But isn't music more than just the music track? People like to listen to the same music, go to concerts, share it with others, share the experience of audience/artist performance.

Moments where music is truly important in one's life will never be replaced by meaningless bit fiddling.

I cannot imagine people caring about books, music, art created by bit fiddling. They will always care about things created by other people. We do not watch chess engines playing together, even though the level of play is "godlike". AlphaZero didn't make human chess less popular. Chess is extremely popular now and it is mostly due to personalities participating in it and the ease of access (streaming videos...).

I find the demo where a random song from an artist you like is created very weird. Who would want to do that? And why would anyone connect to that? Will these people save these random creations and relisten them? Will they remember these moments by remembering these random silly unique tracks? I cannot imagine that at all.

Well, this could have the potential to make infinite covers of your favorite song.

But think about it, people used to watch the same movies in DVD. The movies they loved. Now people watch and infinity of short random videos (tik tok, instagram)...

Technology changes the habits of people, specially in young people. Think about it, one friend sends a song auto-generated from some text, it is "a song made by someone", at least that will be their perception...

I still don't see the pull. Take a band like The National. I'm 100% certain most of the listeners absolutely do not care about covers at all.

This musical world where we generate random stuff that will be consumed equivalently to current music just does not feel real. What will probably happen is that people just won't listen to music or get passionate about it at all. That might already be happening because gaming is something what music was for the generation when pull of the games was not as strong.

Young people today will probably never care about Beatles or Bob Dylan or contemporary bands. The music is just not the main interest.

Just imagine AI making games and everyone in the industry losing their job. It just does not work that way. Product is not the end. Music does not work that way. Music is more than the product.

Any creative history is focused on a group of people and their audience, not on the songs/books/poems in general, but the whole experience of creativity and its outputs.

I think the bigger concern should be around things like backing scores, soundtracks, and other instrumental music. Things that you might have paid a composer to do, or a local orchestra to perform, can be done by AI and a synth.

This has similar energy to the writer’s strike - save money by removing the first layer of human effort. For some things (like the backing music in a commercial) this is sufficient, and for others you can have AI generate the base and then have a human “punch it up” with their vocals or by performing it on live instruments.

I don’t think we risk losing music production in general, but I do think there’s a legitimate concern that many many smaller, less publicly visible music jobs will be lost.

> I think the bigger concern should be around things like backing scores, soundtracks, and other instrumental music. Things that you might have paid a composer to do, or a local orchestra to perform, can be done by AI and a synth.

This was already somewhat accomplished by synths and music production software. Take any keyboardist with knowledge of composition and you can get a very realistic sounding orchestra, played by one person. Synths make air/string instruments sound extremely realistic even when played on a keyboard.

Sounds like that kind of work is almost equivalent to clerical work, yet maybe requires a bit more training effort. Although, do you really need to be a violin maestro to play for a movie soundtrack in an orchestra, are your skills being used at their limits?

So I guess we can just see what happened with clerical work and how the society responds. I guess clerks just didn't have enough "voting power".

I do think music is slightly more immune to this than some other forms of art because music is usually so tied to a personality and a physical presence that there will be ways for artists to overcome this to some extent.

Would you say a mastering engineer is "fiddling with bits?" and also: would you say there's artistic merit in bringing out the brilliance of a song with said engineering?

Almost no human activity in music is fiddling bits, everything has its place. Pretty sure there are not that many points in music where your role can be trivial. Mastering engineer is somewhat replaced by good music production software and his craft became more approachable to the artist who's not familiar with mastering but can now do it easily due to software.

I do not know if mastering engineers who worked with analog equipment started complaining about losing jobs to digital programs, making their experience obsolete. Did they? I don't think any AI product will be able to separate itself from the human will. Anything we humans do is by humans for humans and all of these places where software would steal our music experience is just hard for me to imagine.

"(3) At some point, it will be so advanced that it will hardly need anyone to create it, and Google and other big tech companies can use it to be an alternative to traditional musicians, who will not be able to compete and therefore will not be able to do what they love to survive."

What is your definition of "traditional" here - historically, both music and art were not full time jobs for most. It was a thing people with a passion for did as a side gig, with some (but not a lot) of people eventually sustaining themselves full time with art. Or it was done by already rich people who did not need to work and could afford to be people of leisure.

That was true even of organized things like orchestras, etc. Doing these as a full time job is a relatively recent thing, and even there, "surviving" has been limited to a remarkable few.

Even a decade ago, 30% of musicians had a second job. The 70% was not mostly "bands" but,again, permanent things like orchestras, etc.

Trying to forcefully keep jobs alive that don't need to exist is insanity, and rightfully gets pointed out as such in other contexts. This would be no different in this case.

Here, it's also totally non-obvious that if these things go back to "people pursue it as a side gig because they love it" we will be any worse off than we were in terms of quality of art/music, happiness, you name it.

Because that was the way of the past and art/music were not just fine, but most people even consider it better!

I'll also add - the times folks have spent fighting change in what jobs are needed rarely ends up well vs the time spend helping people adapt to that change.

You have to know the change is real, of course, but once you do, we've ended up with insane results when we try to fight it.

As a indie game developer, this could plausibly enable me to add decent sounding soundtrack to my games. I couldn't afford to pay a proper artist, and my musical skills are... Limited..

It _is_ just a tool, a new instrument essentially, one that is easier to play than most. People being angry that there is now a new instrument that is much easier to play than the one they spent years to learn come across as entitled brats to me. This will enable me to express myself in a way I couldn't before, how is that not about human expression?

It's a accessibility thing as well. Expressing oneself through music has always been nearly impossible to the tone-deaf among us. Now that may change, and you want to stop that because it might maybe potentially affect how much money you can earn from playing music?

Glory to Google for enabling the musically impaired to express themselves through music!

You are exactly why this is a problem. By creating demand for this soulless music we will be inundated by it everywhere. Also all small musicians will basically have to give up because no-one will even bother to save up to pay them. Absolutely trash mindset.

I already can't pay them, so nothing changes in that point.

I don't know why it makes you so angry that I want the best tools imaginable to make music, for my games and otherwise?

I promise you won't be inundated by the music I create, and no-one will force you to listen to it.

The mindset that you have the right to dictate what tools I can and cannot use to express myself via music is downright dystopian and extremely autocratic. If me creating some tunes for my own benefit in my basement scares you, I think you might need to revise your world view, or all that anxiety is gonna have a detrimental effect on your health sooner or later.

I understand that you can't afford it. I have been a poor hobbyist before. I've been so poor I had to try and do all my projects on an overheating piece of hot garbage government issued laptop and I felt very hard done by for being someone with expensive hobbies that only rich people could afford to actually excel at. But there are free music options. AI is an existential threat to our very right to expression as human being and you should not vote with your money for it to wipe out creatives as a fellow creative. There are also struggling amateur music producers out there who are attempting to get good and make a break. They don't deserve to be drowned forever by a machine.

As humans, the fundamental way we derive meaning from life is creation. The purpose of automation has always been to allow for humans to have more space to be creative, as this is really what we excel at and enjoy. If we insist on replacing our creative functions with machines, we will make ourselves obsolete, apart from the few CEOs who own the massive servers that nobody else can afford to own and closed source super-powerful AI systems. Even if you think these ghoul-like assholes would actually care to help the destitute masses whose jobs have rapidly become obsolete on an unprecedented scale that our economy cannot handle, humans require meaning and goals to survive. If we have to all just be kept alive by server owners because our passions are made irrelevant by mass producing robots, humans will die out just from the psychological stress. This is a real thing, one of the top indicators of long lifespan is older people retaining passions, goals and some level of work.

This is of course all worst case scenario stuff I'm talking about here. But I struggle to see an argument for how allowing AI to take over every aspect of our society would not lead to plenty of horrible consequences.

Your convenience is not worth it, I'm sorry.

First they came for the artists. And I did not speak out because I was not an artist. Then they came for the actors. And I did not speak out because I was not an actor. Then they came for the musicians. And I did not speak out because I was not a musician.

...

Then they came for the Indie Game Devs. And there was nobody left to speak for them.

fr it's like this guy doesn't get that if art music and coding are all taken over by AI his whole job/hobby will be redundant

Have you considered something like https://www.indiegamemusic.com/, where a lot of artists have their music available free or super cheaply?

I have, and it kinda works, but I usually have a pretty good idea of what I want the theme to sound like, and I'm never able to find something that even resembles my vision.

That leaves me with 2 options: hire an orchestra and a choir, along with a composer to make the sound I want, which would cost me a lot more than my games ever sell for, or pick a sound that's never quite, or usually even close to, what I had in mind.

With this tool, I'm hoping even someone as musically untalented as me could take the music that's playing in my head, and get it(or something very similar to it) playing on some speakers. It probably won't win me any musical awards, I don't expect this to to magically take me from zero to Vivaldi, but if I can make a tune that sounds like what I imagined, it'll be a win for me.

I'll add here that I really for the life of me cannot see the harm in that, even though you didn't really imply there would be, but others in this thread have been screaming it pretty loudly, so it appears to be a concern among fellow hn'ers

If you have music that's playing in your head, genuinely playing in your head, as in you can actually hear the physical melody then you should be able to trivially whistle it. So in that respect, this tool which aims to combine pitch detection with instrumentation synthesization would be a pretty big net win for you.

Exactly why I'm so excited about it! And so confused by the apparent outrage on display here for it. How is it morally wrong for me to be able to do that?

I'm trying to understand it but so far all I can see is gatekeeping saying that my music isn't music if I used AI to create it. Judging by the comment paraphrasing pastor Niemöller I'm apparently a Nazi sympathiser for wanting to use this tool.

What in the world is up with that?

There is NO SUCH THING as "just a tool". All tools have societal effects that are inevitable in different ways because we operate on basal instincts most of the time, or at least our capitalistic society has made us fairly deterministic.

It's not the same as a new instrument that is easier to play, because with an instrument, you have to determine entirely what comes out of it. With this "tool", you only determine part of the output, a skeleton, and a machine determines the basic musicality.

I 100% do not buy the accessibility argument. Of course, everyone plays that card. But the overall gross societal effects of AI are not worth it, even if it does help some people.

Imagine a new nuclear technology that cures all cancer, but simultaneously allows anyone to create an atomic bomb in their backyard. Would you think this worth it? We have to consider the costs and benefits, not just the benefits like most technophiles think.

You may create something with this tool for your game, but I certainly won't buy your game if AI has been used in its creation.

So what do you think will happen when the indie-game-making AI is released?

Oh that would be so cool! I could finally give all my game ideas a shot, even the more weird/experimental ones! As it is now I have to consider expected payout divided by expected effort, and a lot of ideas are just non starters because they're simply too big to finish for me.

Financially, well I'd expect people as an aggregate would keep spending about the same amount of money, so I don't think the proverbial pie would get any smaller, though it might change who gets a piece and how large that piece is.

Guess what, such is life! Even if we, for the sake of argument, imagine that the existence of such an AI is 100% guaranteed to render me personally unable to make any money whatsoever from making games, that's a price I would be willing to pay! I'd have to work with something less fun but I'd keep making games in my spare time just for fun anyway.

It's not like making a living from our passions is some god given right, It's a privilege! And if that privilege is the cost for making my passion more accessible to everyone, that's a price I'd pay in a heartbeat. I can't wait to make reality out of all my ideas, and I can't wait to see what others are going to make with it either!

It's already one of my bigger regrets that I don't contribute more to open source resources that would make game development easier for others, I just can't find enough time and energy for it.

From the consumers perspective, I expect there'd be a lot more to choose from. I imagine the quality of indie games would rise immensely. Heck gamers could even just use the AI to make a custom game tailored for their own tastes from home, how sweet would that be? Might that make the pie smaller for pro Devs? Sure, it might, but who cares! It also might not! Who knows?

The one thing that is guaranteed from such an AI is that awesomeness goes up. I want it!

It's not a god given right, but I worked really hard to get to where I am in life my visa is tied to my profession and I have a feeling it's going a way soon. Which means my visa might go away soon. I've gone from contemplate suicide to how to carry on. What you might think is awesomeness is dread for others. Just to point out there are 2 sides to this coin.

So what's the job that you'd be hoping to get to sustain your hobbies that is immune from AI takeover. Please tell me?

I am a creative type that became a commercial SE to actually fund my lifestyle. I don't expect to just make money from creative hobbies just because I want to, so I have gone for a job that is in high demand. But AI will eventually learn to code well enough. Then there will be no demand for software engineering, one of the few job markets that even has this level of demand and high employment. So what's the next avenue for us when that job becomes obsolete.

Technology has a way creating new jobs when it takes old ones away. I'm not wise enough to know that those new jobs will be, perhaps we're all destined to become "prompt engineers" or similar. Who knows?

I've worked hard to be where I am too, but if you, like me, were able to land a software engineer job, you'll be able to pick up whatever new skill will be needed in the future without much trouble! I have no doubt you'll manage, so I don't worry about it!

If AI leads to ALL jobs being automated well guess what, we're ready for Luxury Gay Space-Communism as described in Iain M Banks' The Culture. My personal favourite sci-fi utopia!

I wouldn't hold my breath for that though, seems about as likely as running in to Jesus Christ in the supermarket. And I say that as an atheist.

Amen.

I'd only add that the sort of music they're aiming at is already pretty much at your end state. Muzak (and its slightly more advanced cousin Library Music) isn't about human expression, but about a background noise to convey a loose mood. God forbid we should just listen to what someone has to say - it always needs a distracting background interference to go with it.

But, like it or not, creating this drivel does put the food in the mouths of a great number of professional musicians. Even big-name recording studios aren't busy full time with wonderful new creative experiments, it's jingles and library music that keep their doors open. But even this work has been declining sharply for decades, and this new wave of tools will just continue that decline.

If anything, it's going to entrench the music profession for the privileged as there'll be an even smaller pot of work available and so only those that can afford the massive time investment and comfortable with the risk of being without work will survive.

And all this because the people building and paying for these tools are themselves musically illiterate - they don't know what makes good music, or why muzak is utterly devoid of the thing they profess to love and democratise.

Well perhaps we should try and rethink society instead of trying to make its generation more efficient...

I guess someone will make it, if not google or others will.

This is the next iteration of music. First we had only live concerts, then we had recordings, and finally auto-generated music.

I hope some old dudes with long beards will like to hang out and jam with me when I'll be old.

If not google, others will? That is like justifying stealing from an old man on the street by saying that because the street is dangerous, someone else will do it anyway.

This is not the next generation of music. It is one possible future that we can oppose if only we were not so convinced that technology is completely deterministic and can't be opposed.

I am not justifying this.

But that's how life works. Someone invents something. Some people love it and others hate it.

It's like forums. There ara people who hate forums and prefer good old books. There are people who hate books and love forums. There ara people who love both

Some people like watching plays. Others like cinema. And some play videogames.

But be sure this will hurt professional musicians. Not pop musicians, I mean professional musicians that earn a humble living.

> traditional musicians… will not be able to compete and therefore will not be able to do what they love to survive.

Why would anyone owe the musicians a job just because they enjoy doing it? I don’t expect anyone to defend my love of coding when I’m replaced by a future iteration of an LLM.

> Music composed by humans could still be better but AI will compete simply because it is cheap and widely available

If it’s truly better, the market for manmade music will still exist. If bland/poor quality art is no longer produced by humans, what’s the loss?

> It changes the minds of human beings to think more like machines

Not sure how this works, or why it’s so bad.

> If it’s truly better, the market for manmade music will still exist.

That is definitely not true. There are other things that determine what is sold besides quality: ability to mass produce, economies of scale, bullying tactics, etc.

> Not sure how this works, or why it’s so bad.

Because thinking like machines means that we are locked into the cycle of optimizing resource usage to expand and grow forever and not be stewards of the environment. Thinking like a machine means being a human cog in the consumerist machine of selfishness. Thinking like a machine means facilitating the endless growth of technology that furthers us from connecting genuinely with other people in a small community.

Eh, I don't think anyone owes musicians a job, but I also don't think that jobs going anywhere. The painter is still an artist if they use the factory-produced canvas. The musician is still an artist if they use the mass-produced Fender. Or a mass-produced sample library.

> If bland/poor quality art is no longer produced by humans, what’s the loss?

Because even artists often produce bland/poor stuff, sometimes even some that sells well? (or that is recognised several decades/centuries, to be actually great work)

> it's clear that the ultimate goal is to create a system whereby people pay for AI generated music

The goal is to create background music for youtube videos without paying artists anymore at all. Youtube videos feel sterile because they lack music with emotion and are all recycling the same audio library tracks. It's a way to allow some pop culture to youtubers who are scared to death of copyright claims.

Commercial background music is already sterile, even if it is written and performed by humans. Here is a video from four years ago complaining about this sort of commercial music - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIxY_Y9TGWI.

Yes.

And who owns copyright for these songs? Of course not the user. If one of the 1 000 000 00 songs becomes a hit, it's a bank for the google owners.

> It creates a new standard where music is no longer about human expression but about creating a basic layer of entertainment to go along with advertising.

The most music we (humans collectively, not you and me specifically) hear are made for one single purpose: profit.

It's not an AI problem. It's nothing new. Actually it's older than you and me.

You are ignoring the fact that there's a new problem: the ability to milk it with an extreme level of efficiency.

Imagine a burglar who robs houses. He might rob 1-2 per month. Now imagine the same burglar being given a technology that allows him to rob 1000 houses a month. Wouldn't you say that's much worse, even though it essentially arises from the same problem?