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by ToucanLoucan 18 days ago
My girlfriend has been using an AI music generator and like, her music is the best generative music I've listened to. Her prompts are crazy, lots of actual like, music theory and specific requests.

That said, it still shares these qualities. It sounds like AI images look. Oversmoothed/overtuned.

Like as a creative myself, what AI has taught me more than anything is that a lot of what we call artistry happens in the friction between an artist and their tools, when they're pushing to the limit of what they know how to and what their tools are able to do, that's where the great shit is. And it's not even that AI is a bad tool necessarily, it just doesn't create any friction. It can be frustrating, for sure, when you just can't get it to do what you want, but it's not an interesting frustration like friction because you aren't the problem, nor your skill: the tool is the problem.

That probably sounds like I'm saying it's bad and again, no. I'm saying the friction between the artist and their tools is the interesting part, and because there's very little friction, meaningfully, between artists and AI tools, it just comes out... boring.

The push for generative AI is "you can make anything," and that's true. But if you can make anything, then by necessity, anything you make is unimpressive. It's only really impressive if you're not sure if you can make it.

1 comments

The charm is that as humans it's physically impossible to do the same thing exactly the say way twice.

If I play 3 notes, without something like quantization it's always going to be a bit different from you playing the same 3.

Anything AI with vocals sounds completely non sensical. I guess you can feed it words, but at that point just record yourself. I'm not all that good , but that's the point.

Like your thoughts! And then mastery is being able to play things exactly the same. But with mastery comes another way for humans to recognize each other. Specific sounds to specific masters (or movements, techniques for say sports). Each master adds individual grace that we can recognize. That might be why we discount AI-creations vs human mastery. There is a grace (I’m stretching) but it is not unique and not acquired via a process of human mastery. (The word ‘bland’ fits very well!)

I bought this Barenboim on Beethoven DVD set 20 yrs ago only for the bonus DVD where he gives a masterclass. These were exceptional students (Lang Lang is rated as one of the worlds best now), and I can’t play piano, but in that video he shows me as a layman the difference between playing with competence and playing with grace. One can hear the difference in depth of the story behind each note. Found one: [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NYfrht6TU8