Yes, please ruin music. Ruin everything you can. As long as you can build it, you should ruin it. There's really no limit. It's the masses who will actually do the ruining, so those building the technology are totally blameless. And you might even make some money, so it's all worth it.
These music/art AI threads are always gross. Make things for the joy of creating. Prompting some AI model doesn’t make you a musician - it actively robs you of the thing that’s rewarding about actually creating something.
A tool existing doesn't ruin anything. Genuinely stop being so dramatic and learn to ignore things you don't like. Our society would be a lot better and calmer if people did that rather than start pointless crusades.
People said this about photography. It ruined painting, and it did in fact put a lot of portrait painters out of business because in that era the reason you hired them was not for art. It was for a photograph made with brushes.
This is a good read on photography and art. Note that the rhetoric sounds almost identical to today's AI rhetoric.
“If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon supplant or corrupt it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally." - Charles Baudelaire
I don't think AI is a threat to actual art at all. If I want art, I explicitly do not want slop churned out of a model. I want something created by a human being to communicate something. That's the entire point.
Some around here will argue that there have been double blind tests showing that people sometimes can't tell the difference between AI output and human art. That is missing the point too. Knowing who the artist is is part of the artistic experience. If someone deepfake calls you with a model imitating your friend, is it the same as talking to your friend? The parasociality of art is part of it.
It may -- as photography did with portraiture -- be a threat to some of the ways that artists make a living, and I do understand the pushback from that. Back before photography a lot of painters made a living being cameras, and all that work dried up pretty fast. Today AI is replacing all the "filler" churned out by artists. The only silver lining I guess is that artists generally hate this work and it never paid well.
Another thing I expect to happen is: actual AI art. I don't think this has happened yet. There has not yet been an AI equivalent of the Pictoralists.
AI art is art if the AI is used by a human being as a tool to communicate what art communicates, to do what art does. Art, I guess, does many things. It entertains, informs in a way, but also communicates matters of the emotional and spiritual aspect of human existence -- of consciousness -- that can't be communicated well in other ways. If someone uses AI as a tool to do that, it's art.
A lot of what we see today coming out of AI models is I think correctly called "slop" because it is not that. There's no artistic intention or craft behind it.
BTW I'd argue that "slop" exists in the realm of music, literature, painting, and other arts made with traditional methods too. For centuries there's been low-effort smutty pulp fiction, crappy imitative pop music, and gimmicky low-effort painting. Those things are slop made with lower-tech tools. A pretentious gimmicky painting where someone threw some paint at a wall has less artistic merit than a photograph that someone composed with care to communicate something.
I'm not bashing people for being skeptical of AI and worrying about its effects on the arts. There are, like I said, very valid points, especially about the ability of artists to make a living and the effect AI "slop" can have on the population. I just think we have been here before, many times.
Sad to see the downvotes on this well thought out post. Kudos! The parallels between the history of the disruption brought by photography, the musical sampler (another disruptive technology in the late 1980s/early 1990s that is now widely accepted with minimal angst) etc. with the current outcries against Generative AI are hard for me to ignore. Humans grab acoustic guitars, sing with their own voices and often just add hackneyed dreck to our ears. Humans now can type words into their computers and have found another way to often unleash more dreck to our ears powered by Generative AI. But I am deeply interested in Generative AI for its sonic exploration possibilities -- maybe what I make will sound like dreck to you, but I want to be free to do so, just like someone who wants to grab a guitar and sing.
Most of the criticism is from bandwagoning and emotion rather than critical thought. People screech and gnash their teeth as if the evil developers and AI researchers are conspiring to destroy all art ever; it's quite frankly ridiculous.
You narrowed down the important aspect: personal freedom. It's not about AI, or cameras, or samplers, or synthesizers, or automated this or that, it's about giving people the freedom to do an activity how they want. It's terribly sad that others cry for the removal of this freedom and brand it as some noble cause.
To me the crisis of art today is not AI, it's discovery.
People all over the world are making great art. How do I find it in an ocean of human-made mediocrity and now AI-churned slop? How do we discover new artists?
I sometimes go looking for new writers and new music. It's very time consuming. I'll spend hours and hours to find maybe one new piece I like. Most of that time is sifting through stuff that's just unremarkable.
Social media used to help, but now social media is just a flood of dreck.
AI is making this problem worse, but not exactly for the reason the AI bashers say. It's not that AI makes art obsolete or that AI can't be used to make real art. It's the AI makes it so easy to make dreck, it's flooding the zone even more.
