> Consumers are by and large not listening to AI generated music
Consumers are sadly too ignorant to tell. YouTube is brimming with AI music slop and people praising it in the comments because they are unable to tell the difference (and it is actually pretty easy once you know what to look out for)
It takes away from real human artists who do their part to slowly advance human culture. Music will not develop without human artists. Maybe for this moment in time AI can fulfill some people's musical desires, but it's not going to keep up with the times.
The point of art, in a general sense, is humanity. Automating away your artistic needs is like automating away your social needs. It's a one way "relationship" that is superficial and self-indulgent. It's a step towards an empty world.
Why would music not develop without human artists? This isn't true at all, "AI" isn't necessary LLM as well, there is plenty of ways for AI to innovate, and let's be real, most musics from humans are a bit of copy-cat nowadays, ton of AI music actually made me vibe personally and stuff I haven't heard before.
Have you tried a day of listening solely to AI music? I feel you might change your mind, sure sometimes there is some serious off-tune (feels like an hallucination from the model) but we know this is temporary.
PS: I'm conscious of what it does to humanity, but there is also facts that AI does produce great songs, that's 2 different discussions.
You hear a song with vocals that strongly emotionally resonate with you, reminding you of your mother who passed away recently after a long terrible illness. You want to know more about the singer that almost brought you to tears, only to find there is none and that the song was AI generated.
But if you did the exercise 10 years ago you'd find the lyrics were originally about the songwriter's daughter and the band tweaked it to be able the the band manager's hypochondriac ex boyfriend.
Then they hired a session singer to sing it and mixed in several takes and then adjusted the sound with various tools to produce just the right sound. Plus the Chorus was actually from some country song from 1972 that had been completely changed
and the actual "band" is actually just two guys who hire session players to do most of the music while they handle the keyboard and mixing
So it does something good for you, then you decide to put a label on it due to how it was made. You are letting your mind overwrite a genuine response you had based on an opinion that "it should not feel good because it's AI made". As I said in another comment - intelectualization.
Which puts the label "AI made" on it and that changes the listener's perspective. In the example given, the listener had a strong emotional reaction to the sound, but after they put the "AI made" label on it, they suddenly convince themselves to not have that emotional response anymore.
No, that's not the causality. They put the AI label on it and they change their perspective, but the bulk of the perspective change is not specifically because AI, it's because the specific person they felt a connection to doesn't exist. You could get a similar reaction with an extremely impersonal but non-AI method of making a song.
I'm not the one complaining. I have no emotion in this. What conflict do you think I have internally?
You're criticizing an overly simplified version of the actual argument, and I'm trying to help you understand the actual argument.
You could criticize their actual argument. I think there could be a healthy debate there. Their argument, about being disappointed there is no actual author you could have a meeting of the minds with, is something that matters different amounts to different people. Even if you still dislike that argument, it's something you can't dismiss as a mere prejudice that got intellectualized.
> Even if you still dislike that argument, it's something you can't dismiss as a mere prejudice that got intellectualized.
Why can't I?
I think that it's a great example of trying to explain a preference with an idea. Preferences don't need to be explained. Quite often they can't be. I think it strange, that a person would like something, then dislike it because some meta-information about the thing is not preferred. I know people do it all the time. "I like service X, but I don't like the guy who built it" is a great example of that. What we are discussing here is an even better example, because music appeals to the sense of aesthetics more directly and has little to no utility beyond that. If you find a piece that does appeal to your sense of aesthetics, why would you convince yourself to not like it? Sounds like a job for the mind. Discussing which trick of the mind does the job better, seems to be missing the point. That's why I dismiss it.
"I want to have a meeting of the minds" is a valid preference all by itself that involves no prejudice.
> Preferences don't need to be explained.
I don't understand how you start a paragraph with this, and then spend the rest of it taking about how you dismiss people's author-based preferences.
You're allowed to have preferences based on the work itself and the author. Death of the author is not a fundamental truth of the universe. And having those preferences, caring about the author, is not convincing yourself of anything, is not any kind of self-deception.
Realistically speaking, why is that a problem? What is the point of money if not enjoyment? If these people enjoy it, what's wrong with it?
Mark finds $100,000 (something good for Mark), then finds out it's the inheritance of a family who's about to get kicked out of their house (label due to how it was made). Mark decides he should not keep the money because it belongs to the family (intellectualizing).
You're saying Mark should have kept the money because doing otherwise is intellectualizing.
It's like the MBS during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Today it prints money, tomorrow it blows up in your face.
Yeah they put a blue check on it like Elon did. Until they get paid to put the check on slop. Rotten fish is still rotten even if you mix it with fresh fish and label it accordingly.
Consumers are sadly too ignorant to tell. YouTube is brimming with AI music slop and people praising it in the comments because they are unable to tell the difference (and it is actually pretty easy once you know what to look out for)