I was struck by an article in RealClear Books & Culture, titled "A.I. Panic Hits Music City". Here's an excerpt.
Suno is the AI music app sweeping the music world and raising serious questions about the future of the industry. By typing a few prompts into a text box, you—or rather, the algorithm—can generate professional-sounding songs. If you upload your own melodies or lyrics, it can create new versions of your original content. As one song after another plays in the pitch meeting, more of these AI-produced tracks appear, most carrying that same disorienting quality: songs that sound better than they actually are, polished to a high gloss by machine production.
As Barack Obama once said, you can put lipstick on a pig and it's still a pig. Likewise, you can have Michelangelo paint a mural on the ceiling of your uncle Ned's double-wide trailer, but that doesn't make it the Sistine Chapel. Whatever one thinks of the songs, one thing is certain: AI is alarmingly good at producing music at a quality level that, until now, required highly-paid professionals who had spent their lives honing their craft.
Songwriting, Nashville style, is a craft, and a slow-burning one at that. You spend years learning how to write a great bridge, how to make a hook land, how to fit your whole life into three minutes and fifteen seconds. I had heard friends in the business grumbling about what AI was doing to all of that. But I knew I had to find out firsthand. So I went home and fed my song into the machine.
Confronting AI for the first time as a musician can be harrowing. I'd recently watched a video posted by a local touring guitarist—the kind of sideman Nashville produces in abundance—who described receiving an AI guitar track from a client as a reference. The problem: the AI-performed track was so good, he wasn't sure he could match it. He felt there might be only five human beings in the world who could play it so well. This is coming from a professional in a city that represents perhaps the greatest concentration of musical talent in the world.
So it was with some dread that I picked a pop-country tune I'd written recently and uploaded it to Suno, instructing it to “Make a dark, soulful indie country cover of this song with a driving beat.” The platform can generate a complete song from scratch. Meaning, a person with zero talent and almost zero effort can make songs. People are currently creating more than 7 million songs per day on that platform alone, enough volume to surpass the entire Spotify catalog every two weeks. But the technology can also be used more subtly, to create faithful covers of work you've already recorded. It's like having your own band of professional musicians in a box, ready to take direction. That's what I chose to do: I uploaded my rough demo, along with my lyrics, asked it to make a faithful cover, and clicked "generate."
The results were all over the place. One early experiment produced something that sounded like a hit single. The AI singer was so soulful that I would have pulled over to Google him had I heard the track on the radio. But the same version had a hideous, wildly inappropriate drum sound that started firing in verse two, as if Christopher Walken had possessed the algorithm and started demanding more snare. Other versions produced strange discordant moments or went emotionally flat. Working effectively with AI in music isn't a single push of a button. It's an iterative process of trial and error. But after making many versions, I found two keepers.
. . .
There was only one problem: the AI singer had possibly sung my song better than I ever could. In a town full of great singers, I'm considered at least a good one. But the AI voice had everything—incredible control, emotional nuance, and a back-country drawl I'll never have as a Florida native ... Still, the AI offered something genuinely useful: production ideas I wouldn't have thought of myself. A minor chord in the bridge that improved the arrangement. Taking the final chorus up an octave for power and exuberance. A cool twist on the background vocals in the outro. Killer mandolin parts injecting energy into the choruses. These are the kinds of ideas I might have paid a top producer to provide. I was getting them for the price of a $15 subscription.
There's more at the link.
I haven't looked into AI in music in any depth, so this article came as a surprise to me. Intrigued, I looked for AI country music on YouTube, and found innumerable examples. Try this one for size. The source blurb for the collection from which it's drawn notes: "Made with AI. Sounds or visuals were altered or fully generated."
It's a good song, IMHO, and I enjoyed it . . . but I'm left feeling empty, because behind that powerful singing and memorable tune, behind those excellently-played instrumentals . . . there's nobody. The inspiration it offers is artificial.
Would I feel different if I hadn't known it was AI music? I don't know, but I think I would. A song composed and performed by a human being connects heart-to-heart, I guess. Synthetic songs can imitate that, and if they're as good as the one above, they can fool people, but . . . it just feels wrong.
What say you, friends?
Peter
25 comments:
Milli Vanilli won a Grammy, and it took years to find out it was all fake.
Nothing new under the sun. It's just now cheaper to fake it.
AI music for your consideration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfCjLHx8WAA
My dad was a studio musician in Nashville for years. Trombone.
It was our families bread and butter. He didn't know how to do anything else. He was a musician. Talented and trained in university.
I still get royalty checks from things he had done.
I feel sad for all those talented folk who will no longer have a place to shine. No way to make their living doing something they love.
On occasion, I'll listen to an AI song on YouTube, oftentimes it will be a cover of a well known song, but done in a different genre. It's usually very good, and I'll share it with friends. Then I'll forget about it.
There's practically an invasion of junk AI music out there, so much of which I'd almost pay to make them not use it. So many commercials make me cringe...
The funny thing is that music is so algorithmic that it's almost inevitable that someone could take one of the millions of books that show chord progressions and just put songs together. This could have been done 20 or 30 years ago.
In a really good live concert, the song is a collaborative effort between the band and the audience. They feed off each other. I have had the experience on both sides of the stage, and I don't think AI can create that.
There will be 4-5 years, maybe up to 10 years of boo-hooing from the "talent". Then AI will either fade away or just fade into the background noise of our existence. Kinda like what has happened to every other "OMG-der sky is falling" technology event.
Vox Day has done some work on this end.
If you didn't know the source, you would have found it inspiring?
Kind of reminds me of authors where the actual writing may be good, but it's tainted by the author himself being objectionable.
Scary, but for reasons no one is talking about. AI is here, and it will only grow. Those of you who think that AI may fade away in a few years are not looking beyond your own reality to what is happening, happening at lightning speed. Get used to it, AI is in our futures....everywhere.
When it becomes less expensive to buy a copy (on Spotify or wherever) then I'll believe it's cheaper. And remember, music is JUST entertainment - no food on your table or in your belly, no gas in your car, no kilowatt-hours in your EV.
And the folks we imported (or were imported against our wishes) in general don't grow your food, though they may harvest it; don't drill for your oil & gas; don't produce your electricity. Welcome to the new America! Maybe it's still great.
I saw this article and had incorporated it into an article I wrote that I published today. It's a lot more expansive than just this though. It talks about job loss, music, books, trade jobs as well as white collar jobs involving AI... I have been watching this for the last few years and AI is getting geometrically better, fast! I also think that it is going to devastate the worlds job market with very large percentages of a lot of industry's involved. I know there are a lot of technical issues with AI but what I am seeing is such a rapid overcoming of those that it isn't funny. I read a book today that I could tell was AI generated. It wasn't great as in a 5 star book but it was a decent 4 star. I'm assuming author spent a bit of time on it however it was obvious that the AI itself had done a much smoother job than past generations of AI generated content. I actually finished and liked the book. It has two sequals that I'm probably not going to read as I was in the territory of and author that is ok but I will pick something else probably. This is the first time it has reached that level for me though. 100% of the AI stuff I have read so far was bad and I'm not going to finish this and move on quality..
anyways... link to my article here
https://audeojude.substack.com/p/the-ai-voyage
Thanks for providing the link to your article. It's good stuff. I'll ponder it for a while, and add it to my list of points to ponder in the future about AI.
It's a mini compendium of a lot of conversations I have had and my observations of what is happening and a few extrapolations toward future. Most people think I am a Luddite because of my negative attitude toward AI. Negative attitude is the abuse of it that is happening and will continue to happen and accelerate into the future. It is just human nature that it will do so. It is hard to have a good conversation about it though as it is as polarizing as religion and politics. I see the good and the bad, so get hated by both sides when I praise it and call it dangerous to our society.
I have talked to a lot of authors that are starting to use it or have been using it and god help you if your negative about it. It's seen as a personal attack. Trying to tell them or at least in the past tell them that it produces a sub par product just isn't on. It changes fast though and the higher quality of what looks like the latest iterations seems to be overcoming that. Though it also is accelerating the dilution of the writing industry so that it is going to be hard to make money for a lot of authors. I waded through 10 to 20 books looking for new ones that are decently written. I had a bad streak where I tried a bunch of AI written books and kept returning them in KU after a chapter or two. Decided to read an old favorite.. your Take the Star Road and it was so night and day the difference between poor AI vs a decent author. I thoroughly enjoyed it again.
I've been singing to Suno to get royalty-free background music for my streams. It's come up with some pretty good songs, based on a human-generated core that I gave it, and depending on how specific and - this is an important part - ~technical~ I'm willing to get with the style prompts I type in.
The more technical vocabulary you possess to put in your prompt, the better, more precise, and more accurate results you're going to get from the machine.
There's more to go with this particular cut and while it sounds OK in small doses, there's a sameness over many cuts that gets annoying very quickly.
If there is one thing that will definitely drive people to use AI music, it is the desire for the absolute avoidance of copyright strikes on a YouTube channel. Not as fatal as it used to be, but you just don't want it.
The most important thing I can say to people when it comes to cognition type content is that 'AI' (machine leaning) can't generate anything that is actually new. You only get derivatives of what it has to work with, and even then there might be errors. Treat it as a somewhat more advanced search engine and verify anything important.
Reality is where it is going.
Yeah, you can listen to music on the radio, but live music in a bar or nightclub will mean something else.
You are probably safe...for a while. You still need a singer to be up on stage at some honky-tonk C&W bar out on the highway. AI cannot do that...yet.
BTW there's this: https://x.com/heynavtoor/status/2064797676475187520
This!!!!!... there is a sameness..... it isn't what makes AI stuff Bad when it is bad but it is a very big negative. I mentioned to an author I like about his foray into AI that I really liked his books but that the book he used AI to generate, I couldn't tell he wrote it. It was the same as a 100 other books by dozens of authors that looked like it was all written by the same person. There are in my opinion three types of people using AI to publish books.
First is normal authors that are using it for editorial purposes. This is a great use for it. It can quickly point out grammatical issues and suggestions. As long as you don't let it change style this is an enhancement of the actual author.
Second is existing or new authors that are trying to use it to make it easier or faster to bring out the next book. I'm sympathetic but it is as far as quality or creating or maintaining a brand/style cutting their own throats. They are simply publishing the AI's style and brand. After reading a few of them it's ridiculously easy to tell for the majority of works like this.
Third is the new publishing houses in all but name where you have an individual or a small or large business that is pumping out hundreds of story lines and feeding them to the AI and pushing them to publication with little to no editing. They are flooding the market 10 to 1 compared to normal authors. The quality is very low and actually grates on you reading them. I am baffled by the high reviews some of these books have and can only think that they are gaming the review systems as well.
This is happening in music, video and pictures as well. Over on substack where my link goes to, my avatar picture is AI generated from a website called nightcafe. It does a decent job.
Not necessarily. One of the problems is that AI voices exceedingly well. The purity and clarity in the AI generated singers voices is comparable to the best vocalist in the world. The song might be sub par though I have heard a bunch that are pretty good. The sameness issue is a downside though. However if you listen to a lot of top tier vocalists, real or AI and then hit that bar and they have decent to good vocals, the normal singers really show up lacking in comparison. Up till now only 1 in a 1000 singers had that kind of voice, with the AI content they all have it.
It's OK. But it's boring, predictable. Nothing interesting happens. It's so perfect as to be forgettable.
Contrast that with, for example, Willie Nelson singing "Always On My Mind". It''s *NOT* technically perfect. He doesn't come in on the beat, or the perfect pitch. What he does do is make you want to feel what he's singing, and why and how.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7f189Z0v0Y&list=RDR7f189Z0v0Y&start_radio=1
I can listen there, and get something new each time. I didn't get anything new even the first time I listened to the AI.
I don't have an opinion on AI generated music, but this particular criticism made me do a doubletake. Predictable is a flaw? Never listen to In The Hall of the Mountain King, one of the most predictable pieces of classical music I can think of. It's a wonderful piece, but extremely predictable. And that's just one example. Honestly, critique what you want, but predictable and "nothing interesting happens" just...what? Nothing interesting happens in Johnny Cash's performance of "Ring of Fire" either, and it's a great song.
Ah well. I just couldn't wrap my head around that particular objection. But maybe I've misunderstood your actual meaning, in which case, mea culpa. Be well.
Genre writing has common elements and tropes by definition. Musical styles are the same. The people pushing the machines exploit that.
The argument that something is banal and derivative can be applied to 90% of the human generated writing and music, but no one has been looking at it recently the same way they look at AI generated content.
Go back a couple of years to the guy who put a bunch of top pop country songs together, playing them simultaneously, and they fit perfectly, with the same structure and dynamics - because they are produced by the same people to the same "standards" so that they get radio airplay.
I 'listen' to most of my music on youtube. The algorithm is very good at showing me stuff I might like. Lately though, it's been poisoned by a metric ton of AI generated music. AI generated music wasn't even a thing I was aware of but I quickly figured out that there was something "not right" with the songs. Looking deeper, I discovered the whole AI music thing.
My point is, most (popular) music and writing is formulaic and predictable (and if they have money, honed to a high standard), so calling out AI for those things is pointless - AI is just doing what the industries already do.
And, as humans with a lot of experience reading or listening to music, we can TELL. When AI gets good enough to mimic the little things that are the 'human touch', and we can no longer 'tell', will it matter? Not to most readers and listeners. They already consume the genre fiction and musical styles that are made up of a series of generic and replaceable voices.
I can say "Seattle sound" and if you are an American of a certain age, you know immediately what to expect. Same with "big band" or "swing" or "urban fiction". Dozens of bands, mostly indistinguishable from one another filled those bins at the record store and a dozen writers fill the virual shelves with their books. Heck, people buy them because they know what to expect. AI will be able to produce piles of material for the people who already buy that sort of thing.
It will put the people who are only 'just good enough' out of business, or maybe they will learn to drive the AI, and people will accept AI generated content the same way they've come to accept auto-tuned, quantized, synthesized music, and cheap genre fiction.
Or WW3 will derail the whole thing for a while, or tastes will change and people will reject the styles...
But the cat is out of the bag, the lady opened the box, etc. and it's already past the point where things will go back to the way they were.
Listen to and read what you like.
nick
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