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by autuni 72 days ago
it's besides the point of the post but

> That argument is not unreasonable on its face. Artists should have rights. Their work should not be scraped, repackaged, and turned into infinite output without consent. But that is not the whole story. These companies don’t want to stop AI Music generation, they want to own it.

I'm not sure I agree with that assumption - flooding the market with large amounts of generated music (regardless of who does it) will decrease the value of UMG's products (real artists and AI songs) drastically to a point where I'm not sure that they would still have a viable business. While I disagree with a lot of what they do, I do assume that they have an interest in protecting music made by artists, not music generated as a product (though of course they also produce music like products with a lot of their human "artists").

2 comments

> flooding the market with large amounts of generated music (regardless of who does it) will decrease the value of UMG's products (real artists and AI songs) drastically to a point where I'm not sure that they would still have a viable business.

This is questionable. Did generated code decrease the price of software products?

I get what you mean but I don't really think they are comparable, since one of them is art and the other is typically product development. Art factors in the person behind the art piece, software (or other products) does not. The value of art is tied to the skill, creativity and experience required to make it as good as it is (at least in most people's mind).

But also, the main claim of the advantages of code generation is that it will make software development cheaper, and will end up making software cheaper. This is currently not necessarily the case because the quality of the code generation is not really there to make actual (reliable) product development cheaper, but it helps a lot with rapid prototyping. Or as I see it, more things are being prototyped and never finished. What also factors into this is that there are not many incentives for big tech companies to lower their prices, because a lot of what they're offering are tools that we need. This is also not the case with generated music.

> Did generated code decrease the price of software products?

I think it's too early to say.

You could argue that if software development is low effort due to "vibe coding" then it doesn't have the same value as it once did. Perhaps there'll be a race to the bottom by new entrants to the market who don't need to pay a whole development team and can massively undercut the incumbents. Or perhaps the race to the bottom will be in quality along with price, but the savvy user will see the value the incumbents provide.

Generated code isn't a product but a generated song is. And it definitely reduced the value.
Price, no. Value - probably.
There are a lot of executives acting in a way that makes me believe they're less interested in viability than causing a stockmarket supernova.