, they'll naturally fail algorithmically

It implies to trust the algorithm and believe that Spotify developer, first know what they're doing, secondly have your best interest at heart.

I don't believe neither, I don't use their algorithm.