Not sure I agree with the negative opinions in this thread. Surely, having an additional option to listen to the song you want to is a good thing? It's not like the choice to listen to human artists is taken away. Furthermore, a lot more people can now express themselves through music that were previously unable to.
It's not that the choice is taken away. It's that it is going to be even more buried under an avalanche of industry-normalised, generated crap (crap because generated and industry-normalised).
And second, you express yourself, you said it. If a generator produces something, it's not _your_ expression, per definition. You may still have "constrained" it among myriad of possibilities through your prompt, it is still the production of the generator, not yours.
Example: when I play something on a Mellotron, I cannot claim that I played the flutes or violins recorded there. Those are definitely not mine. What I do play with it, what I sing above it, yes, maybe because I produce/play those, with what I understood of my previous musical education/experience.
Regarding the first point of being buried under an avalanche of crap, we can solve this problem through many ways. We can still filter by human music. Or we can use better recommendation systems (automated or p2p/word-of-mouth).
Regarding whether it is "my" expression or not, I consider expression as a way of making my feelings or thoughts known. This grants me an additional way of making my feelings or thoughts known. Perhaps of lower fidelity than if I learn to play an instrument but maybe that will improve with time. Either way, since I now have an additional choice of expressing my thoughts and _I_ decide if it's "good enough" to publish, I consider it as allowing me to express more.
You realise that this is a problematic situation created by technology, that was designed as such first, right?
> This grants me an additional way of making my feelings or thoughts known.
Not really. Because again, this is a generator: what it outputs according to your prompt may _please_ you, or seem like it matches what you think you wanted, but this is still an output determined hugely by all the biases and sum of data it ingested before you even decided to use it.
It is vastly, it is even, again, fundamentally different that putting in the effort of expressing yourself, by formulating your own words, trying to express something on your own, and not being content of it, reflecting about why, trying a different formula or perspective, etc. before finally saying "ok, this is all I can say about it at this point, let's try".
The "your" is critically important here, both for correct attribution (from the perspective of others; this may or may not have financial or legal consequences), and foremost for your own self-esteem/understanding (devoid from an automated, biased generator, whose understanding is beyond yourself).
> You realise that this is a problematic situation created by technology
I'm saying this technology is a net positive for me. Sure, problems can arise from applying this net-positive technology but even considering them, they're a net positive. Especially in this case where we already have solutions for large amounts of crap content created by humans today. I think they'll scale well to crap content created by AI tomorrow (eg: Recommendation systems, p2p sharing etc).
Regarding your second point. I think we just have different perspectives on this. I see this technology as allowing me to do "strictly more" than I could before. You say that it's not "my expression" but I say it is because I'm able to bring forth what's in my mind (according to me!). You say it's not what I had in mind but compare against this scenario: I have an idea for a song and use a musical instrument. The output that I produce is quite far from my intent as I'm untrained. With this model, I can get a lot closer to my intent compared to using an instrument since I'm untrained. I still have the option of later learning an instrument if I'm unsatisfied.
Overall, I lose nothing and gain a nice power and still retain the option to learn an instrument if I wish. Thus it's a clear net positive for me that allows me to express more right now.
I think the negativity comes from the fact that our economic reality isn't currently structured to handle the consequences.
In an idyllic society, this might be all one needs to say about generative AI: "how wonderful, a new way to express ourselves!" I think the backlash stems from the fact that we do not live in such a society. Many people already barely scratch out a meagre existence through self-expression. Now major companies that posses far more power than individuals, that take people's work and data without doing due diligence or asking, that effectively impose the shape of the technical landscape from top down, are introducing tools that threaten the ability of people to survive.
It's kind of hard to paint a completely rosy picture when that's the way these tools are being developed and introduced.
Agree that training without permission and compensation is wrong. My argument is more that this tool is a net good. If suppose in the future, Someone releases a similar model trained on purely licensed data (Eg: Like Meta did with their Cm3leon model[0]), my arguments still stand that it gives people more choice and allows them to express more.
Right? The only thing I fear for is the amount of generic AI generated trash that will be spawned among good music. But I'm super excited about this honestly, I only play guitar and have a musical mind but am absolutely horrible at production tools. Something like this could totally let me create a real production of what I imagine/hum/sing, which would otherwise be impossible.
