Mainyehc
macrumors 6502a
This is where you forget something: in a climate of instant gratification, where people with no formal musical education no longer have to manually tinker with technology (some of which very deep level, like waveform synthesis) to produce some audible output and instead just give it a verbal prompt and that’s that, there will NEVER be another self-taught musician like Deadmau5. And if another one comes up, it’s because they were “AI-luddites” and decided, well, to freaking tinker instead of just asking for machines to do EVERYTHING for them.
You seem to be confusing Luddism with something very different altogether. AI isn’t a simple tool; it can be, yes, and to wit, I even have an extremely close friend, a composer, who’s producing prog rock demos – emphasis on demos, they are not meant for mass public consumption or direct monetisation and he’ll never upload them to a commercial music streaming platform – which he personally composed, line by line, note by note, chord by chord (in fact, the songs themselves and most of the arrangements are almost 20 years old and were put together on Guitar Pro and originally rendered with its MIDI engine). But a random composer using some AI tools (as tools, in the middle of a larger workflow), including extremely realistic vocal generators and instrument samples, to generate output that can then be used to show off their work to their peers, attract and hire session musicians (you know, human ones, which the market, for the most part, demands and appreciates) and maybe then generate revenue by putting it on streaming platforms and playing live shows is completely different than some kiddies – or, worse even, streaming industry employees themselves – asking their instant plagiarism machine to generate some songs for them and making a quick buck from unsuspecting listeners. GenAI that takes existing notes and text and renders them is fundamentally different from (and more morally acceptable than, especially if it’s used as least as possible and never passed off as human) GenAI that produces the underlying notes and text themselves, and if you can’t recognise that difference, it goes to show that you never gave any sincere thought to the subject. This is not about Luddism or technology, it’s about authorship, morals, ethics, economics, culture and even human evolution (or, if I may say so myself, de/involution), it’s a much deeper philosophical conundrum.
You may argue that the output resulting from using GenAI that renders the whole stack, or from getting GenAI output from several different services and combining it, is still art because there was a human involved in the process, somehow, but it’s not. It’s almost like the supposed “author” was a composition teacher evaluating the work of their student (because, yes, school assignment briefs are literally prompts) and deciding to showcase it (and passing it off as their own work, mind you, which would be terrible even in an all-human scenario!!), except that not only is the “teacher” not qualified to be a teacher, they never even attended a class themselves, and the “student” is not even human (the only intrinsically human components AI models have are the algorithms originally written by humans but, at this point, these models are so much like unintelligible black boxes that even their purely human element is becoming negligible or, at the very least, debatable). It’s not human art by any stretch of the imagination. It’s slop, it’s crap, it’s borderline morally fraudulent and the result of technologies and services created, maintained and peddled by complete sociopaths with zero appreciation or respect for human artistry, and I really hope the market votes with their collective wallets.
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