It just launched and in 5 years it's going to be better than Sora is at making videos.
In the meantime, thousands to millions of writers/producers are going to use this to rapidly block out pop songs and rake in $$$ because they'll use it like the genius tool that it is.
I’ve thought a fair bit about what the future of music looks like in the age of AI and I’m not convinced that much will change. The ease of making music on computers already set the skill bar super low. In 2021 Spotify reported that 60k tracks are submitted to the platform every day. Will it really make a difference if this number goes up by 10X?
What knowledge workers fear about AI already happened to musicians years ago. There’s a reason that the vast majority of musicians have to work a different job. This new tool will not make much difference to musicians, who are already economically marginalized.
Alternatively, you could argue that the vast majority of released music is already unimaginative rubbish. Industrialising the creation of more of it will make releasing this type of material completely pointless, so perhaps there will be more of a focus on finding original music to cut through the grey goo?
The ML models are a symptom of an already hyper-commoditized world where all the soul and human condition has been sucked out of every instance of creativity. AI is just letting us see it from a distance
BS. There's a hell of a lot of art in commercial art, and trying to make it appealing enough for people to pay for doesn't change that. This glib "no TRUE artist cares about making money" idea, and the closely coupled belief that commercial art isn't real art are just handy mental shortcuts to cop out of considering the economic damage this technology will do to working artists.
I agree completely, but also want to see this tech advance. The purpose of music is not to make it, nor to make money from it. It's to listen to and enjoy it. To the extent that computers help us do that, great.
The purpose of music is not to make it? Tell that to the thousands of composers that feel they were put on this earth to make music. It's our singular purpose.
This is a lot more nuanced that that. My position doesn't conflict with wanting to see this tech advance, and your wanting to see this tech advance does not lend support to your reductive utilitarian philosophical assessment of "the" purpose of any sort of art, as if there's one true one, let alone in the astonishingly broad realm of music.
I can say that I want to see AI enhance medicine, and also think it's ok for doctors to want to be paid for the work they do. I can think the point of medicine is to heal people and not to make money off of it, while still thinking it's bullshit for the organizations to train a model with all of a doctor's diagnoses and fire them, which is essentially what's happening to many commercial artists. An artist can make something solely prompted by a client needing to use it for a product or service and it's still art... in fact, you can tell by the output of most of the available models that the vast majority of images they ingested were in some way commercial, and I'll eat my hat if anyone could make a model like this one without using almost entirely, if not entirely commercial music.
It's going to Destroy sync no question. one of the few avenues artists have left to make an income with music. My personal opinion is that this is wholesale theft. While the technology is dazzling there is just no way suno wasn't trained on vast catalogues of copyrighted music.
What burns me up the most is that these people are walking around like they own the place. They don't. I really hope the NYT prevails in their copyright case. this will open a floodgate of lawsuits that will also be won.
On the creative side of generative AI, AI seems like a parasite that will do nothing more than further concentrate wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people. When all of those robots come online and really start replacing jobs, there will be a reckoning and it's not going to be pretty.
> It's going to Destroy sync no question. one of the few avenues artists have left to make an income with music. My personal opinion is that this is wholesale theft. While the technology is dazzling there is just no way suno wasn't trained on vast catalogues of copyrighted music.
Yeah I've got a couple friends whose bread-and-butter has been sync for a couple decades, and they're really sweating. It's not just good for them, either-- their living off of that work gave them the money, time, and sophistication to hone their other music which benefits many people in many ways. They were even able to release a comedic side-project album after a particularly tragic school shooting for free, to national acclaim. Their being able to do that matters.
> What burns me up the most is that these people are walking around like they own the place. They don't. I really hope the NYT prevails in their copyright case. this will open a floodgate of lawsuits that will also be won.
Honestly, I left the software development business because that exact self-congratulatory unearned hubris that assumes expertise in everything because they understand how the experts' software was made. It's fucking ridiculous. The only people that think generative AI output is equivalent to making art have absolutely no idea how many decisions those algorithms make for the user, how incredibly consequential they are to the piece, and how much the original artists had to work to create them.
The most infuriating thing about this crowd is the arrogant, patronizing decrees many casually throw around about "the true" meaning of art and which artists are worthwhile and all that. They clearly have absolutely no clue what work artists even do in our society– most don't even have a functional definition of art, and couldn't make one piece of art scholarship that discusses it beyond whatever Aristotle they read in freshman Western History class. Their glib opinions are months old, largely adopted from other people in tech looking to justify not paying artists, and are based on some weird combination of fan art, fine art, and hobby art, being completely ignorant to the other 90% of the art world.
> On the creative side of generative AI, AI seems like a parasite that will do nothing more than further concentrate wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people. When all of those robots come online and really start replacing jobs, there will be a reckoning and it's not going to be pretty.
Though I'm a commercial visual artist, and while there are analogs, I think there are important differences in both the market forces and disposition of generative AI in the practices and fields. I think there are some genuinely useful things that generative AI does in professional visual work-- it just doesn't look anything like what these products look like. In video compositing for example, masking foreground objects from background objects is a giant PITA, and a great use case for neural network algorithms. With Nuke's copycat functionality, you can mask an object in one frame in a video and it will replicate that (with varying success) to the rest of it. For 10 seconds of video, otherwise, that would be hundreds of images to individually mask, and it would be totally inconsistent. On a smaller scale is photoshop's foreground/background tools.
Market-wise, i think there's a larger variety of freelance jobs available in may art realms, but they're less reliable and pay worse-- even in graphic design. From the little experience I have in audio, compared to what I do, I think it takes more experience and skill to create a commercially usable lower-end audio deliverable and this can't do it yet, but the market can support far fewer people than the visual market(s) can so it's at even greater risk.
In visual art, lots of businesses are having generative AI make base assets and having their artists essentially clean them up to be professionally usable, which is about as soulless and shitty of a job as you can get. The end-user tools like Canva aren't much of a direct threat in the long-term to graphic designers because the use cases are usually a lot different, but my (less informed) gut says the real threat to commercial musicians is with products like Garage Band. I think there will be enough control to satisfy some art director's use case, and the output will eventually get high enough quality to hand a bunch of tracks to indie producers to "clean up" rather than making complete things, and that output will progressively get better and persistently decimate the market until only high-end specialists remain.
Considering that we can only listen to about 15 songs per hour, times 16 hours = 240 songs per day, those AI composers won't make that much money each. If there are 1000 of them I'd need 4 days of uninterrupted listening to listen to a song of each of them. 1 million composers? 4000 days, 11 years.
We'll be where we are at now: selection because of genre preferences, quality, fame, marketing.
In the meantime, thousands to millions of writers/producers are going to use this to rapidly block out pop songs and rake in $$$ because they'll use it like the genius tool that it is.