If A.I. took the place of musicians, would you listen to it?


A few questions which I'm curious about. If you have a take on this, please share!

Here's the question:

A.I. is increasingly playing a role in music creation. Not just assisting composers, but generating music.

If you found an A.I. generated song to be enjoyable, interesting, etc. would you have any objection to supporting it by listening and paying for the service which provides it?

If more and more music was like this, and there were fewer and fewer jobs for musicians, would that bother you? -- I'm thinking here about the aesthetics of the issue, not the economics or justice of it. 

I'm trying to understand if people just want to have a certain set of sensations from music and they don't care if there are human beings creating it -- or if it's important for you to know that what you're experiencing from music (or art) is coming from human beings.

Thank you for thinking about this.

128x128hilde45

@hilde45

"Ah, so it's just their present state of development, and you have no objection to AI in principle -- it's just not good enough. I feel the same way about butter substitutes, but not about art."

Why would I object to AI until it has done something objectionable? Technology is not the enemy. It is what we do with it that causes all the problems. Comparing AI to butter substitutes is apples to oranges.

Besides, what I said was....

"Until AI is capable of actual creative genius, as opposed to merely clever mimicry, it will never push creativity forward or have the ability to touch our souls."

Cherry picking parts of a quote to suit your narrative is never a good practice.

It is an open question of how far AI can go. This is the most dangerous experiment I can think of. We can't really even control ourselves, how can we hope to be able to control we don't know what ? And why bother with this AI nonsense, anyway ?

Primitive robots is one thing and true AI is something completely different.

A good song would still be enjoyable to listen to no matter who made it. I don't see   a reason to hate on it just because it's AI generated.

It's up to you. If you like an AI generated song... fine. I wouldn't try to censor it.  If the real artist can do better then do it and I'll listen to that instead.

 

@larsman AI might not stop humans from creating art but it might prevent them from getting paid.  This is a thing in the music industry where companies are using the music libraries they own to train AI to write, produce and record songs in the style of human artists.  Rick Beato has done a couple of videos on the subject.  Not that he is an expert on AI but he has an interesting take on it.

@jastralfu - you are right; getting paid as an artist is bad enough as it is, and you wouldn't want a Milli Vanilli situation where the artists do not perform on the record. But ultimately I do not see an artistic problem as long as the recording is not misidentified as something it's not.