the ai music discussion

[bear]

I've been waiting a while to get my hands on this topic...

So there was a recent issue of Admin Magazine in which the letter from the editor, Artificial Intelligence in Review, summed up my thoughts much more eloquently than I'd be able to write myself--so I'm going to use a few quotes from that as my jumping-off point.

"...[M]any see AI applications such as ChatGPT as enemies and threats to our existence. The problem with that thinking is that these applications only know and can use what we give them... A person might build a program that can cross-reference, compare and contrast, and even draw some primitive conclusions, but it has to be fed the data from which it draws those conclusions. The inner sight that only the human mind can experience is that spark of genius that sees relativity, bent space, and the possibility of subatomic particles... Only the act of falling in love or losing a loved one can inspire the human heart to write great song lyrics... Remember that artificial intelligence is artificial. If it had existed 1,000 years ago, the printing press would not have been invented any earlier than it was, the Americas wouldn’t have been “discovered” any sooner than they were, and powered flight wouldn’t have happened any earlier, either... " (ADMIN Senior Editor Ken Hess for Admin Magazine Issue 77: Secure CI/CD Pipelines)

Now, I'm no expert and I'll probably accidentally misuse some tech vocab words here, but hopefully my point gets across!

I first want to focus on that part about AI only knowing what we give them. There's been many reports of AI image-generation recreating either offensive imagery, or even being inable to depict non-white people. These kinds of issues have been around for a while, which you'll know if you remember certain facial-recognition software having issues identifying non-white faces, or the Twitter AI bots that started spewing hate speech as soon as they launched. In the NY Times article I linked, the Senegalese artist Linda Dounia Rebeiz says about DALL-E 2, "It defaults to the worst stereotypes that already exist on the internet." It seems to me that AI is forever limited by its input data. I'm not alone in noticing an uptick in articles that are completely devoid of any original content, and you can usually pick them out as being written by AI immediately, like in this example. When using Google Images to find photo reference recently, I came across some pretty horrifying AI-generated results. Not only are the resulting images unsettling, they're not even useful!

That being said, a lot of people are fearmongering about something they pretty much should be familiar with already. Machine learning has been around for decades, we've heard complaints about the Facebook and YouTube algorithms near constantly, and predictive text on phones and email services continues to be passable at best. Labeling a lot of stuff we've seen before as "AI powered" definitely feels like slapping buzzwords on stuff for viral marketing. AI art in particular feels like a very similar grift to crypto and NFTs. Sure, it may get a bit bigger and it will probably get better, but it's not going to replace human-made art in the same way Bitcoin has not replaced the US dollar. It will continue to "flourish" mainly in grifter communities as people continue to search for greater fools. At least that's all I see happening...

Anyway, I'll get to the positives now. A few folks have already mentioned using AI as a tool, but I've been a bit stumped trying to find examples of it being used well (read: in a way that doesn't feel like a shallow cash grab). My partner told me about a good one though! Oneohtrix Point Never's newest album, Again, makes use of OpenAI Jukebox, Adobe Enhanced Speech, and the Riffusion neural network to create these incredibly otherworldly, dreamlike tracks. The songs I listened to (which may or may not be the only ones that made use of AI, I can't really tell from what I've read) are Krumville, The Body Trail, and On an Axis. Of course, you probably don't need AI to create these effects (the cut-up speech, for example, could be from recordings of real people talking and I wouldn't know the difference), but it seems like a neat thing to have in your toolbelt as a musician.

Ending with Daniel Lopatin's own words on this seems fitting, so here's his take on his use of AI on his new album:

"It’s so banal. To me the thing that’s exciting about AI is that they seem to behave a lot like we do, in that they confidently misrepresent ideas, they misconstrue history. Those two things are so on point to me that I was like, ‘Yes, this absolutely belongs in the OPN toolbox."

"This is like the mediaeval period. It’s really funny to me. It can be quite haunting too. I don’t even know where the eeriness ends and the humour begins. I’m not so impressed with it sonically, but using this stuff influenced the arrangements, particularly Jukebox. That’s the one that seems to do the weirdest stuff with rhythm and time. It fails so majestically that we have to take note of it." (Selim Bulut interviewing Daniel Lopatin for AnOther Magazine "How Young Adulthood and AI Shaped Oneohtrix Point Never’s New Record")

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

@bear I'll see Lopatin live next year :D. While I agree with many things that you say (some others went in a similiar direction), and agree that AI won't replace the "big/famous/ingenious/pretty/etc" artists, the trouble for many musicians/gfx-artists/writers but even "normal" (as in, non art-related) workers is existent - even if the AIs aren't perfect, they will be used to create stock music and other media - no fields where "high art" is created (if you think in such terms), but where people make their living. There will still be a field for people who compose and play themself, but it is likely to be narrowed by the use of "AI" in the future.

If you want a music-related example: Members of a band that I love that mixes renaissance music with progressive rock and folk influences make music scores for films where "old music" is required; and I'm quite sure that there were times where they made their living with this stuff instead of their "passion"-projects. If such bands loose the way of income (and the risk is high when you can produce "old sounding music" for basically zero money) they might - in some cases - also loose their field for exercise, their ability to visit studios, and such stuff, and might - in the long run - not be able to go on to make music that the enjoy making, and people enjoy hearing.

Same is true for illustrators who do make ads in their job but produce comics in their free time, etc. etc.


We won't get the AI-problem back into the bottle. As soon as it is technically doable (and I'm sure it is on a level that is sufficient for industrial use), it will come. We need to answer these problems (among many others, often even more pressing) as a society.

[bear]

@ThunderPerfectWitchcraft  Oh I 100% agree with you, and I feel bad that I left that out of my original message. I'm a cartoonist & illustrator, so it's definitely a bit worrying. I think I was trying to keep a positive head about it at the time, and then got too lazy to add on everything else.

I think AI will take jobs--it already has. Off the top of my head I can think of a few examples-- a place I worked needed a new logo, and they were looking at different artists in the area that could make one for them. After seeing their prices, the manager said, "Oh, let's just do it on Canva." Then they made a really ugly, generic, clip-art looking logo using the AI tools on Canva. Free is hard price to compete with.

There will always be people who don't care if art is good. Those people have already been short-changing artists on fiverr to make logos, videos, jingles, sound effects, and songs, and they have typically been saved from themselves by the small artists they commission (as long as they don't strong arm them into making something bad).

I don't know how to prevent that. Like you said, we can't get the AI problem back in the bottle. Is the way forward limiting/legistlating the use of AI? Letting artists opt-out of being used in training data for AI? I'm not really sure, but it's probably a mix of those and other solutions.

P.S. I hope you have fun seeing OPN! My partner is going to one of his shows this spring :D!!!

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

@ThunderPerfectWitchcraft  Oh I 100% agree with you, and I feel bad that I left that out of my original message. I'm a cartoonist & illustrator, so it's definitely a bit worrying. I think I was trying to keep a positive head about it at the time, and then got too lazy to add on everything else.

Don't feel bad about it. Just wanted to bring this in, since it also a thing that nags me about the whole AI-discussion. We are always talking about what it does with art, but if we only look how it directly touches art, we only see the half thing.

I think AI will take jobs--it already has. Off the top of my head I can think of a few examples-- a place I worked needed a new logo, and they were looking at different artists in the area that could make one for them. After seeing their prices, the manager said, "Oh, let's just do it on Canva." Then they made a really ugly, generic, clip-art looking logo using the AI tools on Canva. Free is hard price to compete with.

Things are even more visible outside of the art are: My mothers colleague is training a business AI that will overtake her job when shes going to pension (this might work out). At my friends university, all tutors were fired - the ministry wants them to be replaced by AI (this probably won't work out - jobs are gone for the moment, and might not be coming back anyway).

There will always be people who don't care if art is good. Those people have already been short-changing artists on fiverr to make logos, videos, jingles, sound effects, and songs, and they have typically been saved from themselves by the small artists they commission (as long as they don't strong arm them into making something bad).

I don't know how to prevent that. Like you said, we can't get the AI problem back in the bottle. Is the way forward limiting/legistlating the use of AI? Letting artists opt-out of being used in training data for AI? I'm not really sure, but it's probably a mix of those and other solutions.

I agree here. I believe that we need a mix of measures, and - ultimately - if we want to really solve the issue - have to overcome capitalism; the question that is directed at is how society can take place with technological advance, and its basically a continuation of the same conflict that made Luddites attack mechanical weave-chairs, or hinders us from adapt to the issues of global warming. Frustrating, since it isn't looking like we - as humanity - are going into the right direction at this time, but if you want to deal with such issues, your only working way is - in my opinion - political activity; be it as activist or as artist.